David Cameron and his kind will kick a man while he's down and then keep on kicking.

^∗ Actually, it's a coalition government, but doesn't really feel like one.

Will their coalition 'partners', the Liberal Democrats, be able to do anything about that? http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/nov/18/liberal-democrats-benefits-fuel-duty

Hands Off Our Forest : A Call To Arms

We need to stop these plans. Ancient forests like the Forest of Dean and Sherwood Forest are national treasures — once they’re gone, they are lost forever. A huge petition will force the government to rethink. If we can prove how strongly thousands of us are against this, we can make them back down.

Help build the pressure before it’s too late. Add your name to the “save our forests” petition: http://www.38degrees.org.uk/save-our-forests

The Forester newspaper, in association with The Forest of Dean and Wye Valley Review, is launching a petition to send a message to Government ministers wanting to sell our woodlands to private concerns: Hands Off Our Forest.

Sign the petition here: http://www.theforester.co.uk/saveourforest.cfm

References:
http://www.forest-and-wye-today.co.uk/news.cfm?id=38375
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/countryside/8082756/Ministers-plan-huge-sell-off-of-Britains-forests.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/government-plans-huge-selloff-of-britains-forests-2115631.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/oct/24/forests-government-heritage-private-developers

Warren James: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_james

Now published by Breviary Stuff Publications is The People's Farm by Malcolm Chase. It traces the development of agrarian ideas from the 1770s through to Chartism, and explains why, in an era of industrialization and urban growth, land remained one of the major issues in popular politics. This book considers relationship between ‘land consciousness’ and early socialism; attempts to create alternative communities; and contemporary perceptions of nature and the environment. Far from being an anachronistic, utopian, and reactionary movement, agrarianism was an integral part of the working class experience and of radical politics. This book also provides the most extensive study to date of Thomas Spence, and his followers the Spenceans.

Thomas Spence was one of the leading English revolutionaries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At the centre of Spence's work was his Plan, known as Spence's Plan. The Plan has a number of features, including:

• The end of aristocracy and landlords
• All land should be publicly owned by 'democratic parishes', which should be largely self-governing
• Rents of land in parishes to be shared equally amongst parishioners
• Universal suffrage (including female suffrage) at both parish level and through a system of deputies elected by parishes to a national senate
• A 'social guarantee' extended to provide income for those unable to work
• The 'rights of infants' to be free from abuse and poverty

Also back in print in a new, extended edition is the pamplet from The Thomas Spence Society, The Hive of Liberty, The Life & Work of Thomas Spence (1750-1814). Edited by Keith Armstrong, with an introduction by Professor Joan Beal and a new essay by Malcolm Chase. It is available directly from The Thomas Spence Society.

John E. Archer – 'By a Flash and a Scare', Arson, Animal Maiming, and Poaching in East Anglia 1815-1870 Breviary Stuff Publications, ISBN 978-0-9564827-1-6

‘By a Flash and a Scare’ illuminates the darker side of rural life in the nineteenth century. Flashpoints such as the Swing riots, Tolpuddle, and the New Poor Law riots have long attracted the attention of historians, but here John E. Archer focuses on the persistent war waged in the countryside during the 1800s, analysing the prevailing climate of unrest, discontent, and desperation.

In this detailed and scholarly study, based on intensive research among the local records of Norfolk and Suffolk, Dr Archer identifies and examines the three most serious crimes of protest in the countryside — arson, animal maiming and poaching. He shows how rural society in East Anglia was shaped by terror and oppression in equal measure. Social crime and covert protest were an integral part of the ordinary life of the rural poor. They did not protest infrequently, they protested all the time. Read more…

Roger Ball – Tolpuddle And Swing, The Flea And The Elephant
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #12

In 1834, six Dorset farm labourers were tried and condemned to transportation to Australia for joining an early Trade Union. Since then the 'Tolpuddle Martyrs' have become an iconic part of modern British History. Three years before the events in Tolpuddle, much of rural England was rocked with a massive uprising of farm labourers known as the 'Swing Riots'. This pamphlet analyses why 'Tolpuddle' has taken its place in the popular memory and the far more significant events of 'Swing' have been distorted and forgotten. Read more…

Andrea Button – Bristol's White Slave Trade, Indentured and Enforced Labour In The 17th Century
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #13

Bristol’s role as a supplier of labour to the American and West Indian colonies in the eighteenth century is associated with the African Slave Trade however, this trade was not officially open to the Bristol merchants until 1698. The indentured white servant system, operated in Bristol during the seventeenth century, were used by merchants to meet demand for labour in Britain’s new colonies until the Bristol merchants were legally able to compete in the lucrative transatlantic trade. This pamphlet reveals the extent of this ‘white slavery’ and its links to Bristol. Read more…

No Quarter 5

Includes A Somali Pirate Story by Jordan Zinovich (with Hans Plomp), an interview with Gabriel Kuhn, author of Life Under the Jolly Roger, Reflections on the Golden Age of Piracy, Anarchist Commune at Nootka in 1911? by Larry Gambourne, A Couple More Things About New Hazelton by David Tighe, John Oswald: Atheist, Vegetarian, Revolutionary by N. N., Somali Pirates by Peter Lamborn Wilson, book reviews, and a reading list, all interspersed by some nice black and white imagery. Read more…

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This collection of inter-connected essays is concerned with the impact of social and economic change upon the rural labouring poor and artisans in England, and combines a sensitive understanding of their social priorities with innovative quantitative analysis. It is based on an impressive range of sources, and its particular significance arises from the pioneering use made of a largely neglected archival source – settlement records – to address questions of central importance in English social and economic history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Levels of employment, wage rates, poor relief, the sexual division of labour, the social consequences of enclosure, the decline of farm service and traditional apprenticeship, and th equality of family life are amongst the issues discussed in a profound re-assessment of a perennial problem: the standard of living (in its widest sense) of the labouring poor during the period of industrialisation. The author’s conclusions challenge much of the prevailing orthodoxy, and his extensive use of literary and attitudinal material is closely integrated with the quantitative restatement of an interpretation that owes much to the older tradition of the Hammonds’ Village Labourer.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

1. Agricultural seasonal unemployment, the standard of living, and women's work, 1690–1860

2. Social relations – the decline of service

3. Social relations – the poor law

4. Enclosure and employment – the social consequences of enclosure

5. The decline of apprenticeship

6. The apprenticeship of women

7. The family

8. Thomas Hardy, rural Dorset, and the family

Appendix: yearly wages

Bibliography

Index

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On the night of 3-4 November 1839 seven thousand miners from the coalfields of south Wales set out to march on Newport. They were an organized force, armed, angry, and intent on inaugurating a brave new Chartist world. The rising proved to be the most serious clash between people and government in modern industrial Britain: in the major confrontation between Chartists and troops in Newport more than twenty miners were shot dead, and subsequently more than 250 people were arraigned in the last mass treason trial in British history.

The study tells the full story of the rising, its origins and its aftermath, and analyses the profound impact of armed insurrection on the social and political climate of the period. When the people of the coalfield took up the banner of Chartism, that movement became a political crusade. The author reveals that several revolutionary schemes were considered in the valleys, and establishes links with militants in other parts of Britain. He considers the response of the government and propertied classes – from the Special Commission that condemned three of the leaders to death, to the new interest in paternalism and the political concessions that were designed to prevent its recurrence. He concludes that contemporaries were right to regard the rising as one of the most important turning points in Welsh and British social history.

Contents

Maps

Illustrations

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. A unique society

2. A world of politics

3. The tide of revolution

4. The march

5. The rising

6. Punishment

Conclusion

Sources

Notes

Index

It concerns two of the most common types of popular disorders in late Tudor and early Stuart England: the food riots and the anti-enclosure riots in royal forests. Particular attention is paid to the Western Rising of 1626-1632, a series of massive anti-enclosure riots which took place in Gillingham Forest on the Wiltshire-Dorset border, Braydon Forest in Wiltshire and the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire. Concurrent riots in Leicester Forest, and Feckenham Forest, Worcestershire, and lesser known disorders in the Western forests which took place during the English Civil War are also investigated.

The leaders and most active participants in riot were rural artisans — skilled men working in non-agricultural employments. These artisans, particularly those in the major industries of seventeenth-century England located in the forested West, were largely wage-earners. Virtually landless cottagers, who relied on the market for food, clothworkers and other artisans frequently engaged in food riots and attempted insurrections during times of depression or harvest failure. These artisans exploited the common waste of the royal forests. Enclosure of the forests by the Crown threatened the livelihood of the workers who depended on the forests for raw material and pasturage.

The most striking demonstration of continuity is to be found in the identities of a number of the rioters and in the nature of the leadership. Twelve of the participants in the riots of 1643-45 had been fined in the Star Chamber for their part in the disorders of the 1620s; eight were artisans, one was a mercer, two were husbandmen, and one was of undetermined status. Four of them were noted as notorious offenders in the 1640s, including a fuller who acted as drummer and John Philips, tanner, who took over leadership of the riots in 1644 from Richard Butler, a poor linenweaver. It is clear from the examinations of witnesses that Butler had been the leader of the riots in 1643 until he was apprehended and brought before the Lords. His opinions, as reported by a number of witnesses, show considerable contempt for Parliament and for Elgin's agent, Thomas Brunker. At the beginnning of the disorders in 1643 he went into a shop to buy gunpowder. When told it cost 1s. 6d. per pound, "hee sayd his monie would not hold out to have soe much, but desired her to lett him have 2 pennyworth and sayd it would be enough to serve Tome Brunker and for his proclamation I care not a fart of mine arse."

Extract from Ch. 9., A Second Western Rising: Riot during the Civil War and Interregnum

Buchanan Sharp's conclusions challenge the dominant modern view that work in rural industry was merely the by-employment of members of peasant households. Contrary to the prevailing interpretation that disaffected men of standing were generally behind disorders such as the Western Rising, manipulating popular grievances for their own ends, In Contempt of All Authority concludes that in times of economic and social distress or political dislocation (such as the Civil War) the “lower orders” of Tudor and Stuart England were provoked into self-organised direct action by very basic issues of food supply, employment, and common rights. In the course of such actions they manifested an intense hatred of the gentry and the well-to-do, whom they held responsible for existing conditions.

The Breviary Stuff Publications offering is the first paperback edition, in an oversized format (191x235mm, 204pp), with a RRP of £12.00. It is available from all good bookshops, online retailers, such as Amazon, and directly from the Breviary Stuff Publications website, www.breviarystuff.org.uk.

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Five established experts in the fields of industrial protest and industrial relations have set out to survey the historical geography of industrial protest from the 1750s to the present day. What is revealed, in the numerous maps and accompanying text, is a history of change struck through with more continuity than one might expect.

The role of communities as the bases for mobilisation for collective action over working conditions and wages runs from the textile workers' disputes in the West Country in the 1750s to the 1984/5 miners' strike. In industrial protest and strikes, geography matters.

Through the book one sees the development of trade unionism, from its regional bases to the development of national organisations. In that growth waht is apparent is the tension between the national organisation and the locality.

There is new work presented here for the first time: the sailors' strike og 1768, the machine-breaking riots of 1826, the dock strikes in the immediate post-war period. The book gives a rare insight into industrial relations through the direct collective action of workers, caught up in the transformation of the world's first industrial nation

Contents

Preface

Introduction

Section A: 1750-1850 by Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth

Industrial protest: 1750-1850

1. Strikes and popular protest in Gloucestershire, 1756-66

2. The London sailors' strike of 1768 by Richard Sheldon

3. Protests over cotton machinery in Lancashire, 1768-79

4. Protests against machinery in the west of England wollen industry, 1776-1802

5. The Luddite Disturbances, 1811-12

5.1 Luddism in the Midlands

5.2 Luddism in Yorkshire

5.3 Lancashire Luddism

6. The disturbances of 1826 in the manufacturing districts of the north of England by David Walsh

7. The General Strike of 1842

Section B: 1850-1900 by Humphrey Southall

Industrial protest: 1850-1900

8. The records of industrial protest

9. Lock-outs and national bargaining in the engineering industry, 1852 and 1897-8

10. The nine-hours movement of 1871

11. The revolt of the field, 1872-4

12. The strike at Bryant and May's match factory, East London, July 1888 by Gillian Rose

13. Organising the unskilled: the 1889 dock strike

14. The early May days: 1890, 1891 and 1892 by Chris Wrigley

15. The coal lock-out of 1893 by Chris Wrigley

Section C: 1900-39 by David Gilbert

Industrial protest: 1900-39

16. The geography of stikes, 1900-39

17. The General Strike of 1926

18. The miners' lock-out of 1926

19. Little Moscows and radical localities

20. The national hunger marches, 1921-36

21. The Jarrow Crusade of 1936

22. The Harworth dispute of 1936-7

Section D: 1940-90 by Chris Wrigley

Industrial protest: 1940-90

23. The geography of strikes, 1940-90 by David Gilbert

24. Coal disputes, 1940-45

25. Unofficial dock strikes and the 1945-51 Labour governments by Jim Phillips

26. Strikes in the motor car manufacturing industry

27. The winter of discontent: the lorry drivers' strike, January 1979

28. The 1984-5 miners' strike

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The outbreaks of collective violence arising from the tensions existing within society have long been themes in the study of British social history. Detailed studies abound — on the Levellers, the Diggers, fen rioters, food rioters, machinery riots, tithe riots, turnpike riots and so on. This book breaks new ground in that it attempts to survey the whole range of these rural riots, to compare and contrast them, and to draw general conclusions.

Seventy-five maps are included in this volume, each with an accompanying commentary written by an authority on the particular subject. Taken together, the maps show how the distribution of protest changed over time, how particular forms of protest — riots connected with land, with food and with labour — altered as Britain developed from a predominantly feudal to a predominantly capitalist society.

Contents

List of Maps

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction

2. The Geography of Land Protests 1548-1860

2.1 Lowland England 1520-95

2.2 Lowland England 1596-1710

2.3 Upland England 1520-1650

2.4 Wales, Scotland and Upland England 1650-1860

2.5 Lowland England 1710-1860

2.6 1548-52

2.7 1580-1606

2.8 The Midland Revolt of 1607 John Martin

2.9 1608-39

2.10 1640-9

2.11 1650-1701

2.12 1702-39

2.13 The Levellers' Revolt in Galloway 1724 John W. Leopold

2.14 1740-79

2.15 1780-1831

2.16 1832-60

2.17 Attacks on Deer Parks 1640-1740

2.18 Opposition to Enclosure in Northamptonshire c1760-1800 Jeanette M. Neeson

3. The Geography of Food Riots 1585-1847

3.1 Introduction

3.2 1585-1649 John Walter

3.3 1660-1737

3.4 1740 Robert W. Malcolmson

3.5 1756-7 Jeremy N. Caple

3.6 1766 Dale E. Williams

3.7 1771-3

3.8 1776-93

3.9 1794-6

3.10 1799-1801

3.11 1810-18

3.12 1847 Eric Richards

3.13 North Midlands: August and September 1756 Jeremy N. Caple

3.14 Gloucestershire — Wiltshire 1766 Dale E. Williams

3.15 Devon 1795 and 1800-1 John Bohstedt

4 Turnpike Disturbances in the Eighteenth and Early-nineteenth Centuries

5 The Clubmen and Militia Protests

5.1 The Risings of the Clubmen in 1644-45 Garry Lynch

5.2 The Militia Riots of 1757 Jeremy N. Caple

5.3 Militia Riots 1795-8

6 The Geography of Protests by Agricultural Labourers 1790-1850

6.1 The Rise of an Agricultural Proletariat

6.2 The French Wars 1793-1815 and the First Oubreaks of Labourers' Protests

6.3 The Post-war Agricultural Depression and the Protests of the 1815-31 Period

6.4 The East Anglian Protests of 1816

6.5 The Agricultural Labourers' Protests of 1822

6.6 The Captain Swing Protests of 1830-31

6.7 After Swing

6.8 Anti Poor Law Movements and Rural Trade Unionism in the South-east 1835 John Lowerson

6.9 Protest in East Anglia Against the Imposition of the New Poor Law Anne Digby

6.10 The Agricultural Labourers' Protests in East Anglia in the 1840s

7 Rural Protest in Mid- and Late-Victorian Britain

7.1 Introduction

7.2 The Rebecca Riots 1839-44 David J. V. Jones

7.3 The Spread of the Rebecca Riots 1842-44

7.4 Agricultural Trade Unionism in England 1872-94 John P. D. Dunbabin

7.5 The Kent and Sussex Labourers' Union 1872-95 Felicity Carlton

7.6 The Welsh Tithe War 1886-95 John P. D. Dunbabin

7.7 The Highland Land War 1881-96 James Hunter

References

Notes on Contributors

Index

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Rafah, a town at the southernmost tip of the Gaza Strip, is a squalid place. Raw concrete buildings front rubbish-strewn alleys. The narrow streets are crowded with young children and unemployed men. Situated on the border with Egypt, swaths of Rafah have been reduced to rubble. Rafah is today and has always been a notorious flashpoint in this most bitter of conflicts.

Buried deep in the archives is one bloody incident, in 1956, that left 111 Palestinian refugees dead, shot by Israeli soldiers. Seemingly a footnote to a long history of killing, that day in Rafah – coldblooded massacre or dreadful mistake – reveals the competing truths that have come to define an intractable war. In a quest to get to the heart of what happened, Joe Sacco arrives in Gaza and, immersing himself in daily life, uncovers Rafah, past and present. Spanning fifty years, moving fluidly between one war and the next, alive with the voices of fugitives and schoolchildren, widows and sheikhs, Footnotes in Gaza captures the essence of a tragedy.

As in Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, Joe Sacco's unique visual journalism has rendered a contested landscape in brilliant, meticulous detail. Footnotes in Gaza, his most ambitious work to date, transforms a critical conflict of our age into intimate and immediate experience. ]]> http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/12/15/joe-sacco-footnotes-in-gaza/feed/ 0 http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/11/11/eileen-stephen-yeo-eds-popular-culture-and-class-conflict-1590-1914-explorations-in-the-history-of-labour-and-leisure/ http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/11/11/eileen-stephen-yeo-eds-popular-culture-and-class-conflict-1590-1914-explorations-in-the-history-of-labour-and-leisure/#comments Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:12:02 +0000 p http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/?p=1226 Eileen & Stephen Yeo (Eds.) – Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590-1914, Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure
[The Harvester Press 1981]

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This book makes a major contribution to the social history of popular culture and working-class leisure.

The contributors explore important episodes in the development of cultural and associational activity in working people's leisure time. They focus on changes in cultural and associational form and highlight class situation and social conflict as key parts of those changes.

All the vivid details of historical study are here: pubs, alehouses, church bands, Methodism, street football, regulated entertainment, radical culture, Whitsun holidays, music halls, variety theatres, and working men's clubs. Bound together by general argument, these studies will substantially extend existing ideas on class conflict away from work. New research findings offer a coherent account of important areas of modern social life in England from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries.

Contents

Notes on Contributors

Preface

1. Alehouses, Order and Reformation in Rural England, 1590-1660

Keith Wrightson

2. Methodism and the Tatterdemalions

Arnold Rattenbury

3. 'Babylonian Performances': the Rise and Suppression of Popular Church Music, 1660-1870

Vic Gammon

4. Popular Recreation and Social Conflict in Derby, 1800-1850

Anthony Delves

5. Ways of Seeing: Control and Leisure versus Class and Struggle

Eileen and stephen Yeo

6. Culture and Constraint in Working-Class Movements, 1830-1855

Eileen Yeo

7. The Taming of Whitsun: the Changing Face of a Nineteenth-Century Rural Holiday

Alun Howkins

8. The Effingham Arms and the Empire: Deliberate Selection in the Evolution of Music Hall in London

Penelope Summerfield

9. London Working Men's Clubs, 1875-1914

T. G. Ashplant

10. Perceived Patterns: Competition and License versus Class and Struggle

Eileen and Stephen Yeo

Index

]]> http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/11/11/eileen-stephen-yeo-eds-popular-culture-and-class-conflict-1590-1914-explorations-in-the-history-of-labour-and-leisure/feed/ 0 http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/10/08/henry-snowstorm-the-one-day-house/ http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/10/08/henry-snowstorm-the-one-day-house/#comments Thu, 08 Oct 2009 08:48:55 +0000 p http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/?p=1215 The One Day House, a 4-track "EP" from Henry Snowstorm, is now released. 4 instrumentals in a hiphop/downtempo flavour. Like the previous albums, it is available as a free download.

… keep on and on 'til the break of dawn … ]]> http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/10/08/henry-snowstorm-the-one-day-house/feed/ 0 http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/10/01/two-radical-history-pamphlets-old-and-new/ http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/10/01/two-radical-history-pamphlets-old-and-new/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 06:56:43 +0000 p http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/?p=1167 Two radical history pamphlets; the former supposes a high level of prior knowledge of its subject, whereas the latter serves as an introduction.

Historical Geography Research Series No. 1, 1979
Andrew Charlesworth – Social Protest in a Rural Society : The Spatial Diffusion of the Captain Swing Disturbances of 1830-1831 (78pp.)
http://www.exeter.ac.uk/cornwall/academic_departments/geography/HGRG/Research%20Series.html

1830 was a year of revolution in France and Belgium. In England it saw the revival of agitation for parliamentary reform, sustained partly by the examples of Paris and Brussels and undoubtedly encouraged by the success in Ireland the previous year of O'Connell's Catholic Association. 1830 was a year of tax potests and of widespread industrial unrest. And in the autumn and early winter of that turbulent year, whilst the first steps towards the making of the First Reform Bill were being taken, there swept across southern and eastern England a massive series of protests by agricultural labourers.

The labourers' protests took many forms. In some areas there were demands for higher wages and for tithe reductions, although the two were not always associated. Other areas saw the overseers of the poor attacked; in a few places workhouses were the target of the crowd. In central-southern England forced levies of money by the protestors were common, but even more widespread were the detruction of threshing machines. And as a background to the collective protests there was the firing of barns and ricks and the receipt of threatening letters, often signed by the mythical 'Captain Swing'. Finally, after earlier concessions, order was brutally restored.

Such, in brief and bare outline, were the Captain Swing protests of 1830. In the most detailed study of the the protests so far, Hobsbawn and Rudé maintain that:

One thing can be said with some confidence: they [the protests] were essentially a rural and local phenomenon. That is to say their diffusion had nothing to do with national lines of communication and very little to do even with the local towns. Over most of Sussex, Hampshire and Wiltshire, for instance, the movement spread across such main roads as there were from London to the coast of from one town to another … The path of the rising … followed not the main arteries of national or even county circulation, but the complex system of smaller veins and capilliaries which linked each parish to its neighbours and to its local centres.
[E.J. Hobsbawm and G. Rudé, Captain Swing (London 1969; rev. ed. 1973) 159]

It is contended that these conclusions are at variance with the evidence. In fact, the diffusion of the protests had a great deal to do with national lines of communication. Moreover, it is argued that this altered perception of the spread of the revolt opens up new questions and possibly affords new insights into the world of the agricultural labourer. The new findings challenge not only Hobsbawn and Rudé's views on the spatial patterning of the protests but also their conclusions on the unpolitical motivations of the labourers' actions.

Thus the first part of the monograph sets out to identify the channels along which the disturbances spread. In so doing, although we can identify pathways of the rising different to those indicated by Hobsbawn and Rudé, simple contagion models of diffusion are still inadequate to explain why the major routeways of southern and eastern England guided the spread of the revolt. In the second part of the monograph, therefore, the diffusion of the protests is explained in the light of the work of such historians as Charles Tilly and E.P. Thompson. Their perspective on social protest places more emphasis on the 'political' and organisational aspects of collective action, rather than on economic motivation and on the spontaneity of the outbreak of disturbances. It seeks to place collective protest within its historical context, the spread of crowd turbulence reflecting the political crisis of the day rather than the ever present hardships of the common people.

Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #11, 2009
Steve Mills – A Barbarous and Ungovernable People! A Short History of the Miners of Kingswood Forest (20pp.)
http://brh.org.uk/publications.html

"A barbarous and ungovernable people" is a bit of a strong condemnation of a community. Especially considering that at the time the community in question was situated on the outskirts of a vibrant city in Britain. The people of Kingswood Forest supplied the south west of England and the industries of Bristol with coal, and it is fair to say that without the Kingswood Forest coal Bristol would not be the city it is today. However, the relationship between the two communities was strained to say the least.

By the time of the English Civil War 1642-1649 squatting on the common land of Kingswood Forest had become more widespread and many people exercised their age-old right of eking out a living from the raw materials that their environment provided them with. Following the Restoration of 1660, the Crown sought to reassert its authority in the old Royal Forests, Kingswood Forest included. The residents were not prepared to give up their rights easily and over several generations they resisted through petitions, physical force, tearing down of tollgates, smashing of looms, roadblocks, rioting and other means.

This pamphlet tells the story of the misunderstanding and mistrust which, from time to time, blew up into full scale conflagration.

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Voices echoing a revolutionary position have been audible on the margins of the Christian church in every generation. By listening to two of the most prominent revolutionaries in Christian history, Andrew Bradstock aims to discover whether there is any distinctive contribution which Christianity can be said to make to revolutionary theory and practice. His book proceeds by way of an analysis of the life an testimony of Thomas Müntzer (a preacher and pastor of the early Reformation period in Germany, who became embroiled in the Peasants' War of 1525) and of Gerrard Winstanley (leader and main theorist of the Digger Movement in England in the 1640s), who are selected in their capacity as paradigmatic figures. It emerges that not only were millenarian, apocalyptic and utopian concerns central to the thinking of both men, but both hinged the realization of their respective projects on the imminent return of Christ and the restoration of the world to something like a state of prelapsarian perfection. Whether Christianity's eschatological dimension renders it incapable of offering to politics anything other than fantastic, a-historical visions, or whether a more nuanced interpretation of the kingdom points towards a singular and contructive contribution, is the fundamental question which this book seeks to answer.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

Part One: Thomas Müntzer

1. Thomas Müntzer: An introduction to his life and work

2. 'Suffering the sharp edge of the plough-share': Müntzer's theology and politics

3. 'A servant of God against the godless': Müntzer as Christian revolutionary

Part Two: Gerrard Winstanley

4. Gerrard Winstanley: An introduction to his life and work

5. 'To make the Earth a Common Treasury': Winstanley's theology and politics

6. 'Christ rising in sons and daughters': Winstanley as Christian revolutionary

Part Three: Conclusion

7. Building the kingdom: towards a Christian contribution to revolutionary praxis

Notes

Further reading

Index

Bible references

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Belgian-born Masereel illustrated the works of Tolstoy, Zola, and Oscar Wilde, but he made the greatest impact with his wordless novels. These three stories reflect the German Expressionist revival of the art of the woodcut. Precursors to today's graphic novels, they also represent a centuries-old tradition of picture books for unschooled audiences. Masereel combines allegory and satire in his explorations of love, alienation, and artistic creation. Thomas Mann praised these striking Expressionistic images as "so compelling, so deeply felt, so rich in ideas, that one never tires of looking at them." ]]> http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/09/29/frans-masereel-the-sun-the-idea-story-without-words-three-graphic-novels/feed/ 0 http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/09/19/barry-reay-the-last-rising-of-the-agricultural-labourers-rural-life-and-protest-in-nineteenth-century-england/ http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/09/19/barry-reay-the-last-rising-of-the-agricultural-labourers-rural-life-and-protest-in-nineteenth-century-england/#comments Sat, 19 Sep 2009 07:28:55 +0000 p http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/?p=1133 Barry Reay – The Last Rising of the Agricultural Labourers, Rural Life and Protest in Nineteenth-Century England
[Clarendon Press 1990]

The Hernhill Rising of 1838 was the last battle fought on English soil, the last revolt against the New Poor Law, and England's last millenarian rising. The bloody 'Battle of Bosenden Wood', fought in a corner of rural Kent, was the culmination of a revolt led by the self-styled 'Sir William Countenay'. It was also, despite the greater fame of the 1830 Swing Riots, the last rising of the agricultural labourers.

Barry Reay provides us with the first comprehensive and scholarly analysis of the abortive rising, its background, and its social context, based on intensive research, particularly in local archives. He presents a unique case-study of popular mobilization in nineteenth-century England, giving us a vivid portrait of the day-to-day existence of the farm labourer and the life of the hamlet. Dr. Reay explores the wider context of agrarian relations, rural reform, protest and control through the fascinating story of The Last Rising of the Agricultural Labourers.

Contents

List of Plates

List of Figures

List of Maps

List of Tables

Abbreviations

Introduction

PART I THE SETTING

1. Structures

2. Labouring Life

3. Conflict and Discontents

PART II THE RISING

4. The Rising

5. Courtenay

6. The Rioters

PART III THE AFTERMATH

7. Repercussions

8. Epilogue

PART IV IMPLICATIONS

9. Rural Life and Protest in Nineteenth-Century England

Notes

Index

]]> http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/09/19/barry-reay-the-last-rising-of-the-agricultural-labourers-rural-life-and-protest-in-nineteenth-century-england/feed/ 0 http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/09/06/mike-jay-the-unfortunate-colonel-despard/ http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/09/06/mike-jay-the-unfortunate-colonel-despard/#comments Sun, 06 Sep 2009 08:03:07 +0000 p http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/?p=1125 Mike Jay – The Unfortunate Colonel Despard
[Bantam Press 2004]

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Britain is in the grip of a divisive war on terror. The government is forcing through new emergency powers to imprison suspected terrorists without trial. Dissent is spilling on to the streets, where mass popular opposition to the war is suppressed with violence. Secret intelligence sources whisper of a vast international terrorist conspiracy. The year is 1798. And Colonel Edward Marcus Despard is shortly to become the last man to be sentenced to public hanging, drawing and quartering for high treason.

Despard's execution was the culmination of an extraordinary life. He had served as a soldier in Jamaica, and fought along side savage MIskito Indians — and a young Horatio Nelson — in one of the most hellish jungle campaigns in the history of warfare. Rewarded with command of the British settlement of Belize, he married a black woman and staked his reputation on giving the same rights to freed slaves as to white settlers. Summoned back to London to explain himself, he found his career put on hold. At a time when many believed that, as in America and France, the ruling elite was on the verge of collapse, Despard, cast aside by the establishment, joined the revolutionary underground.

The Unfortunate Colonel Despard moves from high adventure on the Spanish Main to the political tumult of the London underworld in the 1790s. Despard's personal drama unfolds against a background of voodoo slave revolts and naval mutinies, the French Revolution and the Irish Rebellion, the democratic ideals of Thomas Paine and the ruthless political clampdown of William Pitt's 'Reign of Terror'. Despard's contested fate was the sensational climax to a British revolution that never happened, but it was also to presage the birth of modern democracy.

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

Prologue: The Hanged Man

PART ONE: The Spanish Main

1 Patriot

2 Hero

3 Colonel

4 Despot

PART TWO: The London Underworld

5 Revolutionary

6 Terrorist

7 Traitor

Epilogue: The Unfinished Despard Business

A Note on Sources

Bibliography

Index

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The Lancashire weavers' riots of April 1826 were one of the most dramatic events in the history of the English cotton industry. Although 1826 was neither the first nor the last occasion on which newly-installed powerlooms were destroyed by angry English textile workers, it was certainly the biggest. For four days, the area bordered by Chorley, Clitheroe, Bacup, and Bury was convulsed as desparate crowds attacked local weaving sheds and smashed over 1100 of the hated machines. The immediate human cost of this brief but spectacular orgy of violence was borne by the six people killed when rioters encountered the military at Chatterton; a further instalment was paid, some months afterwards, by the ten people transported for life, and the thirty others sentenced to prison terms, for their part in the disturbances. The symbolic significance of the 1826 riots — representing vividly the final vain attempt of an old way of life based on the handloom and the domestic workshop to resist by force the 'inevitable march of progress' in the shape of the steam engine and factory — has long been recognised. Yet the exciting story of what happened during these four hectic days has never been told in detail, and the Lancashire loom-breakers have attracted little attention from historians, compared with midland Luddites of 1812 and the 'Swing' rioters in Southern England in 1830. […] Now, at last, we have an exhaustive, hour-by-hour narrative of the four days of rioting, coupled with a detailed account of the fates of some of the rioters, from an enthusiastic local historian who knows the area and its past intimately.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Foreword

Elephants and Chickens

Monday — The Beginnings

Tuesday — 'A Disposition to Riot'

Wednesday — Watch and Ward

Wednesday — The Chatteron 'Fight'

Wednesday — On Two Fronts

Thursday — 'Along by Botany Bay'

Dispute and Dishonour

The Quiet Which Prevails

'A Melacholy Catalogue'

'Like a Wicked Noah's Ark'

Thomas Emmet — On the Manlius

On the Harmony

A Lucky Break

A Family Story

A New Life

Surely not in Vain

Notes

Dramatis Personae

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

Appendix 4

Appendix 5

Appendix 6

Appendix 7

Select Bibliography

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This pamphlet is a study of resistance. It describes the long drawn out fight of the commoners of Otmoor to defend their rights against enclosure, a fight which lasted for at least fifty years, from 1786, when an enclosure Bill was first mooted, to 1835, when the unity of the resistance broke up. The story of the Otmoor disturbances is already familiar in its broad outlines from the account given by the Hammonds in The Village Labourer. But it is told here by Benard Reaney with a wealth of new documents which make it possible for him to offer important new interpretations, and to place the disturbances in a context of class antagonisms and alignments. The 'possessioning' of September 6, 1830, is shown as part of a well-organised and highly-skilled resistance which in some respects reached a higher point after 1830 than before. Documents in the Oxfordshire Record Office and P.R.O. are drawn upon to show the strategies of resistance, and the pattern of militancy is related to the social structure of Otmoor's seven towns — in partiuclar the idiosyncracies of Charlton-on-Otmoor, 'the focus of all principal discontent', the home of 'the more numerous and daring of the offenders'. A valuable section on the 'break-up of the resistance' discusses the social antagonisms which undermined the popular alliance from within. The study is a critical one, and it is hoped that it may offer useful lessons to those engaged in the still unresolved struggle between property and common rights.

Contents

Foreword

Preface

The Seven Towns of Otmoor

Common Rights

The Enclosers

The 'Possessioning' of September 6, 1830 and the Riot at St Giles's Fair

Resistance Movement, 1830-1835

The Break-up of Resistance

The Serbonian Bog

This book traces the development of agrarian ideas from the 1770s through to Chartism, and seeks to explain why, in an era of industrialization and urban growth, land remained one of the major issues in popular politics. Dr Chase considers the relationship between 'land consciousness' and early socialism; attempts to create alternative communities; and contemporary perceptions of nature and the environment. He concludes that, far from being an anachronistic, utopian, and reactionary movement, agrarianism was an integral part of the working class experience and of radical politics.

The People's Farm also provides the most extensive study to date of Thomas Spence, and his followers the Spenceans. New light is thrown on the Spa Fields and Cato Street conspiracies, in which they were involved; but their true significance lies in their contribution to English radicalism—a key factor in shaping the politics of agrarian reform in the 1820s and 1830s.

Contents

Abbreviations

1. Agrarianism

2. Thomas Spence: Newcastle, 1750-1787

3. Spence in London, 1788-1814

4. Agrarians and Revolutionaries: Spencean Philanthropy, 1814-1820

5. Agrarian Ideals in Radical Politics: The 1820s and 1830s

6. Precepts in Practice

7. Designed for the Support of Mankind

Bibliography

Index

Political philosophers (such as Gramsci) and social historians (such as E.P. Thompson) have suggested that rural customs and ceremonies have much more to them than the picturesqueness which has attracted traditional folklorists. They can be seen to have a purpose in the structures of rural society. But no historian has really pursued this idea for the English folk materials of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: the period from which most evidence survives.

Bringing together a wealth of research, this book explores the view that such rural folk practices were a mechanism of social cohesion, and social disruption. Through them the interdependence of the rural working-class and the gentry was affirmed, and infringements of the rights of the poor resisted, sometimes aggressively.

This book opens with an introductory chapter which attempts to explain the context of custom by illustrating that historical continuity was seen as the prinicipal requirement for any kind of collective action to be characterised as 'customary'. Some legal opinion in the eighteenth century strove to undermine the notion of custom and replace it with the certainties of statute law. From this it can be seen that an official culture was often in conflict with unofficial popular morality. Chapter 2 represents an endeavour to reconstruct several local customary calendars for the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to show that the efforts of folklorists and others have resulted in the constructon of artificial regional or even national calendars of custom and usage which destroy local specificity. In fact, the local calendar was made up of several different kinds of calendar relating to the range of experience within village life, from work and leisure to parish or manor government. The relationship of one particular group within the community whose role was shaped by customary practice – the church ringers – to the local calendar is also examined.

Chapter 3 examines some aspects of the notion of legitimation and suggest that, in part, the collective action of the labouring poor which took place on certain customary dates until the mid-nineteenth century, was legitimated by reference to church and manor practice, particularly the annual state services which were celebrated in the parish church, and the structure of manorial organisation. Thus, parish perambulations during Rogation Week, Guy Fawkes night celebrations, and Oak Apple Day customs were reinforced. Chapter 4, by concentrating on an examination of harvest practices, considers the socially cohesive nature of custom and assesses its importance for the labouring poor. Chapter 5 illusrates the socially disruptive side of other customs and rituals and relates them to forms of collective action adopted during periods of more overtly politcal social protest, in particular the Captain Swing disturbances.

Wood gatherers whose actions had previously been legitimated by reference to custom found, during the later eighteenth century, that statute law had eroded their right and cast them in the role of wood stealer. Chapter 6 looks at the struggle between custom and law in the context of the poor's belief in a general customary right to collect wood for fuel. Chapter 7 deals with the suppression of many customs in the mid-nineteenth century, and describes the change from village feast to benefit club day (which transformed one of them). This chapter concludes with an account of the deliberate attempt to remodel some customs, such as the harvest home supper, to conform with and promote more acceptable values of sobriety and good order, and to recreate a kind of deferential community orderliness, supposed by some Victorian writers and painters to recall former times.

Contents

Introduction

1 The Context of Custom

Custom and the Past

Custom and Sources

Custom and Perspective

2 The Community and its Calendars

The Reconstruction of Local Calendars

Local Customary Groups: The Case of Church Ringers

3 Custom and Legitimation

The Chruch

The Manor

4 Custom and Social Cohesion

Harvest and Harvest Perquistes

Calendar Rituals and the Shape of the Community

5 The Rituals of Privation and Protest

Custom, Conflict and Commensality

Protest and the Enemies of the Community

6 Crime, Custom, and Popular Legitimacy

7 The Control of Custom

Appendix 1: The Development of Folklore Studies in England

Appendix 2: The Ritual of the Year

General Index

Index of Places

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The study of popular sexual attitudes and behaviour has moved far and fast in recent years, receiving momentum from historical demographers and histrorians of the family. At most times illicit sex was largely a matter for the church courts, although bastardy always posed problems for poor law administration. During the Interregnum statute law took over and placed drastic sanctions, including in some cases the death penalty, in the hands of its courts. Stephen Roberts examines the working of this remarkable act in Devon. He contributes both to our knowledge of how a statute was regarded and enforced in a particular region and to our knowledge of popular sexual attitudes and behaviour.

Avril Leadley focusses on the market place and the people who interest her would probably be regarded as cheats rather than criminals. Properly she draws attention to the central role of the market place, to the problems of its regulation by borough authorities, to the difficulties of government in gaining acceptance for uniform weights and measures and of the sensitivity of a direct action inclined populace to malpractices.

Roger Wells turns his attention to the problem of order. Crime and disturbance in teh eighteenth century took place in a society which lacked a large and professional enough police system for the imposing of prompt and effective control. Serious outbreaks of disorder needed the employment of the military either in its regular or in one of its irregular forms (yeoman, cavalry, volunteer regiments, etc). Concentrating on one of the most disturbed years, 1795, when disaffection at home, threat of invasion from abroad and high food prices seriously concerned the authorities. Dr Wells examines the problems of using the militia for crowd control when, suffering from the same strains as the population from which it was drawn, the loyalty of many of its number was in doubt.

Bob Bushaway brings together his skills as professional historian and student of folklore and customs. This combination shows to advantage in his account of conflict between wood-taking habits of forest populations and a law increasingly reflecting the property concerns of the woodland owners. Here popular attitudes and developing notions of property rights clashed with as much import as in teh most dramatic confrontations characteristic of smuggling, poaching and wrecking.

John Rule use sheep-stealing as a casestudy of rural crime c. 1740 to 1780. All capital offences create documentation but sheep-stealing was sufficiently commonplace to do so to a usable extent. The paper is exploratory: by looking at sheep-stealers it indicates something of the complexity and range of motivations which lay behind the perpetration of criminal acts in the countryside.

Contents

Introduction

Fornication and bastardy in mid-seventeenth century Devon : how was the Act of 1650 enforced?

Stephen Roberts

Some villains of the eighteenth-century market place

Avril D Leadley

The militia mutinies of 1795

Roger Wells

From custom to crime : wood gathering in eigthteenth- and early nineteenth-century England : a focus for conflict in Hampshire, Wiltshire and the south

Robert W Bushaway

The manifold causes of rural crime : sheep-stealing in England c 1740-1840

John G Rule

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A Chinese woman pushes her way to the front of a hiring queue outside a factory in Shenzhen…. A Bolivian miner, without light or ventilation, crawls deep inside a deserted mine… A group of Somali cleaners files into an investment bank in London’s Canary Wharf…

Globalisation has created a whole new working class – and they are reliving stories that were first played out a century ago. In Live Working or Die Fighting, Paul Mason tells the story of this new working class alongside the epic history of the global labour movement, from its formation in the factories of the 1800s to its near destruction by fascism in the 1930s. Along the way he provides a ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ for the anti-globalisation movement, uncovering startling parallels between the issues that confronted the original anti-capitalists and those who have taken to the streets in Seattle, Genoa and beyond.

Blending exhilarating historical narrative with reportage from today’s front line, he links the lives of 19th-century factory girls with the lives of teenagers in a giant Chinese mobile phone factory; he tells the story of how mass trade unions were born in London’s Docklands – and how they’re being reinvented by the migrant cleaners in skyscrapers that stand on the very same spot.

The stories come to life through the voices of remarkable individuals: child labourers in Dickensian England, visionary women on Parisian barricades, gun-toting railway strikers in America’s wild west, and beer-swilling German metalworkers who tried to stop World War One. It is a story of urban slums, self-help co-operatives, choirs and brass bands, free love and self-education by candlelight. And, as the author shows, in the developing industrial economies of the world it is still with us. Live Working or Die Fighting celebrates a common history of defiance, idealism and self-sacrifice, one as alive and active today as it was two hundred years ago. It is a unique and inspirational book.

Contents

Introduction

1. Rise like lions

The Peterloo Massacre, Manchester 1819
Shenzhen, China, 2003
Manchester, 1819

2. Everything connected with beauty

The silk weavers' revolt, Lyon, 1831
Varanasi, India, 2005
Lyon, France, 1830

3. This is the dawn…

The Paris Commune, 1871
Amukoko, Nigeria, 2005
Paris, April 1867

4. Every race worth saving

How American workers invented May Day
Basra, Iraq, 2006
Philadelphia, USA, 1869

5. A great big union grand

Unskilled unionism goes global, 1889-1912
Canary Wharf, London, 2004
London, 1889

6. Wars between brothers

How German workers tried to stop the war
Huanuni, Bolivia, 2006
Germany, 1905

7. Totally ignorant labourers

The birth of the Chinese working class
New Delhi, India, 2005
Shanghai, China, 1919

8. Heaven and earth will hear us

Jewish workers fight for cultural freedom
El Alto, Boliva, 2006
Brzeziny, Poland

9. Joy brought on by hope

When workers controlled the factories
Neuquén, Argentina, 2006
Italy, 1920
France, 1936
Flint, Michigan, 1937

Afterword: Louise Michel with fairy wings

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

Of particular interest to me were a couple talks delivered by the Bristol Radical History Group, which were perhaps the most controversial thing there. These were about the large scale Captain Swing riots "that swept across the south of England 3 years before the events in Tolpuddle." These were controversial in the sense that they were carried out by the so-called ignorant rural peasants. As the speaker pointed out, whereas The Tolpuddle Martyrs were innocent, the Swing Rioters were guilty and they were defiant in their guilt. They recognised their rights as people, despite what the law and the law-makers would have to say on the matter. It is the innocent/guilty polarity, (amongst other reasons), according to the speaker, which means that today many have heard of the Tolpuddle Martyrs but few have heard of Captain Swing, despite the Captain Swing riots being a much larger movement involving a far greater number of people, and being a far bigger problem for the authorities. I agree. The talk was titled 'The Flea and the Elephant', the flea being Tolpuddle, the elephant Captain Swing.

The Bristol Radical History Group have put on many events, check their website for details of upcoming events. They also publish a series of pamphlets, three of which I picked up whilst I was at the festival:

We Come For Our Own And We Shall Have It, Smuggling In Poole And Dorset
Kevin Davies
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #2
A look at the history of smuggling in Dorset and the government responses to it. This pamphlet examines whether smugglers should be considered folk heroes and to what extent smuggling was a community enterprise.

Yesterday's To-morrow, Bristol's Garden Suburbs
Stephen E. Hunt
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #8
In 1909, the Bristol Garden Suburb Limited was set up to implement the ideas Ebenezer Howard popularised in To-morrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform, first published in 1898. Garden-City principles inspired promising developments at Shirehampton, Sea Mills and Keynsham chocolate factory, but were diluted in the construction of Bristol's interwar housing estates at Knowle West and Bedminster, Hillfields, Southmead, Horfield, Speedwell and St Annes. Today it's timely to revisit Howard's ideas in the light of several topics of green chatter — transition towns, peak oil and Gordon Brown's intention to promote the construction of eco-towns.

Nicotiana Brittanica, The Cotswolds' Illicit Tobacco Cultivation In The 17th Century
Will Simpson & Jim McNeill
Bristol Radical Pamphleteer #9
Four centuries ago a group of farmers from the West Of England decided to see if they could make a living for themselves by growing tobacco. This put them at odds with the English state and its imperial ambition to build a mercantile economy driven by indentured and slave labour. This is their story of resistance.

To date, the Bristol Radical History Group have published 10 pamphlets, see their website for further information.

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England in the long eighteenth century has often been regarded as a deferential society under aristocratic leadership, or more recently, as a society whose internal tensions were dispersed by the persistant experience of war. This book takes a different view. Drawing together the implications of recent work on demography, labour, and law, it seeks to re-explore the power relations in English society and the ongoing struggles over popular entitlements and elite privilege.

Focusing primarily on the experience of England's lower orders, Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers accord new significance to the decline of customary rights and claims, and to the triumph of market forces and the law, showing how the paternalism of the first half of the century gave way to the sharper class articulation of the second, culminating in the birth of a working-class radicalism in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.

'Shuttles', to a squire or great landed patrician, meant trade, manual work, the stain on those who were not, and could never be, gentlemen. To a small master weaver, and his journeymen and apprentices, they were a proud symbol of 'the Trade', a skill and a claim to legal rights, against all those outside it.

Swords, the emblems of gentlemanly status, were still commonly worn in the streets of London in the early eighteenth century. But even when fashion made them less common, they remained an essential element of male formal dress among the upper classes, as long as the duel also remained central to the code of honour. In the eyes of the middling sort they were more likely to be either risible, or carry connotations of privilege or even tyranny. The labouring poor, increasingly through the century, and especially at the end of this period, looked up at swords in the hands of mounted soldiers and propertied volunteers as the state turned more to coercion. In 1819 at least eleven men, women, and children died of sabre wounds or were trampled to death when the yeomanry, directed by the magistracy, attacked the mass meeting for parliamentary reform at St Peter's Field, Manchester. Over 400 were wounded at 'Peterloo', many of them maimed for life. The government congratulated the perpetrators.

Contents

Preface

1. Landscapes and Perspectives

2. Hierarchy

3. The Politics of Love and Marriage

4. Political Order

5. Harvests and Dearth

6. Custom

7. The Disruption of Custom, the Triumph of Law

8. New Populations

9. The Power of the People

10. War and Peace

11. Popular Beliefs and Popular Politics

12. Class and Power in Hanoverian England

Notes

Chronology

Figures

Select Bibliography

Index

This text is an updated version of that originally issued by Past Tense. Further information on No Quarter publications can be found on the No Quarter website: anarchistpirates.blogspot.com ]]> http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/07/05/no-quarter-publications/feed/ 0 http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/07/01/mick-reed-and-roger-wells-class-conflict-and-protest-in-the-english-countryside-1700-1880/ http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/2009/07/01/mick-reed-and-roger-wells-class-conflict-and-protest-in-the-english-countryside-1700-1880/#comments Wed, 01 Jul 2009 06:25:42 +0000 p http://www.thewildbeast.co.uk/wordpress/?p=966 Mick Reed and Roger Wells (eds.) – Class, Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside 1700-1880
[Frank Cass 1990]

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This volume brings together a wide-ranging and seminal debate about the nature of English rural society in the eigthteenth and nineteenth centuries. Previously published in The Journal of Peasant Studies, the contributions challenge many of the existing premises of rural historiography. Together with major new contributions by the editors, the collection will be essential reading for all interested in rural England in modern times.

Contents

1. Class and Conflict in Rural England: Some reflections on a Debate

Mick Reed

2. The Development of the English Rural Proletariat and Social Protest, 1700-1850

Roger Wells

3. The Development of the English Rural Proletariat and Social Protest, 1700-1850: A Comment

Andrew Charlesworth

4. Social Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside in the Early Nineteenth-Century: A Rejoinder

Roger Wells

5. The Wells-Charlesworth Debate: A Personal Comment on Arson in Norfolk and Suffolk

J. E. Archer

6. Social Change and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century England: The Use of the Open-Closed Village Model

Dennis Mills and Brian Short

7. Social Change and Social Conflict in Nineteenth-Century England: A Comment

Mick Reed

8. Peasants and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Rural England: A Comment on Two Recent Articles

Dennis Mills

9. Social Protest, Class, Conflict and Consciousness in the English Countryside, 1700-1880

Roger Wells

10. An Agenda for Modern English Rural History?

Mick Reed and Roger Wells

Consolidated Bibliography

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Customs in Common is a companion volume to The Making of the English Working Class. It explores the ebullient and contradictory plebian culture which preceded the formation of the working class institutions and consciousness, and its customs and practices, some of which survived well into Victorian times.

Although rooted in English evidence from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, these studies have wide-ranging reference and significance. The notion of 'the moral economy', which Tompson first developed to analyse the motives of food rioters, has subsequently become influential in many fields, including peasant studies. Thompson takes up the discussion again, replies to some criticisms and extensions of his work and welcomes others. He shows how careful attention to fragmentary evidence enables one to decode some practices, such as the sale of wives, or shaming rituals like rough music, with their forgotten vocabulary of symbolism. In examining the rigorous presence of women in food riots from the sixteenth century onwards, he suggests the light which this throws on gender relations.

In a study which confronts the triumphalism of much recent history of the agricultural revolution, Thompson re-examines the ways in which villagers lost their common-rights in the face of the law's hostility to custom. Some historians have written of the riotous plebs of eighteenth century England and Wales as if they were only a problem for magistrates and governments to handle. For Thompson, the rulers, landowners and governments were a problem for the people to handle. Perhaps this is why the pages come alive for us. Using an unusually wide range of sources—legal records, folklore collections, academic studies, local record office collections, contemporary newspapers, pamphlets, sermons and poems—Thompson has once again given voices to the silent majority.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements

I Introduction: Custom and Culture

II The Patricians and the Plebs

III Custom, Law and Common Right

IV The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century

V The Moral Economy Reviewed

VI Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism

VII The Sale of Wives

VIII Rough Music

Index

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Historians of protest have attempted to unlock the meaning of social unrest, studying collective violence and action as a barometer of social and political stability. John E. Archer examines the diversity of protest from 1780 to 1840 and how it altered during this period of extreme change. This textbook covers all forms of protest, including the Gordon Riots of 1780, food riots, Luddism, the radical political reform movement and Peterloo in 1819, and the less well researched anti-enclosure, anti-New Poor Law riots, arson and other forms of 'terroristic' action, up to the advent of Chartism in the 1830s. Archer evaluates the problematic nature of source materials and conflicting interpretations leading to debate, and reviews the historiography and methodology of protest studies.

'The Burning & Plundering of Newgate & Setting the Felons at Liberty by the Mob'

Contents

Preface

1. Introduction: Historiography, sources and methods

Sources, problems and methodologies

2. Agricultural Protest

Enclosures and lost rights

Collective disturbances

Post-1830

Anti-New Poor Law protest

3. Food Riots

Timing and location of food riots

The food rioter

The form of the food riot

The 'moral economy'

4. Industrial Protest

Pre-Luddite protest

Luddism

5. Political Protest

The reactionary crowd

Reformist and insurrectionary traditions

The reform movement

Post-1832

6. Policing Protest

Law Enforcement

The 'new' police

The law

7. A Revolutionary Challenge?

8. Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Politicians from all the main three parties have been exposed. Most give the appearance of being humbled in the media now that they have been found out, however, some, (the Tory gentry, as you may imagine), have appeared indignant that they should have to answer to the lower classes. An example of this is Anthony Steen, MP for Totnes in Devon, who claims that we are all just jealous of his million pound home: "I've done nothing criminal, that's the most awful thing, and do you know what it's about? Jealousy. I've got a very, very large house. Some people say it looks like Balmoral. It's a merchant's house of the 19th century. It's not particularly attractive, it just does me nicely."

What is surprising, or perhaps unfortunate, is that it takes something like this exposé in the media to lower the public's confidence in MPs when just a quick browse through history will show that they have been stealing from us for years. Most people would face fines or imprisonment for theft, but these MPs just give an apology, pay a little back and feel exonerated.

There have been heated, angry public debates where politicians are confronted by their constituents, resulting in some MPs being in denial about the feelings of the people whom they are supposed to represent. One wonders if this could be the spark to ignite the summer of discontent of which there have been murmurings of in the press. There is a long history of social protest in the UK, as you can imagine (if you don't already know). Let us take the act of incendiarism as an example and quote from John E. Archer's 'By A Flash and A Scare', where he asks Why Incendiarism?:

—
Links
MPs' expenses in detail (The Telegraph)
MPs' expenses on Google Earth (The Telegraph)

'By a Flash and a Scare' illuminates the darker side of rural life in the nineteenth century. Flashpoints such as the Swing Riots have long attracted the attention of historians, but here John E. Archer focuses on the persistent war waged in the countryside, analysing the prevailing climate of unrest, discontent, and desperation.

In this detailed and scholarly study, based on intensive research among the local records of Norfolk and Suffolk, Dr Archer identifies and examines the three most serious crimes of protest in the countryside — arson, animal maiming, and poaching. He shows how rural society in East Anglia was shaped by terror and oppression in equal measure. Crime and protest were an integral part of the ordinary life of the rural poor. 'By a Flash and a Scare' dispels any lingering notions of a 'green and pleasant land', and makes an important contribution to our understanding of life in the nineteenth century countryside.

Contents

PREFACE

MAPS

ABBREVIATIONS

1. An Introduction to Rural Protest

The Categorization of Rural Crime

Crime in the Countryside

2. The Farm Labourer: Work and Wages

3. The Labouring Community and the Relief of Poverty: 'A Class Which Has Something to Lose'

4. Incendiarism: Annual Survey 1815-1834

Introduction

Incendiarism: A New Expression of Grievance

Annual Summary — 1815-1819

The 1820s

The Swing Years 1830-1833

5. Incendiarism: Annual Survey 1835-1870

1835-1841: The Introduction of the New Poor Law

The 1840s

The Mid-century Depression 1849-1852

The Era of High Farming 1853-1870

6. Incendiarism: An Analysis

The Location and Timing of Incendiary Attacks

Prices, Wages, and Unemployment

Mechanization and Incendiarism

Incendiarism and the Poor Laws

Incendiarism and Rural Crime

Victims of Incendiarism

Protection and Detection

Why Incendiarism?

7. The Myth and Reality of the Incendiary

Introduction

The Myth

The Reality

8. Animal Maiming: 'A Fiendish Outrage'?

9. The Poaching War: 'The Great Attraction'

Introduction

The Poacher

Policing and Detection

Protest and Poaching

10. Conclusion

BIBLIOGRAPHY

PLACE INDEX

SUBJECT INDEX

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The classic and imaginative account of the working-class society in its formative years, 1780 to 1832, revolutionized our understanding of English social history. E. P. Thompson shows how the working class took part in its own making and recereates the whole-life experience of people who suffered loss of status and freedom, who underwent degradation, and who yet created a culture and a political consciousness of great vitality.

"This book has a clumsy title, but it is one that meets its purpose. Making because it is a study of an active process, which owes as much to agency as conditioning. The working class did not rise like the sun at an appointed time. It was present at its own making.

Class, rather than classes, for reasons which it is one purpose of this book to examine. There is, of course, a difference. 'Working classes' is a descriptive term, which evades as much as it defines. It ties loosely together a bundle of discrete phenomena. There were tailors here and weavers there, and together they make up the working classes.

By class I understand a historical phenomenon, unifying a number of disparate and seemingly unconnected events, both in the raw material of experience and in consciousness. I emphasise that it is a historical phenomenon. I do not see class as a 'structure', nor even as a 'category', but as something which in fact happens (and can be shown to have happened) in human relationships."

Contents

Preface

Preface to the 1980 edition

PART ONE : THE LIBERTY TREE

1 Members Unlimited

2 Christian and Apollyon

3 'Satan's Strongholds'

4 The Free-born Englishman

5 Planting the Liberty Tree

PART TWO : THE CURSE OF ADAM

6 Exploitation

7 The Field Labourers

8 Artisans and Others

9 The Weavers

10 Standards and Experiences

I Goods

II Homes

III Life

IV Childhood

11 The Transforming Power of the Cross

I Moral Machinery

II The Chiliasm of Despair

12 Community

I Leisure and Personal Relations

II The Rituals of Mutuality

III The Irish

IV Myriads of Eternity

PART THREE : THE WORKING-CLASS PRESENCE

13 Radical Westminster

14 An Army of Redressers

I The Brick Lamp

II The Opaque Society

III The Laws Against Combination

IV Croppers and Stockingers

V The Sherwood Lads

VI By Order of the Trade

15 Demagogues and Martyrs

I Disaffection

II Problems of Leadership

III The Hampden Clubs

IV Brandreth and Oliver

V Peterloo

VI The Cato Street Conspiracy

16 Class Consciousness

I The Radical Culture

II William Cobbett

III Carlile, Wade and Gast

IV Owenism

V 'A Sort of Machine'

Postscript

Bibliographical Note

Acknowledgements

Index

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All historical studies begin with the framing of questions to be addressed to the evidence left by the past: questions which in the process of research will be revised or abandoned, and will give rise to further or often unexpected questions. In the case of this book the questions arise from hypotheses formulated in Marxist historiography, because those are relevent to 'history from below' and focus on the 'poor', especially the wage workers, and those who claimed to speak for them.

At the time of the English Revolution it was common to make a tripartite division of society into the gentry, the 'middling sort' and 'the poor'. The first and second of these categories have occupied the attentions of historians — the first much more than the second — in assessing the causes and course of the revolution, but the third has been largely neglected. It is the intention of this book to make a preliminary attempt to remedy this omission.

The first chapter considers the economic setting and the growth of the wage earning class in the context of developing capitalism. The second chapter analyses the ideological setting, especially the important role of religion.

The Levellers provided much of the philosophy and programme of radicalism, to which the millenarian Fifth Monarchists and the Quakers added important elements. Such radicalism may be described as being on the 'left' of the revolution, being more radical than the Presbyterians, Independents and Republicans who dominated the revolution. But the focus of thsi book is upon those who stood further to the left than the leaderships of the Levellers, Fifth Monarchists and Quakers. The 'far left' in the English Revolution is defined in terms of ideas, which sought to promote a shift in the revolution towards establishing and economic equality, and in terms of practice, which involved taking more militant action than the established leaders, in order to achieve some of the aims of the far left, but also of the left in general. The latter is the subject of chapter three.

Attention is concentrated on those who attempted to speak for the poor and the more depreived sections of society. Questions arise about how far they reflected attitudes and aspirations of the poor, who remain almost entirely silent in the sources. Questions also arise about cultural differences between dominant and subordinate classes, and about obstacles to revolutionay action by the poor.

The third chapter deals with two attempts at armed insurection arising from the radical or left milieu of the 1650s, and at the same time puts the focus on two individual revolutionaries who emerged from the ranks of plebians. The poor generally did rise in revolt against the republican governments established by the revolution. But viewing the period from below brings with it analysis of the formation of classes, the appearance of class conflicts, and explanation of the course which the revolution eventually took. It is also the purpose of this book to consider aspects of Marxist historiography that relate to its themes, and to place the English Revolution in the history of struggles for social justice.

Contents

Preface

Chapter 1: LABOUR

The extent and limits of proletarianisation

Resistance to proletarianisation

Divergence between small producers and wage workers

Resistance by wage workers

Chapter 2: EQUALITY

Religion and the poor

The search for equality

Decentralisation of power

'Practical Christianity'

Redistribution of wealth

God and revolution

Resistance

Restraints on popular revolutionary action

Chapter 3: REVOLT

The Corporal's Revolt, 1649

The Cooper's Revolt, 1657

Chapter 4: THE ENDING

Index

Further details and downloads can be found on the Unofficial Claws Mail ClamAV™ Plugin page.

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Southern England has been studied considerably less than the industrializing north and midlands in the debate on the standard of living in the period up to 1850. Yet it is becoming clear that it was in the south and in the countryside that the greatest poverty and deprivation was to be found.

These essays examine responses to the struggle to live. The responses ranged from, at the most extreme, sheep-stealing and incendiarism to joining in food riots in an attempt to impose a "moral economy". More sustained protest is to be seen in passive and sometimes active resistance to authority, and in particular in the opposition to the introduction of the New Poor Law of 1834. Finally the appeal yet limitations of Chartism in the south is demonstrated.

From the authors' preface:
Our formative years were in the great era of 'History from Below'. Although we acknowledge that it left some 'silences', especially over gender and ethnicity, it still hugely enlarged the historical subject. We have no reluctance in continuing to write within the tradtion of George Rudé, Eric Hobsbawm, Edward Thompson and Gwyn 'Alf' Williams.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Abbreviations

1 Crime, Protest and Radicalism

John Rule and Roger Wells

2 The Revolt of the South West, 1800-1

Roger Wells

3 The Perfect Wage System? Tributing in the Cornish Mines

John Rule

4 The Chartist Mission to Cornwall

John Rule

5 Richard Spurr of Truro: Small-Town Radical

John Rule

6 Resistance to the New Poor Law in the Rural South

Roger Wells

7 Southern Chartism

Roger Wells

8 Social Crime in the Rural South in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

John Rule

9 Crime and Protest in a Country Parish: Burwash, 1790-1850

Roger Wells

10 The Manifold Causes of Rural Crime: Sheep-Stealing in England, c. 1740-1840

John Rule

Index

Since google launched gmail IMAP the Claws Mail development team (and several Claws Mail users) seem to have devoted a proportionately high amount of time to answering questions and working around problems that arise through gmail's IMAP implementation. The same must surely be true of other open source teams. How many wasted man-hours must that add up to through all the different development teams and how many more useful things could have been achieved in that time? How far will they set things back?

Don't believe the hype!

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Controversial and complex, without an understanding of Thomas Müntzer it is impossible to gain a full understanding of the Reformation.

Hitherto Müntzer has not been fully understood. He has often been characterised simply as an extremist: some have seen him as a theologian steeped in mystic piety, others as a rabid apocalyptic, or a relentless antagonist of Martin Luther, or an intrepid revolutionary. He has been deprecated as a restless fanatic and utopian; and just as often honoured as a selfless fighter for truth and justice.

Professor Goertz has found the key to understanding the many controversial aspects of Müntzer's life in Müntzer's extraordinary ability to relate social conflicts with theological thinking, in a world where changing medieval traditions took on profound spiritual dimensions, created new social conflicts, and ultimately revolutionised the social and spiritual lives of ordinary people.

Goertz shows how Müntzer was inseparably apocalyptic mystic and revolutionary.

—

Scholars are at odds over Thomas Müntzer. Some condemn him as an 'unrestrained fanatic', while others defend him as a 'selfless fighter for truth and justice.' Responses to Müntzer are characterised by fascination and repulsion. It has been like this for some hundreds of years, and it was the case even during the course of his life. His name, in his own words, 'to the little band of the poor and needy, […] has the sweet savour of life, while to those who pursue the pleasures of the flesh it is a gruesome abomination presaging their speedy downfall.' Then as now, he polarises opinions. However, it is only in a precise theological sense that the battle-lines may be defined as the poor versus the pleasure-loving. For some time now the contrast between 'bourgeois' and 'socialist' judgements of society has entered the dispute about Müntzer and has lent a new and, to us, more immediate sense to the concepts of poverty and hedonism: in the former German Democratic Republic Müntzer was an historic hero, the visionary of a more just society, but in the West he is seen rather as a utopian hot-head, the very pattern of unheard-of recalcitance.

It is not possible to avoid this conflict, for it determines the context in which Thomas Müntzer addresses and challenges us today. Since his day we have come to a better understanding of the social struggles in which he was involved, and of the theological insights which he embraced. Anyone who wishes to portray Müntzer must be free of any compulsion to seek principles of interpretation based exclusively either on the social issues or on the movement of theological thought. This biography seeks to resolve this tension and use the best arguments of both approaches: Müntzer's theological reflections led him by their own logic into social action, and likewise, the social tensions of the early Reformation period created the atmosphere in which his thinking gradually took shape — not in a detached or arbitrary way, but closely related to the actual experiences of his time. And in this form his declarations and writings had in their turn an effect on the general course of events.

Müntzer wanted to bring about 'a full and final reformation in the near future' and placed his theology at the service of the 'transformation of the world.' From this sprang — for the first time on German soil — a theology of revolution. It was a sharp attack on the spirtual and temporal authorities; and Müntzer's way of reflectng on society's experiences confronts us today with a challenge which has yet to be taken up: 'the people will go free and God alone will be their Lord.' This is the challenge made by the 'theologian of revolution' to all who step within his circle of influence. We should not meet him either with our defences bristling, or with uncrtical adoration, but with critical sympathy.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

I Distorted Images

II Changing Times

III Blurred Tracks

IV In The Reformers' Camp

V An Early Movement

VI A Personal Manifesto

VII 'In the wretchedness of my expulsion'

VIII Pastoral Care and Political Correspondance

IX Lords, Commoners and Resistance

X Absolute Incompatibilty

XI 'Eternal Alliance' and 'Eternal Council'

XII Battle Under the Rainbow

XIII Apocalyptic Mystic and Revolutionary

XIV Unfinished and yet fulfilled

Bibliography

Index of Names and Places

This is all part of New Labour's target, launched in 1998, to cut truancy, which includes pouring millions of pounds, (over £800m), into the initiative, giving the police new powers to drag kids back to school, hefty fines and imprisonment for parents, paging and text messaging of parents, electronic tagging of parents, withdrawal of child benefit for truants' parents, spiked security fences tipped with paint which marks pupils' uniforms if they try to climb in or out, swipecards for pupils, fingertip scanning of pupils, informing travel agents to warn parents of the dangers of term-time holidays, and so on.

Does it work?

In 2008 truancy rates in England reached their highest level since 1997.

If school days are the best days of your life, go and see a psychiatrist!

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This is a study of the most fascinating and idiosyncratic of all seventeenth-century figures. Like its famous predecessor The Cheese and The Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, it explores the everyday life and mental world of an extraordinary yet humble figure. Born in Lincolnshire with a family of Cambridgeshire origins, Thomas Totney (1608–1659) was a London puritan, goldsmith and veteran of the Civil War. In November 1649, after fourteen weeks of self-abasement, fasting and prayer, he experienced a profound spiritual transformation. Taking the prophetic name TheaurauJohn Tany and declaring himself 'a Jew of the Tribe of Reuben' descended from Aaron the High Priest, he set about enacting a millenarian mission to restore the Jews to their own land. Inspired prophetic gestures followed as Tany took to living in a tent, preaching in the parks and fields around London. He gathered a handful of followers and, in the week that Cromwell was offered the crown, infamously burned his bible and attacked Parliament with sword drawn. In the summer of 1656 he set sail from the Kentish coast, perhaps with some disciples in tow, bound for Jerusalem. He found his way to Holland, perhaps there to gather the Jews of Amsterdam. Some three years later, now calling himself Ram Johoram, Tany was reported lost, drowned after taking passage in a ship from Brielle bound for London.

During his prophetic phase Tany wrote a number of remarkable but elusive works that are unlike anything else in the English language. His sources were varied, although they seem to have included almanacs, popular prophecies and legal treatises, as well as scriptural and extra-canonical texts, and the writings of the German mystic Jacob Boehme. Indeed, Tany's writings embrace currents of magic and mysticism, alchemy and astrology, numerology and angelology, Neoplatonism and Gnosticism, Hermeticism and Christian Kabbalah – a ferment of ideas that fused in a millenarian yearning for the hoped for return of Christ on earth. The English Revolution freed men and women both self-taught and formally educated to speak their minds and challenge their times. But only by contextualizing and then unravelling the mind of this exceptional person can we truly appreciate what it meant to be living in a world turned upside down.

See also: TheaurauJohn : A Name, Not The Thing

Contents

List of illustrations

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

Introduction: TheaurauJohn Tany and the English Revolution

Part I: Genesis

1 Genesis

Little Shelford, Cambridgeshire: The Totneys

South Hykeham, Lincolnshire: John Totney the younger

Apprenticeship: Thomas Totney

The Goldsmiths

2 The bitterness of the godly

St. Katherine Creechurch, London: The bitterness of the godly

3 The wilderness of Zin

The times of trouble

The wilderness of Zin

4 Birth of the Prophet

Ecstasy

The heart prepared

The penitent puritan

Purgation

Illumination

Union

The prophet armed

Part II: Genealogy of the High Priest

5 TheaurauJohn

Genealogy and heraldry

The transmutation of Totney into Tany

TheaurauJohn

6 Genealogy of the High Priest

Genealogy of the High Priest

The High Priesthood

7 Justice

The coming of the prophets

Justice

8 Hell

Coming forth in glory

The prophet outcast

The trial

Manifest error

The Muggletonians

Prison of Stone

Aurora

Part III: King of the Jews

9 King of the Jews

Theauroam Tannijahhh

The seal signatory

10 Canonical and extra-canonical sources

Canon and Apocrypha

The Books of Enoch and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

11 Son of the morning stars

Prisca theologia

Mysterium Magnum

Son of the morning stars

12 The book of Theos-ologi according to TheaurauJohn

The book of Theos-ologi according to TheaurauJohn

13 To your tents, O Israel

To your tents, O Israel

King of the Seven Nations

The grand idols of England

The thousand-year reign of Christ

A third great and terrible fire

14 Gold Tried in the Fire

Gold Tried in the Fire

Bibliography

Index

Index of names

Index of places

Index of signs

Index of canonical and extra-canonical texts

"The essays in this volume all point to the paradoxical and hypocritical ways in which the ruling classes speak for the white working class on the one hand, and how they speak about them on the other. Whereas middle class commentators are happy to defend the white working class interests against the onslaught of politically correct multiculturalism, they will simultaneously deride and riducule the feckless and underserving poor, who have squandered the opportunities gracefully given to them by the state, and therefore righfully be left to wallow in their own poverty."³

The study has been prompted by "a recent emphasis in the media and by other commentators on the segragation of, and competition between, ethnic groups [which] has suggested that white working class communities may be losing out in the conflict over the allocation of scarce resources. … [It] shows that … the most disadvantaged working-class people of whatever ethnic background, roughly the poorest fifth of the population, are increasingly separated from the more prosperous majority by inequalities of income, housing and education. By emphasizing the virtues of individual self-determination and the exercising of 'choice', recent governments have in fact entrenched the ability of the middle and upper classes to avoid downward social mobility and preserve the best of life's goods for their own children. Moreover, the rhetoric of politicians and commentators has tended to abandon the description 'working-class', preferring instead to use terms such as 'hard working families' in order to contrast the the virtuous many with an underclass perceived as feckless and undeserving. … life chances for today's children are overwhelmingly linked to parental income, occupations and educational qualifications — in other words, class. The poor white working class share many more problems with the poor from minority ethnic groups than some of them recognise."⁴

The media's skewed portrayal of the white working class, e.g. the BBC's White Season and Channel 4's Immigration: — The Inconvenient Truth, is exposed as fallacy, "the white working class are habitually pitched against those of minority ethnic groups and immigrants, while larger social and economic structures are left out of the debate altogether. … The media's efforts to acknowledge and discuss white working class grievances has excluded issues such as the legacy of Thatcherism and deindustrialisation, or the rise of the super-rich under Labour. Instead, there is a fairly consistent message that the white working class are the losers … while minority ethnic groups are the winners – at the direct expense of the white working class."⁵

"The white working classes are discriminated against on a range of different fronts, including their accent, their style, the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the social spaces they frequent, the postcode of their homes, possibly even their names. But they are not discriminated against because they are white."³

"When commentators argue over the neglected interests of the 'white working class', the comparison to other groups is always in terms of their ethnicity, with Bangladeshis in Tower Hamlets, or Pakistanis in Oldham. The distinctive social position of these groups is presented in terms of their ethnic identity, as cultural or religious difference, rather than by the very marked class inequalities that they also experience. This exaggerates the differences between ethnic groups, and masks what they hold in common. By stressing the whiteness of the white working class, the class inequality of other ethnic groups also slips from view. This sidesteps the real issue of class inequality."⁶ Of course, this is how the game works for the ruling classes: divide and rule. It always has. For example, see the employment and vagrancy laws, first in the UK, then later in the colonies, bending workers as far as they will go before they break.^*

"The rising significance of education in British society has not undermined the role of class; instead it has opened up new avenues for class competition and disadvantage. … despite the meritocratic values⁷ of British society, high social position still helps to 'insure' against weaker educational performance, and numerous studies show that if we compare lower achievers, those from more privileged backgrounds have much better careers than their less advantaged peers. … the fact remains that it is often harder for privileged children to fail than it is for disadvantaged children to succeed."⁶

England is the "most explicit example of the use of schooling by the upper classes to dominate the lower classes. … Adam Smith epitomised the English bourgeois viewpoint regarding working class education in The Wealth of Nations:

For Smith, as well as for the vast majority of the political, and intellectual élite at the time, the schooling of the working classes was always to be subordinate and inferior to that of the middle classes, designed to contain and pacify rather than to educate and liberate.⁸ When the English state schooling system was set up in the late 19th century the intention of the dominant classes was still to police and control the working classes rather than to educate them."⁹

All well and good, and to paraphrase a line from the introduction, this may all appear as truisms to you or I, even verging on the banal, but it is good that an organisation such as the Runnymede Trust has finally lifted the corner of the carpet and reported on what they've seen brushed under there. I welcome this publication, even if it does put itself well within the bracket of the middle class once again speaking about and for the working class — then again, the main body of readership will be the middle class, that is, I guess, its target audience. Mostly the essays are highly readable but, for me, it fell down in two places. One of these essays in particular made for nauseating reading indeed: the 8th and final essay. It starts with, "The remit for this chapter was to produce a contribution which translates academic thinking to non-academic audiences"¹⁰. An incredibly condescending read! Who did the author think he was writing for, the odd working class person who happened to come across the publication? If the difference between academic writing and non-acedemic writing is the dumbing-down for its apparently dumbed-down audience, then he did a great job. But, seriously, the main difference between an academic person and a non-academic person is the academic's ability to produce prose, but not his thought processes and his ability to understand and reason. This last essay was unnecessary.

Having said that, the report is, however, a stimulating read on the whole. If it works towards creating more solidarity and self-awareness within the working class, then it's a good thing.

Who Cares about the White Working Class? is available as a free PDF from the Runnymede Trust, here.

——
1. http://www.runnymedetrust.org/
2. Who Cares about the White Working Class?, inside cover.
3. Kjartan Páll Sveinsson, Introduction: The White Working Class and Multiculturalism: Is There Space for a Progressive Agenda?, What Does this mean for Race Equality? — The Aims of this Volume, pp. 5-6
4. Dr Kate Gavron, Foreword, pp. 2
5. Kjartan Páll Sveinsson, Introduction: The White Working Class and Multiculturalism: Is There Space for a Progressive Agenda?, Class Re-emerges in Political Discourse, pp. 5
6. Wendy Bottero, Class in the 21st Century, pp. 7, 10
7. …or, rather, because of them?
8. So little has changed.
9. Diane Reay, Making Sense of White Working Class Educational Underachievement, A Brief History of the Working Class Underachievement, pp. 23
10. Danny Dorling, From Housing to Health — To Whom are the White Working Class Losing Out? Frequently Asked Questions, pp. 59-65

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During the seventeenth century, attempts at fenland drainage projects provoked bitter opposition and widespread rioting. In this book Keith Lindley relates the disturbances to their wider political context, showing how they contributed to the causes, course and consequences of the English Revolution.

The implementation of drainage schemes in the 1630s confirmed the absolutist direction of government during Charles I's personal rule. Fenmen were preoccupied with preserving their commons from large-scale enclosure and their traditional economy from transformation, and a broad spectrum of local society from peasant to gentry was drawn into the resistance.

Fenland disturbances helped to raise the political temperature country-wide, as the political elite became convinced that the King must be supported as a bulwark against anarchy. Yet the fenmen were not revolutionaries. The riots themselves were essentially defensive, conservative and restrained. For the vast majority of those involved, the chief significance of the political crisis was the ideal opportunity it afforded to level enclosures and regain their commons.

By the end of the seventeenth century they could claim a large measure of success: courtier-dominated schemes were not revived after the Restoration and fenland drainage projects became subject to parliamentary approval.

Contents

Dating and Abbreviations

Preface

Introduction

1. The Fenland Undertakings

The Hatfield Level

The Great Level and the Deeping Level

The Ancholme Level

Courtier-dominated undertakings: the East, West and Wildmore Fens; the Lindsey Level; and the Holland Fen

2. Commoners, Undertakers and the Privy Council

The Hatfield Level, 1627-40

The Great Level, the first phase: 1632-3

The East and West Fens: 1635-9

The Great Level, the second phase: 1637-8

The Holland Fen, 1638; The Lindsey and Ancholme Levels, 1639

3. Lords, Commons and Commoners

The Short Parliament and its aftermath

The Long Parliament

4. Civil War Allegiance and Regained Commons

5. Commoners, Adventurers and Soldiers

6. Levellers and Fenmen

7. The Restored Undertakings

Courtier-dominated undertakings

The Ancholme Level

The Great Level and the Deeping Level

The Hatfield Level

Conclusion

Index

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Some of the liveliest and fruitful debates in recent historical writing have been about the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Rodney Hilton's vast and distinguished body of work on medieval society has been a major reference point in these debates. Throughout his work the dominant theme has been has been his argument that the 'prime mover' in the development of medieval society was the conflict between landlords and peasants over the appropriation of the peasants' surplus product. This is the class conflict that gives the present volume its title.

The wide ranging collection, updated to include some of Hilton's most recent writings, explores not only the peasant economy and peasant movements but also the nature of towns and their principal classes. Essays include a fascinating study of women traders in medieval England, and an account of medieval tax revolts — all informed by his lucid, undogmatic attention to broad theoretical issues as well as empirical detail. This is a book not only for historians, but for anyone interested in the evolution of capitalism or the larger questions of historical process and social change.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Feudalism in Europe: Problems for Historical Materialists

2 Unjust Taxation and Popular Resistance — Marxist Theory and Practice on a Historical Problem

3 Small Town Society in England Before the Black Death

4 Medieval Peasants: Any Lessons?

5 Peasant Movements in England Before 1381

6 Reasons for Inequality Among Medieval Peasants

7 Popular Movements in England at the End of the Fourteenth Century

8 Some Problems of Urban Real Property in the Middle Ages

9 Towns in English Feudal Society

10 The Small Town and Urbanisation — Evesham in the Middle Ages

11 Lords, Burgesses and Hucksters

12 Women Traders in Medieval England

13 Social Concepts in the English Rising of 1381

14 Feudalism or Feodalité and Seigneurie in France and England

15 Was there a General Crisis of Feudalism?

16 Ideology and Social Order in Late Medieval England

17 Some Social and Economic Evidence in Late Medieval English Tax Returns

18 Capitalism — What's in a Name?

19 Feudalism and the Origins of Capitalism

Notes

Index

Total Casualties:

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/interactive/2009/jan/03/israelandthepalestinians

------
Palestine Solidarity Campaign: http://www.palestinecampaign.org/
Stop the War Coalition: http://www.stopwar.org.uk/
War on Want: http://www.waronwant.org/
Jews for Justice for Palestinians: http://www.jfjfp.org/

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On three successive mornings in February 1652, God spoke to a London tailor by the name of John Reeve. Consequently he and his cousin Lodowicke Muggleton believed that they were the Last Two Witnesses prophesied in the Book of Revelation. Over the next six years the pair attracted a small but dedicated band of followers that, following the death of Reeve, became known as the Muggletonians.

In this lively and engaging history, the origins of the sect during the religious turmoil and freedoms of the 1650s are described in detail. Their unique theology, beliefs and practices are described and traced throughout the changing circumstances of the centuries. Yet the book offers much more than a history of another puritan sect, for unlike many of their contemporaries, the Muggletonians persisted until the latter years of the twentieth century. Moreover, they preserved a comprehensive archive, rescued from the Blitz by a Kent farmer who transported the papers in empty apple boxes on his way back from market. Discovered by E.P. Thompson in 1974, this archive paints a vivid picture of the Muggletonians from their earliest days until the death of their last member in 1979.

By following the history of the Muggletonians from the heady post-civil war days through to the 1970s, this work offers a unique perspective on radical Christian belief and practice, and how it adapted to the changing world around it. More than this, however, it tells the fascinating story of how a small religious group, which eschewed active proselytising and believed in the mortality of the soul, managed to overcome persecution and obscurity, to survive for 320 years.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements and Sources

Bibliographical Abbreviations

1 Introduction: The Archive Discovered

2 'Lodowick Muggleton Was Also Included': 1652–1658

Encounter with God

The Two Last Witnesses

Blessings, Curses, Prison and Death

3 'Great Muggleton' Declares the Truth: 1658–1661

Putting down Clarkson

Changing A Divine Looking Glass

Rewriting Revelation

4 The Prophet of Letters: 1661–1698

The 1671 Rebellion

Delamaine's 'Great Book'

Imaginary Witches

Prison, Release, Death

5 Witnesses Against the Beast: 1698–1837

Life Without a Prophet

William Blake, Benjamin Franklin and the London Muggletonians

Putting Down a False Prophet

6 The Victorian Crisis: 1837–1901

Redefining the Faith: 'Reevonians' versus 'Old Believers'

Redefining the Faith: From 'Ancient' to 'Modern' Muggletonianism

Last Curses

7 Last Days: 1901–1979

8 Conclusion: Muggletonians – the Proper Historical Context?

Bibliography

Index

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Master and servant acts, the cornerstone of English employment law for more than four hundred years, gave largely unsupervised, inferior magistrates wide discretion over employment relations, including the power to whip, fine, and imprison men, women, and children for breach of private contracts with their employers. The English model was adopted, modified, and reinvented in more than a thousand colonial statutes and ordinances regulating the recruitment, retention, and discipline of workers in shops, mines, and factories; on farms, in forests, and on plantations; and at sea. This collection presents the first integrated comparative account of employment law, its enforcement, and its importance throughout the British Empire.

Sweeping in its geographic and temporal scope, this volume tests the relationship between enacted law and enforced law in varied settings, with different social and racial structures, different economies, and different constitutional relationships to Britain. Investigations of the enforcement of master and servant law in England, the British Caribbean, India, Africa, Hong Kong, Canada, Australia, and colonial America shed new light on the nature of law and legal institutions, the role of inferior courts in compelling performance, and the definition of "free labor" within a multiracial empire.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Citations

1. Introduction — Douglas Hay and Paul Craven

English Origins

Taking Statutes Seriously

Labor and the Law in the Older and Newer British Empires: An Outline

Free Labor and Unfree Labor

Uses of the Law

An Example: The Cape Colony

Enforcement, Repression, and Resistance

Master and Servant as Imperial Law

2. England, 1562-1875: The Law and Its Uses — Douglas Hay

The Law to the Eighteenth Century

Enforcement by the Magistracy before the Eighteenth Century

Parliament and the Judges to 1823

Enforcement in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Written Contracts and Testimonials

Magisterial Justice and the Growing Taint of Criminalization

The Judges and an Increasingly Oppressive Legal Regime

The Last Years

3. Early British America, 1585-1830: Freedom Bound — Christopher Tomlins

The Chesapeake: Virginia and York County

New England: Massachusetts and Essex County

The Delaware Valley: Pennsylvania and Chester County

Postscript

4. Law and Labour in Eighteenth-Century Newfoundland — Jerry Bannister

Master-Servant Relations in a Fishing Society

The Development of Naval Government

The Newfoundland Law of Master and Servant

The District Courts: A Case Study of Trinity, 1760-1790

Contextualizing Labor Disputes and Court Actions

Paternalism Reconsidered

Conclusion

5. Canada, 1670-1935: Symbolic and Instrumental Enforcement in Loyalist North America — Paul Craven

Atlantic Canada

Quebec

Ontario

The West

Conclusion

6. Australia, 1788-1902: A Workingman's Paradise? — Michael Quinlan

Employment Regulations in the Australian Colonies: An Overview

Assisted Immigrants and Indentured Non-European Labor

Coverage, Penalties, and Procedure

Due Process and the Magistracy

Patterns of Use and Resistance

Conclusion

7. The Colonial Office, 1820-1955: Constantly the Subject of Small Struggles — M. K. Banton

The West Indies and Africa in the Early Nineteenth Century

The Origins and Consequences of Cape Legislation

An Alternative Model: The Gold Coast, 1877

West Indian Reform

Reform Frustrated: The Colonial Labour Committee

Managing the "Primitive" Worker

The ILO: Abolishing the Relic of Slavery

Conclusion

8. The British Carribbean, 1823-1838: The Transitionfrom Slave to Free Legal Status — Mary Turner

Reforming the Slave Labor Laws, 1823-1833

Defining Labor Laws for Free-Status Workers, 1833-1838

9. Urban British Guiana, 1838-1924: Wharf Rats, Centipedes, and Pork Knockers — Juanita De Barros

Postslavery Labor Law: The Nineteenth Century

Pressures for Change in the Twentieth Century

The Logic of Labor Law and Labor Markets

Evidence of Enforcement

10. South Africa, 1841-1924: Race, Contract, and Coercion — Martin Chanock

Passes

Master and Servant Law: Content and Interpretation

The Political Ecology of Labor Law

Conclusion

11. Hong Kong, 1841-1870: All the Servants in Prison and Nobody to Take Care of the House — Christopher Munn

The Political Economy of Master and Servant in Hong Kong

The Servant's Interest

The Master's Sanctions

Regulation and Registration

Conclusion

12. Britain: The Defeat of the 1844 Master and Servants Bill — Christopher Frank

13. India, 1858-1930: The Illusion of Free Labor — Michael Anderson

The Labor Market and New Employment

Discipline and Advances

Penal Contracts in the Workplace

Judicial Construction of a Working Class

Towards a Formally Free Labor Market

Conclusion

14. Assam and the West Indies, 1860-1920: Immobilizing Plantation Labor — Prabhu P. Mohapatra

Indentured Labor and the Plantation System

Penal Contract Legislation in Assam and the West Indies

Enforcing the Penal Contract

Enforcement in Assam

15. West Africa, 1874-1948: Employment Legislation in a Nonsettler Peasant Economy — Richard Rathbone

Labor and Its Regulation

16. Kenya, 1895-1939: Registration and Rough Justice — David M. Anderson

Master and Servants Legislation in Kenya, 1985-1923

Overlapping Legislation, 1910-1939

Prosecution and Punishment

Discussion

Bibliography of Secondary Works Cited

Contributors

Index of Statutes

General Index

What's in a name? Think Cheltenham Road, Bristol, circa 1984. I'll say no more.

This album has been produced using only FOSS.

Henry Snowstorm gets the party started

therefore consider seriously what you ought to doe in this cause, now is the time to break the neck of tyranny, which if you do not, be sure that Tyranny will breake your neckes one day, because you had him in your power, and did not break his neck. I would not have you kill Tyrants, for then you might kill your selves, but first destroy tyranny in your selves, and then in others: first doe such things your selves, as you would have others to doe, for he that bids me do, and doth the good he bids, he leads me to the substantive, and leaves me not in quid.

Tyranipocrit Discovered, 1649

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This is a comparative study of the role of English and French towns in feudal society in the middle ages. Professor Hilton challenges the view that 'a town is a town wherever it is', and takes issue with the perception of the medieval town as a harbinger of capitalism.

Differences between English and French feudalism are taken into account; but these differences, as well as those between English and French medieval towns, existed within sufficiently similar cointexts to justify the kind of comparison pioneered by Marc Bloch in his Seigneurie française et manoir anglais. Medieval France was much larger than medieval England, and contained a far larger number of towns. French town populations were bigger than those in England, although it is possible that England had a higher proportion of small market towns. Comparisons are made between the feudal presence within the towns of both countries, and between their urban social structures. Conflicts arising from urban demands for freedom and autonomy are examined, together with frictions between various levels of society, such as mercantile elites, craft masters, journeymen, the unskilled and marginals. Finally, the mercantile domination of English town governments is contrasted with tht acquired by lawyers and officials in late medieval French towns — the 'trahesion de la bourgeoisie', as one French historian has described it.

In bringing together much material which dissolves old categories and simplifications in the study of medieval towns, Professor Hilton provides an important new perspective on medieval society and the nature of feudalism.

Contents

Preface

Introduction

England and France: a useful comparison?

The town and feudalism: preliminary definitions

A town is a town wherever it is?

What was feudalism?

Urban classes — a preliminary view

The feudal presence in towns

Towns in the transition from anient to feudal society

Small towns as feudal foundations

The feudal element in bigger towns

Urban social structures

Small towns

Larger towns

The artisans

Urban rulers

How urban society was imagined

The ideology of the orders

Urban society within the system of orders

Urban perceptions of the system of orders

Civic ceremony

'Gladman's insurrection'

Urban communities and conflict

Communes and borough franchises

Revolts against taxation

Artisan protest and political faction

Common rights

Masters and journeymen

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index