Protest and the politics of space and place, 1789–1848 9781784996895

Citation preview

Protest and the politics of space and place, 1789–1848

Protest and the politics of space and place, 1789–1848 K A T R I NA NA V I C KA S

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Katrina Navickas 2016 The right of Katrina Navickas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-­in-­Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data applied for

ISBN  978 0 7190 9705 8  hardback

First published 2016 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-­party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in 10.5­/12.5 Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow

Contents

List of illustrations page vii Preface xi Acknowledgements xv List of abbreviations xvii Introduction 1 I  Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830 1 Spaces of exclusion and intrusion in the 1790s 2 Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–1819 3 Peterloo and the changing definition of seditious assembly Vignette 1:  Radical locales

23 51 82 106

II  Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s Prelude: The reform crisis, 1830–2 121 4 Embodied spaces and violent protest 130 5 Contesting new administrative geographies in the 1830s and 1840s 154 Vignette 2:  Processions 177 6 Constructing new spaces 189 III  Region, neighbourhood and the meaning of place 7 The liberty of the landscape 223 8 Rural resistance 251 9 Making Moscows, 1839–48 277 Vignette 3:  New horizons in America 306 Conclusion 311 Select bibliography 315 Index 324

Illustrations

  1 Map of northern England, showing ancient county boundaries and main places mentioned in the text page xviii   2 ‘Female radical society’, in the Manchester Comet, c.1822 (by permission of Chetham’s Library, Manchester) 76   3 Map of St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, 1819 (m07588, by permission of Manchester Archives and Local Studies) 83   4 Map of radical addresses and meeting sites, north Manchester, 1789–1820. Sources: TNA, PC 1­/3118; HO 42­/172­/152; M. Bush, The Casualties of Peterloo (Lancaster, 2005) 110   5 Map of Chartist meeting sites and addresses of members nominated to the 1841–2 National Convention, Manchester. Sources: NS, 18, 24 December 1841, 29 January, 30 April, 23 July, 6 August 1842 116   6 ‘St Matthew’s Church, Camp Field, Manchester’, 1830, Harwood-­Watkins (m71043, by permission of Manchester Archives and Local Studies) 125   7 Map of loyal and patriotic processions, Manchester, plotted on R. Creighton, map of parliamentary boundaries, 1832 (author’s collection). Sources: MALS, F1798, broadsides, 1798; M9­/M1­/33b, boroughreeve and constables’ letter book, 1832; M71­/2­/6, preparation for the coronation procession, 1831; M71­/2­/9­/5–8, orders of procession, 1831–7; M71­/2­/13­/2, proclamation of her majesty’s accession, 24 June 1837; MM, 31 October 1809; MG, 21 July 1821, 25 May 1839; MT, 18 September 1830 179   8 Map of radical and trade union processions, Manchester, plotted on R. Creighton, map of parliamentary boundaries, 1832 (author’s collection). Sources: S. Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical and Early Days, vol. 2 (London, 1849),

viii

  9

10

11

12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Illustrations chapter 25; MO, 19 August 1820; Bolton Chronicle, 30 April 1831; MT, 20 August 1831; MG, 26 September 1838, 17 August 1842; NS, 22 September 1838, 22 August 1840, 2 January 1841, 6, 20 August 1842 181 Map of processions, Leeds, plotted on sanitary map of Leeds by R. Baker, in E. Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (London, 1842) (© The British Library Board, G.13877–80). Sources: LM, 28 October 1809, 24 April, 25 September 1819; 12 February 1820, 20 May 1826,16 June 1832, 1 July 1837, 16 June 1838, 21 December 1839; Hull Packet, 31 March 1837; NS, 12 September 1840, 23 January 1841 183 Extract from 5 feet: mile Ordnance Survey map of Leeds, sheet 10, 1847, showing Park Row and Mixed Cloth Hall (bottom right) (by permission of the National Library of Scotland) 185 Extract from 5 feet: mile Ordnance Survey map, Manchester, sheet 33, 1849, showing Hall of Science and Camp Field (far left) and the Free Trade Hall (top right) (by permission of the National Library of Scotland) 201 ‘Hall of Science’, Manchester, 1852 (m51617, by permission of Manchester Archives and Local Studies) 201 Map of groups attending Chartist mass meetings at Kersal Moor and Peep Green, 1838. Sources: NS, 16 October 1838; MT, 13 June 1848 241 Map of Swing incidents in Yorkshire, 1830–4. John Cary, map of Yorkshire, 1809, warped to scale (author’s collection) 268 ‘Old Paradise Square, Sheffield’, c.1850 (by permission of Sheffield Local Studies, s18518) 284 ‘Scene at Granby Fields during the riots’ (Manchester), Illustrated London News, 27 August 1842 (author’s collection) 293 ‘Scene at North Bridge’ (Halifax), Illustrated London News, 27 August 1842 (author’s collection) 295 ‘Salter Hebble’, Illustrated London News, 27 August 1842 (author’s collection). 296

Maps composed using QGIS, www.qgis.org­/. Shapefiles of contour lines from Edina OS Opendata: www.sharegeo. ac.uk­/handle­/10672­/9?show=full, http:­/­/hdl.handle.net­/10672­/9.



Illustrationsix

Shapefiles of historic county boundaries from UKBORDERS: Digitised Boundary Data, 1840, SN-­5819, http:­/­/discover.ukdataservice.ac.uk­/ catalogue?sn=5819, via Edina Digimap, http:­/­/digimap.edina.ac.uk­/ digimap­/, all accessed 14 September 2014.

Preface

Space and place are central to the strategies and meaning of protest. Social movements use spatial tactics, the most obvious of these being demonstrating in or occupying public sites. The act of occupation was a movement in itself during the winter of 2011, with the ‘Occupy’ movement erecting mass ranks of tents on city squares across the world as a protest against the failures of global capitalism. Popular attitudes to the legitimacy of ruling authorities are often shaped by how they use law and order against protesters in public spaces. In nineteenth-­century Britain, the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ was a defining event in this respect. On 16 August 1819, magistrates ordered the yeomanry to put down a peaceful mass reform meeting in St Peter’s Fields in Manchester. Cutting through the crowd with sabres and bayonets, the soldiers caused about eighteen deaths and over six hundred severe injuries. The scale of the event by no means matches twentieth and twenty-­first century massacres by governments or rebel forces of civilians. But Peterloo, and the democratic and workers’ movements discussed in this book, still matter. The repercussions of the event defined the nature of both subsequent government legislation against protest and reformers’ attitudes towards the authorities. As Robert Poole has powerfully argued, ‘Peterloo can be ranked alongside other large-­scale protests which have preceded major reforms by a generation or so, such as Amritsar (1919), Sharpeville (1960), Soweto (1976) and Tiananmen Square (1988)’. The freedom to protest in public space was and is defended to the death. Controversy over the form and positioning of a memorial to the victims of Peterloo in Manchester has continued two hundred years later.1 A running theme of this book is protests over the privatisation of public space. Local elites attempted to use improvement in street design R. Poole, ‘What don’t we know about Peterloo’, Manchester Region History Review, 23 (2012­/​14), 2; Peterloo memorial campaign, www.peterloomas​ sacre.org­/​, accessed 4 August 2014.

 1

xii

Preface

and new police forces to exclude political opposition as well as vagrants and other marginalised members of society from meeting in streets and civic buildings. Anna Minton and other contemporary commentators have remarked on the modern proliferation of ‘malls without walls’. These are open air commercial spaces that superficially appear to contain all the signifiers of public spaces, such as streets, art features and benches, but in fact are private spaces. They are patrolled by private security forces rather than by the more accountable police, who restrict anyone deemed to be a marginal part of the ‘public’­– ­from Big Issue sellers to skateboarders­– ­from using the sites.2 In 2014, an outcry in the press against defensible architecture designed to deter homeless people, or the gating of Manchester Library Walk on the very site of Peterloo, suggest a certain continuity in planners’ attitudes to people on the margins of society and to the meaning and uses of public space.3 I started researching this book when the ‘spatial turn’ was beginning to influence historical research. The spatial turn drew historians’ attention to the symbolic representations of space in the same way as the previous ‘turns’ had highlighted the semiotics of texts, culture and material objects as tools of historical agency. But I soon found that taking a simple spatial turn did not answer all my questions. Space alone did not explain how protest was engendered by the major changes and structures that affected the everyday lives of all inhabitants in the nineteenth century: the poor law, enclosure, deteriorating working conditions and lack of political representation. Nor could I use the spatial turn to explain accounts of fear, anger and elation in demonstrations, a topic of increasing importance in contemporary social movement scholarship and geographical studies.4 So I examined protesters’ sense of place. Geographers of resistance emphasise how place and power are intertwined. Contemporary anti-­ globalisation campaigns seek to protect local economies and commu A. Minton, Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-­ First Century City (London: Penguin, 2009).  3 BBC report on Manchester Library Walk, 26 October 2012, www.bbc. co.uk­/​news­/​uk-­england-­manchester-­20092963; B. Quinn, ‘Anti-­ homeless spikes are part of a wider phenomenon of ‘hostile architecture’, Guardian, 20 June 2014, www.theguardian.com­/​artanddesign­/​2014­/​jun­/​13­/​anti-­ homeless-­spikes-­hostile-­architecture.  4 J. M. Jasper, ‘Emotions and social movements: twenty years of theory and research’, Annual Review of Sociology, 37 (2011), 286; C. Berberich, N. Campbell and R. Hudson, ‘Affective landscapes: an introduction’, Cultural Politics, 9:3 (2013).  2



Prefacexiii

nities from control by multi-­ national corporations, while connecting supporters of their cause pan-­nationally.5 They have in common with the anti-­ enclosure protesters, Luddites and Swing rioters of early nineteenth-­century England strands of the same political economy. As Peter Linebaugh has argued, and this book will show, communities of workers, commoners and tenants sought to defend their way of life and skill against the anonymising forces of unbridled free market capitalism.6 Smithian economics was enacted in place: in the labour-­saving machines that cheapened the production of cloth and threshing corn; in the huge factories that reduced workers to the state of anonymous ‘hands’ reliant on the ‘invisible hand of the market’ without the right to form a trade union or protection by state intervention to ensure a fair wage or decent working conditions; in the workhouses of the new poor laws that separated families and reduced the poor to the stark categories of ‘able bodied’ or ‘impotent’; and in large mono-­cultural plantations that paid little attention to a diversity of agriculture or the subsistence of local inhabitants. These changes threatened to take away the identities of communities and their places­– p ­ laces that were defined by skill, independence, custom and indeed, uniqueness. Influential geographer Doreen Massey has drawn parallels between historical and modern social movements that opposed the capitalisation or privatisation of land. Massey argues that campaigns against enclosure and the selling off of forests, and other environmental movements are ‘not local protectionism but a critique of dispossession’.7 Popular politics involved fighting for inclusion and re-­inclusion in the body politic. Social movements fought for places of power and representation as well as spaces to exercise it. I will underline here that this book is a study of northern England. The industrial regions in and adjoining the southern Pennines in Lancashire and Yorkshire remain the main focus – as they did for E. P. Thompson in his classic book of 1963­/8, The Making of the English Working Class­– ­because of the intense concentration of political activity that emerged in their weaving villages and mining townships.8 Peterloo drew D. Featherstone, ‘Towards the relational construction of militant particularisms: or why the geographies of past struggles matter for resistance to neoliberal globalisation’, Antipode, 37:2 (2005).  6 P. Linebaugh, Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures and Resistance (Oakland: PM Press, 2014).  7 D. Massey, ‘Landscape­/​space­/​politics: an essay’, http:­/​­/​thefutureoflandscape. wordpress.com­/​landscapespacepolitics-­an-­essay­/​, accessed 1 June 2014.  8 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2nd edn, 1968).  5

xiv

Preface

the whole country’s attention to Manchester and the industrial north as a centre for extra-­parliamentary political organisation. This book compares this political activity with that of other regions in the North: the dramatic moors and industrial ports of Cumberland and Westmorland; the chalk uplands and flat arable farmlands and small market towns of the East Riding; the rolling dales of the North Riding; and the ports of Hull on the east coast and Liverpool on the west. I do not cover popular politics in Northumberland and County Durham, for reasons of brevity and indeed, because the regional distinctiveness of politics in the North East deserves a book in itself.9 But this is not merely a case study: social movements by their very nature were conduits between the local and the national and the global, their ideas and their spaces. The ways in which protesters navigated class, gender, policing, law and the state are issues affecting all social movements, historical and contemporary.

 9

See R. Colls, The Pitmen of the Northern Coalfield: Work, Culture and Protest, 1790–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), though much more needs to be written on north east popular politics.

Acknowledgements

Thanks especially to Robert Poole, for his unbounded generosity and knowledge, and for working out what was edible in the National Archives’ canteen with Rhian Jones and Neil Pye. Acknowledgements for illuminating discussions with: Carl Griffin, Briony McDonagh and Iain Robertson, while eating icecream in Russell Square; Frank O’Gorman and Allan Blackstock, eating icecream while promenading along Portstewart beach; Steve Poole, James Baker and Rose Wallis, drinking bad coffee in a North Parade café; Malcolm Chase and Joanna Innes, wondering how I’d managed to order a Dunkles in a Munich Bierkeller; Janette Martin, Matt Roberts, Kevin Binfield, Rohan McWilliam, John Halstead and Keith Laybourn, eating curry and drinking real ale in Huddersfield; Tim Hitchcock, Sarah Lloyd, Arthur Burns, Amanda Goodrich, Peter King and the other IHR regulars in the Italian restaurant off Goodge Street; Mike Brennan, in the sunny room that used to be Rochdale children’s library; Fabrice Bensimon, letting us peek into the Sorbonne’s library; Francis Boorman, Peter Catterall, David Churchill, Matthew Cragoe, Mark Freeman, Victoria Gardner, Peter Jones, Ruth Mather and everyone else who helped me along the way. Thanks to Nigel Goose, for use of his conservatory in St Albans. And to my husband Simon, for supporting me throughout. Permissions gratefully received from Chetham’s Library for the image from The Comet; the British Library Board for Robert Baker’s sanitary map of Leeds; Sheffield Local Studies for their image of Paradise Square and quotations from the Wentworth-­Woodhouse Muniments; Manchester Archives and Local Studies for their images; National Library of Scotland for their OS maps; and Oldham Local Studies for use of Edwin Butterworth’s documents. Thanks to the staff at all the archives and local studies that I visited for my research.

Abbreviations

Archive repositories BL JRLUM MALS RO TNA WYAS

British Library, London John Rylands Library, University of Manchester Manchester Archives and Local Studies Record Office The National Archives, Kew, London West Yorkshire Archives Service Newspapers

BO MG MM MO MT LM NS PMG

Bradford Observer Manchester Guardian Manchester Mercury Manchester Observer Manchester Times Leeds Mercury Northern Star Poor Man’s Guardian Journals

EHR E & P HJ HWJ IRSH JBS JSH LHR NH P & P SH

English Historical Review Environment and Planning Historical Journal History Workshop Journal International Review of Social History Journal of British Studies Journal of Social History Labour History Review Northern History Past and Present Social History

1  Map of northern England, showing ancient county boundaries and main places mentioned in the text.

Introduction

Leeds, 1844: Hobson’s challenge Contemporaneous with the right to meet is the right of free discussion. The one right necessarily implies the other. The right to meet would be nothing without the right to speak; neither would the right to speak without the right to meet ­… Both are necessary for the very existence of freedom; and both are guaranteed to Englishmen by the common law of the land.1

Joshua Hobson made this strident declaration at a Leeds town council meeting on 17 July 1844. Hobson and his compatriot on the council John Jackson were leading West Riding radicals who took the label of Chartist in the 1840s. Chartism was the largest mass working-­class political movement of the nineteenth century. The movement is best known for its national petitions to parliament demanding universal manhood suffrage and parliamentary reform, but it drew its strength from local networks and institutions. Hobson and Jackson had been elected as councillors for the industrial district of Holbeck in 1843.2 At the council meeting, they put forward a resolution calling for an investigation into the conduct of the mayor of Leeds. The mayor had prohibited Chartist meetings at the Free Market near the parish church, as well as miners’ meetings during their strike in June.3 Hobson claimed that a previous Chartist meeting held at the Free Market was ‘a Public Meeting of the Inhabitants, for a legal purpose and legally convened, in a Market to all intents and purposes Public Property, having been purchased at the public expense, and held in Trust by the Council for the use and [on] behalf of the public, as a Public Market’. Hobson continued, ‘If the public are not allowed to meet in the only place which NS, 20 July 1844. D. Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England: The Structure of Politics in Victorian Cities (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1976), p. 259.  3 J. Mayhall, The Annals and History of Leeds and Other Places in the County of York (Leeds, 1860), p. 505; LM, 15 June 1844.  1  2

2

Protest and the politics of space and place, 1789–1848

belongs to them­– ­in the Market Place­– ­the place of public resort­– ­a severe blow is at once struck at an “undoubted” right’. The Chartists had to hold their meeting in another commercial site, the Bazaar arcade off Briggate. The resolutions passed at that meeting provided the basis of Hobson’s speech. The first resolution asserted ‘the right to meet publicly, in a peaceable manner, for the consideration or discussion of any legal object, being a right guaranteed to all Englishmen by the constitution and laws of this realm, and being furthermore the most important of all the safeguards of public liberty’.4 Liberty, public, law, constitution and rights were central principles of radical movements in England throughout the ‘age of reform’. This was an issue that involved much more than the semantics of the word ‘public’. Hobson and Jackson’s claim to the right to use the market, declared within the civic arena of the council chamber, was a contest over who controlled both the uses of public space and the meaning of its places. Hobson emphasised that the market was ‘the only place which belongs to them’ because it had been indeed one of the few sites available for political meetings outside the buildings and squares owned and controlled by the Corporation and the other elites of the town. All new markets and commercial halls and most civic buildings in Leeds were privately funded by joint-­stock companies or subscription. Over two-­ thirds of spending on civic buildings, markets, commercial exchanges and assembly rooms in the West Riding came from private sources, especially subscriptions and joint-­stock shares as well as charity. The Free Market was a rare exception, constructed by an improvement commission elected by ratepayers.5 ‘Public’ buildings in the inclusive sense of the term thus hardly existed in northern towns before the 1840s. To take an earlier example, on 30 January 1801, the ‘clergy, landowners, merchants, woolstaplers and tradesmen’ of Wakefield issued an ‘open protest’ against the reformers who held a meeting at the Moot Hall to petition parliament for peace with France. Magistrate William Dawson complained to the Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding that ‘the meeting ought not to have been called in the Moothall, wh’[ich] they improperly considered as the public hall of the Town tho’ in fact [it is] his Grace of Leeds’s Court House which he is so kind as to lend to the Magistrates  4  5

NS, 20 July 1844. K. Grady, Georgian Public Buildings of Leeds and the West Riding (Leeds: Thoresby Society Publications, 1989), pp. 58–9; K. Grady, ‘Commercial, marketing and retail amenities, 1700–1914’, in D. Fraser (ed.), A History of Modern Leeds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), pp. 183–4, 275.



Introduction3

at their sessions and indeed to the Town at any time any meetings may be too numerous’.6 Dawson pointed to a central feature shaping the location of political meetings throughout this period: sites that appeared to be ‘public’ were in fact private, and their uses determined by a landowner or the dominant elite. And even at the turn of the century, there were still very few separate buildings where the different operations of the civic body politic could be conducted. The more ‘civic’ buildings and open spaces were constructed, the fewer ‘public’ spaces there were for all sections of society to use. The old sites of meeting, especially market places and bullrings, were increasingly removed out of town centres. Many streets and squares were in effect ‘privatised’ by being railed off or overlooked by new Palladian-­fronted townhouses built for wealthy bourgeois inhabitants. Improvement commissioners generally shied away from using their rating powers to fund the new public buildings, fearful of upsetting middle-­class and gentry pockets. Improvement was haphazard, however, and any Benthamite visions of straight and clean streets were soon dashed by the realities of industrial pollution and the rapid rise of the population overcrowded in hastily built terraces and courts. From the 1830s onwards, the funding of civic buildings began to shift sources. Aided by the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act, new local authorities increasingly used town rates for building projects.7 Thus began the grand age of Victorian town halls and civic pride in public spaces. As Hobson’s challenge illustrated, and as this book examines, local elites’ attempts to exert exclusionary control over these new halls and squares led to important contests over the meaning of public space and who had the right to form that ‘public’. Hobson’s challenge was not just over the uses of public space. Throughout this period, working-­class groups used protests in public sites as part of a much broader contest over elite power and against exclusion from local institutions of power. In the case of Leeds, in 1840, an alliance of Whigs, radicals and Chartists had combined to elect John Jackson to the board of improvement commissioners, a body that importantly had control of the market. In January 1842, the Chartists won a resounding victory over the whole board, drawing considerable support among small shopkeeping ratepayers. But the Liberals countered through legal means. The improvement act of July 1842 took

Sheffield Archives, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, WWM F 45­ /​30, Dawson to Fitzwilliam, 1 February 1801.  7 Grady, Georgian Public Buildings, p. 68.  6

4

Protest and the politics of space and place, 1789–1848

away the right of ratepayers’ election to the commission.8 Radicals were thus excluded from the board and could no longer get their supporters to elect them. Hobson and Jackson moved on to their next goal, election for churchwardens of the parish church. The Chartists achieved this en bloc from 1842 to 1845. In 1843, they achieved election to the town council. The battle between the factions therefore used the market as a physical and symbolic arena for the claims of power, reaching its climax at the meetings of June and July 1844. After Hobson’s motion to the council failed, no further political meetings were recorded on the site until June 1845, when the Chartists held a religious-­style Sunday camp meeting. The site then seems to have been quiet until the spring of 1848, when the Chartists almost took over the site to hold regular meetings during the push for their third petition to parliament.9 Class, words and actions, 1789–1848 This book examines how and why social and political movements in northern England from 1789 to 1848 fought for the right to meet as well as to speak and to publish. Historians of political movements in this period have generally focused on the latter. The American and French revolutions inspired the writing of thousands of discourses on both sides of the debates. Studies of the effects of these revolutions on British popular politics highlight the flourishing of the radical press and consequent government attempts to shut down freedom of speech in this period. Hobson was a printer, publishing the main Chartist newspaper the Northern Star from 1837 as well as Robert Owen’s New Moral World. He earned his activist stripes in Huddersfield earlier in the decade by publishing the reformist newspaper, the Voice of the West Riding.10 His defence of the right to speak was a natural corollary to his role spearheading the ‘war of the unstamped’ press. Text and propaganda are an important part of collective action and form a major source for historians of popular politics. Historians are still influenced by the ‘linguistic turn’, the post-­structuralist approach of the early 1990s that challenged R. J. Morris, Class Sect and Party: The Making of the British Middle Class: Leeds, 1820–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 124; J. F. C. Harrison, ‘Chartism in Leeds’, in A. Briggs (ed.), Chartist Studies (London: Macmillan, 1970), p. 86.  9 NS, 7 June 1845; Leeds Local Studies, SR 920.4 H247, R. B. Harrison’s diary, 1848. 10 M. Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 16.  8



Introduction5

old debates about revolution and class by examining how words shaped identities and provided opportunities for popular agency and class.11 We now read between the lines much more closely. Moreover, with the advent of digital resources, many of which aggregate eighteenth and nineteenth-­century sources, historians have seemingly (and indeed deceptively) unlimited collections of literary material accessible on the internet, with all the potential that new methodologies of text-­mining and corpus linguistics promise for new historical research.12 But popular politics was not solely conducted within the leaves of a pamphlet. As Hobson’s challenge demonstrated, it was whether the ‘debate’ spilled off the page and into action that really mattered. Words and language were uttered in a space and were associated with a place. Anti-­radical governing elites reacted first to the ‘seditious’ theories emanating from the French Revolution, as interpreted by Thomas Paine, but they soon realised that they were also contending with the rise of mass collective action and demands for representation. Radical printers, reform societies, Chartists, trade unions and many other bodies challenged the authority and exclusive representation of local and national governments. They did so by drawing from a wide repertoire of protest and organisation: meeting in groups ranging from small cells in back rooms of pubs to ‘national conventions’ of delegates from across the country, going on strike, marching and processing, petitioning parliament, occupying squares and churches, attacking property, and organising mass meetings on fields and in their own specially constructed buildings. Radicals also attempted to gain access to representation directly, through participation in the hustings of unreformed elections, contesting positions in local government and, ultimately, standing in general elections. This is a narrative of the closing down of public space from the A. Goodrich, Debating England’s Aristocracy in the 1790s: Pamphlets, Polemics and Political Ideas (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2005); K. Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-­Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); J. Vernon (ed.), Re-­reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); J. Vernon, ‘Who’s afraid of the linguistic turn? The politics of social history and its discontents’, SH, 19:1 (1994). 12 T. Hitchcock, ‘Academic history writing and its disconnects’, Journal of Digital Humanities, 1:1 (2011), http:­/​­/​journalofdigitalhumanities.org­/​1–1­/​ academic-­history-­writing-­and-­its-­disconnects-­by-­tim-­hitchcock­/​, accessed 14 September 2014. 11

6

Protest and the politics of space and place, 1789–1848

1790s, a process that affected all oppositional political groups up to 1848. Government and local elites excluded opposition from sites they could control in town centres; they also intruded into spaces previously considered to be private. Legislation passed throughout this period increasingly restricted when and where political groups could meet and defined what constituted ‘legitimate’ as opposed to ‘seditious’ collective action. The attitude of William Pitt the Younger’s government to the rise of mass public meetings was encapsulated in the 1795 Seditious Meetings Act and further legislation in 1799 against corresponding societies. Reaction to organised labour took the form of the Combination Acts of 1799–1800, which prohibited oath-­bound groups from collective bargaining. Lord Liverpool’s Tory government reacted to the postwar ‘mass platform’ radical movement with another seditious meetings act in 1817. The Peterloo Massacre on 16 August 1819 gave them the ideal opportunity to clamp down on collective action further in the ‘Six Acts’ passed at the end of that year. 1819 indeed marked a turning point, as the events of that year shifted governments’ focus away from prosecuting for seditious libel towards the problem of unlawful assembly. Radical action was muted in the 1820s, but in response to the rise of Chartism, Viscount Melbourne’s government passed two royal proclamations, firstly against night-­time meetings in November 1838, and secondly in May 1839, which enabled magistrates to ban day-­time Chartist meetings virtually at will.13 Christina Parolin, examining the spaces of early nineteenth-­century radical London, argues that a ‘key aim’ of the anti-­seditious legislation throughout this period ‘was to restrict outlets for expression, including access to spaces in which to assemble, in order to curtail the expansion of the political nation beyond the narrow confines of the aristocratic elite’.14 The political nation in northern English towns was, however, wider than the aristocratic elite of Westminster. The legislation in fact had many loopholes, and as we will see, the government still felt bound to protect the constitutional right to petition. Local loyalist elites however were keener to enact total reaction against radicals and trade unions on the ground. The ‘principal inhabitants’ of towns – t­ he gentry, magistrates, clergy, merchants and wealthy employers­– ­ allied with E. Yeo, ‘Culture and constraint in working-­class movements, 1830–1855’, in E. and S. Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590–1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), p. 160. 14 C. Parolin, Radical Spaces: Venues of Popular Politics in London, 1790– 1845 (Canberra: Australia National University Press, 2010), p. 5. 13



Introduction7

publicans, postmasters and other active loyalists, monitored and where possible prosecuted or shut down oppositional activity in a variety of public, and increasingly, private spaces. Magistrates and employers relied on a network of paid informers to spy on and attempt to suppress collective political and trades’ activity. They did so on a much more direct, prolonged and intimate scale than the occasional waves of state repression involving legislation and trials of radical leaders. What were social movements challenging? Moving away from previous Marxist interpretations of class struggle in the industrial town of Oldham in Lancashire, James Vernon argued that elites and their opponents were ‘contesting each other’s definitions of the political public sphere according to their interpretation of the constitution’. Patrick Joyce has come to similar conclusions concerning popular politics in Victorian Manchester.15 The ‘public sphere’ is still a dominant model in histories of society and politics in the ‘long eighteenth century’. Jurgen Habermas defined it specifically as an arena of bourgeois power outside the royal Court created by coffee house discussion and transmitted nationally through debates in newspapers and pamphlets.16 Historians stretched Habermas’s model to encompass other eras of popular politics and other classes. They have been keen to speak of multiple and conflicting ‘public spheres’ to account for working-­class opinions, and they have also spatialised the term. James Epstein concludes that, ‘in large part the history of popular radicalism can indeed be written as a contest to gain access to and to appropriate sites of assembly and expression, to produce, at least potentially, a “plebeian counter-­public sphere”’.17 Christina Parolin argues overtly that the model of plebeian counter-­ public spheres is applicable to sites where radicals congregated in early nineteenth-­century London, including Newgate gaol where the London reformers were imprisoned.18 The original model has been stretched so far that it has lost its original J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 7; P. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (New York: Verso, 2007). 16 J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Enquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. T. Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989). 17 J. Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 113. 18 Parolin, Radical Spaces, p. 10. 15

8

Protest and the politics of space and place, 1789–1848

purpose and coherence. Describing politics as being conducted within multiple public spheres or a dichotomy of public versus private risks making the term methodologically useless. This is not to reject it completely: indeed, as in the case of Hobson’s challenge in 1844, much of the debate over the politics of space concerned the meaning of the word ‘public’. The working classes used instruments of the public sphere­– ­newspapers, pamphlets and political debates­– ­to declare their opinions and rights: the ‘war of the unstamped’ conducted by publishers like Hobson in the 1830s shows the centrality of the written word and the freedom of speech to political movements. But popular politics did not solely aim to enter a world of middle-­class liberalism. The term sidesteps the divisive conflicts in the nineteenth century between classes over rights and economic conditions. Habermas’s model is difficult to apply to non-­ textual forms of working-­class collective action, especially the politics of the street.19 Tim Harris and other historians of early modern Europe have shown how a sophisticated and complex politics of the subaltern or ‘excluded’ existed well before the eighteenth century, and was shaped by and expressed in ways other than the press and text.20 These influences included a legacy of custom and memory which continued into the supposed new era of modernity and the public sphere of the ‘age of reform’. Popular political movements contested exclusion from representation in the civic body politic. The body politic offers an alternative model for understanding popular politics in the first half of the nineteenth century. The civic body politic represented in microcosm what the national body politic should be.21 It was not an overly common term in this period, in part because its associations with commonality and counsel­– ­potent concepts during the Commonwealth­– n ­ o longer accorded with the two central constitutional developments that changed the character of the British state from 1688. The inward-­looking ideal of a body politic did not fit the forthright and expansive vision of a British ‘fiscal-­military state’ and its empire.22 Yet ‘unreformed’ electoral politics and forms of local govern G. Eley, ‘Nations, publics and political cultures: placing Habermas in the nineteenth century’, in C. Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), pp. 304–6; H. Mah, ‘Phantasies of the public sphere: rethinking the Habermas of historians’, Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000). 20 T. Harris (ed.), The Politics of the Excluded, c.1500–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), p. 8. 21 P. H. Halliday, Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England’s Towns, 1650–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 41. 22 L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale 19



Introduction9

ment were not centralised, and many aspects continued to be conducted locally. The body politic describes this participatory political culture. Local and national elites defended their own ideal of the body politic, based as it was on privilege and property. The composition of local government came under intense debate as towns expanded and different interests sought to rationalise or control their patchwork of powers. Mark Harrison and Steve Poole have examined the role of corporate bodies in relation to space and crowd events in eighteenth-­century Bristol. Poole argues (albeit with a tinge of Habermasian phrasing) that citizenship ‘meant more than just membership of the political nation; it meant active, visible and unrestricted access to the public and civic domain, symbolically represented, in social conflicts over particularly resonant topographies and spaces’.23 Middle and working-­class political groups struggled for inclusion within the body politic. They sought to widen its definition to include those who were not propertied or titled. The end goal was the franchise, but important struggles were also fought over the right to sit on local government bodies and use civic sites for meetings. Contests over the body politic and its spaces were contests between classes. E. P. Thompson identified the social and political development of the working class reaching a vital stage in the period 1780 to 1832. His book, The Making of the English Working Class, published in 1963 and revised in 1968, and his later work on eighteenth-­century society, moved away from the economic determinism of traditional Marxist models of class formation by describing class as a process rather than a fixed economic category. Class was a set of identities that was shaped not just by individuals’ positions within an economic hierarchy and struggle with hegemonic elites, but also by collective and cultural interpretations of historic political rights. He showed how Thomas Paine’s interpretation of liberty and equality shaped the working classes’ conception of themselves and their demand for rights from the 1790s onwards, but also how these ideas dovetailed into a much longer tradition of English constitutionalism drawn from myths about Magna Carta and the liberties of the Anglo-­Saxons.24 University Press, 1992); J. Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1788 (London: Century Hutchinson, 1988). 23 S. Poole, ‘“Till our liberties be secure”: popular sovereignty and public space in Bristol, 1750–1850’, Urban History, 26 (1999), 54; M. Harrison, Crowds and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns, 1790–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 196–7. 24 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2nd edn, 1968).

10

Protest and the politics of space and place, 1789–1848

Thompson ‘found’ the making of the English working class in the Pennine villages and townships of the West Riding and south-­ east Lancashire. More orthodox Marxist historians followed in Friedrich Engels’s footsteps by focusing rather on the development of industrial working-­class districts and the Victorian slum, and searching for class conflict in patterns of residential segregation. Theodore Koditschek’s and John Foster’s studies of Bradford and Oldham respectively argued that mass urban growth and consequent social dislocation resulted in class consciousness. Popular protest thus demonstrated the revolutionary potential of the working class.25 Koditschek’s and Foster’s imposition of a Marxist superstructure upon Bradford and Oldham grated with their highly observant accounts of local events and social relations in the towns. They over-­exaggerated the abruptness of social disruption caused by urbanisation. Later non-­Marxist historians critiqued Thompson’s neglect of multiple identities, especially of women and the Irish.26 Some looked towards ‘community’ to replace class, but also perpetuated the connection between the physical environment and social relations. John Bohstedt compared riots in Manchester and villages in Devon between 1790 and 1810, concluding that new urban environments produced a fractured and atomised proletariat prone to violence. Industrialisation involved a destruction of community values whereas rural villages were able to sustain traditional social relations and thereby prevent violence getting out of hand.27 But as Andrew Charlesworth contended, the working classes were able to adapt to the new urban conditions to form new communities; they also maintained more continuity with rural life in the surrounding ‘neighbourhood’ than Bohstedt presumes.28 Furthermore, such studies of residential segregation led to geographic determinism: an assumption that working-­class inhabitants were powerless against the changes in their urban envi J. Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution: Early Industrial Capitalism in Three English Towns (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974); T. Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban-­ Industrial Society: Bradford, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 26 H. J. Kaye and K. McClelland (eds), E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990); A. Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the English Working Class (London: University of California Press, 1995). 27 J. Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790– 1810 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 28 A. Charlesworth, ‘From the moral economy of Devon to the political economy of Manchester, 1790–1812’, SH, 18:2 (1993), 211. 25



Introduction11

ronment. This book shows that this lack of agency was far from the case. Another approach to understanding the development of social movements was quantitative analysis of the frequency and types of protest events. Historical sociologist Charles Tilly employed statistical analysis of changes in the language used by newspapers to describe ‘contentious gatherings’, arguably prefiguring the vogue for text-­mining in digital history twenty years later. He categorised the ‘contentious repertoire widely available to ordinary people’ in the eighteenth century as predominantly violent and riotous, featuring carnivalesque celebration and other locally distinct forms of expression, and claim-­making using intermediary authorities to intercede with parliament. He argued that by the early nineteenth century, modes of protest had changed to become much less violent, more national and bureaucratised, and involving special-­ interest associations employing forms of claim-­ making directly to parliament in petitions and elections.29 Tilly in effect replaced Marxist structuralism with another teleological progression thesis. As this book will show, Tilly’s model is a reductive understanding of protest and underestimates the extent of continuity of the tactics and organisation of social movements between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thompson’s model of class as a cultural process has regained its influence, as have his other works on custom and the law moulding the beliefs and practices of the working class. Adrian Randall’s examination of ‘riotous assemblies’ in the eighteenth century employs Thompson’s concepts of ‘moral economy’ and a popular defence  of customary rights expressed in riots.30 Malcolm Chase’s histories of Chartism and the events of 1820, and Robert Poole’s work on Peterloo illustrate how historians have developed new understandings of the social, cultural and economic contexts of reform movements, while maintaining Thompson’s emphasis on the cultural constructions of class identity.31 The Anglo-­centricism of Thompson’s work C. Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 258, 393; C. Tilly, The Politics of Collective Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 46. 30 A. Randall, Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Hanoverian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 31 E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991); Chase, Chartism; M. Chase, 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013); R. Poole, ‘The march to Peterloo: politics and festivity in late Georgian England’, P & P, 192 (2006). 29

12

Protest and the politics of space and place, 1789–1848

has not hindered his legacy among historians of subaltern protest, especially in India.32 In a field traditionally dominated by labour and urban historians, moreover, it is significant that historians of rural and early modern society have developed new ways of understanding protest. In particular, Carl Griffin, Steve Poole and others have revised the methods and conclusions of Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé’s classic 1969 monograph, Captain Swing.33 Their regionally based examinations of the arson and machine-­breaking agitation of the early 1830s have shown how open acts of protest and resistance should be understood more holistically, within the broader and longer socio-­economic context of everyday life, with distinctive regional patterns and modes of repression.34 Studies by K. Snell, Barry Reay and others of rural protest similarly draw from Thompson’s ideas about custom and patrician-­plebeian relations.35 They also draw from the anthropologist James C. Scott’s theory that subaltern groups used ‘weapons of the weak’. Individuals and communities had agency in forms of action not recorded by newspapers or in official minutes, the ‘hidden transcripts’ of small forms of resistance in everyday life.36 Such smaller, less obvious or openly political actions were part of the ‘repertoire of contention’ not recognised by Tilly. There are precedents to this approach in Thompson’s emphasis on whole communities fostering political action: for example, the conspiracy of silence that surrounded Luddism in the Pennine villages, although R. Chandavarkar, ‘The making of the English working class: E. P. Thompson and Indian history’, in V. Chaturvedi (ed.), Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2000), p. 50. 33 E. Hobsbawm and G. Rudé, Captain Swing (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969). 34 C. Griffin, The Rural War: Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012); S. Poole and A. Spicer (eds), Captain Swing Reconsidered: Forty Years of Rural History From Below, special issue of Southern History, 32 (2010). See K. Navickas, ‘What happened to class? New histories of labour and collective action in Britain’, SH, 36:2 (2011). 35 K. Snell, Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); B. Reay, Microhistories: Demography, Society and Culture in Rural England, 1800–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); B. McDonagh, ‘Making and breaking property: negotiating enclosure and common rights in sixteenth-­century England’, HWJ, 76 (2013). 36 J. C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 32



Introduction13

this was admittedly spurred on by fear as much as by defiance of authority.37 Resistance formed part of the wider context of the struggles of everyday life. It could take the form of reactionary defence of common rights, enacted by trespass in enclosed fields and taking firewood from plantations, or a defence of practices and customs in the workplace. Or it could be idealistic and build towards a utopia: the shared song at a Methodist camp meeting, investment in the Chartist Land Plan, or self-­reliance through friendly societies and auto-­didacticism. As Rosa Congost commented in her study of conflicts over property rights, ‘The historian’s major challenge is to incorporate the study of the whole set of everyday practices and weapons­– ­of the weak, but also of the not so weak and of the strongest­– ­into the analysis of apparently peaceful areas in which nevertheless the long term view reveals deep transformations in the definition of social groups’.38 So this book seeks to uncover some voices of the excluded and those outside more organised forms of popular politics and protest. But popular politics was not always a one-­ sided case of ‘us and them’. Elites could protest too. Indeed some elite-­led campaigns, notably the Anti-­Corn Law League and the movement for the abolition of slavery, were the most successful, as they were able to gain substantial influence among MPs in parliament. From the mid-­1830s to the end of the 1840s, magistrates and local authorities faced new challenges from above as well as from below. The reformed Whig government of the 1830s passed wide-­reaching legislation which, though permissive in nature, was perceived by the provinces as imposed and a route to state centralisation. After decades of stemming resistance from their own inhabitants, local authorities now resisted what they regarded as threats to their own independence and control over place. As we will see in chapter 5, protests against the new poor law and the new police involved local elites as well as working-­ class inhabitants in defending their sense of place and local systems of government. Space and place Space used to be treated as a neutral, abstract and uniform medium in which action and social relations operated; place was the ‘bare stage on

Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 637. R. Congost, ‘Property rights and historical analysis: what rights? What history?’, P & P, 181 (2003), 93, 95.

37 38

14

Protest and the politics of space and place, 1789–1848

which the historical drama was enacted’.39 Cultural geographers were the first to take the ‘spatial turn’, and historians are now examining the cultural representations and meanings of space. Space is now defined as a social construction, formed by culture and in itself forming culture, shaping power and enabling agency. Both Epstein’s and Parolin’s studies of radical politics in 1790s London cite sociologists Peter Stallybrass and Allon White’s assertion that: ‘Each site of assembly constitutes a nucleus of material and cultural conditions which regulate what may and may not be said, who may speak, how people may communicate and what importance must be given to what is said’.40 This succinctly explains the choice of sites for political meetings and of the routes taken by processions, the way in which meetings were run and who participated, and the ways in which those meetings were commemorated with reference to the spaces in which they took place. Jon Stobart, Andrew Hann and Victoria Morgan have ‘spatialised’ patterns of consumption in eighteenth-­century English towns, arguing that shops and advertisements were ‘spaces of representation’ in which consumers negotiated a range of spatial meanings in displays and advertisements.41 Like many historians taking the spatial turn, they apply the definitions of space developed by philosopher Henri Lefebvre and postmodern geographer Edward Soja. Lefebvre and Soja both devised a tripartite model of space. They categorised space firstly as material and concrete, secondly as symbolic and representative, and thirdly, as lived within a combination of the material and representative.42 Soja’s notion of ‘thirdspace’ is useful for understanding how plebeian protesters could subvert the symbolism associated with buildings constructed by elites. Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘heterotopia’ is a related description of ephemeral

S. Gunn and R. J. Morris, Identities in Space: Contested Terrain in the Western City since 1850 (Farnham: Ashgate 2001), pp. 2–4. 40 P. Stallybrass and A. White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (New York: Cornell University Press, 1986), p. 80; Epstein, In Practice, p. 113; Parolin, Radical Spaces, p. 7. The same line is also quoted in A. Müller and I. Karremann (eds), Mediating Identities in Eighteenth-­ century England: Public Negotiations, Literary Discourses, Topography (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 101, among others in the series. 41 J. Stobart, A. Hann and V. Morgan, Spaces of Consumption: Leisure and Shopping in the English Town, c.1680–1830 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 22. 42 H. Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. D. Nicholson-­Smith (London: Wiley, 1992); E. Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-­ and-­Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). 39



Introduction15

locations of a ‘world-­turned-­upside-­down’ in particular situations such as demonstrations or riots.43 The spatial turn suggests that space gives protesters agency. William Sewell has argued in his study of space in protest that by ‘changing the meanings and strategic uses of their environments’, protesters exercise spatial agency and produce their own spaces.44 For example, subversion can be achieved by occupying a square at the ‘wrong’ time or by sitting in the ‘wrong’ seats in a meeting. Power lay in the hands of those who decided what time or place was ‘right’. As sociologist Fran Tonkiss notes, spaces are ‘not merely locations in which politics take place, but frequently constitute objects of struggle in their own right’.45 Structural restrictions on their uses of space could however counter-­balance any agency that oppositional movements may have. Drawing from resource mobilisation theory, in which participation in social movements is shaped by access to resources and sites of power, Sewell notes that oppositional social movements tend to be ‘resource poor’, both in terms of capital and time.46 So propertied elites or whoever owned and controlled sites of meeting had the upper hand in deciding who could meet where. But the historical spatial turn often confuses the meaning of space with place. Influenced by Lefebvre’s and Soja’s emphasis on representation, many studies assume that the space of the spatial turn is the same as the text in the linguistic turn and culture in the cultural turn, both of which centre on semiotics. Yet this focus ignores the very matter that is being experienced and represented. As Leif Jerram has warned in his critique of the historical spatial turn, space shapes physical action by its materiality not by its symbolism. Jerram powerfully argues that terms such as ‘male space’ or ‘sacred space’ are wrong: spaces themselves do not possess inherent qualities of gender or religion.47 This is not to deny that buildings and streets are culturally constructed by people, who themselves are defined by underlining economic and political power structures. Spaces produce ‘effects beyond their symbolic functions’, M. Foucault, ‘Of other spaces’, Diacritics, 16:1 (1986), 24. W. Sewell, ‘Space in contentious politics’, in R. Aminzade, J. Goldstone, D. McAdam et al. (eds), Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 62, 64. 45 F. Tonkiss, Space, The City and Social Theory: Social Relations and Urban Forms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 59. 46 Sewell, ‘Space in contentious politics’, p. 55. 47 L. Jerram, ‘Space: a useless category for historical analysis?’, History and Theory, 52:3 (2013), 404, 410–11.

43 44

16

Protest and the politics of space and place, 1789–1848

such as shaping the direction of a march or the experience of a demonstration in an enclosed square. Cultural geographers argue that place, rather than space, is invested with meaning, associations, performances and codes.48 Hobson was not simply asking for recognition of the Free Market as a public space (the term is contemporary, but in this formulation it should really be public place); his challenge was also a matter of being able to use and occupy the place physically. The form of Chartist meetings was shaped by a combination of material space, geographical location, connotations associated with place and memory of previous events. We should thus examine the whole environment in which protesters acted: its space and place. Geographers Tim Ingold and Nigel Thrift have gone further, suggesting the notion of ‘dwelling’ as a way of breaking down Soja’s binary between representation and experience of space. Ingold conceives of the land as a ‘taskscape’, lived and worked by its inhabitants.49 Iain Robertson applies this theory to the Highland Land Wars in early twentieth-­century Scotland, showing how crofters’ forms and locations of protest were drawn from collective memory of customary uses of their ancestors’ farms.50 I apply this concept to the actions of the Luddites and rural protesters in chapter 8. Geographers of resistance also conceive space as being produced by bodily practices and performances. They argue that protest is a form of embodied geography, producing space through gestures such as parading, processing or trespassing, which in turn gives protesters the agency to change the meaning or uses of politically resonant places.51 Chapter 4 examines bodily protest and the creation of embodied spaces, especially by trade unions in the 1830s. Notions of place were shaped by early modern conceptions of custom K. Olwig, ‘Recovering the substantive meaning of landscape’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 86:4 (1996), 645; T. Cresswell, Place: a Short Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), p. 12; Jerram, ‘Space’, 403. 49 J. Wylie, Landscape (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 166; T. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 195; N. Thrift, Non-­Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: Routledge, new edn, 2007). 50 Wylie, Landscape, p. 11; I. Robertson, Landscapes of Protest in the Scottish Highlands after 1914 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013). 51 M. Keith and S. Pile (eds), Geographies of Resistance (London: Routledge, 1997); M. Rose, ‘The seduction of resistance: power, politics and a performative style of systems’, E & P D, 20:4 (2002), 390; C. Griffin and A. Evans, ‘On historical geographies of embodied practice and performance’, Historical Geography, 36 (2008). 48



Introduction17

and practice, which, I argue, continued well into the nineteenth century. Andy Wood argues that customary practices and laws helped to define the distinctiveness of places. Custom established what rights were attached to inhabitants of a locality (for example, the use of a common for gleaning or fuel gathering), and thereby defined the particular culture of that locality. Custom defined the identity of individuals and communities in relation to place, as ‘the inheritors of tradition, rights, and duties’. This included plebeians as well as elites. For Wood, customary practices associated with the landscape gave inhabitants a channel of agency. He employs Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony, and argues that particularly by using customary law against their opponents, early modern subaltern groups were able to ‘carve out a space beyond domination, generating partial counter-­hegemonies that emerge from day to day lived experience’.52 An important part of this process was memory, the manipulation of the past and representations of the past in the landscape and law. A perennial phrase in documents and testimonies about common rights was ‘from time immemorial’, particularly employed in disputes over enclosure and pauper settlement. Yet unlike Bob Bushaway’s Durkheimian interpretation of custom and the law as being socially integrative, Wood draws from Thompson’s emphasis on custom as an interface that set patrician against plebeian. Custom was not ideal or representative of equality, as it was defined by hierarchies of gender, status and lineage.53 It often defined the rights of working men through the exclusion of women, migrants, paupers and other groups regarded as marginal or threatening to livelihoods. Yet because custom and its practices defined inequalities, it was used as a tool to contest those exclusions from power. From the later eighteenth century, moreover, this definition of custom as place was pitted against global processes of free trade political economy, trading and manufacturing practices, as well as mobility and migration, empire and the breaking down of traditional boundaries such as the poor law parishes. It is at this juncture of challenges to customary understandings of place that mass collective action emerged. But it A. Wood, The Memory of the People: Custom and Popular Senses of the Past in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 11–12. 53 Wood, The Memory of the People, p. 32; B. Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700–1880 (London: Junction Books, 1982); Thompson, Customs in Common, p. 97; J. C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 34. 52

18

Protest and the politics of space and place, 1789–1848

did not arise because of the breakdown of custom, but rather in defence of it. Inhabitants used customary rights and practices to challenge the political hegemony of elites. Carl Griffin’s work on rural protest shows how custom and popular notions of place continued to play a central role in shaping resistance in the nineteenth century. Echoing Thompson on the working class, he argues that subaltern groups employed a ‘language of rights’ that was in itself shaped by custom, religion and local-­ political conflict.54 As we have seen in the case of Hobson in Leeds, the politics of the parish was still important in the nineteenth century. Though the rate of urbanisation in the northern industrial areas was rapid, it did not obliterate older forms of administrative geographies and territorial belonging overnight. Finally, although custom, local rights and exclusion were crucial layers forming the palimpsest of place, this book does not assume that protest is bounded or reactionary. A search for a wider class identity and solidarity could co-­exist with a defence of place. Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘militant particularism’, drawn from his observations of communities in south Wales, suggested that class and place were two processes that shaped each other. Some sociologists, notably David Harvey in his study of labour relations at the Cowley motor works in Oxford, interpreted Williams’s model as a dichotomy between local and (inter)national, empirical and abstract, place and space. Harvey argued that place-­bound political groups cannot achieve their goals, or indeed class consciousness, until they shift from focusing on particular grievances towards uniting with other groups under more abstract political ideologies.55 Doreen Massey and David Featherstone have rejected this interpretation of militant particularism. They argue that the development of shared class and political identities was not antithetical to a strong attachment to place. Featherstone examines the London port strikes and agitation for the renegade politician John Wilkes in 1768. The riots involved specific groups of workers attached to particular areas, but who were connected by various subaltern groups defined by their mobilities, especially sailors and colonial inhabitants, who

C. Griffin, ‘Becoming private property: custom, law, and the geographies of “ownership” in eighteenth and nineteenth-­century England’, E & P A, 42:3 (2010), 753. 55 D. Harvey, ‘Militant particularism and global ambition: the conceptual politics of place, space and environment in the work of Raymond Williams’, Social Text, 42 (1995), 80; R. Williams, Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism (London: Verso, 1989), p. 115. 54



Introduction19

contested ‘the material and social orderings of mercantile networks’.56 Massey posits a relational definition of space, in which boundaries are continually made and remade by various practices (such as bodily movements in protest, representations of spaces in newspaper reports or maps and the physical materiality of objects such as fences or railway lines). Space is a ‘product of practices, trajectories and interrelations’.57 Nigel Thrift similarly suggests that space is relational and embodied rather than representational, emphasising the ‘flow of practice in everyday life’ rather than ‘consciously planned codings or symbols’.58 We should not reject the representational entirely: social movements were keenly aware of the power of symbols associated with protests and their places. But historians should also examine protests within their multi-­layered and changing spaces. Strategies of resistance were in part shaped by underlying spatial structures, buildings, streets and connections dominated by hegemonic elites; these spaces were never static and in struggling for power in those spaces, social movements created their own spaces and forms of spatial practice. Structure Part I explores spaces of exclusions, intrusions and negotiations from 1789 to 1830. It examines the impact of the first French Revolution upon popular politics in England, showing how government and local elites increasingly sought to exclude opposition from public space and intruded into what was previously considered private space. Following this process of exclusion in the 1790s, a new generation of ‘mass platform’ radicals defended the liberty to meet in protest by holding mass demonstrations and creating new meeting sites. The Peterloo Massacre and the Six Acts of 1819 are a major turning point in the narrative, impacting massively upon this nascent mass protest. The part concludes D. Featherstone, ‘Towards the relational construction of militant particularisms: or why the geographies of past struggles matter for resistance to neoliberal globalisation’, Antipode, 37:2 (2005), 252–3, 263; D. Featherstone, Resistance, Space and Political Identities: the Making of Counter-­Global Networks (Chichester: Blackwell, 2008), chapter 1. 57 A. Saldanha, ‘Power-­geography as philosophy of space’, in D. Featherstone and J. Painter (eds), Spatial Politics: Essays for Doreen Massey (London: Wiley-­ Blackwell, 2013), p. 46; D. Massey, For Space (London: Sage Publications, 2005), p. 5. 58 N. Thrift and J. D. Dewsbury, ‘Dead geographies and how to make them live again’, E & P D, 18:4 (2000), 415. 56

20

Protest and the politics of space and place, 1789–1848

with a ‘vignette’, outside the main narrative, a short case study of the political sites in the locale of north Manchester, showing the centrality of neighbourhood in fostering a continuity of collective action. Part II focuses on protests involving the body and civic body politic from the 1830s to the 1840s. It starts with a ‘prelude’ examining the revival of radical agitation leading to the passage of the Reform Act in 1832. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the popular reaction to the new Whig reforms of the 1830s, and the vital role of the anti-­new poor law campaign in consolidating mass working-­class collective action. Radicals, Chartists and Tories contested the Whig regime by standing for elections and attempting to change modes of representation in local bodies. The second vignette considers the procession as politics on the move, comparing loyalists’ and radicals’ contrasting uses of the street-­ scape. The story then enters the later 1830s and 1840s, with the rise of Chartism and Owenite socialism. In response to continued restrictions on the use of civic and public spaces, social movements constructed their own spaces. Spaces of education, religion, alternative consumption and entertainment offered inclusive ways of weaving politics into everyday life. Part III surveys protest in rural spaces and the ‘neighbourhood’ of urban areas throughout this period. Inhabitants’ sense of connection with the environment and landscapes shaped their actions in protest and help to explain the popularity of the Chartist Land Plan. Chapter 8 explores wider forms of resistance in rural areas, including the Captain Swing agitation of the 1830s. It considers why Chartism was weak in some parts of the North, whereas older customary forms of protest, including arson, threatening letters and tree maiming, persisted. The final chapter surveys battles over territory between Chartists and trade unions and the tense triangle of authority of magistrates, military and the Home Office in 1839, 1842 and 1848. It concludes with a vignette that considers wider horizons outside the North, particularly radicals’ utopian visions of North America. Their disillusionment with the progress of land reform and democracy illustrated that the differences between restrictions on liberty in the United States and those back home were not as stark as they imagined.

I

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

1

Spaces of exclusion and intrusion in the 1790s

On Saturday 29 December 1792, a long procession solemnly shuffled into Beverley Minster in the East Riding of Yorkshire. It was headed by the ‘lord lieutenant, noblemen, deputy lieutenants, magistrates, gentlemen, clergy, freeholders, and inhabitants of the East Riding and Hull’, followed by the rest of the populace. The ‘principal inhabitants’ signed an address declaring their loyalty to the king and their abhorrence of radicalism, whose principles and propagators were, they claimed, ‘destructive to all property’. Reverend Robert Wharton, archdeacon of Stowe in Lincolnshire, signed first, followed by Richard Watt junior, who had inherited the large Bishop Burton estate from his uncle, an owner of West Indies plantations. The third signature was Francis Osborne, 5th Duke of Leeds and Lord Lieutenant of the East Riding, who had served as foreign secretary from 1783 to 1791. And so the litany of the principal inhabitants of the county continued until, by the fifth page, the less literate affirmed their loyalty with a cross rather than a signature.1 Scenes like this were enacted across Britain during the winter of 1792–3. In northern England, loyal addresses were drawn up and signed in guild halls (York, Sheffield, Congleton); town halls (Macclesfield, Ripon, Wigan, Halifax, Carlisle, Lancaster); moot halls (Leeds, Wakefield); court houses and sessions rooms (Salford, Knaresborough); grammar schools (Rochdale, Bolton); assembly rooms (Warrington); parish churches (St Helens, Bradford) and chapels in smaller places (for example, Lydgate in Saddleworth, nestled in the hills on the Lancashire-­ Yorkshire border).2 This huge effort of gathering the great and good of each county, town or village was made in response to the government East Yorkshire RO, LT 9­/6 ​ 7, loyal declaration of the East Riding and Hull, December 1792.  2 MM, 11 December 1792, 1, 8 January 1793; LM, 22, 29 December 1792; Cumberland Pacquet, 18 December 1792; Chester Courant, 18 December 1792.  1

24

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

issuing a royal proclamation against seditious writings in November 1792. It was also inspired by the London loyalist John Reeves, who wrote to the ‘principal inhabitants’ of almost every town in Britain, energetically encouraging them to form loyalist associations and draw up such addresses. Reeves received hundreds of replies, illustrating the eagerness of local elites to prove their loyalty.3 The events used the rituals and spaces of civic patriotism and translated them into the new context of a loyalist reaction against radical political ideas of democracy and social equality, especially propagated by the second part of Paine’s Rights of Man. This was a defence of property and the elite. The ritual of the procession, the positioning of the local elites in the best seats in the church or assembly room to delineate their authority and the fabric of the building became as much a part of loyalist activity as the sentiments of the address. The signing of the address reinforced the connection between church and state, representing the new type of explicitly anti-­Jacobin loyalism. By including the less literate, the local elites hoped to encourage a ‘vulgar conservatism’ among the working classes as way of assuring their positions within the existing social order.4 While traditional civic patriotic events such as celebrations of the king’s birthday were meant to unite, loyalism excluded dissent and polarised the spectrum of political adherence.5 As Winifred Gales, wife of Joseph Gales, printer of the radical Sheffield Register, recalled in her memoirs, everyone had, ‘according to the policy of the times, to consider all Reformers favourable to France’.6 Loyalism framed a polarity between loyal and radical; it tarred all reformers with the same brush of extremism, inducing an attitude of ‘if you aren’t for us, you’re against us’. Loyalist principles and actions were as much shaped by elites’ constructed fear of this new radicalism and its potential to cause disorder among the working classes, as they were a response to actual attempts to change the political system. BL, Add(itional) MS 16923–4, John Reeves papers, 1792–3; H. T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989), p. 121.  4 M. Philp, ‘Vulgar conservatism, 1792–3’, EHR, 110:485 (1995).  5 F. O’Gorman, ‘English loyalism revisited’, in A. Blackstock (ed.), Politics and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1850 (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 2007), p. 226.  6 University of North Carolina, Digital Southern Historical Collection, 02652–z, Gales family papers, ‘Recollections’, 1831 (hereafter, Gales papers, ‘Recollections’), p. 89, www2.lib.unc.edu­/​mss­/​inv­/​g­/​Gales_​Family.html, accessed 29 June 2014.  3



Spaces of exclusion and intrusion in the 1790s 25

Loyalists sought to control civic and public spaces in order to exclude radical dissent in the 1790s. This process also involved defining what was constituted a public space. John Barrell and James Epstein have deconstructed contrasting spaces in the trial of the London radical John Frost in 1793, which ranged from the coffee house, the pub, the street to the courtroom.7 The trial debated the exact location of where Frost was supposed to have said ‘seditious’ words. The prosecution wanted to prove that the tavern above a coffee house was a public space where sedition was uttered; the defendant by contrast claimed that he spoke in private and therefore his actions could not be interpreted as seditious. The trial contested the inclusive and ‘polite’ behaviour associated with the coffee house, that iconic symbol of the Habermasian public sphere in the eighteenth century. Barrell portrays this physical and legal redefinition of what was previously deemed private space as an ‘invasion of privacy’. Frost’s trial marked a break with the Enlightenment concept of public and private space, and, by implication, the self. The consequence was ‘the sense that everything had suddenly been or could suddenly become politicised’.8 Barrell’s interpretation of Frost’s trial is important for what it tells us about how loyalist ‘repression’ operated in practice. Debating the extent of severity of William Pitt’s ‘reign of terror’ in the 1790s, historians generally concluded that the government’s attempts to prosecute radical leaders and printers for seditious libel were incomplete and ineffective, with relatively few successful convictions. Barrell argues that the impact of Pitt’s government’s actions was nevertheless severe because of the ‘cultural effects of the repression, the atmosphere of suspicion it created on both sides of the conflict’.9 Admittedly it is more difficult to find tangible evidence of an atmosphere of suspicion; it cannot be quantified in the same way as the total number of prosecutions or the number of radicals who left Britain seeking refuge in France or America. Nevertheless, the atmosphere of suspicion arguably played a larger part in shaping the J. Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); J. Epstein, ‘“Equality and no king”: sociability and sedition. The case of John Frost’, in G. Russell and C. Tuite (eds), Romantic Sociability: Social Networks and Literary Culture in Britain, 1770–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), chapter 3.  8 Barrell, Spirit of Despotism, p. 4.  9 Barrell, Spirit of Despotism, p. 4; P. Harling, ‘The law of libel and the limits of repression, 1790–1832’, HJ, 44:1 (2001); C. Emsley, ‘An aspect of Pitt’s “Terror”: prosecutions for sedition during the 1790s’, SH, 6:2 (1981).  7

26

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

everyday lives of ordinary inhabitants, whether active or not in popular politics, than any edicts coming from Westminster. It involved the appropriation of civic ritual for loyalist ends, as in the loyal address in the Minster. It was also fostered by local loyalist elites’ restrictions on political groups meeting on public sites and, more controversially, surveillance by spies into social spaces used by radicals. Though loyalists could never achieve complete hegemony over such spaces, radicals took more precautions to avoid detection, indicating that the fear of arrest shaped their actions and closed down the range of spaces in which they could meet openly. This chapter examines how ‘principal inhabitants’ of towns, including magistrates, clergy and wealthy employers, together with publicans, postmasters and other active loyalists, attempted to suppress oppositional activity in a variety of public spaces. It also investigates Church-­and-­King violence against radicals, which contributed to the atmosphere of suspicion not just by open outbreaks of riot but also by quotidian harassment and surveillance. An associational culture Radical and loyal political movements were associational cultures, expanded through friendship networks and personal connections as well as by more formal societies and activities such as drawing up addresses and petitions. Historians of popular politics tend to focus on the actions of radical activists and writers: they sometimes thus consequently assume that local and national governments were a static structural force against which radical opponents reacted.10 By contrast, Steve Pile and other geographers argue that resistance is not solely about the linear confrontation of forces, but can develop new directions from powers that are relational and contingent.11 Loyalism in this sense was in itself a social movement. Although anti-­radical ideas became part of state and local authorities’ policies, and thus a structural force, they nevertheless continued to develop in response to radicalism throughout this period. Moreover, like other social movements, loyalists operated within their own formal and informal networks. They shared a repertoire of tactics, such as composing addresses to the monarch during J. Dinwiddy, ‘Interpretations of anti-­Jacobinism’, in M. Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 38. 11 M. Rose, ‘The seduction of resistance: power, politics and a performative style of systems’, E & P D, 20:4 (2002), 386; S. Pile and M. Keith (eds), Geographies of Resistance (Abingdon: Routledge, 1997), p. 2. 10



Spaces of exclusion and intrusion in the 1790s 27

periods of ‘threat’ and forming associations to distribute anti-­radical propaganda and enact surveillance on suspected ‘Jacobins’. Historians have argued that loyalist associations were ineffective tools of repression, owing to their ephemeral nature as dining clubs for the gentry and wealthy middle classes.12 Within the context of the multiple institutions and connections that formed late eighteenth-­century local government, however, loyalist associations played a vital role. The development of an active civic culture and its associated governing bodies during the French wars allowed local elites to come to the fore, directing patriotic processions and mustering volunteer regiments in civic spaces as a show of unity, real or not, against both French and English ‘Jacobins’. Their members were magistrates, gentry, manufacturers and clergy who policed and prosecuted working-­class collective action throughout this period. Whether a Reevesite society in the 1790s, an Orange lodge in the 1800s, a Pitt club in the 1810s or a defence association in the 1830s, this associational world was where loyalist ideas were spread and put into action.13 Reverend Christopher Wyvill, former leader of the reformist Yorkshire Association in the 1780s, refused to attend the ‘meetings to declare Loyalty’ in his home wapentake of Hang West in the North Riding in 1792. He was well aware that the loyal addresses and associations were designed to snuff out any demands for moderate reform and reduction of taxes, fearing that they would class his grievances ‘with Republicans, Levellers and other Enemies of our Constitution’.14 Members of the loyalist societies were not unaware of the potential charge of hypocrisy in their associating for the purpose of preventing radicals from associating. The loyal address of the ‘principal inhabitants’ of Chester coyly admitted, ‘we are conscious that when we claim the right of associating, in support of our political opinions, we admit an equal right in others to do the like, in a peaceable manner; in such case, if they differ from us, we will employ no other opposition than that of reason to reason’. But the rest of the address expressed their ‘strongest disapprobation of M. Duffy, ‘William Pitt and the origins of the loyalist association movement of 1792’, HJ, 39:4 (1996); D. Ginter, ‘The loyalist association movement of 1792–93 and British public opinion’, HJ, 9:2 (1966); A. Mitchell, ‘The association movement of 1792–3’, HJ, 4:1 (1961). 13 O’Gorman, ‘English loyalism revisited’, p. 235; P. Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 14 North Yorkshire RO, ZFW 7­ /​ 2/­​ 74­ /​ 75, Wyvill to Strawbenzie, 9, 15 December 1792. 12

28

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

a Society lately formed in London’ (the London Corresponding Society) and they resolved to assist ‘magistrates and executive government in suppressing all illegal and tumultuous meetings’.15 Other associations similarly comprised the major landowners and employers and although they were only unofficially part of the structures of law and order in towns, they arranged patrols of the streets and surveillance of political meetings.16 The new parliamentary reform movements differed from Wyvill’s Yorkshire Association and other predecessors because of the active working-­class involvement in setting up societies and drawing up petitions to parliament. They did not, however, form a distinctively ‘plebeian public sphere’. In many towns there was middle-­class leadership and some continuity with previous societies, especially anti-­slavery groups and literary and philosophic societies.17 The novelty lay in the size and extent of working-­class activism. Joseph Gales and his friends formed the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information (SSCI) in late 1791, and immediately took up the London Corresponding Society’s (LCS’s) call for ‘members unlimited’. Sheffield seems initially to have fostered more freedom for political expression compared with other similarly sized industrial towns in the North, perhaps because the shop-­based structure of the metalworking industries fostered a strong sense of independence among the artisans. By March 1792, the SSCI claimed over 2,000 members.18 In other towns, radical organisation was shaped by other forms of associational networks and social structures. The Manchester Constitutional Society (MCS), formed by the merchant Thomas Walker and the lawyer and doctor Thomas Cooper in October 1790, attracted about a hundred members. It was more middle-­class in composition, charging half a guinea membership fee. The MCS was more like the London Society for Constitutional Information, of which both Cooper and Walker were also members. Members of the MCS were related to each other either through blood or business, and many had already campaigned in the 1780s for the abolition of the slave trade and for a Chester Chronicle, 14 December 1792. LM, 29 December 1792. 17 J. Mee, Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention and Community 1762 to 1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 82. 18 Proceedings at Large on the Trial of John Horne Tooke for High Treason, vol. 2 (London, 1795), p. 247; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2nd edn, 1968), p. 265; F. K. Donnelly and J. L. Baxter, ‘Sheffield and the English revolutionary tradition, 1791–1820’, IRSH, 20:3 (1975), 401. 15 16



Spaces of exclusion and intrusion in the 1790s 29

repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts that restricted dissenters’ political rights. Two artisanal radical groups, the Reformation and Patriotic societies, quickly emerged. In the early 1790s they worked in an uneasy alliance with the MCS, but neither reached the mass membership of the SSCI.19 Elsewhere in northern England, the emergence of radical societies had a scattered geography, in part reflecting pre-­existing communities of rational dissenters and Enlightenment book clubs. By November 1792, Warrington had an Amicable Society for Free Representation and Political Information, formed by ‘mechanics’ who were no doubt inspired by, if not directly connected to, the independent tradition of the dissenting academy that had dissolved in 1786.20 During the treason trials of 1794, the government also dug up evidence for substantial radical societies in Bradford, Leeds, Huddersfield, Halifax and Liverpool. Stockport Friends of Universal Peace and Rights of Man consisted of ‘yeomanry, farmers, manufacturers, mechanics and labourers and servants in some of the cotton factories’, who corresponded with the LCS.21 As with modern social movements, the societies drew strength in connecting with other bodies, creating a sense of a shared collective identity in an imagined community fostered by correspondence and delegates. The corresponding element of these early societies was a defining feature of their aims and identities. As David Featherstone has shown in his examination of the LCS, these connections forged a synergy between localism and globalism, as political groups were shaped by localised conflicts with loyalist elites, which they then interpreted within broader shared ideals of liberty and fraternity.22 Local identity was combined with ideals of national and international unity. The Leeds Society for Constitutional Information, a more plebeian group, inscribed on their membership tickets the motto, ‘Where Liberty is, there is my country’, C. Horner, ‘A set of infernal miscreants: radicalism in 1790s Manchester’, Manchester Region History Review, 12 (1998), 21; F. Knight, The Strange Case of Thomas Walker (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1957), p. 47. 20 TNA, HO 42­/​22­/​258, copy of the Manchester Herald, 10 November 1792. 21 TNA, TS 24­ /​ 10, London Corresponding Society correspondence, 1792; Halifax Local Studies Library, L632­/​P329, Halifax Constitutional Society pamphlet, 1794. 22 D. Featherstone, ‘The spaces of politics of the London Corresponding Society’, Journal of Historical Geography, 30:4 (2004), 783; M. T. Davis, ‘The Mob Club: the London Corresponding Society and the politics of civility in the 1790s’, in M. T. Davis and P. A. Pickering (eds), Unrespectable Radicals? Popular Politics in the Age of Reform (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 27. 19

30

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

perhaps a misquotation of Benjamin Franklin. It depicted the arms of Leeds Corporation alongside a cap of liberty, thereby juxtaposing civic pride with universal ideals.23 In September 1792, LCS founder Maurice Margarot invited the provincial reform societies in Britain to add their names to the London address to the French National Convention. Among those who signed were four Manchester societies and the SSCI. The Stockport radicals sent resolutions approving of the French Revolution. Wider national links were developed when the Scottish Friends of the People opened their third convention to English delegates in November 1793, though notably the only representatives from northern England who made it up to Edinburgh were from the Sheffield and Leeds societies. The connections were new and fragile. Disappointment with the French revolutionaries, especially as the Terror spread bloodily into 1794, as well as personal and ideological disagreements among the leaders, fractured any sense of unity that correspondence engendered.24 There is also much less evidence for significant organised radical activity in the North and East ridings. The good folk of Beverley need not have worried about Jacobins outside the Minster door. Meeting sites The first sites of radical meeting were by necessity and practice familiar and quotidian. The SSCI began in late 1791 as ‘an assembly of some five or six mechanicks meeting in each other’s houses’ around Sheffield, according to a letter from a member to the LCS, used as evidence in the House of Commons committee of secrecy into the radical societies in 1794.25 Places of work also fostered initial discussion and recruitment. In Ulverston on the Furness peninsula of north Lancashire, radicals­– ­sardonically dubbed ‘the heroes of democracy’ by the local magistrate­ – ­met at ‘Ridgway’s shop’ in 1793.26 In some industries, home and work TNA, HO 42­/​31­/​part i­/​399, rules of Leeds Constitutional Society, 1794. M. Thale (ed.), Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, 1792–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 21, 204, citing TNA, TS 11­/​965­/​3510A, trials of Sheffield radicals, 1794 and BL, Add(itional) MS 27811, fos 7–9; A. Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty (London: Hutchinson, 1979), pp. 237, 244. 25 Parliamentary Papers (PP), 1794 (31), Second Report from the Committee of Secrecy, 6 June 1794, p. 29, appendix D, p. 95; A. Seaman, ‘Reform politics at Sheffield, 1791–1797’, Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society, 7 (1957), 217. 26 TNA, HO 42­/​25­/​373, Darby to Home Office, April 1793. 23 24



Spaces of exclusion and intrusion in the 1790s 31

place shaded into one another, especially metalworking in Sheffield and handloom weaving in the Pennine textile districts. Houses and workshops were not entirely private, but were bound and bounded by their own rules and close self-­surveillance. The workshop structure fostered a sense of artisanal independence, mutuality, homosociality and the integration of political conversation in quotidian working practices.27 In middle-­class circles, Presbyterian and Unitarian chapels were sites of sociability, connecting local dissenting communities with national networks as well as providing an ideal training ground for radical orators and debaters. In Manchester, radical enquiring middle-­class minds met at Mosley and Cross Street chapels; newly built Paradise Street and Benn’s Garden chapels in Liverpool served a similar role for the wealthy circles led by the abolitionist lawyer and banker William Roscoe and Reverend William Shepherd who formed the ‘Friends of Peace’.28 The ‘members unlimited’ policy of the SSCI and the LCS, and radicals’ desire for openness, meant that the new movements could not remain within closed doors for long. They branched out of members’ houses and met in public in defence of the right to meet on the same terms as loyal societies. The SSCI used the Freemasons’ Hall for their main meeting place in Sheffield. Their choice of one of the most prominent buildings in the town indicates that they viewed themselves as equal in importance and standing as the existing associations and networks of local elites. Built in the late 1770s, this building dominated the northern side of Paradise Square (see figure 15), which itself became a major site of protest and meeting. The hall was one of the few premises that could accommodate large meetings. It was nevertheless unusual for freemasons, sworn to be apolitical within their spaces, to offer the use of their premises for political purposes. No other political bodies are reported to have met in the Freemasons’ Hall. The first SSCI public meeting in the Freemasons’ Hall in January 1792 became dangerously packed with attendees. The committee decided to adopt a federal organisation in order to avoid another crush. Members were divided into tithings of ten members each. Similar to the range of the LCS’s meeting sites in pubs across London, these clubs met P. Belford, ‘Work, space and power in an English industrial slum: the Crofts, Sheffield, 1700–1850’, in A. Mayne and T. Murray (eds), Explorations in Slumland: The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 108. 28 I. Inkster, ‘Under the eye of the public’, in F. James and I. Inkster (eds), Religious Dissent and the Aikin-­Barbauld Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 146. 27

32

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

in a dozen pubs spread across Sheffield’s central districts, including the Black Lion in Shoreham Street and the Falcon in Coal-­Pit Lane.29 The tithings elected representatives to a general meeting held monthly at the Freemasons’ Hall, with overflow meetings at the Tiger in New Street and Fountain at Townhead Cross. To restrict numbers and maintain order, admission to the main meeting was by ticket, costing sixpence. In March, they realised that even this structure could not cope with their popularity; the secretary noted that ‘of late our numbers have increased so rapidly, and only having thirteen meeting places, all on the same evening, they were so crowded’. The monthly meetings continued throughout 1792 and the first half of 1793, and the society organised a petition for parliamentary reform that was presented to parliament on 2 May 1793.30 John Barrell has noted with regard to the LCS, ‘the society divided because it grew. But to the alarmist imagination, it grew because it divided’.31 So with the SSCI and the Manchester groups. The authorities viewed this expansion as a dangerous multi-­headed Hydra, and as we will see, attempted different ways of repressing its growth through exclusion and intrusion. Pubs Popular politics originated in the pub. This is a­– i­f not the­– m ­ ajor continuity in this story. The public house encapsulated political associational life in this period more than any other. The coffee houses of the Habermasian public sphere and the assembly rooms of the ‘urban renaissance’ were minor venues compared with the ubiquity of the pub. Licensed premises varied from the largest and most respectable hotels and inns with multiple rooms to the smaller two-­room houses and backstreet beer shops. A house was defined as ‘public’ by its annual licence from the magistrates. But the definition was less clear in relation to the wider range of drinking premises. So a private house may have been J. Stevenson, Artisans and Democrats: Sheffield in the French Revolution, 1789–97 (Sheffield: Sheffield Historical Association, 1989), pp. 16, 54; I. Newman, blog, ‘London Corresponding Society’s meeting places’, www.1790salehouse.com, accessed 30 June 2014. 30 Second Report from the Committee of Secrecy, appendix D, p. 96; Sheffield Register, 9 May 1793. 31 J. Barrell, ‘London and the London Corresponding Society’, in J. Chandler and K. Gilmartin (eds), Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture, 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 104–5. 29



Spaces of exclusion and intrusion in the 1790s 33

held by a former publican, and as Peter Clark notes, unlicensed premises ‘occupied a twilight area on the margins of legality’, including alehouses that sprang up in the vicinity of new factories, where ‘to circumvent the law, beer was given away but an equivalent charge was made for a piece of straw’.32 Pubs had as many functions as their different spatial formations, clienteles and locations. Before local elites built civic buildings designed for specific purposes and groups, the pub was often the only large enough indoor meeting space in a town.33 The large ‘respectable’ inns were arenas of local government and justice. The Talbot Inn in Halifax, for example, was the usual site of magistrates’ meetings and petty sessions as well as being the assembly rooms until as late as 1828. Bradford had no court house until 1834, so the magistrates held their sittings at various taverns. The Bull’s Head Inn off Bradford market place was the main pub used for commercial and political transactions of all kinds; situated opposite the pillory, it also connoted a site of justice.34 Pubs thus easily accommodated the associational culture of loyalism in the 1790s, when the sociability of ‘principal inhabitants’ blurred into the organisation of local government. Justices of the peace played an essential part in the loyalist associations and the organisation of addresses and dinners. In Halifax, the loyalist association was chaired by the vicar Henry William Coulthurst and met at the Talbot Inn in 1792.35 The inn later hosted a Protestant meeting to petition against the Catholic relief bill in 1807, and dinners of the Pitt Club in the 1810s and Conservative Association in the 1820s. After purpose-­built assembly rooms were constructed by subscription in 1828, however, the inn fell out of fashion and reformers were later able to command its use.36 In Oldham, the Angel Inn on High

P. Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–1830 (London: Longman, 1983), pp. 260–1. 33 P. Jennings, The Local: The History of the English Pub (Stroud: Tempus, 2007), p. 15; J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 214; Mark Hailwood, Alehouses and Good Fellowship in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2014). 34 C. Graham, Ordering Law: The Architectural and Social History of the English Law Court to 1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), p. 446; J. James, The History of Bradford and its Parish (Bradford, 1841), p. 298. 35 LM, 29 December 1792. 36 WYAS, Calderdale, HAS: 1363 (435)­/1 ​ 4, 204, posters, 1817; LM, 1 August 1795; Yorkshire Gazette, 31 May 1828; Huddersfield and Halifax Express, 12 February, 12 November 1831; Halifax Guardian, 23 January 1838. 32

34

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

Street was the venue for the loyal address to the king by the ‘respectable inhabitants’ of the town and its surrounding townships on 6 February 1793. Its ‘large room’ was the venue for the controversial coroner’s inquest into a Peterloo victim in 1819. The inn continued its loyal and patriotic associations by hosting the 12 July anniversary dinner of the Orange lodges and celebratory dinners in honour of the proclamation, coronation and marriage of Queen Victoria in the 1830s.37 Smaller pubs in working-­class areas were similarly associational centres for a less privileged clientele. The White Lion in Oldham hosted the meetings of a plebeian loyalist association in 1795 and the male and female operative conservative societies in the 1830s.38 Radicals sought to emulate some of the rituals and use of spaces that their loyalist counterparts used to assert their place within the civic body politic. Formal dining was a major activity, as James Epstein has demonstrated, with its practices of invitations, set seating, hierarchies of speeches and toasts to leaders and supporters.39 Iain McCalman’s study of the ‘radical underworld’ of London in the 1790s vividly demonstrates how the persistence of notions of gentlemanly rights to privacy in drinking clubs and masonic lodges allowed informal political clubs to flourish in the taprooms and clubrooms of backstreet alehouses.40 E. P. Thompson, however, warned historians not to romanticise backroom political meetings. Middle-­class radicals, notably Francis Place in London, hated tavern culture and increasingly sought to distance themselves from plebeian milieux. Moreover, though radicals held occasional lively philosophical debates and jovial dinners, more commonly, working-­class meetings reflected the humdrum of quotidian life, the ‘solid quiet work of the benefit and burial society’.41 Radical meetings in

Oldham Local Studies, D-­M54, diaries of William Rowbottom (hereafter Rowbottom diaries), 1793; D-­ BUT F­ /​ 1, 4, 24, 55, 56, 68, Butterworth papers, ‘news reports’ (hereafter ‘Butterworth news reports’); G. Shaw, Annals of Oldham (Oldham: Standard Office, 1904), vol. 3, p. 172. 38 Shaw, Annals of Oldham, vol. 3, p. 172; Oldham Local Studies, D-­BUT­/F ​ 40, 54, 56, Butterworth news reports. The White Lion and the Angel signed the publicans’ loyal address discussed below. 39 J. Epstein, ‘Radical dining, toasting and symbolic expression in early nineteenth-­century Lancashire: rituals of solidarity’, Albion, 20:2 (1988), 275. 40 I. McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 114. 41 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 561. 37



Spaces of exclusion and intrusion in the 1790s 35

pubs drew from the same culture of self-­help and auto-­didactic activities that were common in such venues. Access to news and information was a priority. In the defiantly independent village of Royton outside Oldham, a group of shopkeepers and small manufacturers formed a ‘Jacobin library’, a radical alternative to the subscription libraries popular at the time. The library was held at the Light Horseman pub on Sandy Lane in Thorpe. We only know this because postwar radical leader Samuel Bamford’s autobiography referred to a Church-­and-­King crowd almost demolishing the pub when they attacked the library in 1794.42 There must have been many pubs like this in every town and village where informal political activity occurred, but which left no trace. Working-­ class pubs were notably impenetrable to outsiders. Bamford described his ‘bearing home’ route between his native village of Middleton and Manchester, during which handloom weavers patronised roadside hostelries and discussed politics on the way. But upon visiting unfamiliar pubs, the regulars would naturally be suspicious, fearing excisemen come to shop them for illegal dealing or magistrates’ spies infiltrating their gatherings. Bamford described the scene upon seeking shelter in a ‘hush-­shop’ in the rural outskirts of Bury: ‘On our entering, all eyes were directed towards us, and the hum of their voices was hushed to silence’. The landlord’s mother ‘screamed, “Excisemen!”, “Informers!”’, but a man then ‘rushed into the room, said he knew us both well, that we were neither excisemen nor informers, and that he would pledge his life for us’.43 Communities were built on trust, personal connections, and bonds of inclusion and enforcement of exclusion, often without leaving any record of these unwritten rules. Popular loyalism Radicals were initially safe in their pub meetings, but as reaction to the French Revolution progressed, loyalism developed direct means of exclusion and intrusion. Anti-­radical loyalism was a complex movement, evolving from below as well as from above. After the royal proclamation against seditious writings of November 1792 highlighted the dangerous message of social levelling in the second part of the Rights of S. Bamford, The Autobiography of Samuel Bamford: Early Days, ed. W. H. Chaloner ([1849] London: Psychology Press, 1967), pp. 43–4; E. Butterworth, Historical Sketches of Oldham (Oldham, 1856), p. 22. 43 S. Bamford, Early Days and Passages in the Life of a Radical (London, 1849), chapter 10, http:­/​­/​gerald-­massey.org.uk­/​bamford­/​c_​radical_​​%​286%​​ 29.htm, accessed 14 September 2014. 42

36

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

Man, Thomas Paine was ritually ‘tried’, ‘executed’ and burned in effigy in almost every village and town in the country. The Paine effigy burnings of the winter of 1792–3 were a particularly extraordinary feature of the claiming of ritual and space. Local elites promoted this form of ‘vulgar conservatism’ but were simultaneously wary of encouraging disorder too far. Frank O’Gorman and Nicholas Rogers emphasise that Paine effigy burnings were far from unthinking or a product of ‘emotional contagion’ assumed to be common in moral panics. Rather, they featured a considered combination of rituals adapted from civic patriotism (processions, military bands of music) and popular custom (Guy Fawkes’ night, charivari, mock trials).44 They were also a claiming of public space. The sites of ‘execution’ were often near stocks and other customary places of punishment of criminals. The fake gallows erected at Dronfield near Sheffield were reportedly twenty feet high, to ensure that all could see the spectacle.45 In January 1793, Bolton market place was the venue not just for the execution of a Paine effigy but also for subscribers to the public library to burn ‘the whole of Paine’s works and several other publications of a similar tendency’. Wakefield public library had already done the same in December 1792, although the committee were divided on the tactic as some feared it would encourage popular disorder. As late as April 1795, the Tory corporation of Carlisle used rate money to purchase peat to fuel burnings of the works of Paine and Franklin in front of the market cross.46 In the township of Failsworth near Oldham, the Paine effigy burning was marked for posterity by the erection of a ‘tall standard’ with ‘an elegant crown on top’, costing fifty pounds. Inscribed on the crown was a statement of loyalist intent, ‘This is our Loyal Standard of Failsworth, erected on 1st January 1793, to the King, Church and present Glorious Constitution’. The site and form of the landmark had much longer roots, particularly in maypoles used by royalists to deride Roundhead parliamentarians in 1642. In this way, the inhabitants constructed a material ‘landmark of memory’.47 Victorian resident Benjamin Brierley recalled that the N. Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), chapter 6; F. O’Gorman, ‘The Paine burnings of 1792–93’, P & P, 193 (2007). 45 Sheffield Register, 18 January 1793. 46 MM, 15 January 1793; BL, Add. MS 16923, fo. 57, Peterson to Moore, 24 December 1792; Cumbria RO, D­/​Ca, Carlisle corporation treasurers’ vouchers, 1795. 47 Oldham Local Studies, Rowbottom diaries, 1 January 1793; MM, 8 January 1793; Chetham’s Library, Cambrics scrapbook, pp. 38, 49, 103; Rogers, 44



Spaces of exclusion and intrusion in the 1790s 37

pole became the ‘rallying point’ for bloodsports and effigy burnings of Napoleon. It thus also became an embodied site, where popular justice was enacted on the body. In 1792 or 1793, Thomas Whittaker, a local radical mathematician, was ‘tried’ at the pole, ‘in the saddle of a dragoon’s horse, whilst the mad and bigoted populace stuck pins into his legs’. He apparently left for America soon afterwards.48 Historians of loyalism have been attracted to such ‘spectacular eruptions of popular sentiment’ in the 1790s. But as Alan Booth has warned, Church-­ and-­ King agitation and riots were intermittent and extraordinary.49 Loyalist repression was sustained in other spaces and modes of action, including the fostering of a low-­ level continuous atmosphere of violence, suspicion and fear. Some of this harassment drew from longer traditions of popular prejudice against religious dissent. A Victorian account of Townley Street Independent Chapel in Macclesfield, Cheshire, lamented the ‘many trials’ its members endured between 1792 and 1804: ‘They were outrageously insulted as they passed through the streets on their lawful business; they were a byeword of derision as “Calvinists” and “Jacobins”, and their meetings for religious worship were liable to perpetual interruption’.50 Also targeted were the Unitarian ministers of Bank Street Chapel in Bolton and nearby Chowbent Chapel. Other incidents were more personal, though radicals undoubtedly gave back as many insults as they got. In July 1794, John Cheetham of the Manchester Reformation Society was crossing the bridge over the river Irwell from Salford into Manchester when a ‘mob fell upon him’. He took refuge in a friend’s house, but the crowd smashed the windows, broke the door, and ‘dragged him out by his hair for several hundred yards’.51 This was not the somewhat staid picture of philosophical debate between ‘loyalists’ and ‘radicals’ in print: it was Crowds, Culture and Politics, p. 204; O’Gorman, ‘The Paine burnings’, 126; M. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans. L. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 175. 48 R. Poole, ‘The march to Peterloo: politics and festivity in late Georgian England’, P & P, 192 (2006), 129–30, citing B. Brierley, Failsworth, my Native Village (Oldham, 1895), pp. 14–15; B. Brierley, Ab o’th’ Yate Sketches and Other Short Stories, vol. 3 (Oldham: W. E. Clegg, 1896), http:­/​ ­/​gerald-­massey.org.uk­/​brierley­/​c_​ab-­oth_​3_​4.htm, after pp. 14–15. 49 A. Booth, ‘Popular loyalism and public violence in the north-­ west of England, 1790–1800’, SH, 8:3 (1983), 296. 50 W. Urwick (ed.), Historical Sketches of Nonconformity in the County Palatine of Chester (Manchester, 1864), pp. 240–1. 51 Booth, ‘Popular loyalism’, 305, 307–8.

38

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

physical, masculine and brutal. The incidents also reveal the double standard of the authorities, who, despite regarding plebeian violence as base, often condoned or ignored attacks on radicals.52 Loyalist exclusions from the civic body politic The travails of Manchester radical activists in the 1790s exemplify the ways in which loyalists sought to close down arenas for discussion. Manchester township had 23,000 inhabitants according to a local census of 1773; by 1801, the general census enumerated over 70,000 inhabitants, a trebling of the population within a generation. It was to triple again by 1831.53 But despite the development of the town as the regional centre of modern commerce and the cotton industry, its governing structures remained medieval: Manchester was a manor under the Mosley family, and it was led by a boroughreeve and constables and a phalanx of Tory magistrates and High-­Anglican clergy based in the Collegiate Church. These structures sustained a deeply conservative loyalism in a way that was perhaps exceptional in industrial England (although nearby Bolton, with its manorial structure governed by Tory-­ Orange trustees and magistrates, the mineowner Colonel Ralph Fletcher and vicar Reverend Thomas Bancroft, came close54). The Bull’s Head Inn was one of the most prominent unofficial political centres in Manchester. Being near the Collegiate Church but also close to the market cross and pillory and the fashionable merchant houses around St Ann’s Square, the pub stood as a gateway between church and local government, and old and new Manchester.55 Notably the inn was not located on a prominent street corner, like most ‘respectable’ inns elsewhere, but off the market place, with its entrance looking out on to an alley and its yard, thus giving it an element of privacy. The inn had been a recruiting station for Jacobite militia in 1745, and was T. Walker, A Review of Some of the Political Events Which Have Occurred in Manchester During the Last Five Years (Manchester, 1794), pp. 39–40. 53 M. Nevell, ‘The social archaeology of industrialisation’, in E. Casella and J. Symonds (eds), Industrial Archaeology: Future Directions (New York: Springer Academic, 2005), p. 187. 54 See their extensive correspondence to the Home Office, for example, TNA, HO 42­/​65­/​442, Fletcher to Home Office, 3 April 1802. 55 J. Aston, Manchester Guide (Manchester, 1804), p. 269; I. Newman, Pubs of Manchester blog, http:­/​­/​pubs-­of-­manchester.blogspot.co.uk­/​search­/​label­/​ Bulls​%​20Head%​20–%​20Bulls%​20Head%​20Yard, accessed 19 December 2014. 52



Spaces of exclusion and intrusion in the 1790s 39

close to the residual Jacobite-­Tory John Shaw’s club.56 It stood as a remnant of this tradition in the midst of rapid social and economic change. The Bull’s Head was initially the inn of choice for the newly formed Manchester Constitutional Society, led by Thomas Walker. Walker had been a prominent member of the ‘principal inhabitants’ of Manchester and Salford. He had led the successful merchant campaign against the tax on fustians introduced by Pitt’s government in the late 1780s, and he chaired the committee of the anti-­slavery society from 1787 onwards. His appointment as boroughreeve of Manchester in 1790–1 reflected the confident commercial identity of the town.57 1792 marked the point when the tide turned irrevocably. On 13 March 1792, the MCS met at the Bull’s Head to draw up a vote of thanks to Thomas Paine for publishing part two of his Rights of Man.58 Two months later, Pitt’s government issued the first royal proclamation against seditious writings. The MCS denounced the proclamation, and their action proved to be the catalyst for a loyalist reaction that had been building for months. The loyalist associations carefully planned celebrations for George III’s birthday on 4 June 1792, using the day to appropriate the civic rituals of military musters and patriotic songs in St Ann’s Square to promote anti-­radical loyalism. After the official ceremonies concluded, a large crowd attacked Walker’s property and threatened his life. Rioters uprooted trees in St Ann’s Square in order to ram the doors of Cross Street and Mosley Street Unitarian chapels (thereby ironically destroying the very features of the square’s leafy bourgeois respectability).59 The attacks echoed the Priestley riots in Birmingham the previous year; anti-­Unitarian feeling had been rising since the dissenters’ campaign for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1788.60

J. Harland, Collectanea Relating to Manchester, vol. 1 (Manchester, 1866), p. 213. 57 MALS, broadsides, F1788­/​1a–1e; TNA, HO 42­/1 ​ 8­/3 ​ 56, printed address, 19 April 1791. 58 Proceedings at Large on the Trial of John Horne Tooke, p. 245. 59 TNA, HO 42­/2 ​ 0­/​547, Griffith to Home Office, 3 June 1792; HO 42­/​20­/5 ​ 50, handbill, 2 June 1792; Chetham’s Library, Cambrics scrapbook, p. 103; Morning Chronicle, 9 June 1792; Walker, A Review of Some of the Political Events, pp. 39–40; J. Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–96 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chapter 5. 60 J. E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism in Eighteenth Century Politics and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 275. 56

40

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

As with modern political movements’ immediate responses to violent suppression, the MCS’s resolve was initially strengthened rather than diminished by the reaction against them.61 In response to the September Massacres in France, they called a meeting at the Bull’s Head for 18 September 1792. Falkner and Birch, printers of the radical Manchester Herald, opened a subscription for the French revolutionaries. These actions however provoked the loyalist associations into more co-­ ordinated reaction. A group of publicans held a meeting at the Bull’s Head on 12 September. Walker alleged that this meeting was followed by ‘a tax gatherer and some other persons’ going round the town to all the innkeepers and publicans, advising them, as they valued themselves, to suffer no societies to ours (the constitutional) to meet at their houses. The publicans thought their licenses of more value than our custom, and would receive neither the constitutional, the patriotic, nor the reformation societies any longer.62

The MCS were no longer able to meet at the Bull’s Head. The newspapers then published a list of publicans signing an address against ‘the treasonable and seditious conduct of a well known set of daring miscreants’. The address avowed that the publicans would ‘not suffer any meeting to be held in our houses of any Clubs or Societies, however specious or plausible their titles may be, that have a tendency to put in force what those infernals so ardently and devoutly wish for, namely the destruction of this country’.63 A total of 228 innkeepers and victuallers signed the address. The first three pubs on the list were the largest and most prominent in Manchester: the Bull’s Head, the Star Inn on Deansgate and the Swan Inn on Market Street; the rest were clustered in the old part of town around Hanging Ditch, or along Deansgate.64 Ten female publicans signed the address, including Ann Bennison, who ran the Fox and Goose on Broom Street. As was the case with coffee houses, it was not uncommon for pubs to have a landlady, although they were not recorded as having taken part in meetings on their premises.65 D. della Porta and A. Mattoni (eds), Spreading Protest: Social Movements in Times of Crisis (Colchester: ECPR Press, 2014), p. 82. 62 Walker, A Review of Some of the Political Events, pp. 40–2. 63 Walker, A Review of Some of the Political Events, p. 42; Horner, ‘A set of infernal miscreants’, 23. 64 Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle, 22 September 1792; Oldham Local Studies, Rowbottom diaries, 1792. 65 C. Parolin, Radical Spaces: Venues of Popular Politics in London, 1790– 1845 (Canberra: Australia National University Press, 2010), p. 254; H. Barker, The Business of Women: Female Enterprise and Urban 61



Spaces of exclusion and intrusion in the 1790s 41

Loyalism offered women a role in the body politic through such avenues of surveillance. Postmistresses were another section of female employment that intersected with loyalist networks. Certain postmistresses were very active in sending on information to the Home Office about radical correspondence and other ‘seditious’ activity. The long-­serving Jane Lee of Rochdale post office kept the General Postmaster regularly updated about radical and Luddite movements in 1812 and plans for an ‘uprising’ in 1816–17.66 The second wave of reaction came in the wake of the second royal proclamation against seditious writings in November 1792. The loyalist associations held a public meeting in the market to draw up an address to the king, and, again, sections of the crowd broke off to attack radical targets, including the office of the printers Falkner and Birch, and Thomas Walker’s house yet again. Again it is unclear to what extent the loyalist associations orchestrated the violence: Whig-­liberal reformer Archibald Prentice suspected a plot, writing later, ‘as if by a preconcerted scheme, the various parading parties united in the Market-­place, opposite the publication office of Falkner and Birch’. The Manchester and Salford magistrates were keen to gather evidence that Faulkner and Birch sold Paine’s Rights of Man and against their radical newspaper.67 Walker issued a statement in the Tory Manchester Mercury condemning the ‘fury of the mob’. At this point, he thought he still had a prominent voice in the civic body politic. But it carried little weight when loyalist violence was condoned by the authorities. A Manchester association committee for preserving the peace and good order of the town, chaired by the new boroughreeve Nathan Crompton, issued a statement in the same issue, thanking the gentlemen and special constables for ‘preserving the peace of the town’.68 Sheffield SCI and other radical societies published public messages of support for Walker, backing his claim that the boroughreeve and constables had been ‘solicitous’ in the violence as they ‘had not taken one single rioter into custody’. But as effigies of Paine burned around them, they feared they were next.69 The Gales’s printing shop was on Development in Northern England, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 69. 66 TNA, HO 33­/​1–2, correspondence to general post office, 1812–17. 67 A. Prentice, Historical Sketches and Personal Recollections of Manchester (Manchester, 1851), p. 9; Oldham Local Studies, Rowbottom diaries, 1792; TNA, HO 42­/​23­/​386, deposition of George Brown, December 1792. 68 MM, 18 December 1792. 69 Sheffield Register, 18 January, 15 February 1793.

42

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

Hartshead, just round the corner from the parish church and Cutlers’ Hall, the key site of political authority in Sheffield, where members of the Cutlers’ Guild effectively ran local government. Like Walker, Joseph Gales was targeted by loyalists. In September 1793, he claimed, ‘The Church and King party … ­ accompanied by a recruiting party, with drum and fife, presented themselves before my house and gave me most loyal music, firing and shouting; and someone was heard to say that my house should not have a window in it that night’. Members of the SSCI however offered a defiant response: ‘for about an hour afterwards, upwards of a hundred stout democrats stood before us, singing “God Save Great Thomas Paine!” to the royal tune’. Winifred Gales claimed that from then on until she left Sheffield, two armed men kept nocturnal watch before the house.70 The cumbersomely named Manchester Association for Preserving Constitutional Order against Levellers and Republicans (APCOLR) was founded on 12 December 1792 at the Bull’s Head as an umbrella institution to lead the various existing loyalist groups. Its committee included the boroughreeve and constables of Manchester, magistrates on the Salford bench, prominent merchants and manufacturers and most of the Anglican clergy from the High Tory High-­ Anglican Collegiate Church.71 The committee issued a vote of thanks on 17 December 1792, ‘to the innkeepers of this Town for their laudable conduct in forbidding all seditious meetings to be held in their houses’.72 The Manchester action spurred loyalist associations in its surrounding towns to put pressure on their pubs. During the winter of 1792–3, publicans in Stockport (51 in total); Bury (31); Warrington; Oldham (43); Ashton-­under-­Lyne (49) and Middleton (12) signed similar declarations disallowing ‘any club or society of persons disaffected to our present happy constitution’ to meet in their premises; nor would they permit seditious books, pamphlets and newspapers to be read, songs to be sung, or toasts to be toasted.73 In Manchester, 228 pubs formed a relatively small proportion of the total number of hostelries, but the impact must have been greater in the smaller towns with fewer pubs, such as the townships around J. Holland and J. Everett (eds), Memoirs of the Life and Writings of James Montgomery, vol. 1 (London, 1854), p. 168; University of North Carolina, Gales papers, ‘Recollections’, p. 90. 71 Chetham’s Library, Manchester, Mun. A.6.45, minutes of APCOLR committee, 1792–9; Prentice, Historical Sketches, p. 420. 72 MM, 18 December 1792. 73 MM, 25 December 1792, 1 January 1793; Shaw, Annals of Oldham, vol. 3, pp. 172–4. 70



Spaces of exclusion and intrusion in the 1790s 43

Oldham which signed the address, including Royton (7 pubs; population in 1801, circa 2,700), Chadderton (7; c.3,500) and Crompton (9; c.3,500).74 Elsewhere in north-­west England, publicans in St Helens and Chester followed suit in January 1793.75 The loyalist associations mirrored the very kind of secrecy enacted by the radical societies that they opposed. All members of the central committee of APCOLR had to sign a declaration of confidentiality, and they employed a doorkeeper to vet people entering the room during meetings.76 Prentice commented on the effect of the publicans’ address: ‘The public house was not a most effective auxiliary to the church, the publican to the parson, and they formed a holy alliance against the mischievous press’.77 The loyalist publicans’ actions forced the radical societies, who had wanted to meet in respectable pubs to emphasise their legality, to meet in private houses. The secretary of Manchester Reformation Society, John Stacey, wrote to the radical London Society for Constitutional Information shortly after the ban: ‘We should have been more numerous had not the influence of the Aristocrats wanted us out of the Public House where we met … ­ We presently rallied our Members and took a private House to meet in’. After seeking to be open and public to demonstrate parity with elite associations, radicals were forced back behind closed doors. Walker lamented in 1794, ‘The Constitutional Society having now no regular place of meeting, in consequence of being thus excluded from public houses, I offered them the use of my house at Manchester until they could accommodate themselves elsewhere’. Walker’s house was situated on South Parade off Deansgate, not very far from St Ann’s Square. The working-­class Patriotic Society thenceforth met in his warehouse at the back of his house, although this again suggests a segregation (self-­imposed or not) between the more ‘respectable’ middle-­class reformers and the workers. The societies continued to meet at Walker’s until June 1793, ‘at which time commenced the proceedings against the Members of these Societies’.78 The publicans’ declarations cannot of course be taken as genuine Butterworth, Historical Sketches of Oldham, p. 148. Chester Chronicle, 11 January 1793; Chester Courant, 1 January, 29 January 1793. 76 Ginter, ‘The loyalist association movement’, 67; Chetham’s Library, Mun. A.6.45, minutes of the APCOLR committee, 1792–3, fo. 10. 77 Prentice, Historical Sketches, p. 8. 78 Walker, A Review of Some of the Political Events, p. 43; Knight, The Strange Case of Thomas Walker, pp. 86, 93, citing Stacey to Adams, TNA, TS 11­/​ 951, papers relating to the LCS, 1794, p. xxxv. 74 75

44

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

evidence of complete loyalist hegemony. Many of the pubs were listed in sequential order of location on the address. Walker’s allegation was therefore probably accurate: the members of the loyalist associations must have gone round collecting signatures door to door. A face-­to-­face visit was likely to enforce collaboration with the address, as would the threat of a loss of their licence. During meetings to form loyalist associations in late 1792, local elites in St Helens and Carlisle advised innkeepers to prevent meetings of any seditious club or society in their premises on pain of losing their licence.79 There was also nothing new in magistrates’ use of the brewsters’ sessions to enforce rules or put pressure on publicans. The reformation of manners movement, combined with civic improvement throughout the eighteenth century, had heightened local elites’ suspicion of low alehouses and started a wider crack down on plebeian culture and behaviour.80 This process of cleansing, sobering and moralising the civic body politic combined with the loyalist reaction from 1792. Moral degeneracy became identified as a troubling symptom of radicalism, thus giving ‘specifically political connotations’ to official and semi-­official movements for moral reform.81 The radical Chester Chronicle published a sardonic editorial on 11 January 1793 about the Company of Innholders’ loyal declaration and promise to ‘suppress all treasonable seditious and immoral conversation, songs or toasts’: ‘The publicans in some place have associated for the purpose of levelling the republicans for the suppression of immorality! As there is no description of people better qualified to mend the morals of mankind­– ­every praise is due them for their sincerity!’82 Pressure was also placed on inhabitants in some places to sign the official loyal addresses from the towns. At Wakefield, after a meeting to draw up a loyal address in the Moot Hall on 10 December 1792, the resolutions were ‘written on parchment and handed from house to house in the town and neighbourhood of Wakefield for the signatures of such persons who shall be willing to sign’.83 J. Peterson, the local merchant charged with the task, boasted to the secretary of John Reeves’s society that he ‘went from house to house for six days and got near Chester Courant, 1 January 1793; Cumberland Pacquet, 18 December 1792. Bolton Archives, FP­/​2­/​2, minute books of watch and ward, 1808–25. 81 D. Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English state in the 1790s’, in Philp, The French Revolution, p. 166; J. Innes, Inferior Politics: Social Problems and Social Policies in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 82 Chester Chronicle, 11 January 1793. 83 MM, 18 December 1792. 79 80



Spaces of exclusion and intrusion in the 1790s 45

1700 signatures to our Resolutions’.84 As in the case of the publicans’ address, clearly not signing would be regarded as a statement of radicalism. An element of coercion upon individuals to take part was clearly evident, and, as Douglas Ginter argued, loyal addresses were therefore a ‘most unreliable gauge of public opinion’.85 Yet this is significant in itself, illustrating how such actions enforced political polarisation in public that was an inaccurate representation of the range of views held in private. Loyalists also sought to regulate private politics in the domestic sphere: the loyalist association of St Helens was one of many that declared in their address of December 1792: ‘we will study to prevent and restrain our families, our children and our servants from uttering disloyal words or reading [seditious] papers’.86 Publicans over the Pennines however do not appear to have followed south Lancashire’s lead; there is no published evidence of similar publican declarations of exclusion of radical punters in Yorkshire. In London, moreover, though magistrates attempted to intimidate publicans into prohibiting meetings of the LCS by threatening to remove their licences, the publicans did not always co-­operate, and a Society of United Publicans was formed to protest against the 1795 Seditious Meetings Act.87 There were nevertheless longer-­term effects of loyalist exclusion of radicals in Manchester and elsewhere. Thomas Walker was arrested and tried for sedition following the second of the Church-­and-­King riots against his property. The Manchester magistrates, especially Reverend John Griffith, were prepared not only to turn a blind eye to popular violence, but also to pressurise witnesses to corroborate false evidence against Walker. This was a murky world of informers and spies, in which magistrates felt it necessary to bend the legal rules in order to combat radicalism. The law itself was a contested space, in which opponents of loyalist hegemony were ‘resource-­poor’. The London and Edinburgh radicals were able to employ skilled lawyers to defend their interpretation of justice, but Walker and his fellow Mancunian reformers initially found it difficult to convince elites of their interpretation of legitimacy.88 Although Walker was eventually acquitted at Lancaster assizes in April 1794, where the false evidence and actions of the magistrates were exposed, the damage was done. His former position in the civic body politic was already untenable and BL, Add. MS 16923, fo. 57, Peterson to Moore, 24 December 1792. Ginter, ‘The loyalist association movement’, 187. 86 Chester Courant, 1 January 1793. 87 McCalman, Radical Underworld, p. 114. 88 Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, chapter 5. 84 85

46

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

indeed unthinkable in the context of the exclusion of radicals from civic life. The social impact of the fear of arrest (or, more likely, a beating by a Church-­and-­King supporter) was more enduring than the brief panic of 1792–3. Archibald Prentice claimed in 1851, ‘There are numbers of persons now alive who recollect seeing in Manchester taverns, boards stuck up with the inscription, “No Jacobins admitted here”. So late as 1825 there was one of them in a public house in Bridge Street, as fine as gilding and decoration could make it, but it was removed in deference to the change of opinion’.89 The Bull’s Head continued to host loyalist meetings convened by the boroughreeve and constables.90 Robert Poole argues strongly for the continuation of active publican loyalism into the postwar period. In 1816, in response to the revival of reform societies, 183 Manchester publicans signed a declaration to bar radical meetings from their premises. Moreover, publicans were over-­represented among the forces of order involved with the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, discussed in chapter 3. The majority of Oldham’s innkeepers had been sworn in as special constables and on the morning of 16 August ‘paraded at the Spread Eagle, in Martial array’. Seventeen of the ninety-­ nine Manchester yeomanry at Peterloo were publicans. They included the innkeeper of the Bull’s Head, Mr Ashworth, who was fatally injured by a cavalryman on the field. According to the Manchester Observer, hostile publican special constables met survivors upon their return home, and were greeted with jeers. Henry Hunt, the leading ‘orator’ arrested at Peterloo, promoted a boycott of ‘truncheon ale’. The authorities reported that many innkeepers had ‘lost so much lost their custom that they must either cease acting or be ruined’.91 Loyalists continued to appropriate local civic bodies and events. Tory-­ Anglican industrialists monopolised the police commission set up in 1792, and by 1810 they dominated the manorial and parochial bodies and the county bench. Tory dye manufacturer Thomas Fleming reigned as treasurer to the police commission during the crucial years of political conflict, 1810 to 1819.92 County administration enacted wider exclusion. The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster prevented dissenters and liberal manufacturers across the county from receiving Prentice, Historical Sketches, p. 7; Clark, The English Alehouse, pp. 314, 325. 90 TNA, HO 42­/​42­/​89, Peel to Home Office, 25 January 1798. 91 Poole, ‘The march to Peterloo’, 138, 142; Morning Post, 19 August 1819; MO, 18 September 1819. 92 Prentice, Historical Sketches, pp. 419–32. 89



Spaces of exclusion and intrusion in the 1790s 47

the commission of the peace, an ‘act of policy’ that Vic Gattrell has described as ‘an expression of candid social prejudice’ but it was also clearly a political decision. The process of exclusion was bolstered by the takeover of associational culture that underpinned it. Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, formerly a beacon of enlightened political thinking in the 1780s, was ‘purged’ of radical and rational dissenters. In 1794, APCOLR marked out thirteen of its members, including Walker, for examination for seditious principles, and the society itself turned its topics of discussion away from political speculation that could allow opportunities for radical dissent. By 1805, the appointment of new members such as Hugh Hornby Birley and the two Robert Peels, elder and junior, indicated the shift towards Tory High-­Anglican members of the local elite.93 By contrast, in the more cosmopolitan port of Liverpool, the wealthy Unitarian ‘Friends of Peace’ were able to maintain their place in polite society because of their international literary reputation, although they toned down their radicalism publicly as the French wars progressed.94 Elsewhere, radical activity was hampered by more arrests. William Pitt commissioned a secret committee to investigate the activities of the corresponding societies, which in effect validated the case for charging their leaders, starting with the LCS, with sedition. The SSCI organised a mass meeting on Castle Hill on 7 April 1794, addressed by Henry Redhead Yorke, the West Indian member of London and Derby corresponding societies. The local authorities used the occasion to justify the arrest of five members of the SSCI. Warrants were also issued for Gales and the compositor Richard Davison, and for Yorke ‘for uttering seditious words’ at the meeting. The SSCI wrote to the LCS on 11 May 1794, confidently proclaiming, ‘We are not in the least intimidated in Sheffield, as we can call and hold a public Meeting whenever Circumstances renders [sic] the same necessary; besides ­… we have a large commodious Room, where the Society can peaceably meet in Rotation’.95 But their confidence was misplaced: no more meetings were possible. A few days later, habeas corpus, that bulwark of radicals’ vision of a mythical English constitution, was suspended until July V. A. C. Gattrell, ‘Incorporation and the pursuit of liberal hegemony in Manchester, 1790–1839’, in D. Fraser (ed.), Municipal Reform and the Industrial City (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982), pp. 33–5. 94 J. E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace: Anti-­ War Liberalism in England, 1793–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 70. 95 First Report of the Committee of Secrecy, 17 May 1794 (London, 1794), p. 113; Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death, p. 191. 93

48

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

1795. Most of the correspondence between the Home Office and magistrates from Sheffield, Leeds and Manchester in 1794 concerned the hunt to find Redhead Yorke as he travelled across the North evading arrest. His whereabouts were tracked by publicans who ‘interrupted’ packets sent in Sheffield and Manchester. Following a tip-­off by the collector of customs, Yorke was eventually captured at Hull as he attempted to leave the country, but Gales succeeded in escaping to Hamburg.96 Winifred Gales was left to manage, as she later recalled, ‘a printing office with sixteen hands in it, a newspaper to edit, a store in full business’, while having four children and another on the way. Her unpublished account, written in 1831 while in exile in America, sheds unique light into the private lives of radicals and their networks, and the immediate and longer-­ term impacts of loyalist repression. The Sheffield Register fell into bankruptcy, not least because their creditors did not want to fund a woman running a concern now labelled ‘seditious’. Winifred was sustained financially and emotionally by a network of friends within Sheffield, especially the Scottish Moravian assistant editor James Montgomery, and by radical contacts in London. Soon after Joseph’s departure, however, she was summoned to face the magistrates at their office in the Tontine Inn. She recalled, ‘ignorant how far legal persecution could go, I was doubtful whether it was not intended to obstruct the publication of the Register (it being known that Montgomery was gone and no other efficient person to take my place), perhaps to oblige me to give evidence which should [in]criminate my Husband’. Reverend Henry Zouch questioned her on the whereabouts of Redhead Yorke and how much involvement she had in the editorship of the newspaper. She cleverly used her maternal identity to evade his questions, arguing that she could not have read all the items they published because she was a busy mother. Yet it is clear the two were not incompatible and that the Gales’ printing shop combined a space for domestic activities with a semi-­public rendezvous. The shop was a relational space, where radical activists both converged in and spread from, connecting informally through personal visits and through print. At the Tontine, the magistrates tricked Winifred into being locked into an adjoining room (albeit providing her with a bribe of fruit, jellies and cake, which she chewed ‘bitterly’ while pacing up and down awaiting her release), while they interviewed her workmen. The extent of support TNA, HO 42­/​30­/​318, Wilkinson to Dundas, 19 May 1794; HO 42­/3 ​ 7­/​356, account by Ross and Higgins, May 1794; HO 42­/​31­/1 ​ 16, Brookfield to Dundas, 9 June 1794; HO 42­/​31­/2 ​ 07–9, Wray to Dundas, 14–15 June 1794; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 144.

96



Spaces of exclusion and intrusion in the 1790s 49

for the Gales was clear in her workers’ refusal to implicate their employers, Montgomery or Redhead Yorke, and a crowd gathered outside, ‘declaring that if I [Winifred] was detained they would pull down the House’.97 Released without charge, Winifred suffered intense emotional distress. Unable to continue, she sold what remained of the business and made preparations to leave. Winifred’s commitment to the radical cause was as strong as to her husband, but even support from a wide network of friends could not overcome the threat of arrest and financial ruin. She left for Hamburg, and upon reuniting with her husband, the family emigrated to America to join Joseph Priestley and the other exiled British radicals.98 Commitment to the cause of democracy resulted in dispossession from community, home and family. The arrests halted the open delegate system in Sheffield, though corresponding activity continued in Leeds. The mayor of Leeds wrote to the Home Office in September 1794 that the radicals ‘meet very frequently at publick houses and it is notorious their object is to promote Sedition, but they are so much on their Guard ’tis impossible for the Magistrates to lay hold of them’.99 The five SSCI men arrested included engineers or engine-­wrights; their examinations before the magistrates, albeit to be taken with care, suggest a return to a closed shop kind of organisation, partly as a retreat from the more open pub-­based structure but also reflective of how politics was part of their everyday artisanal life. Meetings in workshops and private houses (although the latter may also have been unlicensed drinking premises) were ticketed, to deal with numbers but also to prevent the ingress of magistrates’ spies. Tickets served as essential material conduits between public and private, friend and stranger, in eighteenth-­century associational life.100 One examinee, Luke Punshon, denied being a member of the SSCI, but admitted that he had bought a ticket and attended a meeting at a private house. His brother George also confessed to having bought a ticket and paying a subscription to William Broomhead ‘at his room in Watson’s Walk’, east of the town centre.101 In July 1794, Leeds magistrates entered the house of Luke Broughton in the village of Bramley, ostensibly in search of a burglar. They found a rule book of Leeds Constitutional Society University of North Carolina, Gales papers, ‘Recollections’, pp. 70–2. See vignette 3.  99 TNA, HO 42­/3 ​ 3­/​310, Turner to Home Office, 27 September 1794. 100 S. Lloyd, ‘Ticketing the British Eighteenth-­Century: “A thing … ­ never heard of before”’, JSH, 46:4 (2013). 101 TNA, HO 42­/31­/4–12, examinations of Luke and George Punshon, 14 June 1794.  97  98

50

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

and a sheet of tickets. The authorities again however found it difficult to find enough evidence to bring radicals to trial. The mayor of Leeds released Broughton, although he confiscated the documents.102 In other areas, in association with efforts to deport immigrant Irish and remove vagrants, radicals were ordered to leave rather than being arrested. One loyalist from Kendal in Westmorland, James Greene, complained to the Home Secretary about the tendency of the magistrates to move troublemakers rather than arresting them. The radical Henry Pattenden failed to comply with the mayor of Kendal’s deadline to leave, however, and was tried at the quarter sessions in 1793.103 Loyalism developed its ideologies and tactics in reaction to a fear of the worst. Through a Burkean interpretation of the French Revolution, Pitt’s government and propagandists framed all calls for reform as dangerous, and working-­class collective action as potentially revolutionary. The reality of a wide spectrum of reformist views was irrelevant in this formulation. Local elites attempted to deal with their fear of Paineite radicalism and mass collective action through exclusion of radicals from the civic body politic, from the press and from meeting spaces. With the assumption of the rituals and hierarchies of civic patriotism and its sites of meeting, the enforcement of loyalist principles among magistrates and mayors, arrests of radical leaders and printers, and the popular attacks on ‘Jacobins’, loyalism entrenched itself in both local government and everyday life in Britain in the 1790s. Loyalist hegemony could however never be complete. It was impossible to prosecute everyone for seditious libel, infiltrate every pub or workshop meeting, put down every radical printer or burn every copy of the Rights of Man. Though Gales, Falkner, Birch and other radical activists escaped to America, Walker remained defiantly in Manchester, publishing an account publicising his ordeal and continuing his activism in new radical societies. Nevertheless, reformers lived within an increasingly claustrophobic political atmosphere. Fear of spies and arrest and Church-­and-­King violence had a psychological impact upon radicals, constraining their room for manoeuvre. Organising mass public meetings was the next tactic to demonstrate their legality and constitutional intentions. The next chapter examines the local and government reaction to mass meetings and how the definition of ‘sedition’ became to be associated with public assemblies.

TNA, HO 42­/32­/part i­/398–403, Cookson to Home Office, 3 July 1794. TNA, HO 42­/26­/430, Greene to Home Office, 29 August 1793.

102 103

2

Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–1819

In January 1795, Whig merchants in Hull drew up a petition to parliament calling for peace with France. It was opposed by ‘gentlemen, clergy, merchants and principal inhabitants’, who met in the Guild Hall and issued an address assuring the government that the peace petition was ‘considered by many persons as not expressing the general sense of the Inhabitants’. The reformers fought back. Reverend Miles Popple of Walton, seconded by his tutee Daniel Sykes (of a prominent Rockinghamite political family), moved an amendment calling for negotiation with France. They spoke of the ‘ruinous system of the present Ministry’ and ‘the contraction of our liberties’ caused by Pitt, but the Recorder and mayor rejected their radical amendment.1 The process of negotiation over legality and the claiming of public opinion went to the heart of the connection between local and national governments and identities. The process of organising any public meeting followed a formulaic pattern that produced an almost predictable rigmarole throughout this period: a requisition to the mayor or magistrates to hold a meeting, usually met by refusal and a counter-­requisition by an opposing group, a meeting held regardless and the drawing up of an address or petition, and a counter-­meeting drawing up a counter-­address or counter-­petition. Meeting was, and always had been, about active citizenship.2 This was a contest over who had the right to represent the views of the civic body politic to the nation. This chapter examines the contests about the right to meet indoors and outdoors during and after the French wars up the eve of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. Threatened with exclusion from many civic buildings and institutions from the early 1790s, radical societies moved outside to hold mass meetings in politically resonant sites, often resulting in Hull Advertiser, 6 February 1795. J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English PoliticalCulture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 69.

 1  2

52

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

major disputes with local authorities. They drew precedents from election hustings, the mass agitation in support of renegade politician John Wilkes in the 1770s and the demonstrations before the Gordon riots of 1780. Later known as the ‘mass platform’, this tactic was the origin of the modern demonstration, with many of the same features: a hustings or platform upon which famous orators and local political leaders gave speeches; large crowds assembled in a carefully chosen square or field, brought together by processions with banners and bands of music. Mass meetings were designed to create a sense of solidarity, disseminate a political message and demonstrate the extent and potential of the movement to its opponents.3 Mass meetings also offered an alternative to loyalist forms of collective action. Loyalist meetings remained steeped in hierarchical and exclusionary forms: the club; meeting and dining behind closed doors; strictly enforced membership rules. The openness of public meetings, by contrast, both inside and out on the field, was intended to foster in practice the kind of direct representation that the radicals preached in theory. Oratory provided a more direct connection from speaker to audience than communication through textual propaganda. The mass platform was also popular because it was entertaining: rousing speeches by a good orator and the carnival of bands, banners and mummery in processions, in which all could take part. The tactic however complicated the radical ideal of ‘members unlimited’ and the coherent development of a working-­class movement. The legitimacy and authority of ‘gentlemen leaders’ speaking on the stage depended upon what John Belchem and Louise Edwards have described as ‘an unmediated relationship with their popular following’.4 But this legitimacy was challenged both by loyalist repression and by splits within the radical movement over national and local leadership, tactics and principles. Mass meetings and the Seditious Meetings Act Sheffield radicals were again to the fore in holding mass public meetings calling for peace and parliamentary reform. Economic depression and a seemingly interminable war spurred mass discontent. The D. della Porta and M. Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2nd edn, 2006), p. 178.  4 L. Edwards, ‘Popular politics in the North West of England, 1815–21’ (PhD dissertation, University of Manchester, 1998), pp. 94, 67; J. Belchem, Orator Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-­ Class Radicalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 58.  3



Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–181953

surviving members of the SSCI held a mass meeting on Crookes Moor on 10 August 1795, reputedly attended by 10,000 people. The timing and place were politically potent, as the moor was undergoing the process of enclosure, which the residents had physically resisted by riot as soon as the act passed in 1791.5 Mass meetings held by the London Corresponding Society on Copenhagen Fields on 26 October and 12 November provided justification for Pitt’s government to put forward the Seditious Meetings bill alongside a Seditious and Treasonable Publications bill, which became the notorious ‘Two Acts’.6 The Seditious Meetings Act (36 Geo III c.8), passed on 18 December 1795, confirmed loyalist attitudes about what constituted a legitimate public meeting, and determined where and when such meetings could take place. It was important as much for what it stood for on the statute book as for its effects on the freedom to meet. The act prohibited meetings of over fifty people called to consider ‘any Petition, complaint ­… or other address to the King or to parliament, for alteration of matters established in Church or state’. Exempt from this prohibition were county meetings called by the Lord Lieutenant or by two justices of the peace ‘or any meeting of any city, borough or town corporate called by the Mayor or other head officer’ and parish vestry meetings. Large meetings could be held if notice were given five days before ‘by public advertisement in some public newspaper’ by at least seven householders. Meetings without notice were deemed to be ‘unlawful assemblies’ and therefore became a felony if the 1714 Riot Act, after being read ordering their dispersal, was ignored by participants.7 The legislation in effect restricted the membership of the civic body politic to the Lord Lieutenant and magistrates of a county, and the mayor or ‘head officer’ of a ‘city, borough or town corporate’. Those trusted with requisitioning a meeting were ‘householders resident within the county, city or place’, thereby excluding the non-­propertied from the civic body politic. The clause concerning advertising in the newspapers emphasised that political meetings had to be ‘public’. Because the legislation did not apply to meetings under fifty people, however, small meetings were TNA, HO 42­/9 ​ 1­/​256, Sheffield magistrates to Dundas, 23 July 1791; The Proceedings of the Public Meeting held on Crooke’s Moor at Sheffield (Sheffield, 1795).  6 G. A. Williams, Artisans and Sansculottes: Popular Movements in France and Britain during the French Revolution (London: Edward Arnold, 1968), p. 58.  7 A. Aspinall (ed.), English Historical Documents, 1783–1832 (Oxford: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1959), p. 320.  5

54

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

able to continue indoors, although the atmosphere of suspicion and magistrates’ willingness to invoke laws of conspiracy served to dampen enthusiasm for such activity. In one sense there was nothing new about the government’s intent behind the legislation: large political meetings had always been regarded with suspicion by the authorities and meetings had always been called by requisition by ‘principal inhabitants’. The significance of the 1795 act lay rather in that it was directly aimed against the new mass reform meetings. Reaction against the Two Acts was not confined to radicals. Popular attachment to the age-­old right to meet and petition enshrined in the 1689 Bill of Rights persisted despite loyalist scare stories about the radicals’ intentions. Reverend Christopher Wyvill attempted to rouse independent Whigs again, organising a county meeting against the legislation at York Guild Hall on 1 December. The proceedings threatened to get out of hand, and Wyvill had to negotiate with William Wilberforce, Pittite MP for Hull, who had dramatically rushed by stagecoach from London to make a grand entrance at the meeting. Wyvill proposed an address to the king against the bills. He was however unable to gain the votes of the West Riding woollen clothiers, dubbed ‘Billy-­men’ for their support of William Pitt. Reports noted, ‘many came from Saddleworth, a distance of near sixty miles, spending a great part of the night upon their journey’.8 Sir Thomas Gascoigne was forced out of the chair and the Pittite majority of the meeting adjourned to the yard of York Castle, where Wilberforce, seconded by fellow MP Walter Spencer-­Stanhope, carried the address in favour of the bills. The meeting showed how the weight of power had shifted from the older North Riding gentry to whom Wyvill had appealed: Wilberforce by contrast had spent the summer canvassing the woollen interests around Leeds and Halifax. Wyvill attributed his failure to the economic self-­ interest of the West Riding merchants and large farmers in the North Riding, who opposed peace petitions because they were profiting from the wartime economy.9 In 1797, Wyvill again attempted to rouse the Yorkshire Whigs with another county meeting calling for the dismissal of Pitt’s ministry, but it was strongly opposed by the ‘deputies of the five commercial towns in the West Riding’ (Leeds, Wakefield, Huddersfield, J.Mayhall, The Annals and History of Leeds (Leeds, 1860), pp. 184–5; Monthly Review, vol. 2 (June 1838), 166.  9 North Yorkshire RO, ZFW­/​7­/​2­/​95­/​8−34, Wyvill correspondence, November– December 1795, especially ­/​34, ‘W.W.’ to Wyvill, Leeds, 27 December 1795; Hull Advertiser, 18 December 1795; J. R. Dinwiddy, Christopher Wyvill and Reform, 1790–1820 (Borthwick paper, 39, York, 1971), p. 9.  8



Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–181955

Halifax and Bradford) as well as by Wilberforce’s Pittite allies in Beverley in the East Riding. Nevertheless, Wyvill’s actions triggered a revival of independent gentry Whiggism in Yorkshire, culminating in the election of Lord Milton for one of the county’s seats in 1807.10 Across the Pennines, the Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire, the moderate Whig Earl of Derby, did not have the same sway over the smaller and less vocal gentry. There, independence was a town rather than county characteristic. Oldham diarist William Rowbottom recorded how petitions concerning the bills were ‘signed by great numbers in Bolton, Stockport, Oldham, Royton, and the opposite party under their old shield of Church and King’.11 In Manchester, the loyalist associations drew up a petition in support of the anti-­seditious legislation in their headquarters, the Bull’s Head; the loyalist press claimed that their petition had thirty-­ two sheets containing 7,350 names.12 The boroughreeve James Ackers chaired a public meeting in the market hall on 1 December, at which the loyalists denounced a request by the Manchester Constitutional Society to hold a meeting in the same hall to call for peace and the dismissal of Pitt’s ministry. Thomas Walker, George Lloyd, George Philips and other dissenting radicals had to hold their meeting ‘on a large plot of ground near St John’s Church’ off Deansgate on 7 December.13 The lord of the manor’s refusal to let them use his property no doubt influenced the language of their petition: The bill now pending in Parliament is still unconstitutional in its principle and incompatible with the freedom of public discussion, inasmuch as it subjects the people when assembled together for the consideration of general grievances, to the vexatious interferences and control of Civil Officers, who are enabled effectually to frustrate the purposes of such Meetings, and to inflict on peaceable and innocent individuals attending the same, all the penalties of the Riot Act.14

This opposing petition was left for signatures at the Bridgewater Arms, a large, prominent inn on High Street, only a couple of hundred yards North Yorkshire RO, ZFW­/​7­/​2/­​107–108, 116, Wyvill correspondence, May 1797; J. E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace: Anti-­War Liberalism in England, 1793–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 140, 154–5. 11 Oldham Local Studies, D-­M54, diaries of William Rowbottom (hereafter Rowbottom diaries), 1795. 12 True Briton, 25 November 1795. 13 MM, 8 December 1795; Chetham’s Library, Manchester, Cambrics scrapbook, p. 73. 14 The Star, 14 December 1795. 10

56

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

away from the Bull’s Head. A radical handbill advertised ‘a petition for Liberty and the Constitution at the Bridgewater Arms, one against Liberty and the Constitution at the Bull’s Head’.15 The Bridgewater Arms had not signed the loyalist publicans’ address of 1792, and its landlords continued to allow radicals to meet on their premises, including the republican United Englishmen in 1797.16 During the passage of the two bills, the working-­class radicals set up a ‘thinking club’, meeting at the Coopers’ Arms, just south of the Collegiate Church. At their first meeting on Monday 7 December 1795, reportedly attended by 300 people, members sat in silence for an hour.17 There could be no more potent or sardonic demonstration of the effects of the legislation on the freedom of speech than this silent protest. Few radical meetings were recorded in 1796–7 and the Seditious Meetings Act expired in 1798. But following the Irish Rebellion in 1798, further legislation confirmed the government’s suspicion of working-­ class collective action, especially organised labour and the secret cell activity of the United English and Irish societies (discussed in vignette 1). The 1799 Unlawful Societies Act banned the LCS and united societies; the Combination Acts of 1799–1800 prohibited trade unions from combining and taking oaths, and habeas corpus was suspended in reaction to fears of a millenarian ‘general rising’. In 1801, the resumption of habeas corpus and the brief peace allowed an opportunity for a revival of reform meetings across the North.18 Upon the resumption of war with Napoleonic France in 1803, however, the huge patriotic effort of self-­defence and volunteering during the Napoleonic wars reiterated the loyalist message of ‘if you aren’t for us, you’re French’, and dampened open and collective agitation for reform. The unanimity of patriotic fervour after Admiral Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in October 1805 did not last long. From 1807 onwards, as the new government conducted a war of economic attrition with France, the reform movement recovered. The eventual victory of the middle-­class and evangelical campaign to abolish the slave trade in 1807 in particular demonstrated that extra-­parliamentary pressure was not inherently radical. Merchants MALS, broadsides, F1795­/​6/­​a, ‘A petition for liberty’, 1795. J. Graham, Nation, Law and the King: Reform Politics in England, 1789– 1799, vol. 2 (Oxford: University Press of America, 2000), p. 815. 17 Papers of the Manchester Literary Club, vol. 2 (Manchester, 1876), p. 24; Sporting Magazine, 7 (1796), 215. 18 Sheffield Archives, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, WWM F 45­/​29–39, petitions for peace from West Riding woollen towns, 1801; TNA, HO 42­/​61­/​ 459, Fletcher to Portland, 6 April 1801. 15 16



Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–181957

and manufacturers petitioned parliament against the Orders in Council, the economic blockades affecting their businesses that led to war with America in 1812. The uncovering of corruption scandals in government and the monarchy opened up further opportunities for demands for reform and peace to resurface.19 The case of the ‘Thirty Eight’ in 1812 marked a continuation of local loyalist repression but also demonstrated a break with the past, bringing a new generation of radicals into the limelight. On 26 May 1812, at the height of the Luddite machine-­breaking disturbances, thirty-­eight reformers led by cotton manufacturer John Knight met at the Elephant Inn on Tib Street in Manchester to pass resolutions calling for parliamentary reform. Fearing that the deputy constable, Joseph Nadin, would ‘disturb their meeting’, they adjourned to an upper room in the Prince Regent’s Arms in the working-­class district of Ancoats. Nadin entered the pub and arrested the men on a charge of illegal oath taking under the Combination Acts. The authorities refused to accept the radicals’ claim, as expressed by William Washington when challenged by Nadin, that their ‘object was peace and parliamentary reform’ rather than revolution.20 In parliament, Henry Brougham’s support for the Thirty Eight offered an important, if ineffective, challenge to Lord Liverpool’s new government, and Knight and his disciples were eventually acquitted.21 Major John Cartwright’s tours of the northern industrial districts in 1812 and 1813 provided another spur to the revival of reform societies. Cartwright was the itinerant link between the local groups, a conduit of information and inspiration.22 Among the items collated by manufacturer John Shuttleworth in his scrapbook relating to his radical activities in Manchester was a long letter published by Cartwright on 24 February 1813. Cartwright announced plans to ‘initiate a Union Society’ and encouraged the Manchester radicals to do so, as ‘you could easily embrace all the villages in your vicinity that is as far as the

For more on radicalism in this decade, see K. Navickas, Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chapter 6. 20 A. Prentice, Historical Sketches and Personal Recollections of Manchester (Manchester, 1851), pp. 77–8; A Correct Report of the Proceedings on the Trial of Thirty-­Eight Men (Manchester, 1812), p. 100. 21 Prentice, Historical Sketches, p. 82. 22 J. Osborne, John Cartwright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 52; N. C. Miller, ‘Major John Cartwright and the founding of the Hampden Club’, HJ, 17:3 (1974). 19

58

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

Villages report to Manchester Market’.23 Cartwright rightly identified the importance of the ‘neighbourhood’ in forming political networks. These were shaped by trade routes, the ‘putting out’ system of weaving, and migration and mobility patterns common to the towns and villages that were the economic lifeblood of Manchester. Rather than taking up the name of Cartwright’s proposed Union of Parliamentary Reform, however, many of the new radical societies initially became known as Hampden clubs, the name of the more elite and parliamentary group of reformers formed in London in 1811. Perhaps the allusion to the constitutional experiments of the Civil War appealed more immediately, though the societies became known as unions a couple of years later.24 Postwar radicals and their spaces The committee of Bolton Reformers’ Club held their inaugural meeting at the Talbot Inn in the township and manor of Little Bolton on 16 November 1816. The first and most important item on their agenda was the question of whether they should open a debating room. The men were acutely aware of the fate of the previous attempts to foster radical or oppositional political activity in the town and region. A double threat weighed heavily on their minds: first, the restrictions on collective activity imposed by the 1799 Corresponding Societies and Combination acts, and second, the enforcement of these restrictions in Bolton by assiduous magistrate Colonel Ralph Fletcher. John Kay, chairman of the committee, warned members that they should consider all the risks, and noted that although there was room within the existing legislation to campaign for reform, the government could change the laws again (as indeed it did soon after their debate, with the suspension of habeas corpus three months later).25 The committee resolved to open a debating room but asked for advice from Manchester radical veteran John Knight. Knight advised them: You may take a room for the purpose of discussing political or other questions (without licencing the room) provided you do not demand money for admission nor fasten the outer door during your stay but [let] people go in and out at pleasure. In a letter I received from London yesterday it is recommended that such meetings are publicly announced, that a Magistrate MALS, BR F 324.942733, John Shuttleworth scrapbook. N. C. Miller, ‘John Cartwright and radical parliamentary reform’, EHR, 83:329 (1968), 719. 25 H. W. C. Davis, ‘Lancashire reformers, 1816–17’, Bulletin of the JRLUM, 10:1 (1926), 53–4, 64–5. 23 24



Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–181959 is informed thereof, and in addition thereto that secret meetings had better be avoided and that meetings sh[oul]’d be as numerously attended as possible­– ­the Language used sh[oul]’d be mild and constitutional, but firm and clear.26

Knight’s advice to some extent dictated the shape and methods of constitutionalist radical activity after the end of the Napoleonic wars. The actions of the new Hampden clubs and other revived radical societies were defined by careful stepping around a legislative maze of limitations and loopholes that increased in complexity as Lord Liverpool’s government reacted to the revival of working-­class collective action from 1816 to 1820. As Knight outlined, postwar radicals and other political groups had to be very careful to run open and ‘public’ meetings in the knowledge of the authorities and with speakers consciously using moderate ‘constitutional’ terms, thus avoiding any possible intimation of revolutionary potential. Working-­ class political groups were constrained not just by lack of access to civic buildings but also by the haphazard development of urban infilling as industrial towns expanded. Oppositional movements are often, as William Sewell has argued, ‘resource-­ poor’ compared with ruling elites and often have to take the physical environment and the restrictions placed on its use by landowning elites as a ‘given’.27 Radicals and trade unions often had to meet in places that required the least effort and cost the least money: scrubland between unfinished buildings, or the back room of a warehouse, a meeting house or chapel. These were ‘spaces of making do’. They mixed the everyday with the political, and complicated the distinction between public and private. Forced to use the ‘spaces of making do’ also engendered creativity among the societies. Postwar radical groups hired new rooms and used ‘virgin’ sites that they could imbue with their own vision, identity and legacy. Rooms were usually hired on a regular and indeed full time basis. This gave groups a level of permanence and independence, although it consequently meant that the organisers were always striving to dodge financial insolvency and licensing restrictions. To stay within the bounds of legality, political societies wishing to keep a more regular existence had to obtain a licence either under the 1794 Friendly Societies Davis, ‘Lancashire reformers’, 65; TNA, HO 40­ /​ 3, Knight to Kay, 21 November 1816; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2nd edn, 1968), pp. 676–7. 27 W. Sewell, ‘Space in contentious politics’, in R. Aminzade, J. Goldstone, D. McAdam et al. (eds), Silence and Voice in the Study of Contentious Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 55. 26

60

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

Registration Act or under the quarter sessions registration of dissenting meeting houses and schoolrooms. Crucially, however, once a licence was granted, there was no need to apply for permission every time a meeting was to be held. These sites were always threatened by the intrusion of loyalist elites, and more often by the financial and organisational precariousness of the radical groups themselves. The Manchester union society held a public meeting chaired by John Knight in a set of rooms in George Leigh Street in Ancoats on Monday 28 October 1816, ‘notwithstanding all the arts used by the Enemies of the meeting’ to prevent it, including employers ‘posting handbills and threatening to dismiss attendees’.28 George Leigh Street became a long-­ standing site of radical meeting. The committee rooms were evidently not large enough for larger public meetings as the movement grew. Knight soon hired an attic of a cotton spinning factory in New Islington on the edge of Ancoats for larger meetings open to all the public. It was referred to as ‘Bibby’s meeting room’ or ‘Islington garrets’. Henry Bibby paid the rates for a set of garrets at the back of 8 New Islington, and was possibly a member of the religious sect of Swedenborgians.29 Knight, in a letter to the secretary of the Bolton Reformers’ Club, claimed that the room was large enough to accommodate up to a thousand people. He announced that the group would ‘commence our operations’ on a Monday evening in late November 1816 with a public debate on ‘What is meant by a constitutional reform of the Commons House of Parliament and what are the benefits likely to result therefrom?’ The press reported that the room had a rostrum in the centre, and that it was filled at least twice a week.30 ‘Garrets’ perhaps evokes a space for romantic poets, but it was nothing like the actual Poets’ Corner, some surviving tumbledown buildings in the medieval part of Manchester near the old commercial exchange. Rather, it was at the centre of the first industrial heart of the new Manchester, morphing and changing. Parts of such buildings lay empty as technologies and the scales of production evolved and as businesses MALS, BR F 942.7389 SC 13, scrapbook, 1812–32, p. 23. TNA, TS 11­/​156­/​510, ‘Manchester papers’, 1817; MALS, M9­/​40­/​2­/​80, Manchester rate books, 1816. A William Bibby, son of Henry, died aged thirteen months at New Islington in January 1817 and was buried at the New Jerusalem Swedenborgian Temple in Salford: Lancashire Parish Clerk project, www.lan-­opc.org.uk­/​Salford­/​Salford-­Central­/​jerusalem­/​burials_​​ 1817–1818.html, accessed 14 September 2014. 30 Davis, ‘Lancashire reformers’, 52–3; TNA, HO 40­/3 ​ , Knight to Kay, 21 November 1816; Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle, 15 March 1817. 28 29



Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–181961

were set up and became bankrupt. The deliberate openness and size of the meetings however made it easier for magistrates’ spies to attend. Informant Peter Campbell told the magistrates about a meeting held on Monday 21 January 1817 ‘in a Range of Garrets in c.8 houses formerly us’d separately as Picking Rooms for a Cotton Factory but now laid together for the use of the Hampden Club assembling at New Islington’, which suggests that the interior walls at the top of the terrace had been knocked through to form the large room.31 On the evening of Monday 3 March 1817, the reform committee met at the garrets to plan a mass meeting on St Peter’s Fields. An anonymous report to the Home Office noted, ‘The Room was very crowded, and the Room is 50 Yards long and 9 Yards wide’.32 A considerable proportion of factory hands who worked in the large cotton mills nearby attended. The boroughreeve of Manchester claimed that the meetings at the garrets in early 1817 were ‘swelled much in numbers from the moment the Spinning Factories in the neighbourhood leave off working’.33 Similar groupings and spaces formed in other manufacturing towns. In Blackburn, Hampden club meetings were held at the workshop of John Iveson, a joiner, with large public meetings held in his adjoining timber yard.34 Union rooms were used as reading rooms and libraries, but this was only in part emulative of the literary societies and subscription libraries of the elites. The new sites reflected the expanding role and aspirations of radical societies. They were not meeting places set up just during times of concentrated agitation nor were they used solely for the discussion of how to achieve parliamentary reform. They were hives of working-­class auto-­didacticism, a key feature of reform principles and collective endeavour. Reading William Cobbett’s Political Register and the radical press, banned from many town-­centre pubs, strengthened the links within the groups as well as helping to sustain the ‘imagined community’ of Hampden clubs across the nation. In Oldham in December 1816, the radicals had taken four or five empty Rooms for the purpose of reading Cobbett in. The lower class are invited to attend and admission is gratuitous. One or more TNA, HO 42­/​158­/​86–7, and HO 40­/​3­/​part I­/​142, information of Peter Campbell, 28 January 1817. See also HO 42­/​168­/​355, information of ‘no1’, 4 April 1817. 32 TNA, HO 40­/​5­/​4A­/​1335, report of 3 March 1817; HO 40­/​5­/​4A­/​33, deposition of John Livesey, 7 March 1817. 33 Davis, ‘Lancashire reformers’, 48, 74; TNA, HO 40­/4 ​ , suppl. papers 12, 3 February 1817. 34 TNA, HO 40­/​3­/​part II­/​20, information, December 1816. 31

62

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

of the leaders attend and perform the office of reading which is generally accompanied with a short commentary.35

In Carlisle, the union rooms provided a place for the immigrant weavers of Caldewgate to read the Manchester Observer, Political Register and other newspapers. Carlisle Hampden Club met in the Green Dragon on Scotch Street, while another working-­class and more radical group, the Friends of the People, were based in Brown’s Buildings, a notorious slum.36 The other obvious and familiar venue that could easily be adapted as a radical meeting room was the chapel. In villages, chapels were often the only large indoor spaces available. Samuel Bamford recalled in his memoirs how the new Hampden Club in Middleton, a few miles north of Manchester, accrued enough penny subscriptions to take ‘a bold step’ to rent a former Kilhamite chapel. The Methodist New Connection, led by Alexander Kilham, had broken away from the Wesleyans in the 1790s because of alleged ‘Jacobinism’, or in reality their adherence to democratic principles of election.37 The Methodist Unitarians were formed by secession from the Wesleyans in Rochdale, Newchurch in Rossendale and surrounding towns between 1811 and 1815. In Oldham, they took the lead in radical organisation. John Browe, machine-­maker, class leader and trustee of the Methodist Unitarian Chapel in Lord Street, chaired the meeting held on 23 September 1816 that founded the Oldham Union Club.38 Such sects during the French wars, with their emphasis on egalitarian principles, cottage and camp meetings and itinerant lecturers, and in the case of the Methodist Unitarians, rational debate, provided the structural if not political framework familiar to working-­class inhabitants of these areas that radicals could easily build upon. The Hampden clubs aspired to the Methodist class system, again as a way of encouraging membership in a familiar setting.39 Another ‘meeting room of the Reform Society’ was situated in Mount Street in

TNA, HO 42­/​156­/​21, Chippendale to Home Office, 2 December 1816. Cumbria RO, D­/​LONS­/​L1­/​2­/​136, Lowther correspondence, 1819–20. 37 P. Stigant, ‘Wesleyan Methodism and working-­class radicalism in the North, 1792–1821’, NH, 6 (1971), 103–4. 38 Davis, ‘Lancashire reformers’, 49; S. Mews, ‘Reason and emotion in working-­class religion, 1794–1824’, in D. Baker (ed.), Schism, Heresy and Religious Protest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 381. 39 P. Lockley, Visionary Religion and Radicalism in Early Industrial England: From Southcott to Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 166. 35 36



Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–181963

Manchester, possibly the Quaker meeting house.40 The Hull reform society had their union rooms on Blanket Row, an ancient street off the main dock, perhaps at the Independent chapel that was built after a secession from the Congregationalists in the 1760s.41 Political dissent could challenge even the norms of religious dissent. Samuel Bamford emphasised how the Hampden Club revitalised the Kilhamite chapel by throwing it open ‘for the religious worship of all sects and parties’. This apparent ecumenicalism as well as the reform meetings thus ‘drew a considerable share of public attention to our transactions, and obtained for the leaders some notoriety’.42 The postwar radical societies forged a strong sense of local identity and were linked mainly intra-­regionally, within reasonable walking distance of the nearest economic hub. Deputies from the Hampden clubs first met at the Reformers’ chapel, Middleton, on 16 November 1816. Thirteen towns and villages were represented, mostly from north of Manchester.43 Fear of suppression accompanied attempts at organisation. A public meeting on reform was held at the chapel on Sunday 15 December 1816, having been adjourned from Sam Ogden’s pub in the nearby village of Harpurhey, ‘being afraid of meeting with disturbance’. A magistrate’s spy claimed that ‘Mr Ogden [the] publican would not allow them to meet there, from whence they adjourned to Blakeley, where they were likewise refused, on which they went all in a body to Middleton to the place where the Union has ever since been held’.44 Attempts at national co-­ordination were hampered by financial and logistical constraints as well as ideological differences. A meeting of deputies was held at the Crown and Anchor in London, a well-­established centre of metropolitan radicalism, on Wednesday 22 January 1817. The Hampden clubs of Manchester, Bolton, Stockport, Ashton-­under-­Lyne and Liverpool sent deputies, as did the smaller town of Leigh and the radical villages of Royton and Middleton. The fact that the latter two TNA, HO 42­/​156­/​29, pamphlet, Blackburn, 1816. J. E. Bradley, Religion, Revolution and English Radicalism: Nonconformity in Eighteenth-­Century Radicalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 290. 42 S. Bamford, Early Days and Passages in the Life of a Radical (London, 1849), chapter 1, http:­/​­/​gerald-­massey.org.uk­/​bamford­/​c_​radical_​%​285%​ 29.htm. 43 Liverpool Mercury, 10 January 1817; Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, chapter 1. 44 TNA, HO 40­/​4­/​1­/​part I­/​39, Chippendale to Warren, 19 December 1816; MALS, MS F 363 D1, fo.1, ‘Hampden Clubs’ MS, 1816. 40 41

64

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

had a deputy each whereas other large towns did not or could not afford to send any is testimony to the significance of radicalism in their political histories. There were no representatives from the West Riding; the postwar depression that hit the woollen industry hard during winter 1816 meant that none could afford to travel. Radical societies had not had a central meeting of delegates since the Edinburgh Convention of 1794. Though the rhetoric may have alluded to the commonwealth and the corruption of Westminster, it is evident that the deputies could not and did not want to be an ‘anti-­parliament’.45 In the event, Samuel Bamford, representing Middleton, felt disappointed by the London meeting, although it strengthened his faith in new rising star Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt and reaffirmed the radicals’ rejection of the limited measure of household suffrage as advocated by William Cobbett and Sir Francis Burdett.46 The locations of the mass platform were shaped by necessity as well as by design. Radicals in some towns were able to appropriate squares, those symbols of civic improvement. Paradise Square in Sheffield was described as ‘the place where the town meetings are usually convened’. The first meeting calling for parliamentary reform on the square was held on 6 June 1810.47 On 20 January 1817, a reform meeting was held in the square, addressed by Henry Hunt. By this time, the authorities recognised the need for increased policing of the mass platform led by a nationally known figure, and so swore in special constables and kept the cavalry in readiness in the barracks.48 In Liverpool, Henry Brougham rallied supporters in Clayton Square for the general election in 1812. By 1817, radicals had appropriated the site as their own. The mayor had refused a requisition for a public meeting, signed by ‘upwards of a hundred respectable inhabitants’, led by the veteran Friend of Peace, Reverend William Shepherd. The reformers consequently held the meeting in the square on 13 February 1817 without the mayor’s permission, and Shepherd made a point in his speech about the authorities’ refusal of their right to meet.49 The authorities overseeing smaller towns and townships were sometimes more amenable to giving permission for reform meetings, perhaps because they were convened by the constable by requisition from the vestry, rather than a mayor in charge of an T. Parssinen, ‘Association, convention and anti-­parliament in British radical politics, 1771–1848’, EHR, 88:347 (1973). 46 Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, chapter 3. 47 Sheffield Iris, 12 June 1810. 48 Sheffield Archives, WWM F 45h­/​165, Wortley to Fitzwilliam, 15 January 1817; LM, 25 January 1817. 49 Edwards, ‘Popular politics’, p. 161; Liverpool Mercury, 21 February 1817. 45



Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–181965

oligarchical corporation. Hence in January 1817, the inhabitants of the village of Heckmondwike in the West Riding were able to hold reform meetings in their market place. In the nearby town of Bradford, by contrast, the authorities refused to convene a meeting, so the ‘householders’ held it instead on Blake Hill, Eccleshill Common, three miles north-­east of the town centre.50 Open air meetings of thousands of people involved inherent practical difficulties and illustrated how the materiality and phenomenology of space shaped events. The Liverpool organisers set up temporary wooden benches for the speakers (obviously at some cost), but the weather hampered the event. The newspapers reported, ‘great numbers were also perpetually going away, finding it impossible to hear anything, on account of the wind, which blew directly in the faces of the speakers’.51 Similarly, in Wakefield, a delegate from Manchester gave a long speech at a public meeting held by the Hampden Club on 20 January 1817, ‘but principally owing to the inconvenient situation chosen for holding the meeting (which was in the public street near the bottom of Westgate), he was heard by only a very small portion of the persons present’. The weather was ‘extremely unfavourable’.52 Historians have perhaps focused too much on the long speeches printed in the newspapers as forming the central part of the events: the reason why the speeches were transcribed in full was precisely because most of the crowd could not hear them the first time. Paul Pickering has argued in relation to Chartist meetings that protesters produced ‘class without words’, a collective identity that was formed less by the ideas propagated on stage and more by the experience of going to a mass meeting, the dressing up, singing along, walking a few miles in the rain with friends talking about politics on the way.53 The phenomenology of the events­– t­ he experience of the topography, the weather and the crowd atmosphere – ­framed how radicals understood the message of equality and solidarity. Mass meetings often took place on the edgelands, in places outwith jurisdictional boundaries. These were liminal spaces in between urban and rural: scrubland and building land that was often the by-­product of urban ‘improvement’.54 In Carlisle, the mayor had refused to allow LM, 25 January 1817. Liverpool Mercury, 21 February 1817. 52 LM, 25 January 1817. 53 P. Pickering, ‘Class without words: symbolic communication in the Chartist movement’, P & P, 112 (1986), 154. 54 See P. Farley and M. Symmons Roberts, Edgelands: Journeys into England’s True Wilderness (London: Random House, 2012). 50 51

66

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

reform meetings within the city boundary. Jeremiah Jollie, the proprietor of the Carlisle Journal, hosted the first open air meeting of reformers on New Year’s Day 1817, on an open space at Willowholme adjacent to the weaving districts of Caldewgate and Shaddowgate. The estuary site of the Sands was also commonly used for political meetings.55 Such sites could be places of desperation, sought out because of the restrictions on meeting in the newly improved squares and open spaces in town centres. But spaces of the mass platform were also places of familiarity. Inhabitants from a wide area were able to access such sites easily as they were often situated between town and ‘neighbourhood’, on familiar footpaths and rambling routes, spaces for leisure and everyday life. Fields used for radical meetings in this period include Bent Green in Oldham (described by Rowbottom as ‘an open space sufficiently large to contain two thousand people’), Cronkey Shaw Common in Rochdale and May Day Green in Barnsley, all of which continued to be key sites of meeting for later generations of radicals and trade unionists.56 As we will see in part III, working-­class attachment to the land and their defence of commons against enclosure also fuelled the popularity of such meetings. Many of these places had not been previously used for civic or patriotic events by the authorities, and radicals and trade unions claimed them entirely as their own. Through repeated use, they became what Pierre Nora termed ‘lieux de memoire’, sites layered with popular memory, moulded and manipulated by the political activists who stood on the stage and later memorialised the sites in speeches and narratives for their own political ends.57 Clashes with opposition served to memorialise, and indeed sanctify, these sites even further. The most famous field of the mass platform was St Peter’s Fields in Manchester. By the 1810s, St Peter’s Fields was an area in the midst of rapid change, a last vestige of open green space in between the increasingly concentrated town centre and the rapidly expanding factory districts around the J. Barnes, ‘Popular protest and radical politics: Carlisle, 1790–1850’ (PhD dissertation, Lancaster University, 1982), p. 206; Liverpool Mercury, 10 January 1817. 56 Oldham Local Studies, Rowbottom diaries, 1816; TNA, HO 42­/​156­/​35, handbill, 9 December 1816; HO 40­/​3­/​part I­/​110, Chippendale to Home Office, 4 January 1817; HO 33­/​2­/7 ​ , Lee to Freeling, 2 March 1817; Barnsley Archives, Burlands annals, 12 July 1819; MO, 8 August 1818. 57 B. Schwartz, ‘Les lieux de memoire’, in S. Radstone and B. Schwartz (eds), Memory: Histories, Theories, Debates (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), p. 41. 55



Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–181967

routes leading southwards out of town, and around the river Medlock and canals. There were echoes of an older past, as the old gentry estates had only just been built over with residential and industrial development. The area was still new, unstable, unfinished. Perhaps the new generation of postwar radicals chose the site because they wanted to be accessible to the new working-­class residences to the south of town, but also somewhere distinct from the trade union and Irish meetings that took place regularly on St George’s Fields to the north of town. One of the earliest mass meetings on St Peter’s Fields took place from eleven o’clock until dusk on Monday 28 October 1816, and was attended by an estimated 5,000 people.58 The participation of the ‘neighbourhood’ was also crucially important in bringing the movement together; an Oldham magistrate’s spy travelled in and out with a delegation from Failsworth, and alleged that ‘of the number present ­… one half were people from the country’.59 Aided by the magnetic attraction of ‘Orator’ Hunt coming repeatedly to speak, St Peter’s Fields became the central site for the largest public reform meetings, usually taking place on Mondays, when, as handloom weavers and other artisans were still able to take ‘Saint Monday’ off, more workers could attend.60 The March of the Blanketeers and further legislation, 1817 On Monday 10 March 1817, over five hundred men from Manchester and its surrounding towns met in St Peter’s Fields. Carrying blankets to sleep in at night, they set off to present a reform petition to the Prince Regent in London. The March of the Blanketeers evinced a bold determination to represent the grievances of the unrepresented, legally and directly, to the source of national power. The movement was the march, and the march was the movement.61 It proved to be a turning point in the debate over the purpose and tactics of the working-­class reform campaign. Contrary to loyalist portrayals of the Blanketeers as a mob march, the action was carefully thought out within the frame of Cowdroy’s Manchester Gazette, 2 November 1816. Davis, ‘Lancashire reformers’, 67. 60 TNA, HO 40­/​5­/​4A­/​14; HO 33­/​2­/​13, 20, 53, post office correspondence, 1817–18. 61 The march was in this sense an antecedent for the national hunger marches of the 1930s: M. Reiss, ‘Not all were apathetic: national hunger marches as political rituals in interwar Britain’, in J. Neuheiser and M. Schaich (eds), Political Rituals in Great Britain, 1700–2000 (Augsberg: Wisner-­Verlag, 2006), p. 93. 58 59

68

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

legitimacy allowed to them. It expressed, physically and symbolically, a particular view of the constitution and of working people’s place within the body politic. John Bagguley, Samuel Drummond, William Benbow and the other leaders drew their defence from the constitutionalist canon of Magna Carta in 1215 and the Grand Remonstrance of 1641, justifying their legality but also thereby underlining the revolutionary potential of their actions.62 Major Cartwright had advised the marchers to separate into groups of ten, each carrying a petition signed by twenty names, in order to conform to the 1661 Act Against Tumultuous Petitioning, which ‘suggested that it was legal for ten out of twenty people to petition’.63 The Manchester magistrates arrested the leaders on St Peter’s Fields, but not before about several hundred men had set off. About two hundred were arrested at Stockport bridge, but the postmaster of Macclesfield reported that multiple ‘groups of about twenty or thirty’ arrived in his town by four o’clock in the afternoon. That some got as far as Leek in Staffordshire, thirty miles from home, and one man apparently managed to reach London, was testimony to their determination to defend the right to petition.64 The magistrates interviewed most of the rank and file they arrested. Many were understandably vague about their reasons for joining the march, declaring innocence. Thomas Bradshaw, a nineteen-­ year-­ old weaver from Ancoats, admitted that he marched ‘to present a Petition to the Prince Regent’, but he did not ‘know what it was upon, only they said they would give us something to eat, anybody could go­– ­so I was out of work and went’, and that he wanted to see London. Robert McMillan, a seventeen-­year-­old weaver from Newtown, claimed that he had been caught up in the march only because his friend’s mother had asked him to deliver a sack of cloth to Stockport. He was charged with handling stolen goods rather than sedition, and the magistrate expressed some pity for ‘this poor ragged half starved fellow’.65 But this was not a poverty march; the petitions they carried made clear it was a direct R. Poole, ‘“French Revolution or Peasants’ Revolt?” Petitioners and rebels from the Blanketeers to the Chartists’, LHR, 74:1 (2009), 16. 63 M. Schutte Beerbuhl, ‘The March of the Blanketeers: tragic failure or pioneer of unemployed protest?’ in M. Reiss and M. Perry (eds), Unemployment and Protest: New Perspectives on Two Centuries of Contention (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 60–1. 64 Manchester Chronicle, 15 March 1817; TNA, HO 33­ /2 ​­ /2 ​4, Jones to Freeling, 10 March 1817. 65 TNA, HO 42­/​164­/​56, 52, examinations of Thomas Bradshaw and Robert McMillan, March 1817. 62



Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–181969

appeal for political representation. Going directly to the Prince Regent suggests if not Benbow’s mistrust of the metropolitan leadership to represent them, then at least a northern stubbornness to do it themselves. Before the Blanketeers had set off, however, Samuel Bamford, Archibald Prentice and other moderate reform leaders derided the whole enterprise as ‘a chimera’, fearing the inevitable government backlash against the arming that Benbow was encouraging.66 Secret committees of the Lords and Commons collated evidence from magistrates and their spies that showed that Manchester was the centre of a network of Hampden clubs. The government’s concern about their activities, particularly after the March of the Blanketeers, was a main spur for reaction.67 Lord Liverpool’s government suspended habeas corpus on 1 March 1817 and another Seditious Meetings Act (57 Geo III c.19) was passed on 31 March. Leading radicals, including John Knight of Manchester and Joseph Mitchell of Liverpool were imprisoned without trial, leaving their families in penury.68 Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth defended the legislation as essential to the preservation of the safety of the constitution, which he perceived to be threatened by the radical societies. The 1817 act essentially re-­enacted the 1795 act, with the addition of new clauses prohibiting the republican Spencean societies and public meetings within one mile of Westminster Hall.69 Part XIV reiterated the requirement for indoor meetings to be held in licensed venues with the permission of the authorities. Further clauses banned the election of delegates by political clubs, although the right to petition was very much defended.70 It is notable that, despite fears of revolution surrounding Spencean mass meetings at Spa Fields and St Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, chapter 5; Poole, ‘“French Revolution or Peasants’ Revolt?”’ 16. 67 D. Read, Peterloo: The Massacre and its Background (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), p. 98. 68 See the extensive correspondence in TNA, HO 42­ /1 ​68–171, March– November 1817. 69 This clause was referred to in parliamentary minutes of evidence of 2008 concerning prohibiting anti-­war demonstrations outside parliament: House of Commons Committee (2007–8) (551–2), Draft Constitutional Renewal Bill, vol. 2, minutes of evidence, p. 211, www.publications.parliament.uk­/​pa­/​ jt200708­/​jtselect­/​jtconren­/​166­/​166ii.pdf. 70 Aspinall, English Historical Documents, p. 330; J. Fulcher, ‘The English people and their constitution after Waterloo: parliamentary reform, 1815– 1817’, in J. Vernon (ed.), Re-­reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 80–1. 66

70

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

George’s Fields on parliament’s doorstep (London), Lord Liverpool and his government did not legislate against the mass platform directly. Like the 1795 legislation, in some senses it was hardly repressive, as it covered only large meetings that charged an entrance fee. The government relied on the judgement of local authorities to refuse requisitions for political meetings and to invoke the Riot Act if disturbance occurred, a situation that, as we will see, would lead to the complex circumstances surrounding Peterloo in 1819. The impact of the Seditious Meetings Act and the suspension of habeas corpus was, as in 1795, more effective from bottom-­up. The loyalist reaction constructed a continuity, perhaps underestimated by historians, from the Church-­and-­King organisation and principles of the 1790s to new Pitt clubs, defence associations and loyalist addresses of 1817 to 1820. Manchester Pitt club charged a one guinea subscription fee and members included James Ackers, the Philips family and other members of the old loyalist associations.71 Meetings of the ‘principal inhabitants’ were held and loyal addresses were issued in support of the bill in most towns in late January and February 1817.72 The timing of these meetings coincided with the January quarter sessions, and as magistrates in each town met in the sessions rooms (for example, Warrington, Wigan and Bolton), and court houses (Salford), the events were rendered of grave importance, as well as enabling magistrates to call out more special constables and the watch and ward. The resolutions and seven long columns of signatures of the Manchester loyal address, agreed at a meeting at the Police Office, were printed in the conservative press to hammer home their disapprobation of radical meetings.73 An echo of the 1790s can also be seen in the actions of York Book Society at their annual meeting on 14 January 1820, when they proposed ‘the destruction of Paine’s “Age of Reason”’. The book was ‘burnt by the librarians in the presence of the members’ (although why they held a copy of the book in the first place is another question).74 The Orange Institution, formed in Manchester in 1807 with its headquarters at the Star Inn, held a special general meeting on 28 January 1817 to restate their principles, which they updated to defend against the ‘insidious practices of certain secret political missionaries who have long been roaming the country Chetham’s Library, Mun. A.2.79, Pitt Club minute and account books, 1812–31. 72 Manchester Chronicle, 1, 8, 15, 22 February 1817; Hull Advertiser, 8 February 1817. 73 Manchester Chronicle, 18 January 1817. 74 Yorkshire Gazette, 15 January 1820. 71



Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–181971

spreading the poison of disaffection among the laboring classes’. No doubt leading Orangemen and magistrates Colonel Ralph Fletcher and James Watkins brought those sentiments back to their home town when they issued a declaration at Bolton quarter sessions ‘against doctrines subversive of order and of the rights of property’.75 The Pitt clubs and Orange lodges were no benign Toryism. Their purpose and activities also echoed the loyalist associations of the 1790s, especially in publishing anti-­reform pamphlets and acting as defence associations. Though their activities were formerly investigated by a parliamentary select committee in 1835, Orange lodges remained a powerful undercurrent of the enforcement of law and order in south Lancashire and the West Riding, particularly in areas with high levels of both Protestant and Catholic Irish immigration.76 Radicals clung on to their surviving right to meet in public to petition parliament. Another public meeting was held in Clayton Square in Liverpool on Saturday 27 June 1817 to consider petitioning against further suspension of habeas corpus. Debate about the legality of public meetings was heightened by the very act of negotiating the meeting as well as the purpose of the petition. Again, the mayor had refused the radical Colonel George Williams permission to use the space. The speakers addressed ‘several thousand persons’ from the balcony of the house of another Friend of Peace, the physician Dr John Bostock. Williams asserted in his speech to the crowd that although the meeting was ‘irregular’, it was nevertheless legal because the ‘manner in which it has been convened is strictly conformable to the Act of Parliament for regulating public meetings’.77 He referred to the new Seditious Meetings Act, but emphasised that the process of taking no entrance fees and asking permission was more important than whether that permission was ever granted. The legislation had two further impacts. One was to drive some radicals underground, leading to the planning of armed insurrections that culminated in the Pentrich ‘rising’ in Derbyshire in June 1817. The career of ‘Oliver the spy’, the government agent who accompanied Joseph Mitchell touring the radical societies in the North before becoming involved in the rising, increased radical suspicion of the inten Manchester Chronicle, 8, 15 February 1817. PP 1835 (17) Select Committee into the Orange Institution in Great Britain and the Colonies. For more on Orange lodges, see Navickas, Loyalism and Radicalism, p. 127. 77 Liverpool Mercury, 4 July 1817. Williams was elected the first Liberal MP for Ashton-­under-­Lyne in 1832. 75 76

72

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

tions of the authorities and their surveillance.78 This led to the second consequence, a shift in tactics as to how meeting sites were obtained and maintained after the Seditious Meetings Act expired in July 1818. Radical activists first attempted to ally with trades combinations during the mass cotton workers and miners’ strike across Lancashire and Cheshire in summer 1818. The strike rejuvenated the reform societies, which had two new bases: Stockport and Hull. Radical nonconformist Reverend Joseph Harrison set up the Stockport Union for the Promotion of Human Happiness, inspiring similar societies across the North West.79 In Hull, the revival was led by propagandist T. J. Wooler who returned to his native Yorkshire after having been tried twice in London for printing seditious libel in his unstamped newspaper the Black Dwarf.80 He formed a society of ‘Political Protestants’, a name which recalled the Protestant Association that had been the cause of the Gordon riots that flared up in Hull and recusant estates in the East Riding in 1780.81 On 9 September, the Black Dwarf urged that such societies be set up in all parts of the country. Radicals in the North East followed the Hull model, including Leeds, Wakefield and in York, where they formed as a radical alternative to the moderate York Whig Club.82 In Barnsley, the union society (‘the Penny Club’) was reactivated in summer 1818, meeting in private homes on Monday evenings.83 Both the political unions and the Protestant societies based their meetings on the Methodist device of class meetings, but while the north-­eastern clubs focused on reading the unstamped press, unions on the Stockport A. F. Freemantle, ‘The truth about Oliver the spy’, EHR, 47:188 (1932). P. Custer, ‘Refiguring Jemima: gender, work and politics in Lancashire, 1770–1820’, P & P, 195 (2007), 149; R. G. Hall, ‘Tyranny, work and politics: the 1818 strike wave in the English cotton district’, IRSH, 34:3 (1989). 80 J. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 64. 81 Black Dwarf, 19 August, 2 September 1818; Read, Peterloo, p. 49; C. Haydon, ‘The Gordon riots in the English provinces’, Historical Research, 63:152 (1990). 82 Black Dwarf, 9 September 1818; Morning Post, 10 August 1819; P. Brett, The Rise and Fall of the York Whig Club, 1818–1830 (Borthwick paper, 76, York, 1989), pp. 11–12. 83 F. J. Kaijage, ‘Working-­class radicalism in Barnsley, 1816–20’, in S. Pollard and C. Holmes (eds), Essays in the Economic and Social History of South Yorkshire (Barnsley: South Yorkshire County Council, 1976), pp. 119–21; TNA, TS 11­/​979, depositions, ‘Barnsley insurrection’, 1820. After Peterloo, they became the ‘Two Penny Club’ in order to finance delegates to Leeds, Sheffield, Wakefield, Huddersfield and Manchester.

78 79



Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–181973

model met nightly with a more hierarchical system of sections, officers and delegates. Samuel Bamford read John Knight and James Wroe’s new radical newspaper, the Manchester Observer, to more informal groups gathered in his house in Middleton.84 John Belchem notes that ‘London radicalism lacked such a community base’ compared with both the Stockport and Hull models.85 Licensing records from the quarter sessions indicate that the revived reform societies attempted as far as possible to legitimise their existence and safeguard their meetings by registering their rooms as schoolrooms. Manchester radicals were granted a licence for the ‘Union School Rooms’ on George Leigh Street on 6 May 1819 (with another entry in the quarter sessions records on 18 May). The Oldham union was able to obtain a licence for its rooms on West Street. By 1820, Bolton had three union rooms, including at Union Buildings on Bradshawgate.86 It is more difficult however to find evidence for licences or indeed magistrates’ rejection of applications for any rooms in the West Riding. The union rooms were not just rooms for political meetings to draw up addresses or to react to events. They were designed to have a much wider and regular purpose and longer legacy. Their purpose was education and therefore they included some kind of classroom or lecture hall (obviously those held in schoolrooms had this purpose built into the architecture), as well as an area for reading newspapers and books. These sites were the key antecedents to the much more extensive schemes set up by Owenite socialists and other groups in the 1830s and 1840s, discussed in chapter 6. The march of intellect and a desire for respectability in this way determined the choice of venue, and perhaps also the concurrent move towards temperance.87 The objectives of the unions went beyond the usual political goals of universal manhood suffrage and the secret ballot. They sought to provide instruction in public speaking, reading, writing and arithmetic, so that the members could read the radical press, manage the accounts and give lectures, and, more importantly, look to the future by teaching their children these skills. The Trial of Henry Hunt Esq, John Knight, Joseph Johnson and others for conspiracy (London, 1820), p. 187. 85 Read, Peterloo, p. 48; Belchem, Orator Hunt, p. 97. 86 Lancashire RO, QDV­/​4/­​69, record book of dissenting meetings, 6 and 18 May 1819; H. Hunt, To the Radical Reformers, Male and Female, of England, Ireland and Scotland (London, 1820), p. 17; Vernon, Politics and the People, p. 222. 87 D. Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-­Century Working Class Autobiography (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 118. 84

74

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

A member of the Stockport union in June 1819 claimed that his class ‘generally read at a class meeting for about half an hour ­… after reading, a general conversation takes place for about half an hour more, when each member states his opinion and ideas of government’.88 The defence lawyer at the trial at the King’s Bench of the wife of Richard Carlile in July 1821 defended the purpose of the unions and their rooms: ‘The Union Rooms at Manchester and Stockport are admirable models of co-­operation, and are more calculated than anything else to strengthen the body of reformers’. When the prosecution alleged that this meant facilitating military associations, the lawyer retorted, using Carlile’s pamphlet, ‘Here (that is, at the Manchester and Stockport rooms), children are educated and adults instruct each other’.89 More unusual venues for meeting rooms were spaces of making do. At Stockport, the union society first met at the Dog Inn, but then hired an old windmill. The windmill became the venue for the day and evening school set up by John Bagguley when he moved to the town in mid-­1818 following his release from prison.Union meetings were held there every Monday evening. It was registered as an independent chapel from 1818 until 1837. Bagguley’s fellow teacher was the radical Presbyterian minister Reverend Joseph Harrison, who was also new to the town.90 The school resulted from Harrison’s contempt for the loyalist and orthodox tenets taught at the other Sunday schools in the town. The Windmill room offered him an alternative pulpit to preach radicalism on Sundays as well as to give children and adults a basic education during the week. The Union Sunday School was the first of its kind in England, and by August 1819 allegedly had over 2,000 scholars.91 The authorities regarded the schools as pits of infidelity and sedition. John Lloyd, Orange magistrate of Stockport, reported to the Home Office in October 1818 that he suspected that Harrison’s Sunday lectures in Bagguley’s schoolroom were irreligious and that radicals were also giving lectures. He noted that the room was not licensed as a schoolroom, although it was licensed as a chapel and that ‘collections are made after the service’. But although Harrison’s preaching licence Read, Peterloo, p. 50; Sherwin’s Political Register, 5 June 1819. Bridge Street Banditti: Report of the Trial of Mary Anne Carlile for Publishing Richard Carlile’s A New Year Address to the Reformers of Great Britain (London, 1821), p. 22. 90 TNA, TS11­ /​ 156­ /5 ​10, ‘Manchester papers’, 1817; RG 4­ /​ 7, Stockport Windmill Room, births and baptisms, 1818–37. 91 R. Glen, Urban Workers in the Industrial Revolution (London: Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 219, 229–30. 88 89



Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–181975

was obtained in Essex not Cheshire, Lloyd felt his hands tied because, ‘money is not demanded for admission and [therefore] there may a difficulty in applying the act of 57 Geo 3 c.19’, that is, the Seditious Meetings Act.92 The local authorities often went beyond what the legislation enacted, even after its expiration. Cost perhaps determined the existence and longevity of licensed premises more than magistrate intervention and is another reason why union rooms were not set up in every town. The Oldham union society had spent so much on hiring the room and buying desks that it was unable to hold regular public meetings because they were ‘expensive’. With membership of the union costing a penny a week, even with a reported weekly subscription of six pounds (i.e. a membership of 1,440), the Manchester union society had problems subsisting.93 Spaces of female activism The active participation of working-­class women was a distinguishing feature of the mass platform movement. The satirical cartoon of ‘the Female Reformers of Manchester’ (figure 2) is a unique source. The caricature occupies a third of a page in the Manchester Comet or a Rap at Radicals, a fake newspaper published by Joseph Pratt in about 1822 that is ‘surprisingly sophisticated for a piece of Tory propaganda’.94 Though designed to denigrate plebeian women’s involvement with the radical movement, the caricature is nevertheless a rare surviving portrayal of the group and their activities in a meeting room behind doors. The caricaturist besmirched the seriousness of the reform meeting by depicting the women swigging from glasses and bottles of gin, while better-­dressed men intrude by cavorting in the doorway and hiding under the table. Yet despite this, the female orator standing on the table, is not grossly caricatured. She shows a steely determination, a sense of right, and commands the space and the women behind her. The open and public role of working-­class women in the formal organisation of radicalism from 1818 to 1821 was new and striking. Female activists had conducted key roles in 1790s radicalism, as we have seen in the case of Winifred Gales of Sheffield. The loyalist press noted TNA, HO 42­/​181­/​247, Lloyd to Clive, 5 October 1818; Papers Relative to the Internal State of the Country, Presented to Both Houses of Parliament (London, 1819), p. 23. 93 Read, Peterloo, p. 52. 94 Chetham’s Library, Manchester Comet or a Rap at Radicals, c.1822, www. chethams.org.uk­/​treasures­/​treasures_​comet.html, accessed 22 June 2014. 92

2  ‘Female radical society’, in the Manchester Comet, c.1822.



Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–181977

that at the Blanketeers’ meeting in March 1817, ‘many women were also present, with children in their arms, encouraging the rash undertakings of the men by the bold language of defiance to their superiors’.95 But they did not take part in the march. Samuel Bamford identified a progressive step taken at a meeting at the hillside village of Lydgate in Saddleworth on the Lancashire-­West Riding border in early May 1818. He claimed (although likely in a retrospective attempt to posit himself as the central protagonist) that he ‘insisted on the right, and the propriety also, of females who were present at such assemblages voting by a show of hand for or against the resolutions’. The novelty of the idea was clear, but also significant was the space in which it was taken. Bamford wrote that ‘the women, who attended numerously on that bleak ridge, were mightily pleased with it. The men being nothing dissentient, when the resolution was put the women held up their hands amid much laughter; and ever from that time females voted with the men at the Radical meetings’. The men’s amusement at women taking part in the ritual of ‘playing-­at-­parliament’, was a recognition that they were claiming the same part in the political body. Though not countenancing female suffrage, the womenfolk nevertheless threatened their male dominance.96 Placing the women on the ‘bleak ridge’ of Saddleworth moor underlined the importance of ‘neighbourhood’, a rugged individualism combined with collectivism familiar to all the sects of Methodism that practised camp feasts and female preaching in that setting. Notions of ‘separate spheres’ still influenced attitudes towards women’s participation. In Stockport, Reverend Harrison allowed women to be educated in his schools and join his congregation, but the Stockport union did not allow female members to belong to their weekly class. The formation of female reform societies was thus a major step. Importantly, the first female reform society to form officially, on 18 June 1819, was Blackburn, a town already dominated by cotton and calico production in which women took a significant part. Stockport female reformers held separate meetings from 1 July, and officially established the Stockport Female Union on Monday 12 July.97 On the same day, the Blackburn female radicals made a visit to Manchester. They paraded ‘different parts of the town, but particularly the neighbourhood of Newtown, in the costume that made such an impression at the late Blackburn ­meeting’, that is, their white cotton dresses that were to become iconic Manchester Chronicle, 15 March 1817. Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, chapter 24; Custer, ‘Refiguring Jemima’, 149–50. 97 Glen, Urban Workers in the Industrial Revolution, p. 231. 95 96

78

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

as symbols of their purity and sacrifice at Peterloo. They then attended a meeting of their Manchester counterparts, led by Mary Fildes, at the Union Rooms on George Leigh Street.98 The Blackburn society quickly inspired similar societies in the satellite cotton-­weaving towns around Manchester, including Oldham, Ashton-­under-­Lyne, Rochdale, Leigh and Royton.99 The new societies quickly took a leading role in the theatre of the mass platform. At a reform meeting on 11 August 1819 at Leigh market place, an already familiar space of negotiation was transformed into a highly charged political place for the day. The formal association of the women gave a strident show of unity all ‘dressed in white with black sashes’. Magistrate James Norris commented to Lord Sidmouth that ‘what was more novel’ was that the committee of twelve young women ‘planted a standard with an inscription “No Corn Laws, Annual Parliaments and Universal Suffrage”’ and another standard ‘surmounted with the cap of liberty’ on the platform.100 On the Wednesday afternoon before Peterloo, the Leigh committee of female reformers met in a pub and were addressed by men including Henry Battersby, ‘one of the delegates to London in 1816’.101 Female societies met in the same pubs and union rooms as the male reformers. The Manchester female reformers were based at the Union Rooms on George Leigh Street. The Stockport female union society issued its declaration and rules, instructing that communications were to be directed to Mrs J. Hallam at the union rooms. The rooms were described as ‘the place where the Female Reformers hold their meetings’ in a report on Henry Hunt stopping off for supper there on the night before the 9 August 1819 meeting at Manchester. Newspapers reported their regular meetings ‘in the large room of the Windmill’, the same site as the men’s.102 To what extent they felt able to participate in political debate with men is a question familiar to historians of early modern coffee houses, many of whom argue that the Enlightenment ‘public sphere’ was predominantly ‘masculine’.103 Working-­class pubs were more mixed by their very nature, although meeting in a back room or parlour could exclude company of the opposite sex. The Morning Post, 20 July 1819. Epstein, Radical Expression, p. 87; MO, 10, 17, 31 July 1819. 100 Papers Relative to the Internal State of the Country, p. 19. 101 Carlisle Patriot, 21 August 1819. 102 Carlisle Patriot, 14 August 1819; Morning Post, 21 July 1819, 12 August 1819; The Times, 4 August 1819. 103 B. Cowan, ‘What was masculine about the public sphere? Gender and the coffeehouse milieu in post-­Restoration England’, HWJ, 51 (2001).  98  99



Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–181979

Stockport meetings were initially mixed, but at the 19 July meeting, Mrs Hallworth, the president, requested the men to withdraw from the room. She claimed that it was not because they wished to ‘transact anything of a secret nature’, but rather that ‘if in our debates (for it is something new for women to turn political orators) we should for want of knowledge make any blunders, we should be laughed at, to prevent which we should prefer being by ourselves’. They were no doubt aware of the criticism that had been levied at their Blackburn compatriots.104 The nature and demands of female radicalism were couched in a language of domesticity, which has proved difficult for modern historians to explain or even accept. Anna Clark claims that northern male workers shared a more co-­operative attitude that contrasted with the ‘fraternal solidarity of workshop and pub’ in other areas. Northern workers were organised ‘around networks of kin, neighbourhood and community’, which, despite the misogynist elements of trade unionism that attempted to exclude female labour, provided a framework for the new radicalism.105 But this socio-­economic set-­up was not uniform everywhere, and in some cases women defied their menfolk’s attempts to limit their political and economic participation. Northern working-­class women challenged the middle-­class notion of separate spheres not by simply entering the political public sphere, but conversely by asserting domestic concerns as public and political. The Blackburn female reformers, for example, used the standard Cobbettite critique of economic corruption to explain their domestic misery: ‘Our houses which once bore ample testimony of our industry and cleanliness ­… are now alas! robbed of all their ornaments’.106 Paul Custer suggests that Clark and Epstein have offered a misleading argument that the women had to mould their rhetoric and principles to suit a separate spheres model. The crowds were composed of both women and men with a critical appreciation of politics and the economy.107 Ruth Mather emphasises that the language of domesticity was not simply an attempt to deflect criticism. Rather, when combined with other evidence of militancy such as drilling and aiding the men, it was a deliberate strategy of ambiguous hints at their intentions to frustrate the authorities.108 The Times, 4 August 1819. A. Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1995), pp. 158–60. 106 Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches, p. 163. 107 Custer, ‘Refiguring Jemima’, 145, 156. 108 R. Mather, ‘“These Lancashire women are witches in politics”: female reform societies and the theatre of radicalism, 1819–1820’, Manchester Region History Review, 23 (2012­/14), 57. 104 105

80

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

Postwar radicals sought to build a constitutional movement within the increasingly narrow confines of legality as defined by the Seditious Meetings acts of 1795 and 1817, and the 1799 Combination and Corresponding Societies acts. The legislation was not as repressive as radicals feared and had enough loopholes for collective action to continue and develop new characteristics in new spaces. The rise of the mass platform, the hiring of activity-­specific sites such as schoolrooms and chapels, and working-­class women crossing a gendered boundary for the first time were all products of the heightened politicisation of public spaces. Radical concerns over constitutional action dominated in 1816–17, but these were rendered unworkable by the 1817 legislation and the resort to conspiracy. The revived agitation of 1818–19 was bolder, though the more moderate leaders stressed the legal and peaceable nature of collective action. While William Pitt’s and later Lord Liverpool’s governments sought to convict individual radicals and organised labour on grounds of treasonable words and conspiracy, local magistrates strove to define every mass working-­class meeting as potentially seditious, a position that shaped their actions and loyalist thought in 1819. Postwar radicalism was a defiantly northern movement. In May 1819, after the government’s rejection of a reform petition from Stockport, mass meetings became the main form of collective action, centred on Henry Hunt’s new efforts to unify the radical movement by touring the northern industrial districts.109 The ideal of a pan-­regional union still preoccupied the rhetoric if not always the practice of radical networks. Twenty-­eight towns and townships were represented at a meeting of union delegates in Oldham on 7 June 1819, including most of the towns to the east and south of Manchester. They issued a declaration calling for the formation of a national network of union societies, a plan which was endorsed by both the Stockport union society and Hull Political Protestants. Mass meetings at Hunslet Moor in Leeds on 14 June and 19 July, May Day Green, Barnsley on 12 July, Cronkey Shaw in Rochdale on 26 July, Almondbury Bank near Huddersfield on 2 August were all held on Mondays, designed to attract handloom weavers and outworkers who took ‘Saint Monday’ off work.110 The mass meetings at Ashton-­under-­Lyne, Leeds, Barnsley and Blackburn in June and July promoted a ‘national union’ and envisaged ‘a National meeting, that the whole may be brought to one general focus’. They had representa Belchem, Orator Hunt, p. 96. H. Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution (London: Croom Helm, 1980), p. 146.

109 110



Defending the liberty to meet, 1795–181981

tives from Macclesfield, Dewsbury, Barnsley, Leeds and Wakefield.111 E. P. Thompson believed that the northern working-­class radicals’ reliance on Hunt, Burdett and the other national leaders served to compromise their class politics.112 Major Cartwright and Hunt connected the North to London movements, but the relationship was strained and tempered by local leadership who also drew in the crowds and shaped northern tactics and demands. Hunt aimed at standardisation of aims and organisation, principally by attempting to enforce a new policy of remonstrances and declarations instead of petitions. Yet the local radical groups refused to follow his new plan and overwhelmingly stuck to their policy of petitioning.113 Their militant particularism strengthened their attachment to place, and sustained its connection to a belief in the right to petition as enshrined in the mythical constitution. Cartwright had catalysed action in the North, and Hunt led it nationally, but this was a northern movement, with local leadership at its heart.

MO, 12 June, 10 July 1819; Belchem, Orator Hunt, pp. 99–101; TNA, HO 42­/188, Chippendale to Home Office, 7 June 1819. 112 J. Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 126; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 707. 113 Belchem, Orator Hunt, p. 92; MO, 23 January 1819; Lancashire County RO, DDX 113, Henry Hunt correspondence, 1819. 111

3

Peterloo and the changing definition of seditious assembly

On Monday 16 August 1819, over 60,000 people assembled on St Peter’s Fields to hear Henry Hunt and local radicals proclaim the message of universal suffrage. The meeting had been adjourned from 9 August, after the Manchester magistrates issued a notice declaring it illegal. The Patriotic Society, headed by James Wroe, editor of the Manchester Observer, took extra precautions to ensure that the crowds a week later formed a peaceful meeting, with no provocation of an ‘anti-­ parliament’ or physical threat intended. Processions of men, women and children dressed in their Sunday best, led by brass bands and the radical societies bearing laurel leaves and their local banners, wove into Manchester from all the surrounding towns and villages. As Joseph Watson of Oldham testified at Hunt’s trial about his group: ‘There were many females with the party. They did not look like an army going to invade the town. The procession marched in the same order as the Benefit and other Societies do’.1 This was politics on the move, expressing local and community identities as well as showing respectability as proof of their right to manhood suffrage.2 Processing to the nearest large town was not an alien experience for ‘country folk’ who were mobile in everyday life and work. William Elson, a small farmer from Chadderton, joined the Middleton procession. He testified that when he lost his teenage children in the crowd, ‘I was not uneasy about them, as I knew they were acquainted with Manchester’.3 The ten magistrates, chaired by ultra-­Tory mineowner and large landowner William Hulton, were watching from the windows of a house on the southern edge of the fields behind the hustings. They had arranged The Trial of Henry Hunt Esq, John Knight, Joseph Johnson and others for conspiracy (London, 1820), p. 231.  2 R. Poole, ‘The march to Peterloo: politics and festivity in late Georgian England’, P & P, 192 (2006), 136.  3 Trial of Henry Hunt, p. 187.  1



Peterloo and seditious assembly83

3  Map of St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, 1819.

for the military to be arrayed in the side streets around the fields (see figure 3). As Hunt began his speech, they sent deputy constable Joseph Nadin to arrest him. The justices claimed that they had read the Riot Act, but from their position it was unlikely many would have heard them. Nadin asked the inexperienced yeomanry to support him. Getting stuck in the melée, they panicked and viciously cut through the crowd with sabres and bayonets. The regular hussars followed with more restraint and cleared the field. Over 650 people were injured and at least eighteen were killed. Women were over-­represented in the casualty lists; the female reform societies had placed themselves near the hustings in order to take a visible and active part in the proceedings, and they seem to have been targeted by the troops.4 The Peterloo Massacre, as it became quickly became known, was a critical point in the history of TNA, HO 42­/​190­/​7, poster, 31 July 1819; HO 42­/​192­/​21, 73, magistrates’ reports, 16 August 1819; MO, 23 August 1819; M. Bush, The Casualties of Peterloo (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2005), pp. 1–2.

 4

84

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

social movements in the nineteenth century. As Robert Poole has powerfully concluded, ‘the radicals of Lancashire planned for Victory Square, only to find themselves in Tiananmen Square’.5 This chapter focuses on the impact of Peterloo upon the reform movement and upon elites’ dealings with popular protest. Peterloo was not a just a Mancunian tragedy. It was a national event that outraged reformers across Britain. The specific incident came to represent more general loyalist elite repression of the freedom to meet. News of the massacre united radicals in outrage that translated to expressions of a shared northern identity as well as a distinctive working-­class character. After Peterloo, the relationship between radicals and both local and national government changed, irrevocably. Loyalist attitudes to popular radicalism and how law and order should be enforced hardened further. Malcolm Chase has argued that the insurrectionary plots and other events that followed in 1820 were as, if not more than, significant as those of 1819, especially in relation to the international revolutionary situation.6 But the plots can only be understood in the light of the repercussions of Peterloo, not least the Six Acts which effectively proscribed popular protest and expression even further, and the trials of Henry Hunt and the Manchester radicals, which redefined the government’s position on the meaning of sedition and seditious assembly. The question of legality The causes of Peterloo have been debated ever since that fateful day.7 The key question was whether or not the 16 August meeting constituted a seditious assembly. This was not just a matter for the Manchester authorities, but for the government and all loyalist elites. The Lords Lieutenant were concerned about the implications of any enquiry into the events for the enforcement of law and order. On the front page of R. Poole, ‘By law or by the sword: Peterloo revisited’, History, 91:302 (2006), 274.  6 M. Chase, 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), p. 2.  7 D. Read, Peterloo: The Massacre and its Background (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958); E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2nd edn, 1968), pp. 745–56; R. Walmsley, Peterloo: The Case Reopened (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969); R. Poole (ed.), Return to Peterloo, special edition Manchester Region History Review, 23 (2012­/​14).  5



Peterloo and seditious assembly85

his 1819 diary, the Tory Lord Lowther, Earl of Lonsdale and Lord Lieutenant of Cumberland and Westmorland, wrote: The consideration of the Manchester meeting comes under several heads: 1st­– t­ he legality of the meeting 2nd­– w ­ hether it was a peaceful meeting 3rd­– w ­ hether the magistrates were justified in the apprehension of Hunt 4th­– ­who were the aggressors: yeomen or mob 5th­– ­as to Lord Sidmouth’s thinking.8

The other entries concerning Peterloo in the diary show Lowther carefully preparing his justification for a county meeting in order to argue that the meeting was illegal, it was not peaceful in his eyes, that the magistrates were justified and the ‘mob’ were the ‘aggressors’. There was and could be no doubt of this fact in Lowther’s and other Tory-­ loyalists’ opinion. Magistrates framed their strategy towards the mass platform through their memory of their previous dealings with radical meetings and public disorder. As early as December 1816, Reverend Charles Prescott of Stockport asserted ‘the necessity of being prepar’d in some way or other for certainly the issues are much more alarming than in 1812’, and recommended that ‘the loyal subjects should unite, and endeavour to counteract these [seditious] principles and designs’.9 They affirmed this attitude on 15 February 1819, when they sent in constables to seize a cap of liberty on the stage of a reform meeting held on Sandy Brow. The use of force at what became known as the ‘Sandy Brow fight’ was a significant foreshadowing of tactics and attitudes of their colleagues in Manchester, whom they knew well through the Orange Institution.10 Robert Poole’s recent reassessment of Peterloo shows how both government and the Manchester authorities, particularly Hulton, Nadin, Reverend William Hay and James Norris, were already gathering evidence that the mass meetings were in their view unlawful well before 16 August. Norris had been calling for special legislation ever since Hunt had visited Manchester in January 1819.11 By July 1819, local authorities across northern England were clearly at a heightened state of anxiety and preparation against revolution. The Manchester and Salford authorities held a special meeting at the Police Office on 9 July to set up a committee ‘to strengthen the civil power’ ‘for the Cumbria RO, D­/​LONS­/​L2­/​67, Lowther diary, 1819. TNA, HO 42­/​156­/​3, Prescott to Home Office, 12 December 1816. 10 MO, 28 February 1819; Walmsley, Peterloo, pp. 54–5. 11 J. Belchem, ‘Henry Hunt and the evolution of the mass platform’, EHR, 93:369 (1978), 759.  8  9

86

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

purpose of the maintenance of the public peace at this important crisis’ specifically to target popular radical societies, their press and delegates. Magistrates in Bolton and other industrial towns in the Pennine North were preparing in similar ways in July 1819.12 Historians had assumed that the Manchester magistrates acted against government edicts not to intervene in the August meetings. But Poole argues that Lord Sidmouth and his secretary Henry Hobhouse undertook ‘pragmatic backpedalling’ in the last few days before the meeting, ‘prompted by the reformers’ unexpected efforts to stay within the law’. The growth of the mass platform posed a different type of threat for local and national governments, which they could not deal with using the limited proscriptions of previous seditious meetings acts. Sidmouth had drawn up a memorandum in 1818 in which he defined unlawful assembly as conducted ‘in such a manner as is apt to raise a terror in the people’. A riot, moreover, did not need to be defined by violence, but ‘if a number of men assemble with arms in terrorem populi tho’ no act is done, it is a riot’.13 The impression of fear and terror therefore became the grounds for suppression rather than actual disorder, as had usually been the case during the eighteenth century.14 The months of correspondence between the Home Office and the ­magistrates about the necessity to suppress the mass meetings ‘by law or by the sword’, in Sidmouth’s words, negated the last minute exhortation to caution that he made to Norris on 4 August 1819. Having drawn up the special constables, yeomanry and military in readiness in the streets on the morning of 16 August, and indeed made preparations during the weekend beforehand, the ‘select committee’ of magistrates had already decided the meeting was illegal and that troops were necessary to arrest Hunt on the platform.15 Manchester loyalist elites immediately responded by defending their actions. On 19 August, they held a meeting at the Police Office, which JRLUM, EGR 4­ /​ 2­ /​ 3/­​ 2/­​ 6, Egerton papers, printed handbill, 9 July 1819; Chester Courant, 3 August 1819; Macclesfield Courant, 31 July, 7 August 1819. 13 R. Poole, ‘What don’t we know about Peterloo’, in Poole, Return to Peterloo, 9–10, citing the Addington papers in Devon Heritage Centre. 14 M. Lobban, ‘From seditious libel to unlawful assembly: Peterloo and the changing face of political crime, c1770–1820’, Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 10:3 (1990), 352. 15 Poole, ‘By law or by the sword’, 270, 274; Poole, ‘What don’t we know about Peterloo’, 14; TNA, HO 79­/​3, secret and private papers, 1819, especially fo. 485, Hobhouse to Norris, 5 August 1819; see also the correspondence in HO 41­/​4. 12



Peterloo and seditious assembly87

they then adjourned to the Star Inn in order to exclude reformers from attending. The Star Inn was a familiar establishment to those members of the elites who were also members of the Orange Institution and the Pitt Club who held dinners there. It is no coincidence that the meeting was presided over by the manufacturer Francis Philips, former committee member of APCOLR and president of the Pitt Club. They issued resolutions thanking the magistrates for their actions at St Peter’s Fields. Archibald Prentice and the other middle-­class reformers drew up a Declaration and Protest against the resolutions, arguing the loyalist meeting was ‘strictly and exclusively private’, and therefore it could not ‘claim the title of a “numerous and respectable meeting of the inhabitants of Manchester and Salford and their neighbourhood”’. The protest was signed by nearly 5,000 people, including 150 cotton manufacturers, and again illustrated the potent issue of who had the right to represent the voice of Manchester.16 The pan-­regional radical response Cross-­Pennine support for the Peterloo victims was immediate. The impact of Peterloo quickly became a factor unifying disparate reform groups across the North, and indeed, the whole country. Common to many reactions of social movements to incidents of suppression, radicals responded firstly in stunned shock while they tried to make sense of the situation, followed by anger, which leaders sought to channel into carefully organised demonstrations of mourning combined with defiance. Activists’ narrative of the repression, through speeches and propaganda, helped to ‘frame’ the political arguments for further action.17 The defence of the right to meet in St Peter’s Fields was translated to the more general abstract idea (and indeed space) of being able to meet and the constitutional right to petition parliament. Anne Lister, the formidable Tory gentry-woman of Shibden Hall, described the immediate reaction of Halifax and its neighbourhood to the news of the events at Manchester. News reached them by the evening stagecoach, and she noted in her diary, ‘Great many people about tonight in the streets­– ­men talking together in groups of fifteen or twenty’ (presumably out of habit from avoiding the fifty-­person limit of the Seditious Meetings Act). Two days after Peterloo, Lister recorded that ‘the reform infection Read, Peterloo, p. 165; A. Prentice, Historical Sketches and Personal Recollections of Manchester (Manchester, 1851), p. 164, original emphasis. 17 D. Meyer, N. Whittier and B. Robnett (eds), Social Movements: Identity, Culture and the State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 298. 16

88

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

seems to have reached us’, when 500 people gathered to discuss Peterloo on Skircoat Moor at two o’clock in the afternoon. ‘A man dressed in black and on a black horse’ orated an account of Peterloo but he left upon the arrival of the magistrate Thomas Horton. Horton then remonstrated with the crowd, attempting to persuade them that ‘if all the manufacturing districts were united together, they could not gain what they wanted’.18 The crowd dispersed peacefully, but the divide between rulers and ruled was evident. St Peter’s Fields was consciously connected with Skircoat Moor, Hunslet Moor in Leeds and the myriad other places where radicals held mass meetings to mourn the Manchester dead and protest against the actions of the magistrates and Lord Liverpool’s government.19 Halifax radicals held a much more elaborate mass meeting on Skircoat Moor on 4 October. A yellow silk banner displayed at the meeting bore the verse: With heartfelt grief we mourn for those Who fell a victim in our cause; While we with indignation view The bloody field of Peterloo.20

What the Halifax crowds viewed in fact were carefully constructed representations of Peterloo. The Sowerby Bridge banner displayed ‘a view of St Peter’s Field’, most likely one copied from Cruikshank’s famous prints of the scene. Many of the Calder valley residents had probably never set foot on St Peter’s Fields, but their imagination translated these images and narratives of the event to their immediate context of the larger and more rural edgelands of Skircoat Moor.21 The Hunslet Moor meeting of 20 September was perhaps the most deliberately symbolic of all the West Riding demonstrations. The newspapers estimated that over 20,000 people assembled in Briggate, ‘a great number of whom were female’, before beginning to process at two o’clock to the moor. The banners H. Whitbread, Transcript of the diary of Anne Lister, 1819, pp. 156–7, www.historytoherstory.org.uk­/​articlelist.php?atype=2&asection=6, acces­ sed 30 June 2014. 19 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, pp. 690–2; J. Epstein, ‘Understanding the cap of liberty: symbolic practice and social conflict in early nineteenth-­century England’, P & P, 122 (1989), 107. 20 MO, 9 October 1819; The Times, 7 October 1819; P. Holroyd, ‘A Revolution worse than that of France: political radicalism in Halifax and the Peterloo Massacre, 1819’, Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society, n.s., 7 (1999), 81–2. 21 M. Roberts, ‘Radical banners from Peterloo to Chartism’, in Poole, Return to Peterloo. 18



Peterloo and seditious assembly89

carried by the reformers included a black flag inscribed ‘We mourn for the Murder of our Manchester Friends’. Several female reform societies played a conspicuous part in the proceedings; their leaders mounted the stage and Isabella Blackburn of the Leeds Female Reformers presented the chair, Mr Chapman, proprietor of the Manchester Observer, with a cap of liberty. The representation of women and their role in the movement was double-­sided. On the one hand, the ‘women in white’ were portrayed as helpless victims falling sacrifice on St Peter’s Fields. Female reformers on the other hand offered a more strident position: the Gancliffe Female Union flag at Skircoat Moor featured ‘a mother with a scroll upon which is written “The Rights of Women”’.22 The meetings featured itinerant orators from the Manchester radical leadership, principally the pamphlet seller Joseph Mitchell, subeditor of the Manchester Observer, John Thaxter Saxton and John Knight, who toured the northern industrial towns recounting their tales of Peterloo. Their role was crucial in fostering a sense of pan-­Pennine connection. Halifax magistrate Thomas Horton commented drily about the mass meeting on Skircoat Moor on 4 October, ‘None of the speakers on the Moor were even Yorkshiremen I believe’. As was common throughout this period, the authorities were keen to blame outsiders rather than admit to the Home Office that they had lost the loyalties of their native inhabitants; Horton dubbed Knight, Saxton and Mitchell, ‘Lancashire disturbers’, and claimed, ‘this meeting would not have been in any degree what it is, had it not been for the exertions of these strangers’.23 The meeting had been allowed to go ahead without interference because the Manchester trio had called upon the sympathetic magistrate Michael Stocks, who agreed to attend to keep the peace. Loyalist authorities repeated the same patterns of negotiation over the right to meet, with rounds of requisitions and counter-­requisitions and refusals to let radicals meet in no-­man’s lands or sites outside the borough jurisdiction.24 The oratory at the meetings had a further effect. Francesca Polletta and other sociologists of modern social movements have highlighted the TNA, HO 33­/​2­/​109, printed pamphlet, Leeds Reform Meeting Held on Hunslet Moor, September 20th 1819 (Leeds, 1819); LM, 28 August, 25 September 1819; MO, 9 October 1819. 23 TNA, HO 42­/1 ​ 96­/​223–6, Horton to Home Office, 4 October 1819; Holroyd, ‘A revolution worse than that of France’, 81. 24 Bolton Archives, ZZ­/​530­/​2, Holden diaries, 1819. A requisition for a public meeting was left at the shop of Mr Wolstenholme, who later helped to establish a branch of the Great Northern Union, which sent a quilt to Henry Hunt in Ilchester gaol in November 1821. 22

90

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

c­ rucial role of narrative in forming and sustaining political groups.25 The repetition of narrative, especially stories of courage and betrayal, helped to construct a collective memory and attach a longer legacy to contemporary campaigns. This was a constructed as much as inherent process, not least also shaped by the huge amount of radical propaganda in cartoons and ballads visualising and vocalising the story of Peterloo.26 The mock funeral procession became a major feature of the protests. In the procession to the mass meeting on Hunslet Moor in September 1819, ‘everyone wore some black crepe or ribband as a token of mourning for the recent calamities at Manchester’.27 The visual symbolism of the banners and the stark black, white and green clothing, following bands playing ‘Death of Saul’ and the protest hymn composed by Samuel Bamford, ‘A Song of Slaughter’, gave the impression almost of a staged tableau, inverting the normal carnival involved in election or food riot processions. At York, the Lord Mayor, William Hotham, allowed freeholders to hold a meeting by requisition at the Guild Hall on Monday 20 September. Like the radical outdoor meetings, this official meeting was accompanied by mummery and mourning ritual: ‘Bands of music paraded the streets for two hours previously to the meeting with several men preceded by flags and banners and wearing crape hatbands. A blacking maker and a Negro (a radical mourner) headed the funeral procession and banners together a number of apprentices and journeymen with many women and children’.28 Their resolutions were opposed by the King and Constitution club, meeting at the George Inn on Coney Street.29 At Carlisle, radicals led by newspaper proprietor Jeremiah Jollie and the fiery Scottish orator James Wemys (‘Jemmy Weems’) requested use of several sites for a meeting, but eventually had to hold it on Coalfell Hill on the outskirts of the town. The morning of Monday 11 October began with a procession of 200 men from the village of Dalston, ‘with sprigs of Laurel in their hats’, who joined the main procession from the union committee room in the working-­class locale of Caldewgate. The newspapers noted: There was a seriousness in the conduct of this Meeting which is not usual. Not a word was uttered as they passed along. There was not even an F. Polletta, It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 26 C. Burgess, ‘The objects of Peterloo’, in Poole, Return to Peterloo, p. 151. 27 Examiner, 26 September 1819; MO, 9 October 1819. 28 Yorkshire Gazette, 25 September 1819. 29 York Herald, 25 September 1819; Yorkshire Gazette, 25 September, 2 October 1819. 25



Peterloo and seditious assembly91 attempt at cheering. It appeared more like a solemn funeral procession than that of a set of persons assembled to discuss political questions.30

Through their bodily movements and clothing, the processions showed to the authorities the respectability and unarmed peacefulness of the radical movement, both as a statement of intent and as a way of evading the restrictions of the anti-­seditious legislation. The forms of the processions drew from several sources familiar to working-­class communities. Trade funerals were common vehicles for the manifestation of class and political identities when more overt political processions were banned, although they were also genuine expressions of personal camaraderie. Trade funeral processions were the most overtly corporal in connecting the collective body with custom and identity. They were declarations of how the individual had made a lifelong commitment to their trade, and how this commitment was recognised by the whole community.31 Radicals adapted the practice, at occasions when they were able to align their trade and political activities and grievances. They also drew directly from Methodist funeral culture, another familiar structure of belonging and community. The processions produced embodied space through their distinctive performances and gestures, and doing so, claimed the right to speak in those spaces. At the hustings at Carlisle, Mrs Elizabeth Cowper presented a cap of liberty on behalf of the female radicals. She gave an address, asking powerfully, ‘are we, and our husbands, fathers, brothers and sons, to be thrown into prison, trampled upon, sabred and shot, because we legally and peaceably demand our right to live?’32 The Carlisle meeting was important not just because of this continued show of female radicalism, but also as an overt expression of working-­class identity. The always fragile alliance of working and middle-­class reformers was broken yet again by the reaction to Peterloo. John Christian Curwen, MP for Carlisle, and Henry Brougham sought a meeting with deputies from the union committee, presumably to keep them on their side, but the radicals rejected their request, ‘with an intimation that they could manage their own affairs’.33 By November, the radical political unions began to organise a Morning Chronicle, 15 October 1819. C. Behagg, ‘Secrecy, ritual and folk violence: the opacity of the workplace in the first half of the nineteenth century,’ in R. D. Storch (ed.), Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-­Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1982), pp. 161–2. 32 Carlisle Journal, 16 October 1819. 33 Carlisle Journal, 9, 16 October 1819; Carlisle Patriot, 25 September, 2 October 1819; Westmorland Gazette, 9 October 1819. 30 31

92

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

c­ o-­ordinated strategy of protest. Meetings were simultaneously planned for 1 and 8 November at Carlisle, Halifax, Huddersfield, Leeds, Manchester, Bolton, Dewsbury, Barnsley and Otley among other places.34 These meetings were again a deliberate manifestation of local identities and customs, employing a hugely symbolic use of the sites. At Barnsley, the 8 November meeting was held on Church Field, where a large fair was held every October. Reverend Robert Ellis, minister of the Sheffield Road Calvinist chapel, presided, and thus a place for a carnivalesque event was reappropriated for solemn mourning.35 Some element of charivari or community justice was on the other hand enacted as the processions moved through town centres. Particular landmarks of power and personality were marked out by ritual and gesture, constructing a cartography of loyalty and political adherence. In Haslingden, a Methodist minister reported that from early September to mid-­November 1819: ‘the streets of this town were paraded almost every night by hundreds singing seditious songs about Hunt and Liberty, frequently accompanied with a Red Cap suspended on a pole with a lighted torch’. James Epstein notes the revival of the cap of liberty at such demonstrations, but the route was also highly charged. The crowds were subverting loyalist rituals while marking out the bounds of their symbolic authority, gaining control as they repeated their ritual nightly: ‘At the houses of the principal radicals the crowd gave three cheers, whereas at the houses of the “King’s men”, as they term it, they gave three most dismal groans’.36 Other creative tactics also emerged out of the protests. The radicals, drawing from a culture of religious solidarity and community, organised a ‘march on the churches’ well before the Chartists popularised the tactic in 1839. John Hardy of Leeds informed the Lord Lieutenant on 4 November that ‘a large party of Radicals came in a body with white hats to Addle [Adel] Church on Sunday and I am informed they mean to visit Harwood Church in the same way next Sunday’.37 The post-­Peterloo mass platform was also enhanced by a vigorous campaign of boycotting of anti-­radical shopkeepers and exclusive dealing LM, 13 November 1819; WYAS, Leeds, WYL, 250­/6 ​ ­/2 ​ ­/b ​ ox 2, lieutenancy correspondence, 1819. 35 Barnsley Archives, Burlands annals, 8 November 1819. 36 J. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 112. 37 WYAS, Leeds, WYL 250­/​6­/​2/­​box 2, lieutenancy correspondence, Hardy to Lascelles, 4 November 1819; Harbert to Lascelles, 8 December 1819, for another church visit at Deighton, Huddersfield. 34



Peterloo and seditious assembly93

with sympathetic grocers. Henry Hunt sought to capitalise on these tactics by issuing a plan for alternative supplies and the promotion of ‘breakfast powder’, but much of the exclusive dealing was through local initiative.38 This alternative political economy was promoted symbolically as well. At a second Carlisle meeting in November, the procession carried: A large cabbage, much eaten by caterpillars, designed to represent the constitution eaten by corruption. A board to which were appended a tea-­kettle, coffee pot, snuff box, tobacco box, broken wine glasses, pipes, broken ale glasses ­… these were all empty and turned upside down, useless, now that the radicals are determined to abstain from taxed commodities.39

The loyalist response The agitation of late 1819 was difficult for the authorities to police. A reform meeting was held on Amberswood Common on the outskirts of Wigan on Monday 8 November, with an estimated 6,000 people ‘assembled round the temporary stage’. Lord Balcarres suspected that the leaders had chosen that particular day because the quarter sessions were being held at Liverpool, but, he told the Home Office, ‘the magistrates of Wigan and its vicinity were aware of that trick and remained at their post’. The yeomanry were in attendance, but ‘as the leaders had selected a large common for their meeting, the Magistrates thought it advisable not to interfere with them as situated there they could do no mischief’.40 Reformers were careful to keep to the letter of the law on disturbing the peace in towns. Yet drilling continued at night in more secluded parts of the moors outside the jurisdiction of borough magistrates, as more radical groups prepared for a ‘general rising’ in the West Riding. Outbreaks of singular violence against yeomanry and any other person associated with the authorities at Peterloo sporadically broke out in Manchester and elsewhere. Aristocratic landowners in the mining districts were thus uneasy about events. In October 1819, Lord Lilford’s agent Isaac Worthington wrote to Henry Blundell, mineowning MP for Wigan, lamenting, ‘I, for one, am not sleeping on a Bed of Roses’. He claimed that he was regarded as ‘guilty of two offences, unpardonable in the present day­– ­viz. of being possessed of MO, 11 September 1819. Carlisle Patriot, 6 November 1819. 40 Balcarres to Sidmouth, 11 November 1819, in Papers Relative to the Internal State of the Country, Presented to Both Houses of Parliament (London, 1819), pp. 61–2; Morning Chronicle, 12 November 1819. 38 39

94

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

Property myself­– a­ nd of managing the property of a Nobleman. I am of course supposed to be a Foe to Reform’. His comments indicate that the loyalist elites felt that the popular reaction to Peterloo had turned the tables against them. This fear exaggerated their own framing of the radical threat, and Worthington hyperbolically expressed his belief that ‘all sense of morality and Religion seems totally to have forsaken the great mass of the People. Led by appetite and passion alone they are ripe for the horrors of a French Revolution’.41 Belief in a general rising accompanied by violence against person and property was common among authorities perhaps more than among radicals themselves. Local elites mobilised their familiar tactics of loyal addresses and declarations voted at county and town meetings in Chester, Lancaster, Kendal, York, Warrington and elsewhere in September and October 1819.42 The Cheshire county meeting, for example, resolved to form a committee to meet weekly to co-­ordinate defence within the county.43 The expectation and fear of disturbance led to the formation of loyal defence societies and patrols in places where there was in fact little overt radical activity, as at Ulverston on the Furness peninsula and at Kendal in Westmorland.44 The mayor of Carlisle and local notables in Cumberland assured Lord Lowther that they were in ‘perfect readiness and determination to suppress by all legal means the proceedings of the Radicals’.45 Where radicals organised large meetings, employers again attempted to put pressure on their workers not to attend. Edward Taylor, a linen manufacturer from Dodworth, near Barnsley, received an anonymous letter which complained, ‘It is verry [sic] currently reported in Barnsley that you have discharged your work People from attending a Public Meeting to be held at Barnsley Moor on Monday next, and how you have had a kind of tribunal for the purpose of making the men beg pardon who whent [sic] to the Sheffield meeting, and giving the reformers verry [sic] unpleasant names and charging them with bad motives’. Lancashire County RO, DDX 211­ /4 ​­ /​ 24, Worthington to Blundell, 25 October 1819. 42 Westmorland Gazette, 25 September, 20 November 1819; JRLUM, EGR 4­/​ 2­/​3­/​2­/​10, Egerton papers, 2 November 1819; North Yorkshire RO, DC­/R ​ IC II­ /4 ​­ /2 ​­ /3 ​7, handbill, ‘Inhabitants of the city and vicinity of York’, 29 September 1819. 43 Chester Courant, 19 October 1819. 44 Westmorland Gazette, 25 September, 16 October 1819. 45 Cumbria RO, D­/​LONS­/​L1­/​2­/​136, Blamire to Lowther, 30 November 1819, Browne to Lowther, 21 December 1819. 41



Peterloo and seditious assembly95

The writer defiantly proclaimed that if Taylor discharged his men, he would nonetheless be unable ‘to crush the spirit of Freedom that burns in each of their hearts’.46 Loyalists thus tried to use propertied elites’ alarm about the situation to repeat the loyalist consensus of 1817, but they could not achieve a unified response among local and county elites in support for the government. Earl Grey sought to make political capital of the crisis, encouraging the holding of county meetings to ‘steal the thunder of radical orators who claimed to speak for public opinion’, and serve as the rallying point for a Whig party revival.47 The anti-­Lowther party in Westmorland, headed by John Christian Curwen of Workington Hall, MP for Carlisle (who as we have seen tried but failed to ally with the working-­class radicals), and several other anti-­Lowtherite gentry and freeholders requisitioned the sheriff for a county meeting to demand an enquiry into Peterloo. Curwen chaired a meeting in the market place of the mining town of Wigton on 13 October 1819. The resolutions defiantly declared the ‘right of the subject to hold meetings’, a right that had been violated at Manchester. Lowther’s supporters drew up a counter-­address, decrying ‘those Demagogues, by whom the multitude are mislead [sic] to bring about a revolution by force’. The pro-­Curwen press debated the meaning of loyalty and who had the right to represent the loyalty of the county to the Prince Regent.48 These debates provide the context for Lowther’s numbered list on his diary discussed above. A further county meeting was convened by 160 Whig freeholders on the main street in Kendal, where Henry Brougham called for an enquiry into Peterloo. His intentions were party-­political as well as reformist, as he used the occasion as a way of saving political face after losing the contest for Kendal in the general election of the previous year. Brougham claimed that the Lowther interest had drawn up the county’s loyal address privately rather than at a public meeting. The Lowtherite press counter-­claimed that Brougham’s meeting was ‘not a County meeting’ because ‘the clergy and magistrates were not there’.49 Again the debate WYAS, Leeds, WYL 250­ /​ 6/­​ 2/­​ box 1, ‘A friend to truth and justice’, 4 November 1819. 47 E. A. Smith, Whig Principles and Party Politics: Earl Fitzwilliam and the Whig Party, 1748–1833 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), p. 347. 48 Carlisle Journal, 9 October 1819; Westmorland Gazette, 18, 25 October 1819. 49 Morning Chronicle, 21 October 1819; Westmorland Gazette, 25 October 1819. 46

96

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

revolved around who formed the official body politic of the region, and who had the right to define the meaning of loyalism. A more serious predicament for the unity of loyalism was raised by the case of Earl Fitzwilliam, Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding. Though he had opposed parliamentary reform in parliament, Fitzwilliam had expressed sympathy for the crowds attending reform meetings in July 1819, arguing that they attended not for seditious political reasons but as a protest against unemployment and economic distress. Sidmouth took note of Fitzwilliam’s stance, and his letters were included in evidence presented to the House of Lords during the passage of the Six Acts.50 Fitzwilliam, together with Lord Milton and Lord Norfolk, requested a county meeting to be held on 14 October 1819 at York Castle. The mayor of York declined the requisition, and, seemingly with a sarcastically raised eyebrow, he noted that ‘with all possible respect for the estimable characters who have signed the County Requisitions, we doubt whether the Castle Yard at York is the proper place for “an enquiry into these transactions”’. At the meeting, Fitzwilliam remained cautious and did no more than to propose a vote of thanks to the chairman. Nonetheless, his stance cost him his position as Lord Lieutenant and he was replaced by the moderate Whig Lord Lascelles, later Earl Harewood of Leeds.51 Reforming Whigs across the county rallied their efforts to support Fitzwilliam, including Thomas Asline Ward of Sheffield, who travelled to Wentworth House to witness Lord Althorpe presenting an address signed by 6,000 supporters protesting against his dismissal.52 Nevertheless, there was little he could do. The government asserted its hegemony over the definition of loyalty, which Liverpool and Sidmouth defined as support for the actions of the Manchester magistrates. As Michael Lobban has argued, Peterloo was a major turning point in the government’s changing definition of sedition.53 Henry Hunt, Samuel Bamford, John Knight and the other radical activists were tried at York because the authorities feared disorder if the trial were held at Lancaster. Sir Charles Wolseley and Reverend Joseph Harrison of Stockport were tried at Chester for their speeches at a mass meeting on Sandy Brow in Papers Relative to the Internal State of the Country, appendix. Hull Advertiser, 2 October 1819; Smith, Whig Principles, pp. 350–1; Chase, 1820, p. 22. 52 R. Eadon Leader (ed.), Peeps into the Past: Being Passages from the Diary of Thomas Asline Ward (Sheffield, 1909), pp. 262–3; Yorkshire Gazette, 13 November 1819, for a meeting at Wakefield in support of Fitzwilliam. 53 Lobban, ‘From seditious libel to unlawful assembly’, 349. 50 51



Peterloo and seditious assembly97

Stockport on 28 June 1819. Much of the evidence carefully collated by the authorities and prosecution witnesses was discredited in court, and half of the radicals were acquitted.54 But the trials created important legal implications for how the authorities defined and prosecuted political action. The Peterloo radicals were convicted on only one of the six charges, that of intention to foster sedition (rather than committing disorder or actual sedition). Although close attention was still paid to the content of radicals’ speeches, the Manchester and Salford magistrates admitted that they had positioned themselves behind the hustings so that they could see but not hear the speakers.55 The trials of the radicals cemented the new approach to unlawful assembly. Jeremy Bentham published a pamphlet pulling apart the charges against Wolseley and Harrison, criticising how the prosecution’s language of ‘acts of sedition’ and ‘insurrection is rising up’ was ambiguous and loaded against a peaceful assembly: ‘“Being persons of a turbulent­– ­disposition”? By the word turbulence, no distinctly conceivable act is indicated … ­ To whomsoever applied, it is a word of vague vituperation and nothing more’.56 Although there were precedents in the trials of the Gordon rioters in 1781 and the 1795 anti-­seditious legislation, from 1820 onwards, prosecutions increasingly stressed the seditious effect of words rather than any intrinsically libellous nature. Lobban argues that by the time of the Chartist trials in 1839, prosecutions ‘combined the concepts of unlawful assembly, conspiracy and riot in a way not done before 1820’.57 Again local forces of order had already anticipated this shift; parliament was slower to enshrine the new focus in legislation. The Six Acts The ‘Six Acts’ of November and December 1819 marked the culmination of the reaction to mass platform radicalism. The first two acts prohibited armed drilling and training and the collection of arms ‘for purposes dangerous to the public peace’. The third tightened up judicial procedures for prosecuting radicals, while the fifth and sixth acts clamped down on the freedom of speech, further preventing ­‘blasphemous and seditious Poole, ‘By law or by the sword’, 274; TNA, HO 40­ /​ 11­ /​ 266, Maule to Hobhouse, 24 March 1820; TS 11­/​1071, Chester spring assizes, 1820. 55 Examination of William Hulton in The Trial of Henry Hunt, p. 105. 56 J. Bentham, The King against Sir Charles Wolseley and Mr Joseph Harrison, Schoolmaster, Sent Down for Trial at Chester (London, 1820), p. 28. 57 Lobban, ‘From seditious libel to unlawful assembly’, 349, 310. Acknowledgements to Robert Poole for his helpful critique of this argument. 54

98

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

libels’ and imposing a stamp duty on ‘pamphlets and printed papers containing observations upon public events and occurrences, tending to excite hatred and contempt of the Government and constitution of these realms’.58 The latter act provoked the ‘war of the unstamped’ press in the 1820s. The fourth act (60 Geo III c.6) was another Seditious Meetings Act. Its preamble noted the collective and intra-­ regional assemblies of ‘large numbers of persons collected from various parishes and districts’. The act reiterated the previous restrictions against meetings of over fifty people but extended the definition of what they were prohibited from discussing without permission: ‘any public grievance, or upon any matter or thing relating to any trade, manufacture, business or profession, or upon any matter of Church or State, or of considering, proposing or agreeing to any petition or address’. For both moderate Whigs and radicals, the right to petition was enshrined in Magna Carta, and thus the act proposed a severe restriction on their constitutional freedoms. The passage of yet more legislation indicates the very weakness of the state and the law; the limited timespan of each act meant it was impossible to clamp down on all public meetings once and for all. Yet the 1819 Seditious Meetings Act covered some new important developments in relation to attitudes to the working class. The carnivalesque symbolism of the mass platform and processions was prohibited outright by the act. ‘Attending meetings with arms or weapons, or with flags, banners and other emblems’ was made unlawful, punishable by a two-­year prison sentence. So even the wearing of a ribbon­– ­a major feature of electoral culture­– ­was deemed to be an act of seditious intent. Moreover, the act directly targeted customary radical and trade union processing and meeting culture by equating the carrying of banners and other symbolic emblems with parading with weapons. At their trial, Samuel Bamford and fellow defendants contested the government’s definition of a procession as having revolutionary potential. They asserted the ‘common practice in this part of the country’ to conduct processions with banners and music, including rushbearing, benefit societies’ and Oddfellows’ anniversaries and indeed, Orange lodge festivities.59 The post-­Peterloo meetings across the North in the winter of 1819 used ritual and sym A. Aspinall (ed.), English Historical Documents, 1783–1832 (Oxford: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1959), pp. 335–41. 59 S. Bamford, Early Days and Passages in the Life of a Radical (London, 1849), chapter 25, http:­/​­/​gerald-­massey.org.uk­/​bamford­/​c_​radical_​%​288%​ 29.htm; The Trial of Henry Hunt, p. 53; Poole, ‘The March to Peterloo’, 110. 58



Peterloo and seditious assembly99

bolic clothing as focal points for expressions of their political identity. The authorities and the government however deliberately elided these peaceful expressions of protest with the more revolutionary threats of drilling. Whereas the previous anti-­seditious acts sought to exclude the working classes from meeting in public spaces, the 1819 act therefore sought to exclude the unrepresented from political culture and customary social practices. The impact of the Six Acts on radical action was immediate, and effectively lasted until well after their expiration in 1822. The legislation, like its predecessors, limited and channelled collective action into other means and areas, even creatively, although radicals would not have celebrated that specific consequence in such a positive way. Epstein notes for example how radical dinners became a familiar tactic from 1819 onwards because the acts effectively pushed political activity indoors into licensed venues only. This move resulted in a rich calendar of events to commemorate the anniversary of Peterloo and the birthdays of Paine, Hunt and Cobbett. Just one issue of the Manchester Observer, 17 November 1820, for example, advertised dozens of dinners to celebrate Hunt’s birthday. Many were held in union rooms (presumably in pubs that managed to keep their licence), including at Oldham, where 150 ‘Friends of Reform’ dined at the Lower Union Rooms, chaired by ultra-­radical William Fitton of Royton.60 Malcolm Chase has shown how another way in which radicals found a loophole in the legislation was through the theatre. In Sheffield, radicals refused to sing ‘God Save the King’ at the end of performances (in a subversion of the previous tactic of the ‘Old Price’ rioters who sang the anthem repeatedly as a way of occupying London theatres in 1809).61 Moreover, radicals encouraged the audiences in northern theatres to express their political beliefs through canonical and thus uncensored plays, notably Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Julius Caesar. The audience cleverly cheered or booed particular lines, thus imbuing them with alternative meaning or emphasis relating to themes of monarchical betrayal and popular liberty.62 This was a skilful evasion of the restrictions on political writings, but also fostered solidarity among the audience as they shared a knowing MO, 17 November 1820, 3 February 1821; H. Hunt, To the Radical Reformers, Male and Female, of England, Ireland and Scotland (London, 1820), pp. 16–18. 61 Chase, 1820; Epstein, ‘Understanding the cap of liberty’, 155; J. Baker, ‘The OP War, libertarian communication and graphic reportage in Georgian London’, European Comic Art, 4:1 (2011). 62 Chase, 1820, pp. 73–6. 60

100

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

subversion in a way they were unable to do outside the theatre doors. Funerals were another loophole in the anti-­seditious legislation regarding the display of political emblems. On 16 January 1820, Oldham diarist William Rowbottom noted how a large number of radicals ‘with white hats and crape’ attended the funeral of James Jackson, a reformer who had been sentenced with two others to seven years’ transportation in May 1801 for administering illegal oaths. Rowbottom noted sadly, ‘he lived to return but his two companions did not’. Jackson’s funeral enabled the community to protest legally at the historical injustice, and by wearing the white hat associated with Henry Hunt, they connected the point to the contemporary issues of Peterloo and the Six Acts.63 By mid-­1820, however, radicals had reached a point of ‘burnout’ common to social movements after an intense period of campaigning and repression.64 In May, John Lloyd of Stockport reported to the Home Office that local radicals were ‘very flat’ after news of the sentences given to Hunt, Harrison and the others; William Chippendale of Oldham believed that the Six Acts ‘effectively restrained their active measures’.65 Notably the Manchester authorities allowed the commemoration of the first anniversary of Peterloo to take place, fearful of more disorder if they were to prevent it. The event was by its very nature highly symbolic, with a conscious landmarking of place through ritual, visual symbols and sound, but it was also solemn and understated. The radicals evaded some of the restrictions of the Six Acts by using the legal form of a religious and Sunday school procession, and indeed children took the central role. The scholars of the radical Union School processed from its location on George Leigh Street, Ancoats, to St Peter’s Fields, ‘where they sung a dirge and then gave three cheers for Hunt’. Continuing on up Deansgate, ‘on passing the house of a person belonging to the yeomanry, an involuntary burst of indignation issued from the crowd. The latter verses of the dirge, “Can we e’er forget our Brothers” were sung in front of the house’. The commemoration was adapted for the current political circumstances, ‘at the New Cross, three times three cheers were given for the Queen’.66 Oldham Local Studies, D-­M54, diaries of William Rowbottom, 16 January 1820. 64 B. Klandermans, ‘Disengaging from movements’, in J. Goodwin and J. M. Jasper (eds), The Social Movements Reader: Cases and Concepts (Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell, 2nd edn, 2009), p. 134. 65 TNA, HO 40­/​13­/​193, Lloyd to Hobhouse, 23 May 1820; HO 40­/1 ​ 4­/6 ​ 2, Chippendale to Sidmouth, 22 July 1820. 66 MO, 19 August 1820. 63



Peterloo and seditious assembly101 1820

While the reform leaders awaited trial, and small groups planned ‘general risings’ in the West Riding, popular agitation sought expression in the campaign for Queen Caroline in 1820. The tale of the Prince Regent’s estranged wife, returning in triumph to claim her throne, is a familiar coda to histories of postwar popular politics. Historians have used the ‘Queen Caroline affair’ as a neat case study to explore the gendered and cultural aspects of politics, illustrating how women were able to shape the tale of the abandoned wife to fit their ideals of women’s rights.67 Yet as Malcolm Chase has argued, this scholarly interest in female agitation for Caroline has perhaps cumulatively implied that it was the only event that occurred in 1820. The trials of the Peterloo radicals and failed ‘risings’ in Huddersfield and elsewhere showed that the viability of Tory aristocratic rule and the meaning of sedition were the key issues at stake, amplified by news of revolutionary movements on the Spanish Peninsula.68 The Caroline agitation nonetheless remains important as another way of the expression of popular politics outside the restrictions of the Six Acts, especially by the female radicals whose political activity had been quashed by the repression of the mass platform almost as quickly as it had arisen in 1819. The agitation may have been short-­term and ineffective, but the popularity of her case nevertheless enabled the radical movement to sustain itself after the blow of the Six Acts. Indeed, following the mourning and seriousness of protest after Peterloo, the Caroline campaign marked a complete contrast, a brief cathartic outburst of anger against George IV and then joy at her acquittal. Notably, as Ruth Mather has pointed out, initial radical enthusiasm for Caroline began in London, while the North West was relatively slow to take up the cause, as they were still reeling from the repercussions of the arrests of radical leaders. The first commemoration of Peterloo in August 1820 was the first time that northern radicals showed interest in the pro-­Caroline campaign.69 The suppression of political activity of all T. Laqueur, ‘The Queen Caroline affair: politics as art in the reign of George IV’, Journal of Modern History, 54 (1982); T. Hunt, ‘Morality and monarchy in the Queen Caroline affair’, Albion, 23:4 (1991); R. Mather, ‘The same power that scourged us is now oppressing you: the Queen Caroline affair in north-­ west England, 1820–21’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 162 (2014). 68 Chase, 1820, p. 2. 69 Mather, ‘The same power that scourged us’, 139, 142, 148, citing TNA, HO 40­/​14­/3 ​ 97, Norris to Sidmouth, 28 October 1820. 67

102

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

kinds after Peterloo created an odd situation of radicals, in effect led by women, finding the only way they could express themselves was in support of the powers of a most unlikely heroine, a disgraced queen. In November and December 1820, the defeat of the bill of pains and penalties against Caroline was celebrated with bonfires, or illuminations in windows, in almost every town and village in the country. Illuminations were a common means of demonstrating political adherences during elections and national events such as naval victories and the coronations of monarchs. While the authorities looked back in triumph at their suppression of the ‘general risings’, presenting silver cups among themselves at loyalist meetings and dinners, the rest of the populace took the opportunity to reclaim the use of the streets for political symbolism in support of Caroline. More militantly, parading with flags and banners openly flouted the 1819 legislation specifically prohibiting such displays of political symbolism.70 In Bolton, ‘a large body of inhabitants proceeded from near the Britannia public house, through the town with flambeaux and fourteen flags, cheering as they passed the houses of those distinguished for their love of freedom and groaning and hissing at those of the Queen’s enemies’.71 Nicholas Rogers has commented on how these highly ritualised movements created a ‘contested topography of political authority’.72 In the urban areas, support for Caroline was clearly marked out in light against the dark of entrenched loyalism. In Manchester, the Manchester Observer reported, ‘the neighbourhoods which are inhabited by the useful and industrious classes were brilliantly illuminated’, particularly New Cross, Oldham Street and Great Ancoats (the radical locale examined in vignette 1), whereas the wealthier areas in the centre of town were wrapped in the deepest gloom. King Street was appropriately enough in the ‘valley of the shadow of death’ ­… The Exchange and Police Office were, of course, in total darkness. Piccadilly scarcely exhibited a light.73

Similarly, in Leeds, in the bourgeois areas around Park Square, great ‘numbers of houses ­… were altogether in darkness’, whereas in the solidly working-­ class East End, ‘the illuminations were pretty near

Leeds Intelligencer, 18 December 1820; Mather, ‘The same power that scourged us’, 150. 71 MO, 18 November 1820. 72 N. Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 263. 73 MO, 25 November 1820. 70



Peterloo and seditious assembly103

universal’.74 Mather notes how this visible distinction between the ‘industrious’ poor and the ‘idle’ gentry in effect subverted the predominant rhetoric of the poor law, thereby ‘asserting the political legitimacy’ of the working classes.75 The celebrations were not solely urban, and involved villages on a scale not seen since the burnings of effigies of Thomas Paine in 1792–3. Indeed, the meanings of the rituals of the Paine burnings were subverted. The government’s witnesses for the prosecution and the ‘green bag’ of evidence, symbolising government complicity and corruption, were ‘tried’ and burned in effigy.76 The agitation also occurred in areas that did not usually report radical activity. In just one report in the York Herald of 25 November 1820, for example, celebrations were recorded in Aldborough near Richmond, Bedale, Cawood, Guisborough, Howden, Knaresborough, Morton-­upon-­Swale, Pocklington, Scarborough, Stokesley, Topcliffe, Redcar, Welburn and other places in the North Riding.77 In the larger industrial towns with the most turbulent histories of political agitation, by contrast, the loyalist authorities clearly regarded the Caroline agitation as potentially disorderly, if not dangerously radical. The mayors, boroughreeves and magistrates of Leeds, Preston, Bolton, Manchester and Salford attempted to ban illuminations, as did the constables of Oldham and Ashton-­under-­Lyne.78 These actions also demonstrated a collective memory of political landmarks, and in some cases sought to subvert loyalist meanings associated with such sites. Hence in Ashton-­under-­Lyne, pro-­Caroline supporters ‘planted a liberty tree to the pump in Old Street where radicals had formerly received a dousing at the hands of Church and King mobs’.79 The queen’s death in August 1821 marked the end of this heterotopy, and, coinciding with both the second anniversary of Peterloo and with the country folk rushbearing in the Manchester region, again allowed radicals to use tradition to make contemporary political points. In south-­east Lancashire, rushcarts paraded the streets during Wakes holidays bearing the sign, ‘Britons lament your Queen!’80 The shared identity that Peterloo had fostered among the d ­ ifferent LM, 18 November 1820. Mather, ‘The same power that scourged us’, 152. 76 MO, 18, 25 November 1820. 77 York Herald, 25 November 1820. 78 MO, 18, 25 November 1820. 79 Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics, pp. 265–6; MO, 25 November, 9 December 1820. 80 MO, 25 August 1821; Mather, ‘The same power that scourged us’, 157. 74 75

104

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

radical groups in northern England and indeed across the country was strengthened because of its emotional nature, but it could not be sustained physically. This was not however for want of trying. While languishing in Ilchester gaol, Henry Hunt called for the formation of a ‘Great Northern Union’. His object was to amass penny subscriptions to ‘secure the election of at least one honest representative’ to parliament, that is, himself. In part visionary, in part egotistical, Hunt sought to lead the North again. With the backing of the Manchester Observer and Black Dwarf, the plan initially was welcomed at meetings in Bolton, Blackburn, Barnsley, Royton and Stockport, reviving some of the old unions. The Manchester radicals met at the Union Rooms, George Leigh Street, on 20 August 1821 to discuss Hunt’s plans. In Leeds, the Great Northern Union were based at the union rooms in Richmond Hill from 1821 to late 1822.81 Branches were also formed in Ashton, Preston, Rochdale and Carlisle. The Great Northern Union was however short-­lived. Radicals were again divided over aims, funding and organisation, especially as Hunt maintained that ‘gentlemen radicals’ were the only people qualified to lead the Union.82 The union movement fell into decline, suffering from the arrests of its leaders and the financial strain of keeping up payments to those imprisoned. By 1824, the union room in Stockport was sold up to meet debts, radical newspapers (most importantly the Manchester Observer and the Black Dwarf) had folded, and no one was left to organise Peterloo commemorations in Manchester or elsewhere.83 Working-­class energies became subsumed in trade union agitation, especially the mass machine-­breaking and strikes that swept through the cotton districts in 1826 and 1829.84 In 1819, radicals rallied to outflank the 1817 legislation in mass meetings that were too large to police, legitimated and indeed masked by a constitutionalist rhetoric.85 The mass platform was a strident movement by the artisans, handloom weavers and factory operatives and other Republican, vol. 5, April 1822, p. 501; MG, 22 September 1822; R. G. Kirby and A. E. Musson, The Voice of the People: John Doherty, 1798–1854 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), p. 415. 82 J. Belchem, Orator Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-­Class Radicalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), pp. 145–51; MO, 25 August–17 November 1821. 83 Read, Peterloo, p. 162. 84 F. Howarth, An Address Occasioned by the Late Riots in the Manufacturing Districts and the Fatal Affray at Rochdale (Rochdale, 1829). 85 Acknowledgements to Robert Poole for advising me on this conclusion. 81



Peterloo and seditious assembly105

workers demanding democracy and the freedom to speak and to meet.86 Peterloo stands out not as an anomaly but as a break in the normal forms of action and repression. The event defies periodisation within a teleology of progress. E. P. Thompson concluded that the making of the English working class was achieved not by an industrial proletariat but by artisanal workers whose domestic industry was in decline, and who looked backwards to a golden age of liberty as much as forward towards democracy. But this was also a transitional period, and factory workers were involved. Class was there, if not in the classic Marxist formulation of struggle followed by revolution, then at least in loyalist elite hegemony versus workers supported by a liberal-­reformist middle class. Both the working and middle classes were shaped by loyalist reaction. Joseph Barrett, a Newton Heath manufacturer, recalled how the morning after Peterloo, ‘an ultra Tory’ came into his warehouse and allegedly said, ‘We could do it better if [we] had to do it again’, in effect by kettling the rally, ‘by stopping up the end of the streets leading from the meeting and planting cannon, and killing ever[y] devil of them’. Barrett’s brother asked him, ‘What would you do for workmen after that?’, a question to which he had no reply.87 Peterloo united different communities across the North in a way that the 1790s corresponding societies or the postwar Hampden clubs failed to do. It did so not through correspondence and delegate conventions but through emotion and narrative, a shared sense of outrage against an event that was more than Manchester and came to represent an attack on the whole working class. The Six Acts were the culmination of years of pressure and debate among the loyalist elites and government, stretching back to the first reaction to mass radical meetings in the 1790s. Peterloo entrenched a loyalist fear of mass working-­class collective action, and defined it in legislation, but at the expense of establishment consensus, as was demonstrated by the Caroline affair. The Six Acts impacted hard, though they resulted in the evolution of inventive modes of action including dinners and the theatre. But it was much more difficult to protest outdoors. The trauma caused by Peterloo among its survivors goes some way to explaining why anger did not mount into further protests. Rather, radical collective action was immediately channelled into commemoration and, as economic prosperity returned, into the campaign for a free press.

Poole, ‘What don’t we know about Peterloo’, 15. R. Poole, ‘Three new accounts of Peterloo’, in Poole, Return to Peterloo, 136.

86 87

Vignette 1

Radical locales

The outlying ‘neighbourhood’ of towns, out-­ townships and industrial settlements formed distinctive places of political activity. They contained locales, places where social activity was concentrated, nodes in which networks were based. Crucially many were outside the policing or jurisdiction of borough authorities. Some locales were short-­lived, as their sense of self-­contained community was broken by urban development or migration, while other locales demonstrated longer continuities in collective action, connections and legacies.1 The Caldewgate area outside the walls of Carlisle in Cumberland; the village of Almondbury outside Huddersfield, and Wibsey Low Moor south of Bradford in the West Riding; the industrial settlement of Charlestown outside Ashton-­under-­Lyne and the village of Royton in Lancashire, and the rapidly expanding townships along the Tame Valley on the border with Cheshire, all shared particular characteristics. These were neighbourhoods with a mixed ethnic and immigrant population mainly involved in domestic and factory textile manufacture and mining. They were situated on the outskirts of a town centre and thus to some extent independent of elite control or surveillance, but near to major routes of communication with similar communities in other towns. These were distinctively outlier places that fostered continuity in political and religious dissent and a strong sense of trade and community independence..Trades societies, radical political groups and religious sects seem to have been more active in these places than in their nearest towns.2 P. Belford, ‘Work, space and power in an English industrial slum: The Crofts, Sheffield, 1700–1850’, in A. Mayne and T. Murray (eds), Explorations in Slumland: The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 108.  2 Oldham Local Studies, D-­ M54, diaries of William Rowbottom; NS, 17 February 1838, 9 May 1839; Philip Lockley, Visionary Religion and

 1



Vignette 1: Radical locales107

This vignette is a case study of another radical locale: the industrial districts to the north of nineteenth-­century Manchester. Paul Pickering’s study of the Chartist movement of the late 1830s and 1840s highlighted the ‘heartland of Manchester radicalism at New Cross’. He argued that Chartism flourished in the tight cluster of streets between St George’s Road and Little Ireland. The resident Irish handloom weavers formed a ‘wall of brotherhood’ bound by kinship, ethnic and religious ties that translated easily into ‘fireside Chartism’, that is, a political movement that spread through its grass roots.3 This vignette demonstrates that the concentration of radicals in and around Ancoats was the culmination of a much longer tradition of activity. Political activism did not appear out of nowhere, but was built up over generations and a longer rate of stability than perceptions of an area populated predominantly by migrants might suggest. The locale comprised the districts of Ancoats, New Cross, Angel Meadow and St George’s. To its fullest extent it covered just over a square kilometre, corresponding to district 13 of the 1841 census and police district 1. New Cross formed the focal point, from which Oldham Road headed north out of the town and Great Ancoats Street stretched east and southwards. The area was defined by its industrial character. It had one of the earliest clusters of steam-­powered factories in the world, dominated by McConnel and Kennedy’s and Murray’s cotton mills, the first of which was completed in 1798. Rochdale and Ashton canals supplied the mills with water and a transport link from the Irish to the North seas, and in 1839, the area was dissected by the Manchester to Leeds railway. The gridiron streets of cheap working-­ class housing built around the factories, moreover, was a haphazard if ‘pioneering experiment in urban design’.4 Ancoats was already one of the most densely populated districts of Manchester by 1811 and by 1841 had a population of over 42,000 (out of a total population of about 163,000). Manchester statistical society calculated that, in 1840, New Cross and Radicalism in Early Industrial England: From Southcott to Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 63, 73.  3 P. A. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 46.  4 A. Kidd, ‘Ancoats: from industrialisation to regeneration’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 107 (2013), 121; J.  Parkinson-­Bailey, Manchester: An Architectural History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 20, 49; I. Miller and C. Wild (eds), A. and G. Murray and the Cotton Mills of Ancoats (Lancaster: Oxford Archaeology, 2007).

108

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

Ancoats were 43 per cent Irish, while New Town, further north along the Oldham Road, was 62 per cent Irish. A high proportion of the Irish immigrants originated from County Mayo and County Roscommon, and a majority became handloom weavers.5 William Beaver Neale’s polemic on the causes of juvenile delinquency in Manchester in 1840 was just one example of middle-­class misunderstanding and fears of these working-­class residential areas. Decades before William Booth’s influential social mapping of London, Neale employed the telling phrase ‘moral topography’ to explain his methodology for classifying St George’s and New Cross as ‘principally occupied by the criminal portion of society’. In 1842, the assistant poor law commissioner bemoaned the ‘extreme indigence’ of the Irish handloom weavers in Angel Meadow and St George’s, but rightly concluded that the poor sanitation and overcrowding had directly caused the cholera outbreaks there.6 Radicals in the 1790s lived and met across Manchester, but between 1796 and 1803 the republican United Englishmen (UE) were concentrated in this locale. United Irish emissaries were sent to Lancashire with a view to co-­ordinating the Irish Rebellion with French revolutionaries. The UE were home-­grown from remnants of the radical societies and they maintained secular aims distinct from the separatist Catholic identity of the Irish groups.7 Surviving evidence comes from the admittedly highly dubious spies’ reports to magistrates and testimonies at UE trials, but even when discounting their exaggerations, it is evident that Ancoats was the central area of activity. Like many underground secret societies, they were organised in cells and divisions. Iain McCalman has depicted the underground world of London inns and private houses, where UE cells met with UI emissaries under the cover of raucous private drinking and debating clubs.8 Similarly, the Manchester UE frequented small R. Dennis, English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century: a Social Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 72; J. Dale, ‘A brief synopsis of the Irish in the St George sub-­registration districts’, www.rootsweb.ancestry.com­/​~irlmayo2­/​manchester_​irish_​census_​stgeorge_​ 16-­29_​1841.html, accessed 14 June 2014.  6 W. B. Neale, Juvenile Delinquency in Manchester (Manchester, 1840), p. 8; Poor Law Commission, Local Reports on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population (London, 1842), p. 313.  7 A. Booth, ‘The United Englishmen and radical politics in the industrial north-­west of England, 1795–1803’, IRSH, 31:3 (1986), 276; M. Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).  8 I. McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and  5



Vignette 1: Radical locales109

pubs close to their residences. The secretaries of divisions met at the Lower Ship Inn on Shudehill in summer 1797. A spy informed on the ‘Irish delegates who met at the Grey Horse in Angel Meadow’ throughout 1797–8. His list of suspects shows that most were cotton spinners and handloom weavers, and unsurprisingly, most lived or lodged nearby in the close network of streets in Ancoats and off Oldham Road, or just over the river in Salford (see figure 4).9 During the trials of the UE, the prosecution focused on the Fire Engine pub on Lees or Leigh Street, Ancoats, kept by Isaac and Mary Perrins. Isaac Perrins had been a champion boxer but retired in 1789 to take up the post of ‘inspector of engines and conductor of firemen’, hence the name of his other venture, the pub. UE division 1 allegedly met there, and the UI delegate James O’Coigley, tried for treason in 1798, was alleged to have lodged there during his visit to Manchester in June 1797.10 James Dixon was arrested on a charge of high treason in the Archer on Dale Street in April 1798. The UE did venture into the town centre: division 2 met at the Buck and Hawthorne on St Ann’s Square, and division 3, led by the spy Robert Gray, met at the White Hart off Withy Grove. They sought financial support from middle-­ class reformers but mistrust between the two groups was overtly evident. Entrenched internal divisions and ideological differences further decimated the movement well before the arrests of its leaders led to its ultimate demise by 1802.11 The locale nevertheless remained a centre for activity among the Irish and weavers. St George’s Fields were used solely by handloom weavers for meetings during their strikes of 1808 and 1818, and by powerloom weavers in 1826 and 1829. Repeal campaigners used the fields periodically during the mid-­1830s. The Irish Confederate movement had its stronghold in the locale in 1848, with its central club room at Whittaker’s Temperance Hotel at 93 Great Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 11.  9 TNA, HO 42­/​45­/​555, deposition of Robert Gray, 12 April 1798; HO 42­/​ 455­/​535, T. B. Bayley’s notes on the Irish delegates, 19 March 1798; PC 1­/​ 3118, ‘papers relating to the United Irishmen and United Englishmen’, 1798. 10 TNA, HO 42­/​45­/​522, examination of Mary Perrins, 14 April 1798; HO 42­/​ 45­ /​ 528, examination of James Dixon, 5 May 1798; http:­/​­/​pubs-­of-­ manchester.blogspot.co.uk­/​2010­/​02­/​fire-­engine-­george-­leigh-­street.html, accessed 14 June 2014. 11 TNA, HO 42­/​45­/​555, examination of Robert Gray, 12 April 1798; Trial of Arthur O’Connor, James O’Cogley, John Binns … ­ for High Treason (London, 1798).

4  Radical addresses and meeting sites, north Manchester, 1789–1820.



Vignette 1: Radical locales111

Ancoats Street, and other clubs based in pubs on Rochdale Road and Oldham Road.12 E. P. Thompson stated that artisans from the neighbourhood of Manchester composed the main groups attending mass meetings in St Peter’s Fields and the March of the Blanketeers in March 1817. The factory hands working in central Manchester could not take the day off to go to meetings nor risk the long trip to London.13 An analysis of the addresses of those arrested for taking part in the march suggests that the Blanketeers had a large north Mancunian contingent. Out of 251 arrested and detained in the New Bailey prison, 186 names were listed with addresses in documents sent by the magistrates to the Home Office. Of these, most of the names were located in the locale; there were few from Chorlton-­Row or other working-­class residential areas south of the city or in Salford. There were 77 weavers, that is, 41 per cent of the total. The rest of the Blanketeers worked in the other textile trades, including spinners and other factory workers. There were also several skilled artisans, including joiners, shoemakers, machine-­ makers and tailors. Those arrested were therefore representative of the social and age profile of working men in Manchester. Some of the men had Irish or Scottish surnames, but most were English.14 The handloom weavers in particular were suffering low wages, and some of the factory workers had recently been laid off, but, as magistrate Reverend William Hay remarked in his notes on the depositions, ‘only one was receiving parish pay’ from the poor rates.15 These were men with something still to lose in the risk of the endeavour. The locale was clearly a node for political activity and networks. One Blanketeer, William Colman, an eighteen-­ year-­old apprentice weaver living on Club Row, claimed that he had heard about the government’s plans to suspend habeas corpus when it was discussed ‘by scores at New Cross in Manchester, a great place for news’.16 Contemporary engravings of New Cross illustrate it as a convergence of roads and people, and thus information and movement.17 The surviving Home Office lists show that Cropper Street had the TNA, HO 42­/​180­/​143, 1808; HO 44­/​16­/​44, 1826; TS 11­/​137­/​part II, Liverpool winter assizes, 1848; Morning Chronicle, 5 September 1818; MG, 25 July 1829, 22 March 1834. 13 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2nd edn, 1968), p. 709. 14 TNA, HO 42­/​172­/1 ​ 52, lists of arrested Blanketeers, March 1817. 15 TNA, HO 42­/​162­/3 ​ 39, Hay to Home Office, 24 March 1817. 16 TNA, HO 42­/​164­/5 ​ 4, examination of William Colman, March 1817. 17 Illustrated London News, 27 August 1842 (frontispiece). 12

112

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

largest proportion of Blanketeers arrested out of all the streets. Cropper Street pops up throughout the records of radical activity from 1812 to 1842. Situated off Oldham Road on the boundary with Miles Platting, it formed one of a couple of strings of terraces erected on a building ground still surrounded by fields and a coal pit, and thus somewhat isolated from the centre. The 1818 ratebook listed 83 houses on the street, with a population of around 600. Most households had only one family, with perhaps a couple of lodgers: that is, these were not overcrowded slums quite yet.18 The residents of Cropper Street shared a lineage of political activism. Blanketeers Edward Philips, aged nineteen, and John Philips, aged twenty-­four, lived at number 67. Both had ‘son of Thirty Eight’ written next to their names on the Home Office list: they were indeed the sons of Edward Philips, one of the ‘Thirty Eight’ radicals arrested at the Prince Regent’s Arms on Ancoats Lane in 1812. Reform meetings were also held at the crofts on the side of the canal acqueduct on Ancoats Lane, described in the trial as not a ‘public place’ but a ‘quietish place’. Several of the other reformers also lived in or around Ancoats. While incarcerated in Lancaster Castle, another of the Thirty Eight, Charles Smith, wrote to James Smith of Great Ancoats Street, reaffirming his faith in ‘a full radical complete reform in the House of Commons’.19 The Blanketeers John Pendleton lived at number 65 Cropper Street; Spencer Ashton (69); John Gibson (61), and James Scowcroft (36). All were weavers in their early twenties. As neighbours, it is highly likely these men were friends, sharing their working culture and leisure time. These connections were evident at Peterloo. Michael Bush calculated that the greatest number of Manchester inhabitants injured on 16 August 1819 came from New Cross and Ancoats, each having eighty people in the casualty relief list. A dozen of those injured came from Cropper Street and Pump Street. None can be identified in the names or addresses of the Blanketeers but again it is likely they knew each other (that is, the Blanketeers at numbers 61, 65, 67 and 69 must have known Ann Bickerstaff, aged twenty-­two at number 63, listed in the Peterloo relief list as ‘carried off the field for dead’, and James Rhodes, a 46-­year-­old weaver at number 66, ‘sabred severely’). Bush concludes that ‘people came to St Peter’s Field in communal parties MALS, M9­/​40­/​2­/​85, Manchester ratebook, 1818, pp. 137–9, www.findmy​ past.co.uk, accessed 1 August 2014. 19 K. Binfield, The Writings of the Luddites (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), p. 193, citing TNA, HO 42­/1 ​ 29, Smith to Smith, 30 June 1812; A Correct Report of the Proceedings on the Trial of Thirty-­Eight Men (Manchester, 1812), p. 104. 18



Vignette 1: Radical locales113

which tended to stick together when there’, again belying the idea that Manchester was composed of a disparate proletariat.20 Radical residence in the street continued and developed, it seems, a growing identity that defined itself by such residence rather than belonging to a wider group such as a political union. ‘A weaver, Cropper Street’ subscribed threepence to the cause of ‘infidel’ socialist Richard Carlile in 1821.21 The next evidence of activity came from a glut of petitions in 1831–2. In February 1831, a petition for the abolition of slavery was presented to parliament, signed among others by ‘the inhabitants of Cropper Street, Manchester’. On 30 June, Henry Hunt presented a petition for universal suffrage, annual parliaments and the secret ballot ‘from the inhabitants of Cropper Street, Manchester’, signed by 500 people. On 15 July, Hunt presented another petition from ‘the single and married women of Cropper Street’ for the repeal of the Corn Laws and the East India monopoly, and the abolition of slavery. In February 1832, though he disagreed with it, Lord Althorp presented a petition calling for an enquiry into the Peterloo Massacre, ‘agreed to at a meeting held at Cropper-­street, Manchester, but it bore only the signature of Mr Samuel Hewett, the Chairman’.22 It is unclear whether the signatures were collected on site or sanctioned by the working-­class political union, whose headquarters were on Tib Street. Either way, it is clear that the residents shared an identity which was distinctive enough to organise four separate petitions to parliament independently of any other political group. Cropper Street was en route to St George’s Fields and therefore, although isolated from other streets, was used to large numbers of people passing through during agitation. There were also indications of the sectarian nature of its residents. The St George’s area had already experienced riots between Irish Catholics and Protestants M. Bush, The Casualties of Peterloo (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2005), pp. 18, 70, 138, from the Peterloo relief lists now in the John Rylands Library; MALS, M9­/​40­/​2­/​81, 85, Manchester ratebooks, 1818, www.findmypast.com. 21 Republican, vol.1, February 1821, p. 14. 22 Mirror of Parliament, vol.1, 3 February 1831, p. 5; Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, vol. 4, House of Commons, 30 June 1831, col. 499, 15 July 1831, col. 1317; vol.10, 10 February 1832, col.196, http:­/​­/​hansard.millbanksystems.com, accessed 14 June 2014; Asiatic Journal, vol.6, no.23 (1831), p. 240. A Samuel Hewitt, printer of Mosley Street, was listed as a major investor in the Manchester, Cheshire and Staffordshire Railway, 1837: Accounts and Papers: Railway Subscription Contracts, vol. 48 (London, 1837), p. 283. 20

114

Spaces of exclusion, 1789–1830

during Orange societies’ processions. The newspapers reported that on the Orange anniversary of 12 July 1830, ‘a party of eight or ten men disturbed the whole neighbourhood of Cropper Street, Manchester, by running through the streets ­… yelling out “the lives of the Protestants” and “the Lives of no.67”. They broke the windows of no. 67 and dragged the inhabitants out of bed and beat them’.23 This suggests that Irish Protestants were resident, though again it is difficult to uncover why exactly the family (headed by a Thomas Chayner) in that house were targeted. The largest concentration of Irish in district 13 in the 1841 census lived on Cropper Street and Back Cropper Street.24 69 Cropper Street had been the home of the Blanketeer, Spencer Ashton. Twenty-­four years later, in late 1841, number 69’s head of household, Daniel Donovan, was nominated and elected delegate to the Chartist National Convention. Donovan was a weaver originally from Cork, Ireland, and became a polymath activist. He served as president of the Manchester powerloom weavers’ union that headed the tumultuous ‘plug’ strikes of 1842, as well as a popular Chartist lecturer. In December 1842, he was again elected to the convention, together with Maurice Donovan (who was also secretary of the powerloom weavers) and M. Metcalf, both of whom also lived on Cropper Street. Daniel subscribed to the Chartist Co-­operative Land Company in 1847 and served yet again as convention delegate in 1848. He culminated his activism as one of the main leaders of the Irish Confederates, for which he was tried for treason at Liverpool assizes in winter 1848.25 In March 1839, the various radical groups in Manchester published a list of their subscriptions to the Chartist ‘National Rent’ in order to promote a spirit of transparency about the amount of income the central committee was receiving. Most on the list were trades bodies such as the operative spinners, many of whom then elected delegates to the National Convention. But also on the list was Elizabeth Pendleton, resident of Cropper Street, who gave a donation of eleven shillings ninepence. She was listed again as a resident of Boardman Square, together with James Brooks and John Neil, subscribing more than a pound. Boardman Square formed a clutch of small streets a little further up Oldham Road, and similarly stood out as a location where several Peterloo victims and Annual Register for the Year 1830 (1831), p. 122. Dale, ‘A brief synopsis of the Irish’. 25 NS, 18 December 1841, 17 December 1842; TNA, BT 41­/​474­/​2659, subscribers to the Chartist Co-­operative Land Company, 1847; TS 11­/​137­/​part II, Liverpool winter assizes, 1848; E. and R. Frow, Manchester and Salford Chartists (Fulwood: Lancashire Community Press, 1996), p. 87. 23 24



Vignette 1: Radical locales115

then Chartists were resident. According to the 1841 census, Elizabeth was married to a John Pendleton, who may have been the Blanketeer of the same name of Cropper Street arrested in 1817. In any case, the list puts the subscribers on a par with the more collective trades’ based groups, and suggests that Cropper Street and Boardman Square were radical locales led by independent individuals. A Chartist meeting was held in the square on 17 July 1839.26 By the 1840s, Manchester had expanded considerably southwards on the former Chorlton Hall estate and beyond the Medlock river. This demographic shift was reflected in the structure of radical and trades’ organisation and meeting sites. The National Charter Association operated a district system, each of which had its own character shaped by its residential makeup. District number 6, for example, were the Irish Chartists at Ashley Lane, Irish Town, who took a ‘room occupied by the Socialists’ in June 1839.27 The nomination lists to the Chartist general delegate councils in 1841 and 1842 illustrate the range of the different groupings (see figure 5). Delegates from the Carpenters’ Hall, a main meeting site situated to the south of the town near the river Medlock, came not from the immediate area around but from Ancoats and New Islington, showing how this locale sustained radical activists.28 Subscribers to the Chartist Co-­operative Land Company in 1847 (discussed in chapter 7) were much more numerous, with the location of over a thousand members reflecting the more widespread extent of working-­class residences across Manchester and Salford, though again there were significant clusters in Ancoats and St George’s.29 Emma Griffin’s study of nineteenth-­ century working-­ class autobiographies notes in relation to active Chartists, ‘what is most remarkable is the fact that these political activists came from a social constituency with almost no tradition or experience of political action’.30 This Lancashire County RO, PL 27­/​11, trial of John Kay, 19 August 1839; TNA, HO 107­/​574­/​8­/​8­/​11, 1841 census, Elizabeth Pendleton (b.1791) and John Pendleton (b.1796), Cropper Street, www.findmypast.co.uk. The Home Office records listed Blanketeer John Pendleton as aged 24 in 1817, i.e., born in 1793. 27 NS, 29 June 1839. 28 NS, 18, 24 December 1841, 29 January, 30 April, 23 July, 6 August 1842. 29 TNA, BT 41­/​474­/​2659, list of subscribers to the Chartist Co-­operative Land Company, 1847. 30 E. Griffin, ‘The making of the Chartists: popular politics and working-­class autobiography in early Victorian Britain’, EHR, 129:538 (2014), 581. 26

5  Chartist meeting sites and addresses of members nominated to the 1841–2 National Convention, Manchester.



Vignette 1: Radical locales117

vignette modifies her generalisation. Mass collective action may have been novel in some areas, but certainly in radical locales like Ancoats, there was a long-­serving tradition of activism of various types among its weavers, spinners and other workers that stretched back at least to the radical societies of the 1790s­– ­that is, over forty years­– ­if not even earlier. Though it is difficult to track direct personal connections from generation to generation, locales nevertheless fostered traditions of independence and organisation that fed into each successive movement. Moreover, these were not bounded spaces or ghettos, but places of the continual making of political connections and legacies.

II

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

Prelude

The reform crisis, 1830–2

The reform movement revived after the retirement of Lord Liverpool as prime minister in 1827. Political opportunities were opened by the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 and the passage of Catholic emancipation in 1829. In July 1830, the second French Revolution, though in effect merely replacing one branch of the restored monarchy with another, bolstered radical calls for reform. Severe economic depression heightened discontent. Mass strikes swept across the cotton districts in late summer 1830 and the Swing riots broke out in southern England. The reform movement was encouraged further by the coming to power of the Whig reformer Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey, in November 1830.1 Over 120 political unions were formed between January 1830 and May 1832, and more than half were based in northern textile manufacturing towns.2 Political unions defied the 1799 and 1819 legislation against political societies, but Earl Grey initially regarded them as useful demonstrations of public support for his reform bill. This time, the Metropolitan and Birmingham political unions led the way. Henry Hunt, elected MP for Preston, distanced himself from the political unions, preferring to revive his idea of a Great Northern Union, a circle of northern towns that were sites of his regular speechmaking itinerary. Some groups, including at Chorley, joined his plan, but the rest were

I. Newbold, Whiggery and Reform, 1830–41: The Politics of Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 51. The historiography of popular politics and the 1832 Reform Act remains thin, with the exceptions of N. Lopatin-­Lummis, Political Unions, Popular Politics and the Great Reform Act of 1832 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999); G. Pentland, ‘Scotland and the creation of a national reform movement, 1830–1832’, HJ, 48:4 (2005).  2 Lopatin-­Lummis, Political Unions, pp. 101, 160.  1

122

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

hesitant and the plan again failed to take off.3 In the West Riding, the revival of reform societies drew from pre-­existing activity and organisation, especially ‘short time’ committees of the campaign for factory reform, Owenite socialism and co-­operation. The first political unions in the Huddersfield district were formed in the outlying villages of Almondbury and Kirkheaton in the first half of 1830, another example of the ‘neighbourhood’ leading the town. From 1831, a consolidated Huddersfield political union met at the Pack Horse Inn, dubbed Union Hall, adjoining Swan Yard.4 Swan Yard acted as the physical and symbolic nerve centre of free speech and its distribution. Joshua Hobson operated the Union Free Press from his shop in the yard, printing handbills and posters for the Huddersfield Short Time Committee and the Political Union, together with the first eight issues of The Voice of the West Riding newspaper.5 Its place at the heart of radical networks continued: the Radical and Chartist newsroom was based at Swan Yard in early 1839.6 The ‘war of the unstamped’ was not just about the freedom of speech; it concerned the spaces of speech: the physical operation of the presses in buildings, networks of distribution and the individuals who took the risk and the expense to print political newspapers. Throughout the reform crisis, government actively pushed its Stamp Office agents to investigate and close down presses publishing unstamped material and the works of Richard Carlile among others. In March 1832, Joseph Swann of Stockport was imprisoned for three months, and Abel Heywood, bookseller and newsagent of Manchester (and future Chartist), was fined forty-­eight pounds for selling unstamped publications.7 James Acland was imprisoned in Bristol for printing libellous material in his unstamped paper. Upon his release, he relocated to Hull, where he continued his crusade against elite corruption in his Hull Lopatin-­Lummis, Political Unions, pp. 82, 47. J. Halstead, ‘The Huddersfield Short Time Committee and its radical associations, c.1820–76’, in J. A. Hargreaves and E. A. H. Haigh (eds), Slavery in Yorkshire: Richard Oastler and the Campaign Against Child Labour in the Industrial Revolution (Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield Press, 2012), p. 118; Huddersfield and Halifax Express, 12 March, 1 October 1831.  5 J. Halstead, ‘The Voice of the West Riding: promoters and supporters of a provincial unstamped newspaper’, in C. Wrigley (ed.), On the Move: Essays in Labour and Transport History Presented to Philip Bagwell (London: Hambledon Press, 2003), pp. 30, 48.  6 LM, 2 February 1839.  7 PMG, 10, 17 March 1832.  3  4



Prelude: The reform crisis, 1830–2123

Portfolio in 1831 until he was imprisoned again for fifteen months. He supported the radical Hull and Sculcoates Political Union and then moved to Manchester, where he became an Anti-­Corn Law League lecturer.8 Joshua Hobson was prosecuted under the Six Acts by the Stamp Office in August 1833 and sentenced to six months in prison.9 Tensions between the middle-­class reformers and working-­class radicals became a defining feature of the reform agitation. Bolton Political Union was one of the first associations to be formed in April 1830 by master weavers William Naisby and John O’Brien. It held its committee meetings at the Wheatsheaf Inn on Windy Bank and was relaunched on a more radical programme at a public meeting at the theatre in October 1830, with further meetings there in 1831. It shifted to calling for universal suffrage and annual parliaments in order to attract weavers to its membership, 4,000 of whom had joined by January 1832. This move, however, alienated its middle-­class supporters, who mistrusted its aims and especially its tactics during the ‘Days of May’ in 1832 when it put together a petition signed by over 20,000 calling for parliament to withhold supplies or funds to the Crown until the reform bill passed.10 Manchester and Leeds had several political unions, which were also split along class lines. Within weeks of their formation in November 1830, the Manchester Political Union (MPU) boasted 3,000 members, predominantly shopkeepers and businessmen. Their committee was dominated by middle-­class veterans of the postwar reform movement, including the major manufacturers Thomas and Richard Potter and Absalom Watkin, and John Edward Taylor, editor of the Manchester Guardian. Their main goals were representation for the town and for themselves and free trade for their businesses.11 There was some effort at class co-­operation with the Political Union of the Working Classes G. Bush, Bristol and its Municipal Government, 1820–51 (Bristol: Bristol Record Society, 1976), p. 57; J. Acland, The Hull Portfolio: Or Memoirs and Correspondence of James Acland, vol. 1 (Hull, 1831); TNA, HO 52­/​20­/​248, Acland to Home Office, 4 October 1832.  9 Halstead, ‘Huddersfield Short Time Committee’, p. 122. 10 Lopatin-­Lummis, Political Unions, pp. 44–5; MT, 23 October 1830; Bolton Chronicle, 19 March 1831; MG, 22 October 1831; Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, vol. 12, House of Commons, 17 May 1832, cols 1032–5, http:­/​­/​ Harsard.millbanksystems.com, accessed 14 June 2014. 11 MALS, M219­/​1­/​2–3, Absalom Watkin papers, 1830–2. See M. J. Turner, Reform and Respectability: The Making of a Middle-­class Liberalism in Early Nineteenth-­Century Manchester (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), chapter 8.  8

124

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

(PUWC), particularly on the part of Archibald Prentice, who sought an eventual goal of universal suffrage once the working classes had become sufficiently educated.12 Two representatives of the MPU attended the committee of PUWC: R. J. Richardson, master joiner of Salford who was also secretary of the Manchester Operatives’ trade union, and Elijah Dixon, a freethinker who had been a Blanketeer arrested in 1817. Both men later became leaders in the anti-­new poor law and Chartist movements.13 The MPU and PUWC nevertheless distrusted each other, and the tense relationship became a battle over space and who had the right to represent Manchester in petitions to parliament. In 1831, the MPU organised a public meeting for 12 October to discuss the House of Lords’ rejection of the first reform bill. After a preparatory committee meeting at the town hall, the middle-­class reformers hired the Riding School on Lower Mosley Street. A site for theatrical comedy as well as for equestrian training, the school could hold 4,000 people. James Burt, boroughreeve and manufacturer, was called to the chair but his opening words were drowned out by the large crowds both inside and outside the building. Events deviated from the carefully orchestrated and moderate meeting planned by the MPU. The president and secretary of the PUWC moved an amendment that the meeting should adjourn to Camp Field, off Deansgate. The boroughreeve and constables rejected the adjournment as they ‘refused to recognise’ the working-­class political union. Burt asserted that he ‘would only consent to call and preside at a meeting of the Inhabitants of Manchester held within doors. They might choose the largest place in the town for that purpose, but indoors it must be’.14 Fear of another Peterloo was probably at the forefront of his mind, as well as a legacy of the seditious meetings acts against unadvertised mass open-­air meetings, but it was also an issue of control. The PUWC in turn rejected the decision. Burt refused to be involved further, but the committee of the MPU eventually decided to reconvene Lopatin-­Lummis, Political Unions, p. 56; A. Prentice, Historical Sketches and Personal Recollections of Manchester (Manchester, 1851), p. 395. 13 M. Goffin (ed.), The Diaries of Absalom Watkin: A Manchester Man, 1787– 1861 (Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1993), p. 147; United Trades Co-­ operative Journal, 5 June 1830. 14 Manchester Chronicle, 15 October 1831, original emphasis; MALS, M219­/​ 1­ /​ 2–3, Absalom Watkin papers, ‘Resolutions of the public meeting, 22 September 1831’, ‘Draft resolutions for the public meeting on the rejection of the Reform Bill, 12 October 1831’­– ­note on the back reads ‘Meeting upset by the Radicals’; Prentice, Historical Sketches, p. 398. 12



Prelude: The reform crisis, 1830–2125

6  ‘St Matthew’s Church, Camp Field, Manchester’, 1830, Harwood-Watkins.

on Camp Field in the hope of maintaining public order. The radical requisitionists pointedly marched four abreast out of the Riding School, down Peter Street to pay homage to the site of Peterloo, before going the short distance down Deansgate to Camp Field.15 Camp Field was another space of making do, a scrubland site on the edge of development by St Matthew’s church (see figure 6), used by trade unions for their meetings. As discussed in chapter 2, the farrago repeated the clash of authority in 1795 when the Constitutional Society met there after the boroughreeve refused their amendment to the town’s address about the anti-­seditious bills. The difficulties of holding an ad hoc mass meeting outdoors were evident as it took some time for the MPU to requisition some carts and wagons from the Police Office yard and the New Quay Company, no doubt sanctioned by Mark Philips, the company’s Manchester Chronicle, 15 October 1831; Diaries of Absalom Watkin, pp. 135–6; Prentice, Historical Sketches, pp. 398–9.

15

126

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

c­ hairman and one of the MPU committee. The platform was initially erected by the church, but as ‘the situation was unfavourable’, it was then dragged into the centre of the ground. The newspapers estimated ‘no less than 100,000 persons’ were present.16 The radicals outlined the symbolism of the site, and in so doing attempted to shape collective memory of place. John Shuttleworth informed the crowd that they were ‘assembled on the very ground which about thirty-­six years ago the first public meeting was held in this town for reform and peace’. He thereby linked the political union with a longer heritage, and furthermore appealed to his own legitimacy as a leader by stating that the radical meeting of 1795 was called and attended by his father and the fathers of some of the other members of the MPU.17 The issue was not only what kind of reform Manchester wanted, but again who had the right to represent the ‘public opinion’ of the town to the king and to parliament. The address to the king as approved by the reform committee on 19 October was entitled ‘the loyal and dutiful address of the undersigned Bankers, Merchants, Traders and other inhabitants of Manchester’.18 Members of the MPU had been among those protesting against exclusion from the Star Inn resolutions of 19 August 1819; but now they enacted the same process of excluding the radical working classes from the body politic. Importantly, the MPU entrenched their association with Peterloo in embodying place as well as in their speeches and banners, by repeatedly processing through St Peter’s Fields. The site was their obvious choice for mass public meetings on 3 May and 13 June 1831.19 Their performances in place thus demonstrated their identity as the legitimate reformers against the more radical working-­class group. The MPU were able to meet in the Manor Court Room and the York Hotel on King Street in 1830, and hold public meetings at the town hall in 1831 and during the ‘Days of May’ in 1832.20 The MPU nevertheless lost control of the mass meeting on 12 October 1831. Richardson and the PUWC pushed through a much more radical motion. Absalom Watkin, writer of the original address, recalled in MT, 15 October 1831. MT, 15 October 1831. 18 MALS, M219­/​1­/4 ​ , Absalom Watkin papers, ‘Address to the King approved by the committee, 19 October 1831’. 19 MG, 7 May, 18 June 1831. 20 Diaries of Absalom Watkin, p. 126; MALS, M91­/​M1­/​33­/2 ​ 7, 101, 165, proceedings of public meetings, 1831–2; Manchester and Salford Advertiser, 22 January 1831; MT, 19 May 1832. 16 17



Prelude: The reform crisis, 1830–2127

his diary that ‘after protesting against it, Mr Potter was compelled to put a mangled version of our Address praying for annual Parliaments, universal suffrage and vote by ballot and we left the ground, tired, baffled, exhausted and chopfallen but congratulating ourselves upon having escaped personal violence’. Two days later, the MPU committee considered refusing to send any ‘expression of public opinion in favour of the Reform Bill’ to parliament and the king ‘for fear of the radicals’. They sought advice from ‘those gentlemen in the town who were most conversant with the rules of public meetings’ whether it would be legal to not send the address with the radical amendment. But the attorney Mr Atkinson could not decide either way. Potter refused to sign the radical address and then ‘swore he would never attend another public meeting but “stay in his warehouse and mind his business”’.21 In exasperation, he therefore sought sanctuary in his own private commercial world. The committee asked Watkin to draw up another address, but national events overtook the local deliberations as parliament was prorogued. Older and Marxist histories of the reform crisis sought a ‘revolutionary moment’ between October 1831 and May 1832. Their attention centred on the Swing riots and the major outbreak of rioting in Bristol, Nottingham and Derby after the Lords’ rejection of the reform bill in October 1831. Later historians argued that though social tensions were heightened, revolution was unlikely.22 The agitation in northern England, moreover, was relatively peaceful compared with elsewhere in the country. Reform bill riots in Derby and Bristol descended into violent outbreaks of anger directed against Tory elites.23 But in northern England, collective agitation remained peaceful or controlled. As seen by the Camp Field debacle, the memory of Peterloo and its repression still loomed large. Magistrates were certainly on heightened alert, and took rumours, however spurious, seriously. The PUWC organised a mass meeting on St George’s Fields in Manchester on 22 January 1832, attended by a reputed 10,000 people. The authorities raised fourteen divisions of military and 1,000 special constables in anticipation of Diaries of Absalom Watkin, pp. 128, 135–7, original emphasis. E. Royle, Revolutionary Britannia? Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain, 1789–1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), chapter 2; D. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 331. 23 J. Beckett, ‘The Nottingham Reform Bill riots of 1831’, Parliamentary History, 24:S1 (2005), 114. 21 22

128

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

trouble. The deputy constable took ten members of the committee into custody, and five were tried at Lancaster assizes.24 Elsewhere in Lancashire, Lord Ribblesdale, who voted against Grey’s reform bill, called in troops from Burnley barracks and armed his own tenants to protect his seat at Gisburn Park in November 1831. Haystacks had been burned in nearby Birstal and the act was labelled as a Swing attack. The close environment of weaving shops in the district fostered rumours that the arsonists would next target Gisburn. An informant to Ribblesdale claimed he was ‘at George Crossling’s shop in Colne when there was [sic] more than ten persons in the shop and one Douglass was reading in the newspaper the account of the Bristol riots’ and that others claimed that a meeting would be held ‘to go to Lord Ribblesdale’s that evening and set fire to his house’. Ribblesdale believed he was saved by the assembling of seventy of his tenants and the appearance of a troop of military passing through the district.25 The largest disturbances occurred in Carlisle in Cumberland. In the first week of November 1831, the outlier district of Caldewgate responded to news of the first rejection of the reform bill by repeatedly parading and ‘executing’ effigies of Lord Wellington and Robert Peel at the market cross (thereby reversing the ritual of the corporation who had burned the works of Thomas Paine on that spot in 1795). The magistrates deemed these actions threatening because of their ritualistic and orderly form. They were followed in the following week by Swing riots, but the agitation was provoked by agents provocateurs whom the authorities employed in order to create an opportunity to arrest the radical leaders.26 Above all, despite petitions to parliament threatening a ‘run on the banks’ and rumours of a general rising during the ‘Days of May’, the ultimate aim of the reformers was reform not destruction of the political system. The splits between moderate middle-­class reformers and working-­class radicals in Manchester, Leeds and elsewhere damaged the coherence of the movement, although this was not as decisive as some histories of the reform crisis have assumed. 1832 marks another shift in the narrative of collective action in this period. The previous part of this book focused on radicals’ battles with loyalist elites over spaces to meet. This part widens its focus to examine battles not just over public space TNA, HO 52­/​15­/​529, Armytage to Melbourne, 12 November 1831; PMG, 4 February 1832. 25 TNA, HO 52­ /​ 15­ /​ 520–6, Ribblesdale correspondence and examinations, 9–12 November 1831. 26 K. Navickas, ‘Captain Swing in the North: the Carlisle riots of 1830’, HWJ, 71 (2011). See chapter 8. 24



Prelude: The reform crisis, 1830–2129

but over the body politic. The ultimate result of the reform agitation was to strengthen the class identities of all parties involved. The next three chapters show how the new reforming governments of the 1830s fostered resentment among the working classes through new legislation, institutions and spaces, which pushed radicals, trade unions and wider communities to combine in much larger and more integrated social as well as democratic campaigns.

4

Embodied spaces and violent protest

The 1830s were the ‘age of reform’. The 1832 Reform Act, the 1833 Factory Act, the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, the 1835 Municipal Corporations Act and the 1839 Rural Constabulary Act, and other legislation, created new institutions that became foci of contestation. The factory and poor law commissions, new boroughs, corporations and police embodied in power and place the new Whig-­liberal regime. Historians have tended to regard the campaigns against these acts separately, but radicals, Tories and aristocratic Whigs framed the reforms as part of the same policy. Much of the reaction was anti-­interventionist, fearing government centralisation over the powers of local authorities.1 The reforms were perceived as depersonalising the individual and attacking the pauper body, the working-­class family and the local community. This chapter shows how the body was a key theme of propaganda against the Whig legislation of the 1830s, and how opponents used corporeal forms of protest against the people and institutions that represented it. Popular protest is corporeal. Protesters demonstrate a collective body, bringing individuals together in a shared sense of self. Assemblies and processions demonstrate a collective body symbolically and physically by force of numbers, and all may be peaceful, but they can also resist using violence, especially against state bodies regarded to be using unjust practices or illegal force against them.2 In their bodily movements, protesters enact a kind of choreography, with gesture P. Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 123; J. Innes, ‘Central government “interference”: changing conceptions, practices, and concerns, c.1700–1850’, in J. Harris (ed.), Civil Society in British History: Ideas, Identities, and Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).  2 S. Amussen, ‘Punishment, discipline and power: the social meanings of ­violence in early modern England’, JBS, 34:1 (1995), 2.  1



Embodied spaces and violent protest131

and ­performance designed to change the spaces in which they occur. Geographers have underlined the significance of embodied spaces in protest, arguing that humans are vectors for interactions between material objects and the environment, in a field invoking the body. Protest is thus a product of, and productive of, ‘affective’ encounters between bodies and their environment.3 Carl Griffin’s study of the Captain Swing agitation in southern England of the early 1830s shows how violence could also be powerfully psychological. Psychologists and sociologists understand violence as more than physical, effected through non-­bodily engagement. Violence is any action that ‘provokes a bodily response through the fear of terror’.4 Threatening letters, attacks on machinery and symbolic totems like effigies and bread soaked in blood deliberately fostered a response of fear.5 In doing so, their makers inflicted disembodied pain upon their targets through the representation of physical pain on embodied representations. Communities had long resisted impressment and the militia ballot, enforcing community justice against state compulsion by attacking the rendezvous-­houses to release the impressed and in defence of the ‘freeborn Englishman’.6 Influenced by theories of progression or Norbert Elias’s model of a ‘civilising process’, historians tended to portray such violence as a backward unthinking reaction that preceded the development of more ‘constitutional’ forms of collective action. The continuity of violent and customary forms of popular resistance in the nineteenth century however belie such teleological typologies.7 Violence was not reactionary, but rather a carefully chosen tool in the repertoire of C. Griffin and A. Evans, ‘On historical geographies of embedded practices and performance’, Historical Geography, 36 (2008), 10; N. Gregson and G. Rose, ‘Taking Butler elsewhere: performativities, spatialities and subjectivities’, E & P D, 18:4 (2000).  4 C. Griffin, ‘Affecting violence: language, gesture and performance in early nineteenth-­century popular protest’, Historical Geography, 36 (2008), 141; C. Griffin, ‘The violent Captain Swing’, P & P, 209 (2010).  5 See A. J. Peacock, Bread or Blood: A Study of the Agrarian Riots in East Anglia in 1816 (London: V. Gollancz, 1965); B. Reay, The Last Rising of the Agricultural Labourers: Rural Life and Protest in Nineteenth-­ Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990).  6 For anti-­impressment riots in Liverpool, see MM, 5 September 1775; TNA, PL 27­/​8­/​part II, Lancashire assizes, 1809–10.  7 C. Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 363; K. Watson (ed.), Assaulting the Past: Violence and Civilisation in Historical Context (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).  3

132

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

­ rotest to strengthen legal contests by radicals and trade unions against p the new legislation. Rather than being singular and divorced from more legitimate forms of claim-­making, moreover, corporeal protest continued to accompany, and sometimes predominate over, petitions or elections to the contested bodies. Spaces of control and resistance Opposition was first aroused concurrently with the reform crisis in 1832, and focused on the government and local authorities’ policies towards the outbreak of a cholera epidemic and issues of public health and poverty. In Carlisle, only a few months after reform bill agitation and eighteen months after Swing riots in the town, riots repeated the same forms of action and sites of protest. The spark was a parliamentary motion on 26 January by Spencer Perceval MP, son of the prime minister assassinated twenty years earlier, for a general fast day to be held on 21 March to pray for national salvation, a relic of the established state that had not been invoked since the depths of wartime.8 The ‘respectable’ inhabitants of the city must have experienced a sense of déjà vu on 21 March 1832, when the weavers carried an effigy of Perceval through the streets with banners, music and lit torches before burning it at the market cross. A weaver named John Morrison was prosecuted for reading the proclamation of the fast ‘either in derision or condemnation’ at the cross, while divine service was being held in the cathedral nearby. The prosecution claimed that ‘the effigy was placed at the prisoner Morrison’s left hand and he repeatedly struck it and cursed it’.9 The violence expressed working-­class fear and anger against what they perceived to be the state’s attack on the pauper body: the cholera would only be exacerbated by a general fast enforced by the rich on those already starving. Violence replaced the more carnivalesque theatre of effigies at elections; this was not simply a cypher for their energy and a rejection of what they saw as the empty rituals of the established church, but a real manifestation of threat. Cholera riots broke out in Liverpool and Leeds in May and June 1832. Crowds targeted the cholera hospitals, set up by the new local boards of health, and the palanquin carts which were rumoured to carry ‘Perceval, Spencer (1795–1859)’, in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons, 1820–1832, ed. D. R. Fisher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), www.historyofparliamentonline.org­/​volume­/​1820–1832­/​mem​ ber­/​perceval-­spencer-­1795–1859.  9 Cumbria RO, D­/​HOD 13­/​61, Cumberland Easter sessions 1832.  8



Embodied spaces and violent protest133

stolen pauper bodies.10 The Anatomy Act was a connected cause. Passed during the same session as the Reform Act, the legislation allowed surgeons to claim the bodies of paupers who had died in workhouses or hospitals if those corpses were unclaimed for burial.11 Gothic literature such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) shaped popular imagination about dissection, and fears were heightened further by the infamous Burke and Hare murders in Edinburgh in 1828. Rumours arose that hospital governors would use the clause to their financial advantage, especially after the new poor law enabled the construction of workhouses as punitive institutions designed to increase efficiency. Marxist historians have argued that the populace regarded the Anatomy Act as a piece of class legislation; Gwyn Williams described it as ‘the pursuit of the propertyless beyond the grave’.12 As with radical reform protests, the issue revolved around the non-­propertied and non-­represented being excluded from the civic body politic. This time, they were excluded not just in life, but also in death. The main opponent of the bill in parliament was Henry Hunt, then MP for Preston, who thereby cemented connections between the issue, radical politics and the legacy of Peterloo.13 The cholera and anatomy rioters mirrored the tactics of food rioters, employing prior threats and community justice against perpetrators of immoral actions seen to have transgressed moral norms. Soon after the passage of the Anatomy Act, on 2 September 1832, a crowd in Manchester attacked the cholera hospital on Swan Street in New Cross, under the suspicion that a boy patient had been ‘burked’. Popular outrage arose when a man opened the coffin of his grandson to find the head of the corpse replaced with a brick. A somewhat macabre demonstration ensued in which the open coffin was paraded around the streets to drum up support for an attack on the building. Furniture and palanquins were ransacked and burned in the street. Twelve men, ‘nearly all S. Burrell and G. Gill, ‘The British cholera riots of 1832’, in M. Holland (ed.), Swing Unmasked: The Agricultural Riots of 1830 to 1832 and their Wider Implications (Milton Keynes: FACHRS Publications, 2005), pp. 196, 202. 11 F. K. Donnelly, ‘The destruction of the Sheffield School of Anatomy in 1835: a popular response to class legislation’, Transactions of the Hunter Archaeological Society, 10:3 (1975), 169. 12 G. Williams, ‘Introduction’, in D. Thompson, The Early Chartists (London: Macmillan, 1971), p. xi. 13 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, vol. 10, House of Commons, 27 February 1832, cols 838–9, http:­/​­/​hansard.millbanksystems.com, accessed 14 June 2014. 10

134

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

Irishmen’, were arrested. The solicitor to the Board of Health requested that the magistrates issue an arrest warrant for the surgeon for cutting the head off the corpse.14 The most tumultuous resistance occurred in Sheffield in 1835. On the evening of 25 January, upon hearing domestic violence near the School of Anatomy on Eyre Street, inhabitants gathered and assumed that the beaten wife was in fact being ‘burked’. The next morning, a crowd completely gutted the building, setting its furniture on fire outside. They attacked fire engines sent to douse the flames and repeatedly returned to the scene after being dispersed by military and special constables. In the evening, the crowd reassembled to attack the adjoining Medical Hall and the house of the surgeon Wilson Overend on Church Street. The Sheffield Independent notably remarked, ‘they seemed more like day-­labourers, desirous of not doing more than a day’s work for a day’s wages, than angry and violent rioters’, mirroring contemporary descriptions of the orderly tactics of the Swing rioters.15 F. K. Donnelly argued that the riot was a ‘dispensation of popular justice rather than [being] politically orientated’.16 This may have been the case, but it nonetheless reflected wider fears of the state attacking the pauper body. Samuel Roberts, as executor of the will of the owner of the building, had refused the Overend family of surgeons use of the rooms and published a pamphlet insinuating about their ulterior motives in setting up the school.17 Roberts was the self-­proclaimed ‘Pauper’s Advocate’ and a strenuous opponent of the new poor law, producing a voluminous number of writings and broadsheets on a variety of perceived injustices, including the game laws, child labour, slavery and drunkenness from at least 1819 until his death in 1848.18 Wilson Overend continued to invoke anger among the metalworkers of Sheffield. He was appointed to the bench in 1842, and like many of his colleagues from the professional class, threw his efforts into attempting to suppress trade unionism. As Christopher Frank notes in his study of the Master and Servant Act, ‘the repeated quashings of PMG, 8 September 1832; R. J. Morris, Cholera 1832: The Social Response to an Epidemic (London: Croom Helm, 1976), p. 110. 15 Sheffield Independent, 31 January 1835; Donnelly, ‘The destruction of the Sheffield School of Anatomy’, 170. 16 Donnelly, ‘The destruction of the Sheffield School of Anatomy’, 171. 17 S. Roberts, The Dissectors Dissected, or the Lecturers Lectured (Sheffield, 1834). 18 S. Roberts, The Negro’s Friend: or the Sheffield Anti-­ Slavery Album (Sheffield, 1826); S. Roberts, Chartism: The Offspring of the New Poor Law (Sheffield, 1839). 14



Embodied spaces and violent protest135

his rulings at the quarter sessions confirmed in the eyes of many that he was a vindictive and partial arbiter’ against the working classes.19 So the issue of cholera was much more than about disease: it typified local and national elites’ attitudes to the poor and the working classes. Anti-­new poor law riots The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act was the most controversial piece of legislation passed in this whole period. The Poor Law Commission, based at Somerset House in London, set up the new poor law boards in southern England first, and, anticipating resistance, did not begin to redraw the boundaries of welfare in the North until 1837. The anti-­new poor law movement was a vital expression of both local and regional solidarity in the industrial North. It drew its strength and prior organisation from the short time committees formed in the early 1830s by workers to campaign for factory reform and shorter working hours, and in turn, it fed directly into both the grievances and organisation of Chartism from 1838 onwards. A loose delegate structure of anti-­poor law associations organised regionally from Bradford and Manchester, gave the movement both momentum and structure that differed from the more diffuse resistance in the rural South.20 There were significant regional differences in the level of popular anti-­new poor law violence. Economic distress did not result automatically in a violent response. Lancashire was surprisingly calm, and apart from some outbursts in Oldham, Rochdale and Colne, even districts with high proportions of struggling handloom weavers, such as Burnley, remained quiet. There was little intimation of discontent in the North and East ridings, again even in places with populations of workers dependent on seasonal labour.21 The anti-­poor law campaign in all these areas focused on peaceful meetings and legal challenges. It also did not take major issue with the new poor law’s aim of removing out-­relief; the C. Frank, Master and Servant Law: Chartists, Trade Unions, Radical Lawyers and the Magistracy in England, 1840–1865 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 161. 20 F. Driver, Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System, 1834–1884 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); N. Edsall, The Anti-­Poor Law Movement, 1834–41 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971); M. E. Rose, ‘The anti-­poor law movement in the North of England’, NH, 1 (1966). 21 D. Ashforth, ‘The urban poor law’, in D. Fraser (ed.), The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1976), p. 131. 19

136

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

old poor law system was hardly generous with out-­relief itself, and there had always been face to face differentials based on the generosity of individual overseers and their attitudes towards the undeserving poor.22 The West Riding of Yorkshire, by contrast, caused much more trouble. Bradford and Huddersfield in particular were centres of open and sustained resistance. The strong sense of independence among the woollen workers of the Spen and Calder valleys, demonstrated in Luddism in 1812 and the ‘risings’ of 1819–20, kept a legacy of physical resistance high in the repertoire of protest tactics. Alfred Power had been appointed as an investigator for the 1833 Factory Commission, and during his visit to Yorkshire he was harassed by short time committees who suspected he was siding with the factory owners. His actions were not forgotten when he returned in 1837, appointed as Assistant Poor Law Commissioner for South Lancashire and the West Riding.23 Power began his visits to the overseers in January 1837. The timing could not have been worse, with the start of a severe recession in the West Riding woollen trade. Although a brief recovery was felt in later 1837–8, it was followed by a severe downturn in the industrial economy across the North.24 Power was given short shrift by the populace wherever he went, and was physically attacked at least three times in the West Riding.25 At Keighley, in March 1837, Power had to delay his visits because of anticipated demonstrations. The authorities switched the venue of meeting from the court house to the Mechanics’ Institute, but despite locking the doors, angry crowds forced their way in. After a tumultuous meeting, Power attempted to leave but had his coat torn off in the melée, which was afterwards displayed in the Institute as a token of the battle.26 The meeting of the Bradford board of guardians at the court house on 30 October 1837 had to be adjourned to the Sun Inn because the crowd made their way into the corridors and attempted to enter the meeting room. Power reported that ‘on leaving the Court House at the close of the meeting, I was violently assaulted by some of the persons assembled outside’.27 Local supporters of the new poor law were ­similarly E. C. Midwinter, Social Administration in Lancashire, 1830–1860 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969), p. 23. 23 J. Knott, Popular Opposition to the 1834 Poor Law (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1986), p. 90. 24 Driver, Power and Pauperism, p. 18. 25 TNA, MH 32­/​63, Power to Poor Law Commission, 8 January 1837. 26 The Times, 28 March 1837. 27 P. Carter (ed.), Bradford Poor Law Union: Papers and Correspondence with the Poor Law Commission, October 1834–January 1839 (Woodbridge: 22



Embodied spaces and violent protest137

targeted. The radical Lawrence Pitkethly accused a reporter from the Huddersfield and Halifax Express of publishing an unfavourable report of an anti-­new poor law meeting on Peep Green on 16 May 1837. At the Huddersfield meeting of guardians the next month, the reporter was dragged out of the room and dropped over the bannisters. He was caught by those at the bottom of the stairs, but a crowd attacked him as he escaped outside. The meeting was followed by burning of effigies of Power and the chairman of the board, again linking physical violence against the person with disembodied representations of pain.28 Violence notably followed refusal of popular demands for the meetings to be opened to the public. Ratepayers actively participated in vestry meetings, and so campaigners felt that the board of guardians’ meetings excluded them from what had formerly been participatory politics in vestries and court houses. The most severe riot in Huddersfield occurred on 5 June 1837. The overseer reported how the Tory-­radical factory reformer Richard Oastler had addressed a large crowd from the window of the Druids Hotel on Ramsden Street, who then marched for a mile to the workhouse at Paddock, where the board of guardians was meeting. The crowd attacked the workhouse, not because it was a ‘Bastille’ (it was the old parochial workhouse), but because they wished to enter the meeting. After tearing down the iron gates, which were locked, ‘it now became unequivocally clear that their object was the destruction of the Poor Law Commissioner or Mr Swain the Chairman of the Guardians who had been rendered unpopular by a handbill which had on the morning of the preceding day been posted on the walls’. The crowd threw stones at the guardians on their way to the Albion Hotel, and then attempted to force their way in. The magistrates however refused to read the Riot Act or call out the military.29 The Poor Law Commissioner blamed their disorganisation for exacerbating the unrest, especially the actions of Mr Battye, the magistrate. Battye had addressed the crowd from the hotel window, allegedly declaring ‘I have been desired to read the Riot Act, but I will not do so, understand me, unless I see a spirit of or acts of violence’. The Commissioner rightly surmised that ‘These words were, in my opinion, calculated to inspire the Mob with a confidence’.30 John Sutcliffe, a recently appointed Whig Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 2004), p. xxxvi, citing TNA, MH 12­/​ 14720, fos 114–15. 28 Huddersfield and Halifax Express, 10 June 1837; LM, 10 June 1837. 29 TNA, HO 52­/​35­/​52, deposition of Thomas Shepherd, 9 June 1837. 30 WYAS, Leeds, WYL 250­/​6­/​2­/​box 1, lieutenancy correspondence, Russell to Harewood, 5 July 1837.

138

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

magistrate in favour of the new poor law, believed that the crowd had been wound up by Oastler and by the printers Hobson and Tinkler, who sold unstamped radical publications. The crowd carefully targeted their opponents, as only the ‘guardians who were known to be favourable to the Law were repeatedly surrounded by the mob’. The intimidation was successful: ‘only eleven out of the thirty-­nine Guardians present voted for electing a clerk’.31 As we will see in the next chapter, popular pressure was an essential accompaniment to administrative resistance to the new poor law by the overseers and other local authorities in charge of implementing the changes. In November 1837, the Poor Law Commission imposed watered-­ down regulations in six unions in south Lancashire and the West Riding.32 Five of the Tory-­led unions acceded, but Bradford, run by Liberals, proved to be a mistake. The Northern Liberator dubbed the next board of guardians’ meeting on 20 November 1837 as the ‘beginning of the civil war­– ­the Battle of Bradford’. The paper reported that ‘large companies of persons poured into Bradford from the surrounding villages’ and ‘the people became clamourous that the Court House should be thrown open and the proceedings of Guardians made public’.33 The guardians stationed the military in front of the court house, and constructed a barricade across the steps. These actions prompted the crowd to assault the soldiers with showers of stones and brickbats, remove the barricade and attempt to enter the court house by the back entrance. The Riot Act was read, the military dispersed the crowd, but as soon as the soldiers left the scene, the crowd returned. The guardians and magistrates were forced to take shelter in a warehouse, and agitation continued all evening.34 The Northern Liberator later praised ‘the men of Bradford who used against this atrocious doctrine the only right reasoning, that of the barricade and the paving stone’.35 TNA, HO 52­/​35­/​73, Sutcliffe to Russell, 7 June 1837; HO 52­/3 ​ 5­/4 ​ 6 Tinkler to Russell, 8 June 1837; HO 52­/3 ​ 5­/​41, Huddersfield magistrates to Russell, 20 June 1837. 32 Edsall, The Anti-­Poor Law Movement, p. 109. 33 Northern Liberator, 25 November 1837, in Carter, Bradford Poor Law Union, n.169. 34 WYAS, Bradford, DB 16­/​C32, John Clark notebooks, ‘Riot at Bradford in consequence of introduction of the new poor law, 20 November 1837’; TNA, HO 52­/​35­/​11, Thompson to Russell, 20 November 1837; HO 52­/​35­/​ 111–14, Bradford magistrates to Russell, 21 November 1837; HO 52­/​35­/​ 131, Harewood to Russell, 21 November 1837; BO, 23 November 1837. 35 Northern Liberator, 9 December 1837. 31



Embodied spaces and violent protest139

The violence was thus marked by a combination of weapons from French and northern industrial streetscapes. Five men were tried at York assizes for taking part in the riot and were sentenced to one month’s imprisonment. The resistance was immortalised in popular memory by the local brickmaker-­cum-­poet Reuben Holder in his ‘Verses on the Bradford Riot’, which he sold among other broadsheets in the market on Saturday nights.36 Anti-­new poor law violence enacted a community defence of the poor and the old parochial system, however imperfect the latter may have been. At Todmorden, a public meeting in February 1837 passed a resolution proclaiming, We have committed no breach of the law ­… we have had no riots or disturbance­­… we have paid all demands on us, public and parochial; that we are willing to continue to do so, if we may be allowed without sacrificing our rights and liberties, but if we be required to surrender these and to live under a despotism consisting of three commissioners and whose rules, regulations and orders if obeyed would take the controul [sic] of our parish affairs out of our hands ­… then we say resistance to such an attempt is not only a virtue but a duty.37

They proved their threat in practice in the case of William Ingham of Mankinholes. Ingham was a respectable farmer and overseer of Langfield township within Todmorden. He first refused to pay the poor rate over to the new guardians, and then deliberately avoided the fine for non-­payment issued at the Halifax petty sessions. On 16 November 1838, two constables attempted to distrain his goods, but once they were inside Ingham’s house, workers from the nearby railway and Lumbutt’s cotton spinning mill (owned by the prominent anti-­new poor law campaigners, the Fieldens) laid siege to the house for an hour. They then marched the constables to Wood Mill, where the board of guardians were meeting, and attacked the building. A sense of community justice and place was evident at the trial of local inhabitant James Kershaw. One of the constables testified, ‘When I first came out of Mr Ingham’s house I spoke to an old man (Kershaw) and told him I was surprised to see a man of his age come out with such a mob as that. He said, “well if we are come to fight, we are only come to fight for our own”’.38 Five days later, more serious disturbances ensued when a rumour spread WYAS, Bradford, DB 3 C4­/1 ​ ­/​1, Reuben Holder’s broadsheets. MG, 18 February 1837; TNA, TS 11­/​816­/2 ​ 691, Liverpool assizes, 27 March 1839. 38 TNA, TS 11­/​815­/​2683­/​57, Northern Circuit assizes, 1839. 36 37

140

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

that the constables were about to repeat the attempt to seize Ingham’s goods. Over a thousand people assembled in his defence. Drawing from local knowledge of the ‘neighbourhood’, they toured the highways and byways of the hills around Todmorden, calculatingly targeting new poor law supporters. For example, they plundered the shop of Ann Holt of Todmorden, a draper who had roused anger at her ‘many speeches over the shop counter in favour of the new poor law’. Some element of class antagonism was also evident in the attack on Todmorden Hall, house of the magistrate and chairman of the board, James Taylor, who suffered the loss of his furniture, paintings and carriage at an estimated value of £1,000. The topography of the district was a key feature enabling the agitation. Knott describes the authorities’ operation to arrest the suspects as having ‘all the appearance of a military exercise deep in enemy territory’. The troops avoided the main roads and travelled cross country to each mill in the valley, arresting forty-­two men.39 The incident demonstrated the difficulty that the local authorities faced, reliant on special constables and military to put down disorder when there was an element of class co-­operation in resistance. Resistance continued for years. In March 1848, riots broke out outside Tib Street testhouse in Manchester. The testhouse represented the harshest elements of the new poor law in practice as well as the desperate poverty of the inhabitants. The authorities hired the former Barratt’s mill at the north end of Tib Street to ‘test’ up to 800 unemployed able-­ bodied men after the wave of Irish famine immigrants and a typhus outbreak had caused the main Bridge Street workhouse to overflow.40 Fifty of the B-­division of the police were stationed at the end of Tib Street to contain the disturbances, but they were attacked by a crowd. The next day, Irish repeal leaders held a meeting at New Cross. A tricolour was raised on the cross, linking the agitation symbolically with the revolution in France. We have seen in vignette 1 how New Cross was a centre for meeting and news-­gathering for the inhabitants of Ancoats and the Irish communities off Oldham Road. The authorities stationed police at strategic junctions, but this only served to heighten the battle for territory. In the afternoon, the crowd attacked the police and reclaimed the space: ‘the centre of the square formed by the meeting of four streets at Knott, Popular Opposition to the 1834 Poor Law, p. 214; TNA, HO 40­/​38, 24 November 1838; TS 11­/​814­/​2679, Case against the Langfield overseer, November 1838; L. Croft, John Fielden’s Todmorden: Popular Culture and Radical Politics in a Cotton Town, 1817–50 (Todmorden: Tygerfoot Press, 1994), pp. 43–5. 40 www.workhouses.org.uk­/​Manchester­/​, accessed 14 June 2014. 39



Embodied spaces and violent protest141

the Cross was now gradually taken possession of by several thousand people’. Tensions mounted and half an hour later, a third section of police arrived, ordered to disperse the crowds: ‘the mob rallied several times and most persevering resumed the ground they had lost’. They cleared the area, ‘but a great body of people lined the footpaths on every side’. An hour later, the crowds reoccupied New Cross again, and then processed up Oldham Road to the police station to release men arrested earlier in the day.41 Resistance to the new police The Tib Street testhouse riots illustrate how the final battle over the working-­class body politic concerned the new police forces introduced by the 1839 Rural Constabulary Act. Earlier borough forces created by local police acts had been met with physical resistance, but the new police caused a much larger and sustained movement of opposition. Old country-­Whig fears resurfaced about the potential for a despotic government to introduce a gendarmerie or standing army; opposition was further stoked by a longer critique of the corrupt nature of criminal justice, which radicals and trades unions had experienced stacked up against them.42 But a more immediate reason was that Chartists knew that the old parish constables were easier to live with and to intimidate than the new police.43 Chartist plans for a ‘general rising’ in the spring of 1839 were a crucial context for both shaping the implementation of the policy, and popular resistance to it. Rioters in Huddersfield and Dewsbury were put down by disciplined detachments of the metropolitan police, and the Chartists had no desire to see this type of force translated into local equivalents. Also Robert Storch suggests that trade unions feared that the police could be used against them by their employers, in effect serving as ‘the guardians of unfettered capitalist economic development’. Local manufacturers indeed testified to the Royal Commission on the constabulary that they desired a paid police force to protect blackleg strikebreakers against violence by strikers.44 MT, 11 March 1848. C. Williams, ‘The Sheffield Democrats’ critique of criminal justice’, in R. Colls and R. Rodger (eds), Cities of Ideas: Civil Society and Urban Governance in Britain, 1800–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 96. 43 NS, 9 March, 27 April 1839; R. E. Swift, ‘Policing Chartism, 1839–1848: the case of the specials reconsidered’, EHR, 122:497 (2007), 693. 44 R. D. Storch, ‘The plague of blue locusts: police reform and popular resistance in Northern England, 1840–57’, IRSH, 20:1 (1975), 68–9. 41 42

142

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

There were other open disturbances against the new police in Middleton and Lancaster in 1840; during the ‘plug strikes’ (the almost general strike that spread across the cotton districts of the North West) in 1842; in Manchester in 1843, and in Leeds, where agitation was the manifestation of a much longer battle of attrition since the corporation police were formed by an improvement act of 1836.45 During protracted riots against the new police in Colne in August 1840, the Pennine town was thrown into darkness as the crowd extinguished every streetlight.46 This was obviously a useful tactic to exploit inhabitants’ knowledge of the urban environment against the newcomers, but the actions could have another meaning relating to the power of the police. Practices of policing and surveillance were predicated on visual control over space and the use of light. In Manchester, the police commission owned and ran the lighting of the city. The Tib Street rioters in March 1848 attacked the symbols of ‘improvement’ and police control by ‘extinguishing the great lamp at the Cross and many of the lamps in Oldham Road, Swan Street and Rochdale Road’.47 The attack on streetlights could be viewed within Patrick Joyce’s Foucauldian framework of a ‘political economy of detail’, in which policing shifted from the eighteenth-­century model of protecting private premises, to the new police designed to ‘secure public space in the interests of law and order’ using surveillance aided by streetlights and a regular beat.48 Yet although lighting was a major feature of improvement and policing acts, defence of private property was still a major concern. As historians of police have argued, there was no sudden shift of the policing ethos, and resistance to the new system was not or could not be total.49 The Benthamite model of panoptic surveillance did not apply in practice, not least because many of the new forces contained only a couple of dozen constables. Colne could afford a force of only seventeen, so rumour was bigger than reality. The Lancashire County Constabulary were ineffective during the plug strikes of 1842, and similarly weak during

Storch, ‘The plague of blue locusts’, 70; TNA, PL 27­/​11, Liverpool assizes, September 1842; Morning Post, 28 July 1840; LM, 15 June 1844. 46 MT, 15 August 1840; NS, 15 August 1840. 47 MT, 11 March 1848. 48 P. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003), p. 109. 49 D. Churchill, ‘”I am just the man for Upsetting you Bloody Bobbies”: popular animosity towards the police in late nineteenth-­century Leeds’, SH, 39:2 (2014), 248. 45



Embodied spaces and violent protest143

the disturbances of 1848.50 Bolton, with over 60,000 inhabitants in the 1840s, had a borough police force of only twenty-­four constables and the magistrates had to warn millowners to arm their own workers during the agitation of 1848.51 Resistance to the new police was obviously heightened during trade and Chartist unrest, but there was a more quotidian reason for popular opposition. The new police had a policy of ‘moving on’ loiterers from the streets, and this was regarded as another physical and symbolic restriction on the freedom of movement and use of public space, and an intrusion into working-­class residential areas. Edwin Butterworth noted in his diary in July 1839: ‘The Oldham police commissioners are taking measures to prevent groups of persons from standing on the footpaths of the principal streets, which is become a general practice, particularly in the evenings, and is very annoying to all individuals who wish to pass along with facility’.52 The ‘move-­on’ system soon became used as a way of clearing the streets not just of vagrants but also of radicals and trade unionists. Special constables were regarded with as much opprobrium as the police, and the employment of Chelsea pensioners (out of desperation for a large enough force) exacerbated tensions further. During the Chartist agitation of May 1839, the magistrates of Ashton-­under-­Lyne sent out Chelsea pensioners under the provisions of the 1827 Ashton police act ‘to patrol the streets, especially the principal thoroughfares, with a view to prevent the congregating of disorderly persons’. The police act enabled the prosecution of any individual ‘standing, loitering ­… or in any other Manner obstructing or incommoding, hindering or preventing the free passage of any such footway or causeway, or prejudicing, insulting, jostling, or annoying any person or persons travelling, passing or going thereon’.53 The Chelsea pensioners were also sent in F. C. Mather (ed.), Chartism and Society: An Anthology of Documents (London: Bell and Hyman, 1980), p. 138. 51 TNA, HO 45­ /​ 2510­ /​ 500, Bolton magistrates to Fulcock, 26 July 1848; D. Philips, Crime and Authority in Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1977), p. 116. 52 Oldham Local Studies, D-­BUT F­/​66, Butterworth papers, ‘news reports’, 1839. 53 M. Steinberg, ‘The riding of the Black Lad and other ritualistic actions’, in M. Hanagan, L. Page Moch and W. te Brake (eds), Challenging Authority: the Historical Study of Contentious Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 21; Parliamentary Papers (PP) 1827, Act for the Lighting, Cleansing, Watching … ­ of Ashton-­under-­Lyne, 7 & 8 Geo IV c.lxvii, p. 1,731. 50

144

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

because a crowd was gathering to ‘insult and annoy these special constables’ and ‘annoying parties who are obnoxious to the Stephensites and Chartists’. This allegation indicated that the blame was laid upon supporters of the local radical minister Reverend J. R. Stephens and the Chartists for fomenting opposition to the police. In response, the inhabitants stood their ground: ‘the streets were crowded, especially Stamford Street, with young men and women and boys, who congregated on the footpaths, and refused to move away when required’.54 The ‘Radicals of Ashton’ wrote to the Northern Star to defend their actions: Last evening, in consequence of these quondam peacemakers insulting women on their return home from their labours, and, in fact, every person of every age if they dared to stand to talk to each other in the street, as formerly, an immense concourse of men congregated in the public squares and streets, and every policeman, old and new, that came in view, was hissed, groaned, and in some instances, stoned.55

The letter evinced a memory of customary practice in working-­class culture ‘as formerly’ and an awareness of claiming ‘public’ space. The popular broadside, produced around 1842, lamented that ‘Manchester’s an Altered Town’: In former times our cotton swells were not half so mighty found, sir, But in these modern times they everywhere abound, sir; With new police and watchmen, to break the peace there’s none dare, At every step the ladies go, the policemen cry, ‘Move on there’.56

The first wave of anti-­police riots in Colne in April 1840 was preceded by low-­level resistance against the move-­on system. The newspapers reported that since the stationing of the new police, ‘they have been daily subjected to every species of annoyance and insult. Not one of them could pass along the streets or highways without being hissed and hooted at, or pelted with stones and mud’.57 Lieutenant Colonel Constance, stationed at Burnley, reported to General Napier how the ‘lower orders of Colne’, whom he derogatorily termed as ‘a particularly uncourtly set’, had until the intervention of the police, ‘been in entire possession of the place, occupying streets, footpaths and public places in groups at nearly all hours to the great inconvenience of the more respectable parts of the inhabitants’. Constance warned (too late) that

Swift, ‘Policing Chartism’, 694; MG, 18 May 1839. NS, 18 May 1839. 56 W. E. A. Axon, Lancashire Gleanings (Manchester, 1883), p. 147. 57 Blackburn Standard, 29 April 1840. 54 55



Embodied spaces and violent protest145

‘the police in correcting an inconvenience of so long a standing may do well at first to correct it gradually and by quiet measures ­… the ignorant will resist ­… if driven to it by harsh measures’.58 A related source of anger was the belief that the police were intruding into working-­class streetlife.59 Robert Shoemaker and Miles Ogborn have argued that urban improvement and bourgeois sensibilities transformed the London street into ‘a public space inhabited by privatised individuals’.60 This change, however much desired by the middle classes, did not apply to industrial working-­class areas in the North. The French industrialist Leon Faucher, visiting Manchester in 1844, commented about the ‘poor quarters’, principally the locale of Angel Meadow, Newtown, Ancoats and Little Ireland: ‘you perceive the doors of the cottages open, and you are jostled by the crowd of loiterers’.61 The doorstep was neither solely public nor wholly private. The class segregation of space by time increasingly enforced by factory work did not control all aspects of working-­class residential life, though middle classes may have wanted it to impact on their use of public space. Restrictions on working-­class customary activities and uses of public space had been attempted before, particularly by societies for the suppression of immorality and vice, and by middle-­ class campaigns against bull-­ baiting, football and bonfire night celebrations. Social reformers associated loitering with vagrancy and begging, and magistrates initially attempted to use the various vagrancy and improvement acts to prosecute anyone hanging around suspiciously. Loitering with intent to commit a felony was made an offence in relation to streets and public places in an act of 1802, and it was codified more fully in the 1824 Vagrancy Act.62 The 1828 Manchester police act imposed similar restrictions as the Ashton

Storch, ‘Plague of blue locusts’, 79, citing TNA, HO 40­/5 ​ 8­/2 ​ 69, Constance to Napier, 29 April 1840. 59 Storch, ‘Plague of blue locusts’, 66. 60 M. Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity: London’s Geographies, 1680–1780 (New York: The Guildford Press, 1998), p. 76; R. Shoemaker, ‘Public spaces, private disputes? Fights and insults on London’s streets, 1660–1800’, in T. Hitchcock and H. Shore (eds), The Streets of London, 1660–1780 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2003), pp. 66–7. 61 R. Dennis, English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986), p. 79. 62 J. Marriott, ‘The poor in eighteenth-­century London’, in Hitchcock and Shore, The Streets of London, pp. 123–5; J. Wheeler, Manchester: A Political, Social and Cultural History (Manchester, 1836), p. 315. 58

146

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

police act against loitering.63 The restrictions were part of deeper concerns about the stability of society in an increasingly mobile and migrant population. They also reflected a growing nervousness among industrial magistrates against the increasingly organised tactics of trade unions. Trades had long asserted their control over the streets through parading and marching. The tactic was a performance of solidarity against both their employers and the government’s restrictions on their right to combine, and the gesture of marching three or more abreast, arms linked, embodied the space. Parading demonstrated a ‘mysterious brotherliness’ or ‘homosociality’ as identified by historians of organised labour, while picketing a factory embodied the space around it as a space of exclusion against ‘blackleg’ strikebreakers.64 The tactic of parading had initially developed during the major strike across the north-­west cotton districts in 1818.The new stipendiary magistrate for Manchester, the barrister James Norris, sent a detailed explanation of events to Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth on 29 July. He outlined the snowball effect of one trade striking after another, and then noted how the dyers ‘adopted a practice for the first time here of parading two and two through the public streets almost every day­– ­certainly conducting themselves with great order but still the practice being novel, it tended to alarm’. The spinners then adopted ‘the practice of assembling in large bodies of two and three thousand each and parading through some of the streets of the town almost daily, certainly still without committing any breach of the peace’.65 The strike spread through a system of delegates, flying ‘picquets’ sent to mills along the roads to neighbouring towns, whose strikers were supported by regional funds collected by committee. The authorities felt torn about how to put down the agitation. Non-­interference of the state in industrial relations, a principle MALS, M9­ /​ 30­ /​ 9­ /​ 1, Reports of Manchester Police Commissioners, 1828, p. 23. 64 C. Behagg, ‘Secrecy, ritual and folk violence: the opacity of the workplace in the first half of the nineteenth century’, in R. Storch (ed.), Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-­Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1982), p. 158; K. Binfield, ‘Industrial gender: manly men and cross-­dressers in the Luddite movement’, in J. Losey and W. Brewer (eds), Mapping Male Sexuality: Nineteenth-­Century England (Cranbery, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000), p. 34. 65 A. Aspinall (ed.), The Early English Trade Unions: Documents from the Home Office Papers in the Public Record Office (London: Batchworth Press, 1949), p. 282; TNA, HO 42­/​179, Norris to Sidmouth, 29 July 1818; HO 33­/​ 2­/​58, Whitelock to Sidmouth, 5 September 1818. 63



Embodied spaces and violent protest147

already blessed by the government in the repeal of the statute of artificers in 1813, held some sway.66 Norris claimed on 1 September, ‘my brother magistrates and myself did not think it right on this account to interfere in their practice in order that the lower classes might see that we kept aloof from any question between them and their employers as to the advance of wages’. On 1 to 3 September, large bodies of weavers and spinners marched in military order into Manchester from the surrounding towns (following the routes that many would take to Peterloo the following year). On 4 September, the Manchester magistrates issued a public warning that they would arrest not just combinations of strikers but also anyone parading ‘down the Public Streets’.67 It was difficult for magistrates to contain large numbers of paraders or arrest loiterers individually for vagrancy or ‘loitering with intent’. The Stockport magistrates informed the Home Office they intended to use the vagrancy laws to arrest the strikers, claiming that, because ‘the cotton spinners who have voluntarily placed themselves out of employment and paraded the streets, to the disgrace of the police, are to all intents rogues and vagabonds, they were liable to be committed, their cases coming completely within the meaning of the Act of 17 Geo II, c.5’ (‘An act to amend and make more effectual the laws relating to rogues, vagabonds, and other idle and disorderly persons’). Yet, as permanent under-­secretary of the Home Office, Henry Hobhouse, explained, the specificity of the vagrancy laws meant that this was not possible; he responded: ‘there must be proof of poverty and of refusal to work’.68 The authorities in Manchester tried another approach, asking the Home Office whether it was legal to drive away strikers who stood about ‘in clusters’ in the streets, who had declared their right to stand in the highway. The Solicitor General responded that if they ‘conduct themselves peaceably and quietly … ­ then I do not think the Magistrates will be justified in interfering to disperse them’.69 This clash of customary interpretations of the use of public space frustrated the authorities and gave J. A. Jaffe, Striking a Bargain: Work and Industrial Relations in England, 1815–65 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 54. 67 Manchester Chronicle, 5 September 1818; Aspinall, Early English Trade Unions, p. 282, citing HO 42­/1 ​ 79, Norris to Clive, 1 September 1818; Oldham Local Studies, D-­M54, diaries of William Rowbottom (hereafter Rowbottom diaries), 1818. 68 Aspinall, Early English Trade Unions, p. 277; TNA, HO 42­/1 ​ 79, Lloyd to Hobhouse, 25 August 1818. 69 J. L. and B. Hammond, The Skilled Labourer, 1760–1832 (London: Longman, 1920), p. 102. 66

148

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

strikers room for manoeuvre. Trade unions paraded and picketed daily during the major strikes of powerloom weavers in 1826 and 1829, and spinners in 1830–1.70 Magistrates preferred to use the 1714 Riot Act to disperse loiterers, which codified that twelve or more people refusing to leave an hour after the reading of the proclamation were liable to be prosecuted for felony or be dispersed by the military. Time as well as space thus defined whether standing around on the streets was felonious or not. Yet the Riot Act in effect only served to exacerbate the problem further, as dispersed crowds would often regroup in other areas before returning en masse. Loitering increased authorities’ nervousness about the potential for any group of people to turn into a meeting or disorder. In July 1839, a Leeds Chartist was charged with causing an obstruction of the footpath in Kirkgate. A policeman alleged that early on a Sunday morning, Chartists left their meeting room in York Street and went to Wharf Street, where they stopped to carrying on debating. The people ‘filled the streets, until it was impossible for any person to pass’. The policeman ordered them to disperse, and a few ‘went into Kirkgate and stood speaking on the causeway’. The defendant then ‘declared he would not go away, and said he did not care for the law so long as he kept within it’. In the trial, the police sergeant made it clear that the role of the police was to ‘keep the streets clear in that neighbourhood’, and therefore ‘they had had much trouble from five o’clock in the morning’ because the Chartist meeting spilled out on to public space. The Chartist’s defence was that ‘the groups of people were caused solely by persons stopping from curiosity to see what a policeman could have to do with him’. The magistrates dismissed the charge.71 There was a clear separation by time and day, and a misunderstanding of street cultures. The middle classes did not or would not accept the working-­class claim to the streets near their residential areas and their customary use of the streets­– t­he spaces of everyday life, which urban improvement and policing aimed to move indoors, out of sight and out of mind. Hence magistrates commonly ordered a curfew during disturbances, as a handbill proclaimed during riots in Carlisle in 1830: ‘All Masters and Heads of families are requested to prevent their Servants, Apprentices and Children from being out in the Streets unnecessarily after Sunset’.72 MG, 22 July 1826; Oldham Local Studies, Rowbottom diaries, 30 April 1826, 5 May 1829; TNA, HO 52­/​13­/2 ​ 31, 8 January 1831. 71 NS, 13 July 1839. 72 TNA, HO 52­/​6­/​483, handbill, 13 November 1830, in disturbances correspondence. 70



Embodied spaces and violent protest149 Trade unions: bodies of exclusion and violence

In contrast to fears of centralising tendencies of the Whig-­liberal reforms, trade unions sought the reinstatement of state intervention in issues of their wages and working conditions. Since the 1790s, successive governments conceded to pressure from industrialists to promote a Smithian laissez-­faire economy unbridled by state controls on the regulation of wage levels. Moreover, though the Combination Acts were repealed in 1824, the repeal was amended in the following year to restrict the terms in which trades could combine. Organised labour faced greater hindrances in the 1823 Master and Servant Act which enabled prosecution for breach of contract.73 Trade unions reacted against the free market perception of workers as ‘hands’ defined by their economic worth, who could be degraded or disposed of at will. Trades used violence as well as parading and picketing to enforce the solidarity of their collective body. The old Fabian and Marxist narrative of the development of trade unions in this period depicted localised and single-­trade groups in a ‘proto-­industrial’ phase of economic development, emerging into a national, federated and class-­ conscious trade unionism from the mid-­nineteenth century onwards. Labour historians now offer a picture of a more sophisticated organised labour in the eighteenth century, arguing that trades’ action did not need to be ‘highly formalised or continuous in a structural sense’ to be effective.74 Trade unions did aim at pan-­regional and more co-­ordinated bodies under the models of John Doherty’s spinners’ union and his National Association for the Protection of Labour of 1830, which morphed into the bold but ill-­fated experiment of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union.75 But they nonetheless maintained many of the same tactics and aims of earlier composite groups, and like radical societies, drew their strength from representing their local communities. Older labour histories were also keen to disassociate the legal and institutional development of trade unions from violence and other illegal actions. Traditional tactics of machine-­breaking and violence were still used alongside negotiations over the table, however much trade union Jaffe, Striking a Bargain, p. 89; M. Chase, Early Trade Unionism: Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), p. 112. 74 Behagg, ‘Secrecy, ritual and folk violence’, p. 158; J. Rule (ed.), British Trade Unionism, 1750–1850 (Harlow: Macmillan, 1988). 75 M. Steinberg, Fighting Words: Working-­Class Formation, Collective Action, and Discourse in Early Nineteenth-­ Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 203. 73

150

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

leaders publicly disavowed the connection. Malcolm Thomis’s study of Luddism, for example, claimed that violence ‘occurred not through established trade union machinery but in its absence’.76 John Archer wrote that the major machine-­breaking attacks on powerlooms in the Manchester region in 1829 indicated ‘the weakness of union organisation among handloom weavers and suggests that industrial violence was by this time a tactic of the doomed or as Thompson termed them, “casualties” and “losers”’.77 Violence and machine-­breaking were not, however, ‘indicative of organisational weakness’ as Archer claimed, or blind reaction to economic distress, but rather formed part of a wider spectrum of targeted and controlled responses to perceived injustices, such as deskilling, and, in some cases illegal practices undertaken by employers and non-­unionised workers.78 Luddism in 1811–12, riots against new powerlooms in 1826 and 1829, the Swing riots of the early 1830s and the plug strikes of 1842, and strikes in general were targeted defences by skilled workers against threats to a collective body, defined by skill, custom and place. Violence of exclusion was a common part of the geographies of organised labour. Exclusion was linked to place. Underground movements, including the United Englishmen at the turn of the century, required tickets and codes for people to first find out the location and then be allowed to participate in nightly meetings and drillings on the moors. ‘Twisting in’ was essential self-­defence against infiltration by spies; the forms of the illegal oaths bound their takers to the chosen body by word and gesture. Luddites followed on from this tactic, and several manufacturers testified at their trials that when crossing Luddite ‘territory’ on moorland roads at night, they were threatened with violence if they did not know the ‘sign’.79 Violence of exclusion was aimed at the individual strikebreaker or an entire ethnic group. Parliamentary select committees M. Thomis, The Luddites: Machine-­Breaking in Regency England (Hamden: David and Charles, 1970), p. 132. 77 J. E. Archer, Social Unrest and Popular Protest in England, 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 55; E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2nd edn, 1968), p. 13. 78 Archer, Social Unrest, p. 55; A. Randall, Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 150–1. 79 Sheffield Archives, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, WWM F 45–6, , disturbances correspondence, 1801–12, especially 46­ /7 ​ 9, ‘Private Information’ to Fitzwilliam, n.d. [July 1812]. 76



Embodied spaces and violent protest151

into trade combinations following the repeal of the Combination Acts revealed the extent of concern among government and employers about violence, oaths, secrecy and intimidation interfering in workmen’s independence. Indeed, the revised repeal passed in 1825, though allowing certain forms of collective bargaining, made obstruction of workers a specific prosecutable offence.80 During severe unrest and major strikes in the cotton towns of south-­east Lancashire and north-­east Cheshire in 1830–1, threats and violence abounded against blacklegs and employers. A common tactic was throwing vitriol in strikebreakers’ faces; the act dehumanised people who had already been dubbed as inferior with the metonym of ‘blacklegs’, brutally destroying their ability to make a livelihood by blinding them.81 Murder and attempted murder, rare in political collective action, were not unknown in labour agitation. The fatal shooting of Thomas Ashton, of a major cotton magnate family of Ashton-­under-­Lyne, on 3 January 1831 marked a peak of fear and mistrust among employers and the unions. The spinners’ union denied involvement and no-­one was tried for the offence. A day later, spinners attacked another mill in Millbrook, dragging blacklegs out of the building, tying their hands behind their backs and chalking ‘3s 9d’, the piece-­ rate sought, on their jackets.82 Though the Irish and Scottish played a significant role in the leadership of strikes, not least in areas of high immigration such as Carlisle, Liverpool and Manchester, the vilification of their compatriots was common. The attempt to exclude immigrant labour was not just an urban industrial phenomenon: in the 1840s, the Yorkshire Gazette reported recurring physical attacks by local agricultural labourers on Irish harvest pickers in the North Riding, as well as intimidation of their compatriots working as navvies and building the Great Northern Railway.83 Pickets and parades also delineated the sites of working-­class protest by gender, asserting a certain type of masculinity associated PP 1825 (417), p. iv, Select Committee Report on the Combination Laws; MALS, M9­/​M1­/​33b, memorial of master spinners of Ashton-­under-­Lyne, 5 January 1831. J. Orth, Combination and Conspiracy: A Legal History of Trade Unionism, 1721–1906 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 87; Frank, Master and Servant Law, p. 213. 81 TNA, HO 64­/​2­/3 ​ 4, Winstanley and Catterall to Home Office, 13 January 1831. 82 Steinberg, Fighting Words, p. 221; Lancaster Gazette, 15 January 1831; see also Tameside Archives, DD 8­ /​ 5, diagram of bomb sent to William Hegginbottom, 1830. 83 Yorkshire Gazette, 20 October 1838, 13 August 1842, 4 January 1845. 80

152

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

with industrial organised labour (although in some pickets women and children were used as ‘shields’ against the police). As Marc Steinberg has identified in his study of the spinners’ strike of 1830–1, male workers overturned the customary gendering of public protest sites in the town. The market place, a customary place for both charivari and food riots, in which ‘disorderly women’ and cross-­dressing men took part, was now traversed by the martial formations of strikers’ parades exhibiting their masculine strength. Though women formed a large part of the cotton spinning workforce in Lancashire, the trades’ actions were designed to exclude their participation in the strike and in the space.84 The protests by radicals and trade unions in the 1830s rethought the eighteenth century ‘moral economy’. The once common food riots over the fair price of grain had almost disappeared by this period, but the sense of fairness translated to include the rights of the poor to relief and workers to a fair wage. Trade union agitation defended a skilled workforce against the attacks of a free market economy, embodied in machinery and in unskilled workers. As Peter Jones has argued in his study of the actions of the Swing rioters in southern England, in the early 1830s in the atmosphere of Malthusian desperation, ordinary inhabitants looked for and enacted a sense of fairness and were prepared to act physically if the authorities were perceived to be acting illegally.85 The ‘bastilles’ of the workhouses, schools of anatomy and cholera hospitals, Police Offices and large factories employing machinery and unskilled labour moreover embodied the new unfair political economy in the minds of their opponents. Local authorities and the national government transgressed customary morality by splitting families up in the workhouse, condoning pauper dissection and using new police to ‘move on’ inhabitants; so those inhabitants felt justified in rejecting their authority and using force against them. The boundaries of the body were defended and contested in resistance. The Anatomy Act and the new poor law appeared to challenge the boundary between the self and society. Radicals and Chartists fought exclusion from the body politic, workers fought dispossession from their customary rights, and as we will see in part III, rural inhabitants battled dispossession from customary notions of the land. Protesters against the Whig-­liberal regime contested the state taking away their personal rights and building spaces to confine them. Resistance to state Steinberg, ‘Riding of the Black Lad’, p. 34. P. Jones, ‘Swing, Speenhamland and rural social relations: the “moral economy” of the English crowd in the nineteenth century’, SH, 32:3 (2007).

84 85



Embodied spaces and violent protest153

intervention continued into the later nineteenth century, for example, against the 1853 Compulsory Vaccination Act.86 The factory, workhouse, anatomy school, hospitals and Police Office were in many senses alien institutions to the poor. Their imposition, combined with police intrusions on the working-­class residential street, represented a reordering of the spaces of everyday life, and the longer paths of the lifecycle in birth and death.

N. Durbach, ‘”They might as well brand us”: working-­class resistance to compulsory vaccination in Victorian England’, Social History of Medicine, 13:1 (2000).

86

5

Contesting new administrative geographies in the 1830s and 1840s

Excluded from the civic body politic, radicals found new opportunities to enter it in the 1830s. In 1838, the Working Men’s Association of Carlisle declared that their ‘chief object’ was ‘to elect persons of their own opinions not only to serve in Parliament but also in all local offices, so far as their influence extended, in order to bring to a successful issue the prayer of the National Petition’.1 Their aims illustrate how by the end of the 1830s, working-­class collective action had evolved much bolder forms of organisation, objectives and tactics than their predecessors. This chapter examines how different groups contested not just the spaces of political meeting or the physical imposition of the new legislation of the 1830s, but also the very governing bodies that controlled those spaces and institutions. Few working-­class radicals could realistically envisage themselves sitting on the green benches of the House of Commons, but even the ordinary rank and file could practically aspire to the hard pews of the vestry or the oak chairs of the court house, although in its meeting rooms rather than in the dock. The working men’s associations, often formed by members of older radical societies, short time committees and anti-­new poor law associations, evolved into Chartism. Labour historians have tended to underplay this form of collective action, regarding contested elections to local bodies as parochial and therefore of less importance than the development of the national structures of Chartism and other political groups in the 1830s and 1840s.2 Yet parochial did not mean insularly local. Local power  1  2

TNA, HO 40­/​41­/3 ​ 68, declaration of James Willoughby, 5 March 1839. B. and S. Webb, History of Local Government (London: Longman, 1920); P. Salmon, ‘Local politics and partisanship: the electoral impact of municipal reform’, Parliamentary History, 19:3 (2000). See J. Garrard, Leadership and Power in Victorian Industrial Towns (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983); D. Fraser (ed.), Municipal Reform and the Industrial City (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1982); W. C. Lubenow, The Politics of



Contesting new administrative geographies155

was important in and of itself, as well as being a step towards accessing national power. As Derek Fraser made plain in the introduction to his 1976 study of urban politics: Politics for Victorians began not at Westminster but at their own front gates ­… politics intruded [into] the whole urban experience and the limited political world of parliamentary elections was not a political boundary recognised by contemporaries. The mid-­nineteenth century political activist pitched his tent in whatever battlefield was open to him.3

The Whig-­liberal legislation of the 1830s was enacted within the spirit of Benthamite utilitarian rationalisation and efficiency. Indeed, some historians have regarded the reforms as forming the base for the ‘modern’ Victorian liberal state.4 The reforms were nevertheless underpinned by an aristocratic concern for property, and their effectiveness was counterbalanced with laissez-­faire permissiveness. Aside from the mass physical resistance to their implementation, the reforms had other major impacts. They in effect superimposed a new layer of administrative geographies upon existing boundaries of local authority. Popular politics always involved who had the right to be part of the civic body politic, but now it concerned institutions and authorities that were claimed to be ‘reformed’, although corruption continued. In many northern towns, the long-­established Tory and gentry-­dominated local governments were overtaken by the wealthy Whig-­liberal middle classes. These new elites faced a situation where they had to control and suppress the working classes with whom they had previously allied against Tory-­Anglican aristocratic hegemony. Civic body politics in the regions were moreover impelled to alter their relationship with national government. The new electoral districts, factory inspection districts, poor law unions, municipal corporations and police districts created new boundaries that were either larger than or crossed the variegated patchwork of local court leets, manors, parishes and other customary forms of geographical authority. The new Government Growth: Early Victorian Attitudes Towards State Intervention, 1833–1848 (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1971).  3 D. Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England: The Structure of Politics in Victorian Cities (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1976), p. 9.  4 A. Burns and J. Innes (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain, 1780– 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 47; J. A. Phillips and C. Weatherell, ‘The Great Reform Act of 1832 and the political modernization of England’, American Historical Review, 100:2 (1995); P. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003), p. 114.

156

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

police also redrew the boundaries of the law and its uses and control. On the one hand, many Whig-­ liberal elites welcomed the changes, especially the chance to incorporate their town and thereby remove what they regarded as corrupt Tory power, reduce poor rates and abolish church rates. On the other hand, local elites of all political stamps remained suspicious of the government’s seemingly centralising initiatives. Opposition to Whig reforms, especially the new poor law and police, cut across the loyalist­/elite versus radical­/working-­class divide that had formed the basis of popular political conflict since the 1790s. Vestries The desire for representation turned the parish vestry into an arena of collective action. All ratepayers had an opportunity of having a say at open vestries, and when votes were taken by acclamation, unenfranchised ratepayers could exercise some power, particularly when candidates were elected by party list rather than standing individually.5 Dissenters pushed the issue into opposition to mandatory church rates, and Whig-­liberals saw this as an opportunity for revenge against Tory-­ Anglican resistance to the passage of the Reform Act. In Manchester, Peterloo veteran and Manchester Political Union committee member Archibald Prentice put forward an amendment to the Anglican list at the 1833 Easter vestry meeting, and he and his fellow liberals were able to secure election for their candidates. The popular vote for Prentice’s amendment was however reversed when the Tory-­Anglican elites invoked a Sturges Bourne poll. Usually studied in terms of their impact on the poor laws, the Sturges Bourne acts also created a potent electoral tool.6 Sturges Bourne’s Parish Vestries Act of 1818 introduced a gradated scale of voting that allowed a ratepayer between one and six votes dependent on the size of their property. Non-­electors generally sought vote by acclamation as they had a better chance of having their vote counted, whereas local elites could call for a vote by Sturges Bourne’s poll so that the property of their members would weight the results well in their favour. Critics in the 1820s had already highlighted the setting up of select vestries to close down popular participation in

M. Chase, ‘The “local state” in Regency Britain’, Local Historian, 43:4 (2013); A. D. Harvey, ‘Parish politics: London vestries, 1780–1830 (part 2)’, Local Historian, 40:1 (2010).  6 S. Shave, ‘The impact of Sturges Bourne’s poor law reforms in rural England’, HJ, 56:2 (2013).  5



Contesting new administrative geographies157

parochial politics.7 Commonly known as the ‘bricks against brains’ system, the Sturges Bourne poll was another form of exclusion of the unrepresented by the propertied. In the case of Manchester, the new poll exaggerated the majority by more than two and a half times, as over sixteen per cent of ratepayers were able to cast over six votes each. Radicals fought back the next year, when at a riotous vestry meeting, the opposition (led by James Wroe, the radical bookseller, former editor of the Manchester Observer who invited Hunt to St Peter’s Fields in 1819, and future Chartist delegate), censured the chairman Reverend C. D. Wray. Payment of church rates in Manchester became untenable and unenforceable by 1835.8 The success of the anti-­church rate campaign is notable as a victory for nonconformity. Its importance also lay in providing the arena for heated contests over local power, where radicals of various stripes were able to use these opportunities (and indeed get elected on a nonconformist ticket) to mount a serious challenge to local elites. In Bolton, leypayers had already mustered in response to an increase in the poor rate following the economic distress of 1826. Led by the radical draper William Naisby, they declared a lack of confidence in the ‘Junta’ of assessors and overseers and called for the establishment of a select vestry. Radicals contested the position of churchwarden from 1831, and their candidate, pawnbroker Charles Nuttall, was elected in 1832 and 1833. The magistrates retaliated in 1834–5 by appointing from lists of names adopted at township meetings. In 1836, despite some Tory employers attempting to pressurise their spinners into carrying the Conservative list, the workers, in a striking assertion of independence, carried the reformers’ list and elected Naisby. The magistrates struck Naisby’s name off the list and appointed Richard Daly, a Tory trustee and former constable and boroughreeve. The reformers regained control in the next vestry.9 In Bradford and Rochdale, ratepayers in both towns voted against the church rate in 1839. Both towns’ meetings resulted in the radicals forcing adjournments outside to the churchyards, where the vicars and reformers stood on the tombstones to speak. The physical space of the vestry came to represent exclusion and Tory-­Anglican corruption, and the reformers forced the debate outside, into a more public Fraser, Urban Politics, p. 28; Chase, ‘The “local state”’, n.59; Parliamentary Papers (PP) 1830 (215), Select Committee on Select and Other Vestries.  8 Fraser, Urban Politics, pp. 38–9; MALS, M3­/​3­/​11, Manchester vestry and overseers’ book, 1830–5.  9 P. Taylor, Popular Politics in Industrial England, Bolton, 1825–50 (Keele: Keele University Press, 1995), pp. 30, 34–5.  7

158

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

space, metaphorically and physically. When the liberals gained control of the churchwarden and vestry, the Tory clergy were forced to concede and rates were no longer imposed.10 Challenges over vestries also subverted the deeply engrained hierarchies of local government in smaller places. The annual meeting of leypayers in Dukinfield at Easter 1838 should have been, as previously, a routine affair. Dukinfield was a rapidly expanding industrial village near Ashton-­under-­Lyne, under the patronage of the main landowner the Earl of Stamford and Warrington, but also with a long history of radicalism and rational dissent. At this meeting, over two hundred people crowded into the Sunday School, and the parochial authorities faced a challenge for the first time. Immediately after the chair, John Cheetham, had given his opening welcome, ‘Mr Stephens rose’ and proposed a motion to adjourn the meeting: He objected to the meeting being convened at a time when a majority of the ratepayers were engaged in their daily avocations. One o’clock was a most unsuitable and inconvenient time at which to call a convocation of the people for the purpose of discussing their parochial affairs.

This was Reverend Joseph Rayner Stephens, independent minister and leader of radical congregations and the anti-­new poor law movement in the Tameside district. With the skilful rhetoric of a seasoned orator, Stephens moved quickly from the specific accusation­– t­hat the time of the meeting excluded working people from attending­– ­to his wider point: Either they were citizens or not­– ­leypayers or not­– ­freeborn Englishmen or not ­… The Constitution had clearly given the people vested rights and they would not allow them to be bartered or frittered away.

He thus inferred that parochial meetings were just as important as parliamentary elections, and part of the mythical constitution which gave male inhabitants ‘vested rights’ of representation. The chair refused his request for an adjournment to the evening, and another official asserted ‘that the town’s business has been transacted in the same room and at the same time for many years previously’. Stephens jumped on this justification as ammunition to prove ‘that the abuses had been allowed NS, 27 July 1839; BO, 11 February 1841; BL, Add MS 54546, fo. 63, Hubard to Napier, 24 November 1839; M. Brennan, ‘Civic and municipal leadership: a study of three northern towns between 1832 and 1867’ (PhD dissertation, University of Leeds, 2013), p. 102; A. Elliott, ‘The incorporation of Bradford’, NH, 15 (1979), 164–5.

10



Contesting new administrative geographies159

to continue too long’. The election of overseers proceeded regardless, although the accounts were not audited, and Stephens and his seconder Mr Durham were elected on to the new vestry.11 For radicals like Stephens, the election of overseers and the participation of inhabitants in parochial bodies were not merely matters of local administration. His language of ‘people’, ‘citizens’ and ‘freeborn Englishmen’ of course linked his campaign with a longer radical tradition. An integral part of the ideologies of radicalism, and indeed, of party politics, involved notions of the corporate body, often more than of the liberal modern state. Chartism deliberately manipulated tropes of chartered rights and privileges that had been integral to electoral and radical rhetoric in the eighteenth century.12 Urban historian Rosemary Sweet argues that ‘the localist, corporatist view of the political nation, which saw the state as a bundle of rights, interests and privileges specifically tied to place’ did not quickly dissipate as ideals of the nation state developed in the nineteenth century.13 The liberal and individualist ideal of Victorian government was still malleable and could be radicalised, as Chartists attempted to do. The anti-­new poor law campaign From 1837 onwards, the vestry gained even more political significance as the point of conflict for and often the administrative centre of resistance to the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. As overseers had the administrative responsibility of organising the election of the new boards of guardians, control over their position was essential for both supporters and opponents of the new system. The factory reform and anti-­new poor law movements provided essential political training for future Chartist leaders and in essence trained the rank and file in forms of protest.14 Administrative resistance, in the form of either election or abstention from election, was arguably much more important, and actually more effective, than the popular violence against ‘bastilles’, not least because it involved an alliance between oppositional political groups and local government. NS, 7 April 1838. G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 13 R. Sweet, ‘Civic ritual in eighteenth-­ century towns’, in J. Neheiser and M. Schaich (eds), Political Rituals in Great Britain, 1700–2000 (Augsberg: Wissner-­Verlag, 2006), pp. 52–3. 14 L. Charlesworth, ‘Poor law in the city’, in A. Lewis, P. Brand and P. Mitchell (eds), Law in the City (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007), p. 206. 11 12

160

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

The anti-­ new poor law movement continued the seemingly paradoxical political alliances engendered by the factory reform campaign. Tories’ and radicals’ deep mistrust of middle-­class liberal reforms and policies in the 1830s meant that they temporarily overcame their differences over the question of universal suffrage. Tory-­radical paternalism was exemplified by Richard Oastler, the ‘squire of Fixby Hall’ near Huddersfield, the strident sermons of ‘Parson’ George Stringer Bull of Bradford, and the active leadership of manufacturer and MP John Fielden of Todmorden.15 Allied with a growing strain of working-­class conservatism, co-­ordinated formally in operative Conservative societies which formed part of the growing political party organisation after the Reform Act, Tory-­radicalism forged a powerful oppositional force in the industrial North in the later 1830s.16 The Poor Law Amendment Act sought to remove what Edwin Chadwick and his officials regarded to be an antiquated and over-­ complicated system based on parishes and townships. For example, Lancashire’s sixty-­nine parishes were historically subdivided into nearly five hundred townships. The assistant commissioners aimed to group together two or three dozen parishes within a ten-­mile radius into a union, centred on the nearest market town. They enacted this quickly, but their map-­drawing did not fit with existing boundaries defined by ‘organic growth or historical tradition’.17 Fear of the transfer of customary powers away from local institutions and accountability was a major theme of the opposition. The resolutions of a large meeting in Hull in February 1838 declared that the attendees opposed the principles of the new poor law ‘because by vesting the funds raised for the relief of the poor in the hands of three commissioners at Somerset House the ratepayers are deprived of all power of applying the money which they pay for this principle’. The magistrates of Hull were also split on party lines and clashed over the nomination of guardians. The overseers of adjoining Sculcoates, which already had a workhouse and was rapidly expanding as a working-­class locale, refused to be combined with Hull because they would lose out from the rating of the docks, a third of S. Weaver, John Fielden and the Politics of Popular Radicalism, 1832–1847 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 16 D. Walsh, Making Angels in Marble: The Conservatives, the Early Industrial Working Class and Attempts at Political Incorporation (London: Breviary Stuff Publications, 2012), pp. 182–3. 17 S. and B. Webb, English Poor Law History, part II (London: Longman, 1929), p. 113; E. C. Midwinter, Social Administration in Lancashire, 1830–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969), pp. 16, 18–19. 15



Contesting new administrative geographies161

which lay in their parish.18 At Bradford, the first resolution of a mass meeting in June 1838 moved that the act was ‘a robbery on the ratepayers inasmuch as it takes from them the right of control in the election of those who have the distribution of monies collected from them as poor’s rates’.19 Administrative resistance was enacted in multiple ways. These included outright refusals to be elected on to boards, collect the new rates, appoint clerks or audit the accounts. Existing parish officials paid skilful close attention to the letter of the law to use it as a tool to frustrate passage (a clerical version of filibustering or the foot-­dragging of workers in action short of a strike). Elections to the board of guardians were also used as a tool in the wider party conflict between Whigs and Tories, who often allied with radicals against their opponents. In Rochdale and Bolton, radicals were elected to the board, who ensured that the implementation of the system was delayed for years.20 The geography of contested elections to the board and other resistance to the imposition of the new poor law was uneven and indicative of several factors, including the prior history of popular mobilisation and the political disposition of local elites.21 Oldham had a combination of conditions that easily enabled the boycott of elections. The union comprised of only eight townships (the average union in Lancashire had twice that number), a strong Radical Association, and the campaign was supported by its MPs, the Tory-­ radical manufacturer John Fielden and radical General Johnson. Factory reformer Richard Oastler, moreover, sought to make Oldham the testing ground of the movement. Four townships in the union, including Oldham, successfully boycotted the guardian elections. The overseers did what was legally required of them, receiving and advertising nominations for the office of guardian, but they did no more, and refused to deliver or collect any voting papers. The remaining townships returned enough guardians to constitute the board, however, but the Radical Association stepped up their campaign in the run-­ up to the March 1838 elections. The Chartist clogger Thomas Swire nominated John Halliwell and Benjamin Dunkerley to the Oldham list, but declared that The Times, 13 February 1838; Hull Packet, 3 February, 7 April 1837: the Tory paper published vicious editorials against the new poor law. 19 Standard, 8 June 1838. 20 NS, 7 April 1838; Garrard, Leadership and Power, pp. 119, 210; Taylor, Popular Politics in Industrial England, pp. 30, 35. 21 F. Driver, Power and Pauperism: The Workhouse System, 1834–1884 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 123. 18

162

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

if elected, they would refuse to act. Ratepayers’ meetings were held in each township, attempting to extract a pledge not to nominate or stand as a guardian. Oldham diarist Edwin Butterworth’s account of events indicates how a combination of administrative resistance, regional leadership of popular agitation and the exploitation of radical memory for the new campaign, formed a potent force for expanding resistance. For example, ‘in Royton the overseers did not receive any papers naming Guardians’, and then ‘a special meeting of delegates of various trades’ was held on Curzon ground on Easter Monday, presided over by John Fielden, to which ‘banners and emblems of mourning said to be commemorative of “Mr Cobbett and the victims of the Peterloo Massacre” came from Middleton’.22 Not one guardian was appointed for any of the townships in March 1837. The weight of administrative opposition caused the Poor Law Commission to delay introducing the poor law in Oldham. When the Commission resumed implementing it in 1844, Oldham officials joined with those of Rochdale and Ashton-­under-­Lyne to resist. The magistrates also refused to co-­operate. A final writ was not issued until 1847.23 The success of this strategy cannot be underestimated. Ashton-­under-­Lyne similarly held out until the mid-­1840s, while Rochdale resisted the building of a new workhouse until 1871.24 The situation was varied outside the main strongholds of resistance in Lancashire and the West Riding. In Kendal, for example, no resistance occurred because a statutory body already existed, the trustees of the fell lands, who owned the parish workhouse, which they rented to the board of guardians after 1837, distributing part of the revenues to offset the burden of the poor rates. Elsewhere, the new poor law faltered because of specific socio-­economic conditions. Carlisle was seen by the poor law commissioners as an ideal test case to demonstrate that the new poor law could operate successfully in manufacturing districts. The board of guardians showed little ideological opposition. However, the implementation of the new poor law in Carlisle was hindered by underemployment and consequent low wages in the town’s textile industry in 1839–40. The board of guardians, faced with a mass application for relief from over 450 weavers, had to resort to small sums of outrelief. Distress continued into 1841, and was a factor in pushing Oldham Local Studies, D-­BUT F­/​42, 47, Butterworth papers, ‘news reports’ (hereafter Butterworth news reports), January–March 1837. 23 Standard, 30 March 1837; Weaver, John Fielden, p. 169; N. Edsall, The Anti-­Poor Law Movement, 1834–41 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), p. 80; Brennan, ‘Civic and municipal leadership’, pp. 174–5. 24 Brennan, ‘Civic and municipal leadership’, p. 30. 22



Contesting new administrative geographies163

weavers to Chartism. Local elites banded together to find a compromise between the harsher labour tests imposed by the new poor law and newly established charities established to deal with the fall-­out of the policy. The union workhouses, according to R. N. Thompson, thus ‘never became the bastilles of caricature in Cumbria’.25 The Poor Law Commission produced a report ‘on public opinion’ in December 1838, which outlined their main concerns about the administrative resistance. It naturally blamed agitators ‘not recognised as belonging to any great political parties, but engaged in political agitation as an occupation’ for stirring up popular opposition, particularly in the out-­townships where Tory gentry also fostered obstruction to the law. It argued that the administrative resistance was also conducted by ‘persons who by the operation of the law have lost power or influence or have been deprived of the means of obtaining popularity or money’. In one sense they were right­– ­little else could explain the Tory-­radical alliance­– ­but opposition to the new poor law was also an emotional response to the inhumane way the new poor law envisaged the needs of the poor. Nevertheless, authority was at issue, and assistant poor law commissioner Alfred Power’s first suggestion in the report was ‘to repeal that part of Sturges Bourne’s Act which gives the appointment of assistant overseers to the open vestry’.26 Exclusion from the civic body politic thus took place at many levels, not just on the street or in the meeting hall but also in the complex legal fabric of local government. Resistance to the new poor law, administrative and physical, did not simply end with Chartism, but rather carried on through it. It formed one of the central campaigns outside the political points of the Charter, holding the different wings of Chartism together. Improvement, highways and police commissions The next local institutions to be contested dealt more directly with place and its control: commissions for improvement, the highways and police. Over three hundred bodies for the improvement of the industrial towns were created in the early nineteenth century. Ratepayers could elect commissioners (as at Leeds) or indeed qualify as commissioners (as at R. N. Thompson, ‘The working of the Poor Law Amendment Act in Cumbria, 1836–71’, NH, 15 (1979), 120, 135; Carlisle Patriot, 4 April 1840; PP 1840 (23) Report of the Commission on Handloom Weaving, p. 24. 26 TNA, HO 73­/​54­/​81, fos 328–60, Poor Law Commission report on public opinion, 28 December 1838. 25

164

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

Manchester and Salford from 1792).27 Rather than enacting an imposition of a liberal vision of efficiency, as Patrick Joyce suggested, improvement commissions provided another source of Tory-­liberal conflict that often precluded any practical attempts to get anything done.28 But they also offered brief opportunities for more radical experiments in local government. Leeds improvement commission was a case in point. A Liberal remarked in the Leeds Mercury in 1840, ‘surely the office of sweeping the streets and lighting the lamps or of superintending these operations has not much to do with either politics or religion?’29 But it had on both counts. As the Tories lost control over the corporation and other bodies in the 1830s, they sought to gain power over the liberal-­dominated improvement commission. The Tories packed the vestry with members of the operative Conservative society, and gained leadership over the improvement commission from 1837 to 1839. Middle-­class Leeds radicals and Chartists, led by Joshua Hobson, then made the commission a vehicle for their own attempts to gain power but also, moreover, an experiment to test the possibilities of a truly local democracy. They attempted to shape a new improvement bill in early 1842 into a model of working-­class participation. Their plan was to use the vestry to elect the commissioners, removing the powers of magistrates and councillors in the process. Commissioners needed only a residential rather than a financial qualification, and all meetings were to be held in the evening rather than at the usual time of noon so that working men could attend. In the face of opposition by the established elites, however, Hobson and the commission withdrew the bill. The liberals made their final coup in 1842, with a new improvement act that abolished the commission and vested all powers in the council.30 As we saw in the introduction, this formed the basis for Hobson’s challenge to the council’s control over the Free Market and the main institutions of local government. The Manchester police commission was contested throughout this period, especially because it served as an alternative authority to the manorial institutions. As we saw in chapter 1, the Tory-­Anglican oligarchy in Manchester local government had been cemented by the takeover of the 1792 police commission by Thomas Fleming and his fellow loyalists. The structure of the commission nonetheless allowed for political rivalries and challenges. Any ratepayer of £30 or above could act as a Fraser, Urban Politics, p. 91. Joyce, The Rule of Freedom, p. 108. 29 LM, 11 January 1840; Fraser, Urban Politics, p. 93. 30 Fraser, Urban Politics, p. 94. 27 28



Contesting new administrative geographies165

police commissioner. By the postwar period, rising inflation meant that vestry meetings were increasingly populous as relatively poor inhabitants scrutinised constables’ accounts. In 1826, 600 people attended one meeting, led by Archibald Prentice and William Whitworth, making the transaction of business impossible.31 The Tories struck back, and introduced a police bill to exclude their rivals, setting the voting qualifications much higher and ensuring victory by using Sturges Bourne’s rules to vote in the proposal. Liberal-­radicals including Richard Potter, Edward Baxter and John Shuttleworth claimed to have been added to the list without being consulted. They denounced ‘Mr Bourne’s Vestry Act’ as ‘a most flagrant departure from the principles of our constitution’, and believed that meetings had been ‘disgraced’ by ‘clamour and tumult’ rather than held ‘in a spirit of temperance and decorum becoming the Character of the second town in the Empire’.32 The Whig-­ liberals managed to compromise with the Tories to lower the qualification slightly, but both sought to exclude the radicals in the 1828 act.33 The issue became tangled up in the struggle to incorporate Manchester, with advocates for incorporation seeking to take over the commission in order to silence opposition. Throughout the 1830s, radicals contested the new police commission: indeed it became a training ground for the political talents and ideas of future Chartists and their allies, including James Scholefield and Abel Heywood. In a similar scenario to radical attempts to democratise Leeds improvement commission, Chartists sought to use Manchester police commission as a way of introducing ‘Universal Suffrage in Local as well as General Government’. In early 1838, the now-­Chartist James Wroe proposed opening the vote to all who paid the police rate and Edward Nightingale moved that commissioners should be appointed in proportion to the population in each district (thereby giving more representation to the densely packed working-­ class districts).34 The move failed, but it was an important precedent for future experiments, Fraser, Urban Politics, p. 96. MALS, M91­ /​ 30­ /​ 7­ /​ 3, Police act committee minutes, appendix of letters, March 1828; M91­/​M1­/​33, boroughreeve and constables’ minutes, 1828, p. 276. 33 Fraser, Urban Politics, p. 97; V. A. C. Gattrell, ‘Incorporation and the pursuit of Liberal hegemony in Manchester, 1790–1839’, in Fraser, Municipal Reform, p. 37. 34 P. A. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 78, 80; Fraser, Urban Politics, p. 99; MALS, M91, Police commissioners minutes, 1838, vol. 8, pp. 116–19, 133. 31 32

166

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

especially in Sheffield, where Isaac Ironside, a former Chartist accountant, attempted to democratise local government in the early 1850s. He set up ‘ward-­motes’, directed by his Central Democratic Association, which claimed the right to vet parliamentary candidates and submit nominations for local offices.35 Manchester radicals’ colleagues over the river in Salford were more successful, owing to the larger ratepayer franchise. Judiciously allying with the Tories against the new poor law, five radicals, including R. J. Richardson, were elected on to the vestry in 1838. Control over the police commission and vestry enabled Salford’s radicals and Chartists to use the town hall and public spaces for meetings with less restriction than in Manchester.36 Policing was a major issue concerning the relationship between local and central government, and the enforcement of law and order. Administrative resistance to the Rural Constabulary Act of 1839 had implications for the policing of disorder during Chartism and trade union agitation.37 Predictably, much of the debate concerned rates and financing, as well as the political question of who had control over the different forces.38 As with resistance to the anti-­new poor law, and indeed entangled within such resistance, Tory-­radical alliances emerged against liberal control of local government. In the West Riding, the county police force was rejected by a marginal vote after a series of long debates at the quarter sessions, chaired by the Tory Lord Wharncliffe in 1840–1. Whig magistrates, including the MPs Charles Wood and Sir Francis Wood, were leading proponents of the county police, and were opposed by the Tory anti-­new poor law paternalist William Busfeild.39 Country Tories proposed a compromise whereby the industrial areas of the West Riding would have a paid county police, but not the rural areas. The issue was not one of local versus central control, but rather revolved around who would exercise Fraser, Urban Politics, pp. 107–8; C. Williams, ‘The Sheffield Democrats’ critique of criminal justice’, in R. Colls and R. Rodger (eds), Cities of Ideas: Civil Society and Urban Governance in Britain, 1800–2000 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 96. 36 Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists, p. 81. 37 F. C. Mather, Public Order in the Age of the Chartists (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959), pp. 75, 128–9. 38 D. Churchill, ‘Local initiative, central oversight, provincial perspective: governing police forces in nineteenth-­century Leeds’, Historical Research (forthcoming 2015). I am grateful to David for sharing this MS with me before publication. 39 LM, 18 April, 26 September, 12 December 1840; BO, 11 February 1841. 35



Contesting new administrative geographies167

local control, and inevitably, the cost of the rates. Rural townships offered particularly strong opposition to being lumped in with new boroughs, fearing their money would be used for the benefit of policing urban criminals and protesters.40 The North Riding of Yorkshire, which had been relatively quiet in political matters in the early 1830s, similarly asserted the rights of the localities. A handbill ‘to the inhabitants of the North Riding’ gave several reasons why they should oppose the Rural Constabulary Act. It argued that the Chartist unrest was a reason against rather than for the establishment of the new police, as ‘there is all the complaining, the bitterness of feeling still existing’, which would make the police even more hated by agitators. Attachment to a parish system defined by financial responsibilities to its own parishioners (a debate also raised about the new poor law boards) was also evident: the handbill claimed, ‘one very great objection is the expence of this to fall upon the Riding without discrimination­– ­ the peaceful vallies of Swaledale, Wensley Dale, Arkingarthdale and Lunedale are to pay for the prosecution of the property of Whitby, Yarn, Guiseborough, Malton and Stokesley shopkeepers!!!’ It is unclear who wrote this handbill or produced the printed templates of the petition against the act to be sent to the North Riding quarter sessions. They may have been organised under the direction of the writer of another handbill, John Bacon Sawrey Morritt, former Tory MP for Beverley and Northallerton and wealthy dilettante of Rokeby Hall, who complained of the lack of necessity and expense of the new police, ‘though useful in the collieries’.41 Almost every township in the North Riding filled in a petition. The collection now in North Yorkshire Record Office numbers over a hundred, indicating a high level of organisation (at least to post them to the right person) and a rare example of the voice of the smaller and more rural localities. Most of the petitions had a couple of dozen signatures, reflective of the small populations of each place, of whom most were farmers, though a few women (presumably propertied widows and shopkeepers) were included in each. The parish of Forcett, eight miles north of Richmond, for example, offered forty-­ four signatures out of a population of about ninety. Newton Morrell, seven miles north of Richmond, was only signed by two names, D. Phillips, ‘A weak state? The English state, the magistracy and the reform of policing in the 1830s’, EHR, 119:483 (2004), 891; D. Taylor, The New Police in the Nineteenth Century: Crime, Conflict and Control (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), p. 28; Churchill, ‘Local initiative’. 41 North Yorkshire RO, QAP­/​1, handbill, ‘Rural Police’, 3 February 1840, in North Riding police records, 1840–98. 40

168

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

Thomas Sowerby and Robert Robson, but noted this was because ‘we two occupy the whole township’.42 There were some flickers of radical opposition in the North Riding. In 1842, Chartists in Malton overturned an attempt by local elites to push a list of nominees to serve as borough constables, and a veteran radical named Wilson substituted a list of their choice, and defeated a bid to establish a paid police force.43 Elections and the meaning of the ‘public’ Corporations and councils formed yet another arena of contest. Many liberal elites welcomed the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 as a way of removing corruption and Tory influence from local government. At the heart of opposition to incorporation was the defence of customary definitions of authority and place. One problem was caused by rapidly expanded towns retaining medieval forms of government. The struggle to incorporate Manchester had a long history, with many battles with lord of the manor Sir Oswald Mosley. Manchester was eventually incorporated in 1838, but the process resulted in the bizarre situation of two rival authorities, both claiming to be the local government of the borough. Incorporation was strongly resisted by the old Tory elites, including police commissioners, overseers, churchwardens and the county magistrates. The new council of mayor, aldermen, councillors and borough magistrates were barred from using the town hall, and therefore conducted their meetings in the York Hotel, next door. The York Hotel, which had been the venue for reform bill meetings in 1830–1, was chosen by the liberals to hold the first meeting of the anti-­corn law association in September 1838. It was also commissioned by Colonel Warre as his headquarters for the military during the plug strikes in August 1842.44 This confusion of local authority had serious implications for the maintenance of public order. In 1838, the police commissioners refused to dissolve their night police while the court leet refused to dissolve its day police. Both authorities furthermore refused to co-­operate with the new corporation’s borough police. Disturbances during the Chartist ‘national holiday’ in 1839 highlighted the ­tangled North Yorkshire RO, QAP, petitions against the rural police, 1840. R. P. Hastings, Chartism in the North Riding (Borthwick paper, 105, York, 2004), p. 33; NS, 8 October 1842. 44 MG, 25 December 1830; Bolton Chronicle, 30 April 1831; M. Rose, ‘The plug riots of 1842 in Lancashire and Cheshire’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 68 (1957), 108. 42 43



Contesting new administrative geographies169

web of who was in charge of suppressing unrest, and so a new Manchester police bill was rushed through parliament. A similar situation occurred in Bolton, again with two rival governing bodies and two police forces. The borough police were able to take over only through the Borough Incorporation Act in 1842, although the old set of trustees continued to refuse to surrender their powers.45 Opportunities for radical contests of the new councils created in the wake of the Municipal Corporations Act were variegated. Administrative resistance to incorporation meant that some towns had municipal elections only towards the end of the period, as in Halifax as late as May 1847. Elsewhere, newspaper editors and publishers from all parties were particularly prominent in seeking local office, not least Edward Baines, liberal editor of the Leeds Mercury; Robert Perring, Tory editor of the Leeds Intelligencer; and, over the Pennines, Archibald Prentice, liberal proprietor of the Manchester Times. These men had the finances, respectability and more importantly the technical capabilities and reach to undertake the mass propaganda campaign necessary to persuade local opinion. Chartists faced more of an uphill struggle but they made it a life’s goal to tick off membership of all the local institutions on their CV: we have already seen the targeted elections of Joshua Hobson and John Jackson on to the various bodies in Leeds. They overtly connected local with national representation. Jackson and his fellow Chartists declared that their objective was to ‘make the Municipal Council of Leeds in miniature what we want the Commons House of Parliament to be’.46 Planning for election began in the Northern Union room in the Shambles in October 1839, and ward committees were duly set up, reflective of the increasing organisation of all political parties in the 1840s. The strategy had some success, as John Bower was elected for the working-­class ward of Hunslet with a majority of 151.47 Municipal Chartism was similarly successful in Sheffield, with its strongly independent tradition of the artisanal metalworkers. Initial resistance to incorporation waned and the town was incorporated in 1843. The leader of the ‘Democrats’, Isaac Ironside, was elected along with his Chartist colleague Thomas Briggs, in 1846, and their Bolton Archives, ZBR­/​5/­​2/­​57, petitions from Great and Little Bolton householders opposing incorporation, 1838; Midwinter, Social Administration in Lancashire, p. 142. 46 D. Fraser (ed.), A History of Modern Leeds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), p. 286; M. Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 343. 47 NS, 5 October, 2 November 1839. 45

170

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

influence and the vibrant ratepayer franchise enabled Chartists to hold twenty-­two of the fifty-­six council seats by 1849.48 Other town councils presented greater obstacles to election of working-­ class people. In Leeds and Bolton, councillors had to be rated at over £30, well above the £10 qualification for the national electoral franchise.49 Local elites also attempted to exclude by more illegal means. In October 1839, the overseer for Botchergate ward in Carlisle attempted to remove five hundred men from the burgess roll, that is, four-­fifths of the total. He claimed that the decision was due to a technicality of the charter of incorporation that burgesses had to pay their rates directly, and could not be tenants of landlords who compounded the rates. The Tory mayor and eminent naturalist, Thomas Coulthard Heysham, backed the action in the borough court. The Chartists contested the decision, no doubt in part because they regarded the decision as a class action, as Botchergate was a working-­class district outside the city walls with a strong radical tradition. The secretary of the Chartist association, Henry Bowman, lived on Union Street in Botchergate.50 Following advice from the Solicitor General, the mayor established a register of two hundred electors. The overseer continued his policy of exclusion into 1840, supported by the Whig-­liberals on the council who ordered him to disenfranchise over one hundred municipal electors in the ward. In October 1840, the Chartist burgesses drew up a memorial to the Home Secretary calling for an enquiry. They included three ward lists in their letter: the 1838 list contained 616 names, that of 1839, 241, and 1840, 154 names.51 The Botchergate Chartists stood their ground, but to little avail. In 1842, the Northern Star accused their comrades in the other Carlisle wards of apathy. With typical hyperbole, but nevertheless stressing the strategy of municipal Chartism, the ‘correspondent’ claimed: ‘the point established by the burgesses in this [Botchergate] ward is one of great and paramount importance to the country and would, if generally acted upon, enable the Chartist body to infuse a much more liberal spirit into the various corporate bodies throughout the country’.52 S. Pollard, A History of Labour in Sheffield (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1959), p. 48. 49 Garrard, Leadership and Power, p. 167. 50 NS, 12 October 1839; BL, Add MS 34245A, papers on the Chartist National Convention, 1839. 51 NS, 17 September 1840; TNA, HO 40­/​41­/​738, correspondence, 1840; HO 44­/​35, McKenzie to Normanby, 21 October 1840; J. Barnes, ‘Popular politics and radical protest: Carlisle, 1790–1850’ (PhD dissertation, University of Lancaster, 1981), pp. 344, 353. 52 NS, 12 November 1842. 48



Contesting new administrative geographies171

These contests revived the debate about what a public institution was, who had the right to be represented, what was public space, and which people had a right to use it.53 The spaces of representation and governance themselves were contested as part of these challenges. Chartists argued that public spaces were exactly that: as they were directly paid for by taxation, they should be open to all the people. Hobson’s challenge to the mayor of Leeds over who could use the Free Market was an integral part of their attempt to redefine that ‘public’ by getting elected on to the municipal body as well as using the spaces it controlled. Town halls bore particular significance in these battles. It was only from the 1820s onwards that many towns began to build town halls funded through the rates. In May 1838, the Stalybridge Chartist and future delegate to the National Convention, John Deegan, lamented the repeated denials which they have received when they have applied for the Town Hall. That edifice was built at an enormous expense to the people, and they have now to pay large sums of money as interest to persons who advanced money towards its erection … ­ Any person or any party can have the use of it, except the people alone are excluded.54

In July 1838, on a visit to Carlisle, Feargus O’Connor made a speech alleging that the liberal middle classes, recently elected to the corporation, had betrayed the working classes through the Reform Act and the Municipal Corporations Act: ‘These men had now got their Corporations, their town halls, and their billiard rooms, whilst the working people had their gaols and their Bastilles’. The local radical leader Joseph Broom Hanson congratulated them [radicals] upon their approach to the Town Hall. They were upon the threshold. The building, the whole building, belonged to them, and he hoped soon to see them in possession of the interior­– ­[cheers]­ – ­for in truth since the Whigs had got there, the people had to pay even more tolls and customs and dues.

The market place and cross directly outside the town hall had long been a site of protest, including during the reform agitations of 1819 and 1831. And in August 1838, the radicals temporarily achieved Hanson’s aim when they hired the town hall for a public meeting to form a branch

J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 55. 54 E. Yeo, ‘Culture and constraint in working-­class movements, 1830–1855’, in E. Yeo and S. Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1560–1914 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), p. 157. 53

172

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

of the Great Northern Union.55 In some towns where the policy of municipal Chartism was successful, radicals and Chartists were able to command enough of a majority on local councils to allow meetings to take place in the town hall or other civic buildings. Oldham was again exceptional in this regard, with T. P. Thompson, James Leach and other radical orators giving lectures in the town hall throughout 1842.56 In most places, however, town halls remained the exclusive preserve of local elites and their chosen causes for meetings, such as anti-­slavery and the anti-­corn law campaigns, and for calling up special constables and military against popular unrest. The working classes and their use of spaces were constrained not just by physical exclusion but by the local elites’ restrictive definition of the public and public space, which even when funded by the rates, was deemed private. Chartists perfected the radical rhetoric of the people and claimed to represent all the working class. But the tactic of municipal Chartism nevertheless relied on ratepayers to be the public, and was thus self-­limiting and not wholly democratic. The battles over public space were hard fought, and as we will explore in the next chapter, led to Chartists, Owenite socialists and organised labour forming their own spaces outside the control or contestation of local elites. The ultimate aim for radicals and Chartists was of course to elect MPs to parliament. The geography and timing of the policy was dependent upon not just the political makeup of the new boroughs, but also the verve and leadership of individual candidates. The general election of 1832 offered the first opportunity. In Rochdale, James Taylor, an ultra-­ radical hatter and Unitarian preacher, stood for election and gained significant support, although mainly from non-­electors. He later became a delegate to the National Convention. Rochdale maintained a radical representation by electing William Sharman Crawford, sympathetic towards the Chartists, at the 1841 election.57 A by-­election at Wigan in March 1839 provided the first opportunity for Chartists themselves to step up to the hustings. Local Chartists presented the publican Edward Nightingale of Manchester, but after a lukewarm reception he decided not to go to the poll, although a radical reformer won. The training and publicity given by municipal Chartism was essential in building a civic reputation essential to stand as a candidate. As Malcolm Chase has shown, Nightingale was chosen because he already had experience in NS, 21 July, 25 August 1838; Barnes, ‘Popular politics’, p. 323. Vernon, Politics and the People, p. 55; Oldham Local Studies, D-­BUT F­/7 ​ 8, 80, Butterworth news reports, 1842. 57 Brennan, ‘Civic and municipal leadership’, pp. 218, 235. 55 56



Contesting new administrative geographies173

local government; he had been elected to the police commission in 1838, was a leading member of the licensed victuallers’ society and had been active in the anti-­new poor law movement.58 In Manchester, Colonel T. Perronet Thompson contested the by-­election in September 1839, and his campaign was organised by radical electors’ associations in New Cross and Hulme, led by prominent Chartists including Nightingale and Wroe.59 Yet the chaotic party politics and large number of districts made it difficult to contest Manchester. Oldham, by contrast, proved much more fruitful electorally. It is no co-­incidence that both William Cobbett and Feargus O’Connor chose it as their electoral battleground, thereby connecting the local politics of opposition with issues of national representation, and providing the (albeit wobbly) springboard for O’Connor’s launch into national electoral politics. Backed by a committee organised by the radical Methodist minister James Holladay, Cobbett and the ten-­hour campaigning manufacturer John Fielden successfully contested the new seat in 1832, standing again in 1835. After Cobbett’s death, O’Connor stood in the by-­election, but only gained thirty-­two votes. In the 1837 and 1841 elections, Fielden was elected together with another radical, General William Johnson. The clash of personalities and principles often inherent in radical politics, however, led to a split by the time of the 1847 election, and with the decline of Chartism, radicalism’s control over Oldham weakened considerably.60 The 1841 National Convention decided to create a policy for contesting elections. The Chartists analysed the poll lists carefully, as at Carlisle in 1843 where they drew up a report on ‘the numbers who voted for the Whigs and Tories, and the numbers of Chartists who did not vote, which will shew the balance of power is in the hands of the people, and if cautiously exercised, may secure a Chartist MP for the borough’.61 In the 1847 election, Joseph Broom Hanson, weaver of Botchergate (one of those who had challenged the overseer’s decision to disenfranchise compounding ratepayers from the ward in 1839–40) stood for nomination, but on seeing the show of hands go in favour of the Conservative William Nicholson Hodgson and the major Whig manufacturer John

M. Chase, ‘“Labour’s candidates”: Chartist challenges at the parliamentary polls, 1839–60’, LHR, 74:1 (2009), 66–7. 59 Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists, p. 78. 60 NS, 17 July, 7 August 1847; Brennan, ‘Civic and municipal leadership’, pp. 78–80; E. Butterworth, Historical Sketches of Oldham (Oldham, 1856), pp. 205–8. 61 NS, 30 September 1843. 58

174

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

Dixon, he did not go to poll.62 In the West Riding, Ernest Jones, the prominent London barrister and convert to Chartism, stood unsuccessfully for Halifax in 1847 and 1852, the first time receiving fewer votes than the radical Edward Miall, a leading member of the British Anti-­ State Church Association.63 In the North Riding, the Liberal member for York from 1841 was Henry Galgacus Redhead Yorke, who had voted for the Charter in 1842 and was the son of the Sheffield radical arrested in 1794. His suicide in 1848 caused a by-­election, which was contested by the lecturer Henry Vincent, supported by the local Chartists, radicals, Quakers and independents. The bitterly fought contest saw Vincent come second with 880 votes.64 The significance of attaining several hundred votes from what was still a limited electorate is evident in itself, but we should also recognise the role of non-­electors. Historians of unreformed electoral politics have long emphasised participatory politics­– ­the inclusion of non-­electors in the rituals of hustings and feasts and influence­– ­but historians of post-­1832 politics by contrast tend to focus on the newly enfranchised and argue that the Reform Act did not lead to any substantial change in either the electorate or the composition of parliament. Yet the contested elections for local institutions vividly demonstrate participatory politics in the post-­reform arena. The votes of ratepayers often decided whether a candidate would go to the poll or not. Non-­electors were stronger in some boroughs compared with others, most notably in Rochdale, where they were led by the very active Chartist Thomas Livsey. There were some close misses at the polls, but the policy then evolved into supporting the Tories in order to dislodge the sitting Whig-­liberals.65 As with all types of politics and protest, there were significant regional variations dependent upon local socio-­economic structures. In many of the towns and villages in Lancashire and the West Riding that were dominated by one or two master manufacturers or major landowners, The Poll Book for the Borough of Carlisle Election (Carlisle, 1847), p.i. Brennan, ‘Civic and municipal leadership’, p. 60; M. Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the Romance of Politics: 1819–1869 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); K. Tiller, ‘Late Chartism’, in D. Thompson and J. Epstein (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–1860 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), p. 311. 64 Hastings, Chartism in the North Riding, p. 33; Gentleman’s Magazine (1848), p. 96. 65 Brennan, ‘Civic and municipal leadership’, p. 72; Chase, ‘“Labour’s candidates”’, 71. 62 63



Contesting new administrative geographies175

notably Halifax and Huddersfield, it was much harder for oppositional groups to gain a foothold in local government.66 By contrast, in towns with more differentiated and changeable socio-­ economic and landowning patterns, such as Manchester, Salford, Leeds and some of the smaller cotton towns such as Rochdale and Oldham, lively contests over most of the institutions of local government became common from the 1830s. Admittedly entry to even the lesser institutions was not for the faint-­hearted. A hundred people crammed into a vestry to elect a radical list offered safety in numbers; but for those individuals elected, there was a bigger challenge of being the odd one out in terms of class and education. Benjamin Wilson recalled in his memoirs his discomfort as a working man attending Halifax vestry, filled as it was with gentry and the old elite.67 Nor was the connection between ratepayers and Chartists uniform in areas of Chartist strength. Leeds was perhaps exceptional in that ratepayers formed the bulk of support for these Chartist endeavours, while in nearby Bradford, by contrast, Chartism had a defiantly more proletarian flavour and composition. In most places, popular politics was not a simple case of a unified working class versus large capitalist manufacturers. The main struggles for power occurred among urban middle classes as well as between them and various working-­class groups, revolving around groupings of families, religious sects and political party affiliation. The fragmented social structure of layers of different types of manufacturers and merchants, craftsmen, tradesmen, shopkeepers and artisanal workers all with their own interests, and the fluctuations in their economic fortunes over time, blur the strict class lines delineated by John Foster and Theodore Koditschek in their Marxist studies of Oldham and Bradford respectively.68 The municipal and electoral challenges also jar with the usual picture of Chartism as ‘the quintessential industrial protest movement’. Chartism was more complex, both in its socio-­economic makeup

Brennan, ‘Civic and municipal leadership’, p. 92; B. Lewis, The Middlemost and the Milltowns: Bourgeois Culture and Politics in Early Industrial England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 182. 67 D. Thompson, ‘Who were the people in 1842?,’ in M. Chase and I. Dyck (eds), Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), p. 126. 68 Fraser, Urban Politics, pp. 15, arguing against J. Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974); T. Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society: Bradford, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 66

176

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

and in its political goals.69 And municipal and electoral challenges were among its greatest successes, against the odds. We must not however overplay the coherence of the strategy of municipal Chartism; Chartist councillors acted independently from each other as well as from other radicals and parties, especially on local matters of improvement and retrenchment during the economic depression of the early 1840s. Chartists were united not on policy therefore but in the more general desire for more popular control in local institutions.70 The longer legacy of all these party conflicts and radical challenges nevertheless was the continued vitality of local governmental institutions at the heart of Victorian politics.

Chase, ‘“Labour’s candidates”’, 79. Fraser, Urban Politics, pp. 257–8.

69 70

Vignette 2

Processions

Processions are politics on the move. Parish authorities had always conducted ‘perambulations’ of their boundaries, and though the custom was fading in the most rapidly expanding urban areas, civic processions enacted a similar symbolic claiming of space in town centres. They demonstrated collective identity using routes carefully chosen to assert authority over space, but their form and purpose could be contested by both participants and spectators.1 Processions dominated civic and patriotic events that punctuated the yearly calendar of urban life. Celebrations of the king’s birthday were incomplete without a cavalcade of local notables, the military and brass bands processing to and from the parish church or town hall. The careful ordering of who marched where in the procession was a visual show of who was included and excluded in the civic hierarchy.2 Particularly from the end of the French wars onwards, radical and trades’ processions contested elites’ symbolic hegemony over space and exclusion from the civic body politic. This vignette compares civic and radical processions in Manchester and Leeds. It shows how popular politics was conducted through contested routes and choreographies, but also how changes in the streetplan of towns shaped the direction of the tactic.

R. Poole, ‘The march to Peterloo: politics and festivity in late Georgian England’, P & P, 192 (2006), 142; D. Gilbert, ‘The geographies of protest marches’, in M. Reiss (ed.), The Street as Stage: Protest Marches and Public Rallies since the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 46.  2 P.Borsay, ‘All the town’s a stage: urban ritual and ceremony, 1660–1800’, in P. Clark (ed.), The Transformation of English Provincial Towns 1600–1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 228; R. Sweet, ‘Civic ritual in eighteenth-­ century towns’, in J. Neuheiser and M. Schaich (eds), Political Rituals in Great Britain, 1700–2000 (Augsburg: Wisner-­Verlag, 2006), p. 40.  1

178

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

The focal point for civic and patriotic processions in Manchester was St Ann’s Square, the central civic space of the town built during the first round of ‘improvement’ in the 1720s. Patriotic processions during the American and French wars mustered in the square before parading to divine service at the ancient Collegiate Church, thereby connecting the mercantile district with the medieval centre of manorial power. The new commercial exchange (opened in 1809) on the side of the square, became a common starting point and the main thoroughfare of Market Street was well paraded. Such routes symbolically marked the increasing wealth of the merchants and manufacturers taking their places among the local elite. Processions increasingly journeyed through Piccadilly as the lord of the manor ‘improved’ the area as the commercial gateway into Manchester.3 The town hall, built on King Street in 1825, provided another focus, though its centrality in civic ritual was not achieved until after the incorporation disputes were resolved in the 1840s. Civic and patriotic processions were short and generally oriented north to south (see figure 7). But by the 1830s, they became longer, venturing further down London Road to Ardwick Green, the fashionable suburb of choice for respectable merchants and manufacturers. The first recorded occasion beginning at Ardwick appears to have been the celebration of George IV’s coronation in 1821; the procession covered six miles, the longest yet.4 As Salford expanded, furthermore, civic processions increasingly crossed over the river Irwell and down to the other fashionable middle-­class suburb of the Crescent. Events were jointly run by the two authorities, although it is clear that the focus of the procession remained on Manchester rather than its sister town. Organisation of the processions by committee became so regular by the 1830s that the same order of notables and routes was used. The committee for arranging celebrations of the passing of the 1832 Reform Act used a printed copy of the order of the 1831 coronation procession as a template, simply crossing out some of the particulars that were no longer relevant. Annual processions for the king’s birthday became regularised, using the same route from 1834 to 1837, a distance of about three miles. The working-­class areas were generally avoided, apart from some trips

J. Moore, ‘Urban space and civic identity in Manchester, 1780–1914’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 153 (2004), 96.  4 MG, 21 July 1821; M. Harrison, Crowds and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns, 1790–1835(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 164.  3

7  Loyal and patriotic processions, Manchester, plotted on R. Creighton, map of parliamentary boundaries, 1832.

180

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

down Great Ancoats Street on the other way to Ardwick.5 The focus on the centre of town was maintained despite the population of the four central districts falling by 11 per cent between 1821 and 1831 and many of the buildings becoming dilapidated.6 The cartography of radical processions in Manchester was very different (see figure 8). Radicals did not overtly challenge the traditional sites of civic procession, hardly ever passing the Collegiate Church and St Ann’s Square. Rather, most radical and trades’ processions went down Oldham Road and through New Cross, in immediate proximity to the major working-­class districts to the north, before turning down Oldham Street and then heading towards St Peter’s Fields. This reflected their wider composition, with many processions coming from the industrial towns and villages north of Manchester and entering the city from this direction. Passage through the town centre became more common as the site of mass public meetings shifted from St George’s Fields in the north to St Peter’s Fields towards the south. After Peterloo, crossing this martyred ground became almost obligatory for every radical procession wishing to associate with the site of political pilgrimage. The direction of reform processions in Manchester continued to be shaped by the activities of Henry Hunt. Processions met Hunt as he passed through the town to and from Preston to contest the seat in 1831. The procession to celebrate Hunt’s visit on 1 November completely circumnavigated the town centre without venturing anywhere near St Ann’s Square or Market Street, and travelled a distance of over four and a half miles, taking several hours. The procession to mark the completion of a monument to Henry Hunt took place on the anniversary of Peterloo on 16 August 1842, and made sure to go the length of St Peter’s Street in a route of over four miles.7 The well-­trodden path from New Cross down Oldham Street continued into the 1840s, particularly because the Chartists decided to use nearby Stevenson’s Square as a new base for mass meetings. Market Street also remained a regular part of routes by all types of protesters, especially because the crowd could jeer or cheer in front of the newspaper offices situated there.8 New Cross and Great Ancoats Street MALS, M71­/​2­/​19­/​6–8, printed orders of procession, 1831–2; M71­/​2­/​9­/​5, orders of procession, 1834–7; M71­/​2­/​13­/​2, proclamation of her majesty’s accession, 24 June 1837.  6 R. Dennis, English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century: A Social Geography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 69.  7 Bolton Chronicle, 30 April 1831; NS, 6 August 1842.  8 NS, 22 August 1840.  5

8  Radical and trade union processions, Manchester, plotted on R. Creighton, map of parliamentary boundaries, 1832.

182

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

remained common starting points for radical processions because the headquarters of political unions and several Chartist branches were situated in the district. Radicals ventured over the river to Salford more rarely than civic processions. In part, Salford radicals plotted their own routes, asserting their own identity, but also Manchester radicals deliberately avoided many of the obvious sites associated with elite authority, including the New Bailey prison (next to the bridge over into Salford) and the town hall. Chartist processions also inversed their direction of travel and outlook. Lack of space in the town centre, together with restrictions on meeting enforced by the authorities, pushed Chartists to hold mass meetings on Kersal Moor across the boundary, three miles north of New Cross. For the first monster meeting on Kersal Moor in September 1838, the processions were marshalled to prevent disturbance, with each political and trades group assembling in a designated place before converging by stages along the road. The Manchester Guardian calculated that it took thirty-­five minutes to pass through the toll bar leading to the moor. The marches powerfully crossed the concentric circles of class-­segregated residential areas that Friedrich Engels noted were characteristic of Manchester’s urban development. They escaped the pollution of the centre and disturbed the middle-­class villas of Broughton en route.9 Leeds civic and patriotic processions were similarly centred on the medieval heart of the city and connected it to the new commercial areas (see figure 9). All major processions passed up and down Briggate, the ‘principal street’ of the town. Proclamations, including of the peace preliminaries in 1814 and for George IV’s accession in 1820, were read at the bottom and top of Briggate, the latter site being the market place outside the Moot Hall, the early seventeenth-­century centre of governance that stood in the middle of the street with the pillory and stocks in front. Processions followed down Kirkgate to the parish church, another traditional focus of civic authority.10 An improvement act of 1822 cleared and widened Briggate and demolished the Moot Hall, thereby enabling the new Whig-­liberal authorities to get rid of the symbolic centres of old Tory power and to construct a corn exchange and a straighter and more bourgeois arena for civic processions. Urban expansion also widened the reach of processions in Leeds, though not as far as in Manchester. MG, 26 September 1838; NS, 22 September 1838; P. A. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford(London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 10; F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (London, 1892 edn), p. 46. 10 LM, 12 February 1820.  9

9  Processions, Leeds, plotted on R. Baker’s sanitary map of Leeds, in E. Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain (London, 1842).

184

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

From the later eighteenth century, civic processions began to form in Park Place before they descended into the town centre. The development of the Park estate of bourgeois residences included a garden-­square and St Paul’s church, which offered exclusive pew and internment rights to the wealthy residents.11 The celebrations of George III’s golden jubilee in 1809 began at Park Place, where the gents were serenaded by bands playing the national anthem before they filed off to the mayor’s house and into Park Square.12 At the foot of Park Row were the Coloured (or Mixed) Cloth Hall, the largest indoor space in Leeds when it was built in 1758, and the court house, provided for by an improvement act of 1809.13 From the late 1810s, the court house became a major starting and termination point for civic processions. The local elites attempted to develop civic pride by connecting these sites with other significant building endeavours in the town. The court house was the starting point for a procession of 160 shareholders to lay the foundation stone of the new £30,000 Commercial Buildings at the end of Boar Lane in 1826.14 Industrial development however shaped civic ritual in more negative ways. From the 1820s, pollution from Benjamin Gott’s woollen factories at Bean Ing on the banks of the river Aire and the growth of working-­class slums threatened to choke the West End, and wealthy merchants deserted the area for leafy suburban villas in the fresh air of Woodhouse Moor. The organisers of processions nevertheless continued to use Park Row as a starting point. The court house and Coloured Cloth Hall remained key sites for public meetings (see figure 10). The proclamation of the accession of Queen Victoria in June 1837 was read first at the court house, before the procession ‘moved in excellent order slowly up Park Row and then towards Briggate and after parading the town, returned to Park Place, at the windows of which, as on the whole line, the ladies appeared to show their loyalty’.15 Leeds radical and trade union processions differed from their Manchester counterparts in that they used the same streets and landmarks as the civic elites. They went up and down Briggate, and many also went up Park Row to attend meetings held in the Coloured Cloth Hall Yard, or to protest outside the court house. In April 1819, ‘several K. Grady, Georgian Public Buildings of Leeds and the West Riding (Leeds: Thoresby Society Publications, 1987), p. 104. 12 LM, 28 October 1809. 13 M. Beresford, East End, West End: The Face of Leeds During Urbanisation, 1684–1842 (Leeds: Thoresby Society Publications, 1988), p. 107. 14 LM, 20 May 1826. 15 LM, 1 July 1837. 11



Vignette 2: Processions185

10  Extract from 5 feet: mile Ordnance Survey map of Leeds, sheet 10, 1847, showing Park Row and Mixed Cloth Hall (bottom right).

hundred’ unemployed croppers and clothiers assembled in front of the building before parading into town to demonstrate about their distress.16 Leeds radicals and trades thus directly challenged the symbolism and the occupation of civic processional sites, subverting their meaning, if only temporarily, by the ritual of processing. Radical and Chartist processions also ventured out of town to and from Holbeck and Hunslet moors. These sites were just over a mile south of the centre and were increasingly encroached upon by urban and industrial expansion, notably by Gott’s factory and Marshalls’ mills complex in Holbeck.17 LM, 24 April 1819. D. Fraser, A History of Modern Leeds (Manchester: Manchester University

16 17

186

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

Radicals in 1819, trade unions in the 1830s and Chartists in the 1840s held regular meetings on Hunslet Moor, featuring elaborate processions from Leeds.18 Mark Harrison’s analysis of procession routes in early nineteenth-­ century Liverpool noted that crowds rarely processed in from the outskirts and thus processions were generally confined to the centre of the town.19 This of course contrasted with Manchester and Leeds, where the outlying neighbourhood formed the main participants in radical and trade union mass meetings, with the processions in from the s­ urrounding towns being events in themselves. Harrison claims that Manchester, compared with Liverpool, had a lack of opportunity for developing civic processions, because of ‘the absence of parliamentary elections and of a town corporation’.20 This statement seems less convincing if we consider the well-­established local elites of boroughreeves, magistrates and fellows of the Collegiate Church who formed the equivalent civic body and led the regular processions on royal and military commemorations. The processional map of the town is more complex and contested than Harrison admits. Manchester processions of all types had an average distance of just under three miles, whereas those in Leeds were around one and a half miles. This reflected the fact that Leeds had a more compact town centre. Many Manchester processions circumnavigated the town centre but they also travelled south to Ardwick Green and ventured further north up to Kersal Moor. Hunslet and Woodhouse moors were much closer to the centre of Leeds. But it also indicated the socio-­economic differences between the towns. Both civic and radical processions tended to avoid both the East End and western areas of Leeds, even though branches of the Northern Union and other radical and trade union groups had headquarters in each district by the late 1830s.21 A sanitary map was commissioned by the Leeds Board of Health to investigate the sources of the cholera epidemic in 1832. Dr Robert Baker depicted stark class segregation in Leeds. By delineating the ‘cleansed’ juxtaposed with the ‘less cleansed’ districts, the map showed Leeds was not constructed of concentric circles as Engels found in Manchester, but rather a striped pattern, in which the commercial and middle-­class centre between Park Row and Briggate was enclosed on either side by the slums (and thus Press, 1980), pp. 97–8. LM, 25 September 1819; MG, 21 June 1834; NS, 20 August 1842. 19 Harrison, Crowds and History, pp. 159–60. 20 Harrison, Crowds and History, p. 160. 21 NS, 22 June 1839. 18



Vignette 2: Processions187

concentrations of cholera) of the East End and the far western districts. However, historical geographers have revealed that the map simplifies a more mixed social geography of class and residence in all districts. R. Dennis noted, ‘the brown wash with which Baker depicted less cleansed districts aptly served to obscure much of the detail of working-­ class streets and courts, artistically embodying the ignorance of the East End held by the middle classes of west Leeds’.22 The emptiness of civic patriotism Civic patriotic ritual had always involved an uncertain relationship between participants and spectators: watching a civic procession did not translate to absolute adherence to its political message. By the 1820s, the ultimate emptiness of elite-­controlled civic ritual was evident for a majority of the working population. Popular hatred of George IV was fostered in the aftermath of Peterloo and the Queen Caroline affair; Thomas Asline Ward of Sheffield wrote in his diary in 1820, ‘We had rather a poor procession on the King’s proclamation, and some hissing. The yeomanry were very unpopular, though their captains, Shore and Rimington, would not act as the Manchesterians’.23 The rituals of civic patriotism provided a legal outlet for political expression and dissension at a time of restrictions on public meeting. Subversion of civic patriotism reached another level with a mass boycott of the celebrations of Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1838. Trade unions had participated in the civic procession of 1831 for the coronation of William IV, but made a concerted effort to avoid the celebrations in 1838.24 A poster addressed to ‘the officers and members of trades’ unions in Manchester and Salford’ offered stridently class-­based reasons for the boycott: We are not wanting in love and loyalty to the Queen, but that dear-­bought experience has taught us the folly of such idle pomp and useless parade, and we can no longer as rational and intelligent beings become the dupes of our oppressors, the passive instruments for creating by shews [sic] and gewgaws a false notion of our prosperity; for the truth is, the working classes have not wherewithal to spend in glittering paraphernalia, neither Dennis, English Industrial Cities, p. 67. R. Eadon Leader (ed.), Peeps into the Past: Being Passages from the Diary of Thomas Asline Ward (Sheffield, 1909), p. 263. 24 R. Sykes, ‘Early Chartism and trade unionism’, in D. Thompson and J. Epstein (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–1860 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 159–61. 22 23

188

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

having the confidence in the government of the country being willing to better their condition.25

Disillusionment with the emptiness of monarchical show was widespread; Matthew Tomlinson, a tenant farmer on the outskirts of Wakefield and by no means a reformer, lamented in his diary on 27 June: ‘George the 4th cost the publick 259,000 £’s on his Coronation day, yet I hope that the crowning of a young girl will not cost so much money as the crowning of a libidinous epicure’.26 The central grievance behind the protests was the imposition of the new poor law in northern England in 1837, and this is reflected in the fact that there are no records of the boycott further south than the Trent. Anti-­new poor law associations joined with trades in co-­ ordinating the subversion of civic patriotism.27 In Oldham, ‘a large crowd of the working classes’ avoided the civic procession of local elites and operative conservative societies. Instead radicals met on their usual site of Curzon ground to propose a memorial to the queen ‘praying for the dismissal of the Poor Law Commissioners and to agree to a demand to the House of Commons for universal suffrage, annual parliaments, no property qualification for members’. Handloom weavers from Failsworth ‘brought a large cart in which was placed a loom with a Jacquard on top and a “poor weaver” weaving a piece of “fancy goods”’.28 Such ritual borrowed from the mummery of wakes holidays and ensured that all could understand the sarcastic symbolism. The local authorities reacted to the boycotts and alternative processions with more aggressive ritual. The queen’s birthday in May 1839 was marked by a massive military display in Manchester and other towns, intended to remind the Chartists (whom they feared were planning a ‘rising’) that loyalist authorities were in control. Yet ultimately local elites began to recognise the ineffectiveness of showy civic rituals. The last of the annual Queen’s birthday parades was held in Manchester in 1840, leaving the routes and streets solely to the Chartists, trade unions and corn law repealers.29

TNA, HO 40­/​38­/​692, poster, 1838. Wakefield Local Studies, 920:TOM, diaries of Matthew Tomlinson, vol. 11, 27 June 1838. 27 Leeds Times, 30 June 1838. 28 MT, 30 June 1838. 29 Champion, 5 May 1839; MT, 6 June 1840. 25 26

6

Constructing new spaces

In June 1839, the Chartists of Heckmondwike and Liversedge in the West Riding announced their plans to build a ‘People’s Hall’. The Northern Star commented that the decision to build the hall was prompted ‘in consequence of the Radicals of Heckmondwike and Liversedge having been ejected from public houses and schoolrooms through the influence of the “conscientious and liberal” Whigs and despotical Tories’. Their initial motivation was thus a product of exclusion, but their wider aims were inclusive. Funded by one-­pound shares, the hall was primarily intended to host their meetings and activities, but it was also to be ‘confined to no sect or party, but for the benefit of the people at large’. This was not a ‘Radical or Chartist Hall, but a People’s Hall’. Upon construction, the people were nevertheless defined by class and gender: the building became Heckmondwike working men’s hall.1 With greater longevity and funding than their predecessors, radicals were able to move beyond ‘spaces of making do’. Owenite socialists, Chartists, trade unions and the other social movements that emerged in the 1830s hired or constructed detached buildings for their sole use. These sites of meeting functioned not just for immediate campaigns, but for longer visionary goals. These were spaces to enact an alternative economy, a freer religion, an egalitarian education and for entertainment. Association rooms, working men’s clubs and halls of science reflected a holistic view of how politics should shape communities and their everyday life. They offered a new definition of public space.2 Owenite socialists used halls of science to challenge the dominant NS, 29 June 1839; E. Jones, Notes to the People, vol. 1 (London, 1851), p. 926.  2 F. Tonkiss, Space, the City and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), p. 64; see C. Parolin, Radical Spaces: Venues of Popular Politics in London, 1790–c.1845 (Canberra: Australia National University Press, 2010), chapter 7, for the metropolitan context of new radical sites in the 1830s.  1

190

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

­ olitical economy of the elites; they offered an alternative to the middle-­ p class controlled mechanics’ institutes. Through the conviviality and mutuality of working men’s halls, the trade unions provided an alternative to the drudgery of factory work. The Chartists attempted to create a holistic way of life with entertainments, shopping and education in their own halls, shops, chapels and schools. The more radical dissenting sects continued to look to this world and the next against the alienating class hierarchies of Anglican churches and the increasing conservatism of traditional Methodism. Historians have underplayed these elements of social movements, focusing rather on hagiographies of their leaders and their role in major campaigns such as the Chartist petitions to parliament in 1839, 1842 and 1848. But as more recent studies of Chartism have shown, the associational and social elements of political movements were neither ancillary to the main goals of achieving representation in parliament nor a response to political failure. Social activities were an integral part of building the movement.3 The ‘localities’ columns of the Northern Star and the Poor Man’s Guardian advertised week after week the wealth of social activity that supported political agitation at its very height as well as in between each peak. Class identities and solidarity were formed through everyday life as well as through points of struggle. And during and between waves of agitation, new spaces provided room for the movements to develop and expand outwith the restrictions placed on oppositional action by anti-­radical elites since the 1790s. Chapels Nonconformist chapels continued to provide venues for many different oppositional groups, such sites often being the largest indoor space available in villages and the ‘neighbourhood’. The postwar Reformers’ chapel in Middleton was succeeded by the Primitive Methodist chapel (founded 1835) at the top of Barrowfield (itself a frequent political meeting site). The Chartists met at the Reformers’ chapel in support of the imprisoned Reverend Joseph Rayner Stephens in January 1839 and in February 1840 to arrange a memorial to the queen to request a pardon for the Welsh Chartists transported to Australia for their part in  3

E. Yeo, ‘Robert Owen and radical culture’, in S. Pollard and J. Salt (eds), Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1971), p. 104; P. A. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995); M. Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).



Constructing new spaces191

the Newport rising.4 Queenshead Northern Union in the West Riding used the New Connexion Methodist chapel and the Baptist schoolroom for their meetings. The Baptists later refused the Chartists further use of their schoolroom, but the Primitive Methodists offered their chapel as a replacement venue.5 Chapels were nodes of co-­ordination for evangelical itinerant preachers, and Chartists were able to use their ready-­made networks to spread their own message. William Thornton from Halifax, a regular speaker for Bradford Northern Union, preached every week at Mount Carmel chapel, Little Horton, and Zion chapel, Birstal.6 Independent Methodists were particularly sympathetic hosts in Oldham and surrounding towns in Lancashire. The sect, like the Kilhamites and Primitives, was formed after Wesleyan leaders attempted to suppress revivalist activities in fear of being associated with political radicalism as well as theological heterodoxy. The Manchester Wesleyan Leaders’ meeting expelled over four hundred members in 1806, enforced a ‘no-­ politics rule’ for sermons and reassured the Home Office of their loyalty to the monarchy. The Independent Methodists therefore provided a natural home for both political and religious dissent.7 Their schoolroom on George Street in Oldham continued its long-­standing role as a venue for meetings of the Radical Reform Association, temperance tea parties and meetings for the Ten Hours campaign.8 Dr James Scholefield’s congregation provided another important haven for radicalism through the difficult years following Peterloo all the way until Chartism. The combination of a committed activist over a long time and a community who had already risked much in their dissent sustained their position through thick and thin. Scholefield’s Cowherdite Bible Christians were an offshoot of the Swedenborgians,

TNA, HO 40­ /​ 37­ /​ 90, Halsall to Russell, 2 March 1839; Champion, 27 January 1839; NS, 15 February 1840.  5 NS, 8 December 1838; A. Peacock, Bradford Chartism, 1838–40 (Borthwick paper, 36, York, 1969), p. 19; E. Yeo, ‘Christianity in Chartist struggle, 1838–42’, P & P, 91 (1981), 117.  6 E. Webster, ‘Chartism in the Calder Valley, 1838–50’, Transactions of Halifax Antiquarian Society, n.s., 2 (1994), 56; J. Martin, ‘Popular political oratory and itinerant lecturing in Yorkshire and the north east in the age of Chartism’ (PhD dissertation, University of York, 2010).  7 D. A. Gowland, Methodist Secession: The Origins of Free Methodism in Three Lancashire Towns (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), pp. 25–6.  8 Oldham Local Studies, D-­BUT F­/​54, 55, Butterworth papers, ‘news reports’ (hereafter Butterworth news reports), 1838.

 4

192

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

founded by William Cowherd (now better known as a pioneer of vegetarianism). The Cowherdites took on many of the children of radicals turned out by Methodist Sunday schools after Peterloo. Scholefield was a preacher and medical doctor who became renowned for his treatment of the poor during the 1832 cholera epidemic.9 He constructed Christ Church chapel on Every Street near the expanding industrial area of New Islington in Manchester. The chapel formed part of a complex consisting of a two-­storey house with an attached large circular hall, nicknamed the ‘Roundhouse’. The round form of the chapel, as in the case of Richard Carlile’s Rotunda in London, was intended to facilitate a more direct and less hierarchical relationship between lecturer and audience. It was overtly political from the start, with the opening ceremony taking place on 16 August 1823, the anniversary of Peterloo (an event which Scholefield had witnessed and had given evidence about at Hunt’s trial), and at which eight children were named after Henry Hunt.10 The radical Working-­Class Political Union held their district meetings in the schoolroom ‘under the chapel’ during the agitation for the reform bill in late 1831. A public meeting to consider the cause of the Tolpuddle Martyrs, addressed by the cotton spinners’ union leader John Doherty and radical R. J. Richardson, took place in the chapel in April 1834.11 Scholefield sustained the religious and political independence of his congregation and took them with him into Chartism. Scholefield went on to represent Ancoats on the new Manchester corporation.12 Scholefield’s chapel continually constructed and reimagined radical heritage. In 1842, on the anniversary of Peterloo, 16 August, at the height of the plug strikes, the trades’ congress and the Chartist Convention, Feargus O’Connor inaugurated the erection of a monument to Henry Hunt in the burial ground of the chapel. The monument demonstrated the Chartists’ wish to construct their connection with the postwar radical movement using a physical ‘landmark of memory’. The Northern Star featured an engraving of the monument prominently P. A. Pickering and A. Tyrrell, ‘”In the thickest of the fight”: the Reverend James Scholefield and the Bible Christians of Manchester and Salford’, Albion, 26:3 (1994). 10 N. Mansfield, Buildings of the Labour Movement (Swindon: English Heritage, 2013), pp. 18–19; JRLUM, 133 MMC­/​2­/​ScholefieldJ­/​2­/​20–27, Manchester medical collection, documents relating to Dr Scholefield, n.d. 11 MT, 12 November 1831; MG, 12 April 1834; R. G. Kirkby and A. E. Musson, The Voice of the People: John Doherty, 1798–1854 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1975), pp. 290–1. 12 NS, 8 October 1842.  9



Constructing new spaces193

on its front page, intimating that the authorities’ actions against both Chartists and the trade unions boded another massacre.13 The siting nevertheless reflected their exclusion from public space: despite the Liberal authorities continuing to connect their identity with the legacy of Peterloo, they would not have allowed a radical monument associated with universal suffrage on St Peter’s Fields (where they were constructing the Free Trade Hall, associated with Smithian economics not the rights of workers). So the Chartists had to erect their monument in their own locale on the land of a sympathiser. The construction of a landmark of memory worked in the short term. In 1847, the Northern Star reported the funeral of ‘Mr Rothwell, the oldest Radical in the town’: ‘His last wish was that the Chartists of Manchester should follow him to his last home and that he might be buried in the vault under “Hunt’s monument”’.14 From 1897 to 1963, the old chapel was the venue for the Manchester University Settlement. The fate of the monument, by contrast, illustrated the fate of the radical movement it represented: funded by penny subscriptions, it was by necessity cheaply built and difficult to maintain, leading to its collapse a couple of decades later.15 A contrastingly charismatic leader was Reverend Joseph Rayner Stephens, who established a network of chapels in Ashton-­under-­Lyne, Stalybridge and surrounding villages in the Ashton and Huddersfield circuits. Stephens, after seceding from his appointment to the Ashton Wesleyan Methodist circuit, erected his own chapel in Charlestown to accommodate 1,100 people in 1837. Its siting was an obvious choice: the rapidly expanding industrial settlement of Charlestown had a long tradition of radical and dissenting independence.16 The chapel became the central place in the district for radical activity. By 1839, the Stephensites had ten preaching stations and thirty-­one preachers in the Ashton circuit alone. Stephens and his supporters were therefore able to mobilise their movement quickly and effectively by building upon a well-­established community of believers. Stephens headed the anti-­new poor law campaign in the district and then became even more notorious for his forthright sermonising on behalf of Chartism. He was arrested NS, 20 August 1842; I. Haywood, ‘Encountering time: memory and tradition in the radical Victorian press’, in L. Brake and J. Codell (eds), Encounters in the Victorian Press: Editors, Authors, Readers (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2005), pp. 77–8. 14 NS, 11 September 1847. 15 Mansfield, Buildings of the Labour Movement, pp. 18–19. 16 P. Lockley, Visionary Religion and Radicalism in Early Industrial England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 72. 13

194

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

by Bow Street runners sent up from London in December 1838.17 As the first notable radical leader to be imprisoned, the campaign to free him became a national Chartist concern. Upon his release on bail in March 1839, Stephens intended to give a defiant sermon justifying his actions in his Charlestown chapel, thereby drawing national attention to this industrial village, connecting national with local. Thousands of people assembled, causing the sermon to be adjourned to Ashton market place.18 The structures and connections of the breakaway Methodist sects were again key to the rapid organisation and pan-­regional spread of Stephens’s defence fund. The Stephensite Chartists borrowed chapels or Sunday schools under working-­class control to deliver Sunday sermons and take a collection. Such sermons brought small townships into national notice in the spring of 1839. At Lees near Oldham, Chartists held a meeting in support of Stephens at the Arminian Independent room, and across the Pennines, fundraising sermons were preached in his honour, for example at Mount Carmel chapel in Little Horton outside Bradford.19 Stephens repudiated Chartism after his arrest, resigning his seat in the Convention, and was subsequently vilified by the movement. In August 1839, he was sentenced to eighteen months in prison.20 The Charlestown chapel nevertheless remained a site of meeting. Several delegate meetings of the plug strikes were held in the ‘Chartist meeting room’ in the summer of 1842, and in September, Richard Pilling, another Ashton leader, was arrested as he addressed a strike meeting in the chapel.21 Many religious congregations preferred to promote issues of social justice, temperance and anti-­poverty rather than risk loyalist censure by allowing radical reformers to meet regularly in their premises. So Oldham Providence Independent chapel held a meeting to support Michael Sadler’s factory bill in January 1832, while in November 1836 the Methodist New Connexion chapel hosted a meeting to support the campaign for a ten-­hour working day, addressed by the paternal Yeo, ‘Christianity’, 113, 115; NS, 17 February 1838, 2 March, 13 July 1839; The Trial of Feargus O’Connor Esq and Fifty-­Eight Others (Manchester, 1843), p. 13. 18 NS, 9 March 1839. 19 Yeo, ‘Christianity’, 116; Oldham Local Studies, D-­BUT F­/6 ​ 2, Butterworth news reports, 1839; BO, 7 March 1839; Champion, 27 January 1839; NS, 16 March 1839. 20 T. M. Kemnitz and F.Jacques, ‘J. R. Stephens and the Chartist movement’, IRSH, 19:2 (1974), 211. 21 Chase, Chartism, p. 227; NS, 18 June 1842. 17



Constructing new spaces195

ist manufacturers John Fielden and Richard Oastler and chaired by ultra-­radical William Fitton.22 The new poor law was an even more cross-­party issue, and anti-­poor law campaigners met at many chapels, including the Methodist chapel at Wigton in Cumberland, where the female radical society agreed a memorial to the queen against the new poor law in December 1838.23 Socialists and Chartists sought to construct buildings to facilitate their utopian visions of a radical religious community. Socialists envisaged multi-­purpose sites which would combine radical services with self-­education in lectures, a library and newsroom. At Huddersfield, 120 one-­pound shares had already been collected by October 1829 for the erection of a ‘neat, plain and spacious’ chapel. It was never completed, but it foreshadowed the building of the Owenite Hall of Science a decade later.24 The Chartists, as in many endeavours, had the longevity and funds to set up their own chapels, predominantly in Scotland, but also in about twenty places in England. The significance of these chapels lay in their emphasis upon full lay ministry, in reaction to the clerical and classist hierarchies of the established church and the increasing self-­preserving conservatism of the Methodist sects.25 They sought, if ephemerally, to offer some kind of democracy in religious practice and belief. At Northowram, a township north of Halifax, the Round Hill Primitive Methodist Chapel severed its connection with the Connexion and formed a Chartist church. Keighley Primitives made a similar break to offer Chartist-­ oriented services.26 In Oldham, the chapel ‘lately occupied by the Primitive Methodists’ on Grosvenor Street became a central meeting place for many radical groups. It held anti-­new poor law meetings in early 1837 and a meeting of the working classes to support the striking Glasgow spinners in November 1837. The Owenite socialists took over the chapel and renamed it the Socialist’s Institution, with a series of lectures in the first week of January 1838. Later in the month, Richard Carlile gave a series of lectures in the Institution, and Robert Owen, Lloyd Jones and Feargus O’Connor lectured there in 1838–9. Socialist tea parties were held every Easter Monday. Operative Oldham Local Studies, D-­BUT F­/6 ​ , 39, Butterworth news reports, 1836. NS, 29 December 1838; Yeo, ‘Christianity’, 111. 24 J. A. Hargreaves and E. Haigh (eds), Slavery in Yorkshire: Richard Oastler and the Campaign Against Child Labour in the Industrial Revolution (Huddersfield: University of Huddersfield Press, 2012), p. 110; Lion, 23 October 1829. 25 Chase, Chartism, p. 52. 26 Yeo, ‘Christianity’, 117. 22 23

196

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

­ltra-­ u radicals and Chartists also used the Institution for meetings between 1838 and 1840.27 Association rooms and working men’s halls By 1840, authorities’ suspicion of Owenite socialists was roused not so much by their association with trade unionism as by their social and pseudo-­religious activities. What worried Anglican clerics in particular was the secularism which they saw was the result of socialists creating an alternative sphere of activities on Sundays for the working classes.28 In early 1840, the bishop of Exeter rallied his peers against socialism. He presented correspondence to the House of Lords, complaining of the erection of a social institution in Leicester. The Home Secretary, Marquis of Normanby, retorted by stating that socialism was not on the increase.29 Clergy and other Anglican notables indignantly wrote in their droves to the Home Office to contradict him. Liberal antiquarian John Easby of Manchester, for example, boldly informed Normanby that his statement was an ‘error’, and then listed the places where socialists had a ‘fixed place of meeting’, either a hired room or meeting house, visited each Sunday by lecturers. These included: Liverpool, Bolton, Ashton-­under-­Lyne, Rochdale, Oldham, Preston, Wigan, Warrington, Stockport, Heywood, Hyde, Leigh, Middleton, Macclesfield, Mottram, Blackburn, Sheffield and Huddersfield. For Manchester, he reported, In 1836 they assembled in small numbers in Salford, comparatively unknown, increasing, they engaged Mr Bywater’s room in Manchester (one of the largest in the locality) for Sunday discussions. Average attendance [is] 600, although one penny was exacted for each person’s admission. Now they have six [paid lecturers] at a salary of 30­/-­each. Average attendance now in the Carpenters’ Hall [is] 800.

Easby noted that the socialists were increasing ‘so rapidly that they have purchased land, and have nearly completed a very large Hall near St. Matthew’s Church’.30 Mr Bywater’s ‘large room’ on Peter Street

Oldham Local Studies, D-­BUT F­/​52, 54, 57, 62–3, 67–8, Butterworth news reports, 1837–9; NS, 9 March 1839. 28 J. F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (London: Routledge, 1969), p. 217. 29 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, vol. 52, House of Lords, 17 February 1840, cols 309–14, http:­/​­/​hansard.milbanksystems.com, accessed 14 June 2014. 30 TNA, HO 44­/​38­/​118, Easby to Normanby, 10 February 1840. 27



Constructing new spaces197

was situated on the edge of St Peter’s Fields and was neighboured by various chapels, including the Methodist New Connexion and the Swedenborgians. It held up to 2,000 people, and hosted lectures by Richard Carlile upon its opening in November 1836. However it is clear that Mr Bywater was less concerned about the particular tenets expounded in his rooms than collecting his rents, and the venue also hosted a meeting of the operative dyers during their strike in April 1837 and a ‘Great Protestant meeting’ railing against ‘Papists’ in January 1839.31 The erection of social institutions and working men’s clubs from the 1830s was a breakthrough in political movements’ control over space. Many groups sought to break their reliance on renting, as well as the use of hard-­earned money to line the pockets of Rachmanish landlords. Constructing their own buildings provided an opportunity for socialists, Chartists and trade unions to at least attempt the construction of temporary utopias in spaces where they could seek their goals of education and liberty. The Carpenters’ Hall in Manchester was built by the voluntary labour of its joiners and carpenter members, who raised £4,500 for the construction, and backed by socialist trustees and anti-­ new poor law campaign leader R. J. Richardson. Located on Garratt Road off Granby Row Fields, near Piccadilly, a site also used regularly for open air meetings by trades and striking workers, the 6,000 capacity building included a gallery, organ loft and several ante-­rooms.32 Edward Royle points to its success as a shared endeavour between Owenites and Chartists. It hosted Chartist meetings, especially during the agitation of 1839, and the Chartists took over the running of the venue in 1842.33 Radicals in Oldham had been able to get elected to the vestry, which uniquely enabled them to use civic sites such as the sessions room in the Terrace Buildings and the town hall, where several prominent Chartist leaders gave lectures in 1842.34 But they lost control of vestry government in 1843, which led the Chartists to resolve to build their own hall. Oldham working men’s hall cost £1,600, financed in part by one-­ pound shares. The symbolism of this act was made overtly clear at the MG, 3 May 1837; Protestant Magazine, 1 March 1839. Manchester and Salford Advertiser, 21 April 1838; Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists, p. 31. 33 E. Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–1866 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), p. 136; Morning Chronicle, 31 August 1842; Yeo, ‘Robert Owen’, p. 90. 34 Oldham Local Studies, D-­BUT F­/6 ​ 8, 78, Butterworth news reports, 1840, 1842. 31 32

198

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

laying of its foundation stone in April 1844. Feargus O’Connor took a role deliberately subverting the ritual and authority of local civic leaders who attended every ceremonial bricklaying in this period of urban expansion. His typically triumphant address underlined the centrality of physical space and the meaning of place to political conflict: ‘You will remember what it was that made you think of building this Hall. You were denied the use of that Hall which your labour and money had erected. Thus has persecution, at all times, defeated its objects’.35 In 1840, the Sheffield Chartists similarly declared, ‘we make ourselves independent of every other body or class, we cannot do so unless we have our own meeting, reading and lecture rooms’.36 William Hill, editor of the Northern Star, reported on his trip to the town in 1843: There is no nonsense about the men about Sheffield. They are men of the right sort. The Town Hall had been refused us, and the ‘lads’ were compelled to put me in their own room, in Fig Tree Lane. They have had it tastefully beautified since I was there. It is now a very handsome room; but rather wanting in size.37

The Fig Tree Lane rooms were the beating heart of Sheffield Chartism, with weekly meetings being held there from 1839 to 1844. The lane was a hundred yards or so downhill from Paradise Square and close to the parish church and Cutlers’ Hall; the Quaker meeting house was also situated on the lane. The ‘association room’ adjoined the Fig Tree tavern, most likely at number 21, where Chartist George Cavill, newsagent for the Northern Star, was registered in 1845. Chartists held a meeting with the trade unions at the room during the plug strikes in August 1842. A Chartist youth group met on Sundays at the rooms from March 1842, and the female Chartists held evening meetings and lectures there.38 The Chartists also were quick to adorn the space with symbolism. After the imprisonment of Samuel Holberry for his involvement in the Sheffield rising in 1840, the Chartists created a shrine there, with a bust of their martyred leader and banners inscribed with the name of Wat Tyler, whom Holberry idolised.39 A branch of the rival middle-­class Complete NS, 13 April 1844; J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c.1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 223. 36 NS, 22 August 1840. 37 NS, 29 July 1843. 38 NS, 7 September 1839, 5 March, 20 August 1842. 39 R. Gammage, A History of the Chartist Movement, 1837–1854 ([1894] London: Merlin Press, 1969), p. 216. 35



Constructing new spaces199

Suffrage Union was formed at a meeting in Paradise Square in February 1842 and they hired their own political institute for their lectures.40 Other social institutions and Chartist rooms were less specifically designed for their tenants, not least because they were part of pubs or other buildings with multiple uses. Indeed, O’Connor’s speech in Oldham was predictable hyperbole, as Oldham Chartists and trades also met throughout this period in the Socialists’ Institution on Grosvenor Street and the prominent Albion Hotel on High Street, among other pubs.41 Huddersfield Owenites’ first social institution was a room in the George and Dragon on Manchester Street, but it proved too cramped for the burgeoning movement and magistrates threatened the landlord with the loss of his licence. Dickinson’s room on King Street, the base for Huddersfield Political Union in the early 1830s, became the association room for the Northern Union and Chartists in 1839.42 An anonymous source reported to the Home Office in July 1839 that the socialists in Bradford ‘have taken a large Room from a person named Butterworth calculated to hold 1500 persons which was formerly used as a preaching room for the [Radical] Associationists’.43 Chartists used the room for central committee meetings on Saturdays, and itinerant socialist preachers gave sermons and lectures on Sundays, so the site was also dubbed the Democratic Preaching Room. The growth of Chartism prompted the committee to reorganise their structure into sixteen divisions in late October 1839, which they decided in ‘their room’, and the venue continued to be used for public meetings in November 1839 and to elect delegates to the National Convention in December 1839. Owenites and Chartists sought a more ambitious enterprise in 1840, planning a working men’s hall which would have included a complex of committee rooms, shops, and a large lecture theatre. By October, a hundred shares had been sold to fund the venture. The complex was however never constructed. Nevertheless, the utopia was still achieved in a way: the different functions were built separately by 1841, and functioned as envisaged, albeit not under one roof. Butterworth’s room NS, 5 February, 5 March 1842; S. Pollard, A History of Labour in Sheffield (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1959), p. 47; Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, pp. 241–2; Chase, Chartism, pp. 198–200. 41 Oldham Local Studies, D-­BUT F­/4 ​ 1–75, Butterworth news reports, passim. 42 PMG, 10 December 1831; NS, 23 February, 9 March 1839; E. Royle, ‘Owenism and the secularist tradition’, in M. Chase and I. Dyck (eds), Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), p. 203. 43 TNA, HO 40­/​52­/​432, anon. to Russell, 19 July 1839. 40

200

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

maintained its purpose as a centre for oppositional information: in October 1842, for example, the Northern Star reported that it opened on a Sunday ‘for the reading of several political works; the Evening Star, Northern Star, Chartist Circular, Labourers’ Library and Democrat always to be had’.44 The West Riding was unusual for the number of Oddfellows’ lodges who allowed radical groups to meet in their halls. Barnsley Chartist diarist John Hugh Burland recorded that the Oddfellows’ Hall in Barnsley hosted a meeting to support the striking Glasgow spinners in February 1838; a public dinner on New Year’s Eve 1838 to welcome back William Ashton, a former linen weaver transported to Van Diemen’s Land in 1830 for having taken part in a strike; and a public meeting to raise a subscription for Reverend Stephens in February 1839. Feargus O’Connor gave lectures in the hall on his regular visits to Barnsley in 1839.45 When the Bradford Chartists found all other meeting places closed off to them in 1839, the Oddfellows rented their hall for their use. However, the magistrates summarily threatened to revoke their licence if they continued to let the Chartists use the hall. Initially the Oddfellows denied the rumours about the threat of the magistrates, and wrote to the Northern Star claiming, ‘you may still hail with delight the erection of the only building in the town of Bradford that is pro bono publico­– ­open to all and influenced by none’. Unusually, the Oddfellows decided to prepare for confrontation with the authorities, which they avoided only because the Chartists themselves decided to withdraw.46 Spaces for alternative education, economy and entertainment Halls of science epitomised the visionary schemes of working-­ class social movements in this period. Halls of science were built in Manchester, Huddersfield, Ratcliffe Bridge, Sheffield, Macclesfield, Bradford, Liverpool, Leeds, Halifax, Honley and Stockport between 1839 and 1841. The ‘very large Hall near St. Matthew’s Church’ in Manchester (see figures 11 and 12) mentioned by John Easby was con NS, 20 July, 14 September, 28 September, 19 October, 2, 23, 30 November, 21 December 1839, 15 October 1842; LM, 17 August 1839; T. Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society: Bradford, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 521. 45 Barnsley Archives, Burlands annals, 1839; NS, 13 April, 28 December 1839. 46 NS, 29 December 1838; BO, 9 May 1839; Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society, p. 464. 44



Constructing new spaces201

11  Extract from 5 feet: mile Ordnance Survey map, Manchester, sheet 33, 1849, showing Hall of Science and Camp Field (far left) and the Free Trade Hall (top right).

12  ‘Hall of Science, Manchester’, 1852.

202

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

structed on the edge of Camp Field on the Mosley estate and leased to Samuel Kay (the long-­time secretary of Cross Street Unitarian Chapel, and one of the founders of the Portico Library and Royal Institution) and William Clegg (the Owenite business associate of the Fieldens of Todmorden and treasurer of the South Lancashire anti-­new poor law association).47 Though this book has been wary of the spatial turn’s practice of describing buildings as ‘texts’, a sure exception can be made for the halls of science.48 In Manchester, ‘Hall of Science’ was carved on its door lintel, while ‘sacred to the investigation of truth’ lined the side of the long edge of the building. Owenite socialists sought a new truth that challenged the individualistic profit-­motive of the developing ‘Manchester School’ of laissez-­faire merchants and manufacturers, as demonstrated by their Free Trade Hall. More directly, the ‘truth’ was a more communitarian, ‘moral’ and even democratic education than was offered by the paternalist middle classes in their mechanics’ institutes. Owenites could not however afford to be exclusive and hired out their hall for Chartist meetings, as well as for trade unions during strike agitation.49 Halls of science were particularly distinctive in style and features, directed by Robert Owen’s theories on architecture as realised at his utopian experiment at New Lanark in Scotland. All the halls were built in a neo-­Classical style, relatively plain but with pediments and porches, demonstrating a similar but alternative permanence and trustworthiness as the buildings most alike in appearance, banks. Interiors were planned around a high-­ceilinged central hall with adjoining kitchens, library and meeting rooms.50 The scale and ambition of the constructions were reflected in their size, appearance and contents. The halls showed off workmen’s skill in craft and creating beauty in a political demonstration of the worth of their labour. The prospectus of Huddersfield Hall of Science boasted that ‘the lecturers’ platform is to occupy a position directly in front of a splendidly stained glass window executed by Mr Joseph Smith of Manchester’.51 With a six-­foot high stage lit by gas, the Manchester Hall of Science was a monument to the modern age MALS, M3­/​2­/​106 a–e, release of land, Camp Field, 1825–50. W. Whyte, ‘How do buildings mean? Some issues of interpretation in the history of architecture’, History and Theory, 45:2 (2006). 49 MG, 16 May 1840, 9 March, 17 August 1842, 6 June 1846; MT, 2 October 1841; NS, 18 June 1842; TNA, TS 11­/​137­/​part II, Liverpool winter assizes, 1848. 50 Mansfield, Buildings of the Labour Movement, p. 24. 51 New Moral World, 9 November 1839. 47 48



Constructing new spaces203

and the belief in mutual improvement.52 The Liverpool Hall of Science cost £5,000 and included seating for 1500 people in an upper-­storey lecture hall. According to the prospectus, on the roof there was ‘a leaded platform, 19 feet by 72 feet, on which there will be an observatory for astronomical purposes, and this platform commands a beautiful view of the town, the river and the docks’.53 The job of raising money and organising the construction of these new sites was in itself a political act. The halls of science in Manchester (which cost £6,000), Liverpool, Halifax and Stockport were financed through share clubs and building societies.54 The investments reflected the confidence in their success and longevity as well as a strong tradition of building societies as a form of mutual self-­help and alternative economy, although more individualistic than strict Owenite economists would have liked in theory. Hyde Institute or social institution was set up by a committee of ten men, including a weaver, a factory overlooker, two shoemakers and a stonemason, headed by John Bradley, a clogger from Blackburn who became ‘the leading Chartist in Hyde’. They secured a long lease on a piece of land, and the hall was opened by Robert Owen with a programme of lectures, processions and sermons by Reverend Stephens from 9 to 11 September 1838. Owen’s speech expressed his vision of unanimity: ‘this is the first building of the kind ever erected in this part of the country and will very likely do much towards the softening and wearing down the sharp edges of petty differences and prejudices that have hitherto too commonly characterized the people of this and every other district’. Just over a month later, however, the committee had to mortgage the institute and its lease for £350 at 5 per cent interest to a widow and shopkeeper from Dukinfield. The Chartists used the institute extensively during 1838 and 1839.55 These buildings were not intended as subversive statements, but rather as positive alternatives to the limited options available to the working classes. The first toast proposed by Abel Heywood at the dinner to celebrate the opening of the Manchester Hall of Science was to the queen, followed by a recitation of the national anthem.56 J. F. C. Harrison interpreted these experiments as a form of escapism, a Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists, p. 32; MT, 13 June 1840; NS, 4 April 40. 53 R. G. Garnett, Co-­ operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain, 1825–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), p. 149. 54 Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites, p. 222. 55 Cheshire RO, P154­/​8­/​6–9, typescript speech of Thomas Chaloner, n.d. 56 MT, 13 June 1840. 52

204

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

­ sychological reaction among former craft workers against the ‘disrupp tion’ of industrial and political forces. The move indoors more generally has also been seen as reflecting a desire for respectability among the Chartist and other working-­class movements. Eileen Yeo argued strongly against these interpretations, asserting that the Chartists and Owenites were not conducting a retreat from capitalism. Rather, ‘they felt that they were creating alternative and competing cultures in a still-­ molten situation’.57 This image of the shape and government of early Victorian towns as still in a state of flux, where many different possibilities were still available, is a more useful way of understanding the political battles over space than a hard and intractable story of inevitable class exclusion. Owenites, Chartists and trade unions had some agency to fight back, both in practice and symbolically. Their goals were not otherworldly; they sought what they regarded as an achievable alternative to middle-­class paternalist and capitalist culture through collective self-­help and democratic control. The halls were the outward sign as well as the venue for moral and physical improvement among the working classes. The dedication of the shareholders and trustees of Oldham working men’s hall was aimed at ‘the accommodation of all classes of society, the improvement of m ­ anners, the refinement of the taste, the elevation of the moral character’.58 This was often tied in with temperance. Temperance groups opened their own coffee houses and halls, which were also used as venues by political groups as an extension of their culture, such as Holland’s Temperance Hotel in Burnley, where a Chartist was arrested during the agitation of 1842.59 Education mattered for Owenite socialists as reflective of Owen’s vision of a communitarian new moral order, but it also mattered for all working-­class political groups as part of the much longer tradition of auto-­didacticism and Sunday schools. Emma Griffin states that reading groups were the most frequently mentioned clubs in her sample of nineteenth-­century working-­class autobiographies, testimony to the strong desire for mutual improvement that also provided a space and materials for free thought.60 The village of Royton near Oldham, for example, with its long-­established community of radical activists, continued to use the ‘Old School Room’ for oppositional political activity, including an anti-­new poor law meeting in January Yeo, ‘Robert Owen’, p. 106. NS, 13 April 1844. 59 NS, 17 September 1842. 60 E. Griffin, ‘The making of the Chartists: popular politics and working-­class autobiography in early Victorian Britain’, EHR, 129:538 (2014), 583. 57 58



Constructing new spaces205

1838 and Chartist lectures in April 1839.61 The main spaces within the new socialist and Chartist halls were designed around large lecture rooms and schoolrooms used for Sunday and evening schools, for adults as well as children. These were not just alternatives to but in direct opposition to the middle-­class provision of education and religious teaching. Radicals believed that mechanics’ institutes taught a singularly technical curriculum fit only to make workers into controllable and efficient cogs within the industrial economy, as well as perpetuating a governance dominated by employers and upper-­class subscribers as a form of paternalistic philanthropy. The local Owenite leadership in Manchester, some of whom had been students in the Mechanics’ Institute, founded a breakaway ‘New Mechanics’ Institute’ in 1829. The New Mechanics’ Institute was radically democratic in its organisation, electing representatives from the students to sit on its board. It was the first attempt by the Owenites to build a hall of science, collecting over 600 one-­pound shares for the new venture in 1832, though this first attempt was never completed.62 Over thirty members of the Mechanics’ Institute in the new railway town of Crewe resigned when its trustees removed the Northern Star from the newsroom in 1844; they formed their own institution but it lasted only a year. More successfully, Reverend J. R. Stephens and his followers founded Stalybridge People’s Institute to compete with the Mechanics’ Institute in 1841. The plaque on the front of the ‘stark, stonebuilt, chapel-­ like’ building was inscribed ‘The People’s School, 1841’. Like much Chartist and socialist rhetoric, by ‘people’ it sought to cross class boundaries, but in practice was defiantly working class in its usages and membership.63 Yet the popularity of such institutions and activities demonstrates that the working-­class pursuit of knowledge was driven not just by class identity but by a ­variety of desires and interests.64 Owenites, Chartists and co-­operators constructed their own spaces of an alternative economy. Protesters had long enforced a ‘moral economy’ of fair prices for workers, including food riots, boycotting and exclusive dealing. Co-­operative stores and trading associations offered an alternative to corrupt dealers, the truck system of monopoly dealing and the

Oldham Local Studies, D-­BUT F­/5 ​ 3, 63, Butterworth news reports, 1838–9. Yeo, ‘Robert Owen’, pp. 89–90; Garnett, Co-­operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities, p. 147. 63 Mansfield, Buildings of the Labour Movement, pp. 14–15; Chase, Chartism, pp. 144–5. 64 M. Tylecote, The Mechanics’ Institutes of Lancashire and Yorkshire before 1851 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1957), pp. 126–7. 61 62

206

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

hegemony of the ‘shopcracy’ outside protest and in everyday life.65 The co-­operative societies were not just fundraising schemes for the movements. The weekly meetings of the societies encouraged communitarian principles in an ideal of democracy.66 A Chartist co-­operative shop was established in Hull as early as April 1839, and in December, Chartists held a public meeting in Stockport working men’s club to discuss establishing a joint stock provision store, known as the ‘Patriot’s Store’, to ‘obtain all the necessaries of life and the first quality and the lowest possible price’.67 As Peter Gurney has argued, Chartist co-­operation differed from Owenite practices in its political aims: Owenites sought to foster a communitarian utopia gradually, while Chartism was about much more direct and immediate ‘radical transformation of an existing, corrupt state’.68 Political groups nevertheless used normal commercial and workspaces for meetings, out of ‘making do’. Leeds Chartists hired a room in the fish market, part of the Bazaar and New Shambles. The Northern Union room was in operation from autumn 1839. It was the venue for the formation of the Women’s Radical Association in October 1839, and the Chartist headquarters during the general election of June 1841.69 In Manchester, the New Cross division of Chartists took a former cheese room in Smithfield market, which subsequently served Richard Carlile as a radical chapel and then became an educational institution and finally a temperance hall. Sir Oswald Mosley, lord of the manor, refused a meeting of ‘the unemployed’ at the market in December 1842, which adjourned up the road to St George’s Fields. Following incorporation and the lord of the manor losing control over the markets, the Chartists regularly held public meetings at Smithfield during their last push for the Charter in 1848.70 In Carlisle, the rooms housing beam engines situated next to the river Caldew were used for political meetings by the Radical Association. The Female Radical Association held a public meeting at ‘Mr Sinclair’s Beaming Machine’ on 17 December 1838, where Mrs McIlwy moved the first resolution to practise exclusive deal PMG, 13 October 1832; P. Gurney, ‘Exclusive dealing in the Chartist movement’, LHR, 74:1 (2009), 93. 66 Yeo, ‘Robert Owen’, p. 85. 67 NS, 14 December 1839. 68 Gurney, ‘Exclusive dealing’, 101. 69 NS, 5, 26 October 1839, 26 June 1841. 70 Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists, p. 31; Champion, 18 November 1838; NS, 29 June 1839, 12 September 1840; MG, 3 May 1843; TNA, TS 11­/​137­/​part II, Liverpool winter assizes, 1848.

65



Constructing new spaces207

ing.71 William Farish recalled in his autobiography that the beaming machine room in Water Lane was ‘a common resort of the ardent spirits of the first Reform period and a sort of political barometer in Chartist days’.72 This is likely to have been William Blythe’s beam machine, as he seconded a resolution held in the room in June 1842. The meetings were held on Monday and Friday evenings throughout 1841 and 1842. The radicals then based themselves at 6 John Street, a building that remained in working-­class hands as a reading room until 1933.73 Chartists and socialists succeeded in attracting large numbers of adherents because of their holistic appeal to the everyday life of the working classes. No social movement spreads widely by focusing solely on sombre and single-­minded political activism. The halls of science and political institutes were designed as much as spaces of entertainment as for political meetings and debates. Theatres, music halls and other sites of performance were also amenable sites for political meetings.74 Audiences were familiar with the elements of counter-­theatre associated with these spaces. Chartists attempted to cultivate a different sort of atmosphere. Radical oratory could be serious but it also could be sarcastic. It sought respectability, though it could still be forceful and noisy, with loud responses from the audience. Walton’s Music Saloon on South Parade, Leeds, opened as a concert venue in 1837. It was hired out to various groups, including the Leeds Tradesmen’s Conservative Association, but gained most notoriety as the venue for socialist meetings. Reporting on a series of socialist lectures in June 1838, the Northern Star praised it as ‘the best room for public purposes that we have in Leeds’, in terms of both comfort and appearance, and noted that ‘a large and powerful organ occupies the upper end of the room, and its tones are put into requisition by the Socialists, on Sundays, to vary and enliven their proceedings’.75 The Owenite Leeds District Board of the Association of all Classes held their annual conference in the saloon in

NS, 22 December 1838. W. Farish, The Autobiography of William Farish, the Struggles of a Handloom Weaver (London, 1889), p. 35. 73 NS, 30 October 1841, 1 January, 17 December 1842, 30 September 1843; J. Barnes, ‘Popular protest and radical politics in Carlisle’ (PhD dissertation, Lancaster University, 1981), p. 329. 74 Chase, Chartism, p. 142; Parolin, Radical Spaces, p. 223; M. Brodie, ‘Free trade and cheap theatre: sources of politics for the nineteenth-­ century London poor’, SH, 28:3 (2003). 75 BO, 25 January 1838; NS, 23 June 1838. 71 72

208

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

May 1840.76 The Chartists also used the rooms to prepare for the mass meeting on Peep Green in October 1838, and held a dinner to celebrate the release of their leaders from prison in September 1840. The economic slump of the early 1840s however forced Walton to sell up, and the middle-­class trustees of the Mechanics’ Institute bought it for educational uses but probably also in order to evict the Owenite socialists.77 More unusual commercial venues provided a particularly useful combination of large open space with shelter from the rain. In Manchester, these included the Riding School on Lower Mosley Street and Batty’s Circus on Great Bridgewater Street. The latter venue was part of William Batty’s touring circus empire in the North. His Manchester site was a permanent building ‘capable of holding three to four thousand persons’, which hosted the circus season during the winter and then was hired out in spring and summer.78 The Ten Hours campaign hosted a public meeting at the circus in March 1837. The Chartists hired the site almost exclusively for their meetings from spring 1839 until the circus burned down in March 1842.79 The most infamous meeting occurred on the evening of Tuesday 23 April 1839, held in support of the National Convention. The Northern Star reported that the ‘immense building was literally crammed, notwithstanding every person had to pay for his admission’, and that the building was decorated with ‘two or three flags having suitable mottos ­… one of which was one of the flags that waved in the breeze on the memorable field of Peterloo’. R. J. Richardson, Bronterre O’Brien and others gave physical force speeches, for which they were later arrested for sedition.80 Though such events were serious, Chartists and socialists also appealed through leisure. The socialists of the silk manufacturing town of Congleton in Cheshire, for example, could hardly be described as completely sober and humourless when they held a ball in a mill that lasted until three o’clock in the morning, much to the annoyance of the constable who was stationed outside until it finished.81 The Henry Street NS, 26 May, 16 June 1838; Mirror of Parliament, 5 (June 1840), 4,041; D. Roberts, The Social Conscience of Early Victorians (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 218. 77 LM, 20 October 1838, 12 September 1840; R. J. Morris, Class Sect and Party: The Making of the British Middle Class: Leeds, 1820–50 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 311. 78 Charter, 10 March 1839. 79 NS, 4 May 1839, 2 April 1842. 80 NS, 9, 16 March, 27 April 1839; Liverpool Mercury, 26 April 1839. 81 Cheshire RO, CJP 9­/​1, Congleton constables’ occurrence book, 1839–40. 76



Constructing new spaces209

Association room in Ashton-­ under-­ Lyne was ‘open every Saturday night at seven o’clock, for singing, dancing and reciting and is well fitted up for such amusements’.82 The New Moral World reported on the week’s activities at the Chartist Institute in Hyde in September 1839: ‘On Saturday 7th we held a Social Festival, which was well attended, and the rational amusements seemed to give pleasure to all present. Selections of music, songs and glees, recitations and the mazy dance’. On the Sunday, visiting Chartist lecturers gave three lectures to ‘very large audiences, composed of Chartists, Methodists, Socialists and many of the supporters of the Reverend J. R. Stephens’, indicating the shared interests among the movements. Three hundred people attended a tea party on the Monday and a concert by the members of the Owenite branch on the Tuesday. The paper acclaimed, ‘Thus for the first time have the working class of Hyde had the opportunity of enjoying rational amusement in their large numbers, in their own building and of bringing together many who have hitherto held aloof from us’.83 This was very much part of lively and rich associational life, which included individual associations’ uniformed brass bands, expressing a community spirit and local identity.84 These leisure activities were political acts. They enacted an alternative to the restrictive and exclusive world of polite society. Huddersfield Choral Society, for example, expelled any member who attended meetings at the Hall of Science, and thus the musical activities of the hall provided a more welcoming outlet for their talents.85 They brought the theatre of the mass platform indoors in another form. As Chase has highlighted, the Chartist enthusiasm for theatre and radical entertainments ‘blurred the line between performance and protest’.86 For example, the Northern Star reported that at Christmas 1841, ‘the trial of Robert Emmett Esq was performed in full costume by the Chartists’ in the Pole-­lane schoolroom, Failsworth. This alternative pantomime had particular political resonance for the large number of Irish immigrants in the Oldham out-­township, and notably the schoolroom was situated at the same place that had seen United English activity at the turn of the century and the infamous Paine-­effigy burning in 1792. The am-­dram group then performed the play in the Primitive Methodist schoolroom

NS, 5 March 1842. New Moral World, 9 November 1839, p. 779. 84 Chase, Chartism, p. 143. 85 Mansfield, Buildings of the Labour Movement, p. 24. 86 Chase, Chartism, p. 143. 82 83

210

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

of the neighbouring village of Hollinwood on New Year’s Day 1842.87 Such activities were a successful way of maintaining solidarity and networks, and attracting new members to the movements. Leon Faucher, the French industrialist visiting Manchester in 1844, noted that the socialists ‘increase the number of their adherents by oratorios and festivals, by rural excursions and by providing cheap and innocent recreation for the working classes’.88 Chartists used symbolism and ritual to construct a radical narrative in these spaces. At Chartist dinners the room was customarily adorned with portraits of radical heroes. The interior of the venues for such events was in part shaped by the Northern Star because it included prints in special issues to paste up on the walls, and its own reports obviously focused on these more than other elements of the decoration. For commemorations of Henry Hunt’s birthday in November 1842 at Mossley near Oldham, the Chartists’ meeting room, it noted, was ‘beautifully decorated with evergreens and a large number of Star portraits; also two banners with full length portraits of Feargus O’Connor and Henry Hunt which had been kindly lent by the Manchester Chartists, and a beautiful transparency of the Northern Star painted for the occasion’.89 But as Matthew Roberts has argued, this invention of tradition was selective and constructed to portray a particular radical story that included Thomas Paine and Hunt, while excluding other groups such as the seventeenth-­ century Levellers and the British artisanal Jacobins of the 1790s. Chartists aped elite rituals of commemoration of national heroes in civic patriotism. In doing so, they deliberately ignored working-­class or more controversial forebears. In a search for respectability, therefore, the leaders demonstrated a continued adherence to ‘gentlemen leaders’.90 Middle-­class sites Working-­class radicals and socialists were not the only groups hiring and erecting their own buildings. Middle-­class liberals took over large complexes to conduct their own campaigns, and then used their wealth to construct overtly symbolic landmarks to their politics. In Manchester, NS, 24 December 1841. L. Faucher, Manchester in 1844, ed. W. H. Chaloner (London: Routledge, 1969), p. 17. 89 NS, 12 November 1842. 90 M. Roberts, ‘Chartism, commemoration and the cult of the radical hero’, LHR, 78:1 (2013), 13, 32; NS, 4 April 1840. 87 88



Constructing new spaces211

Newall’s Buildings was a large complex of rooms over shops situated on the corner of Cross Street and Market Street, next to the Exchange, and thus at the heart of the commercial centre of power. As well as a library and picture gallery for exhibitions, the buildings also hosted the Stamp Office, which waged ‘war’ on the unstamped press in the 1830s, for example, prosecuting Edward Gleave for selling unstamped publications in 1834.91 Radicals made an application to use the buildings, together with the manor court room, for Feargus O’Connor’s visit during his mission to set up a national Radical Association in December 1835. The administrators of both venues rejected their request as they could ‘not be used for political purposes’, and the radical meeting had to be held in the large room of Albion Mills tavern. The nascent branch of the Northern Union managed to hire a room in the buildings in August 1838 in order to plan the mass Chartist demonstration on Kersal Moor.92 From then on, however, the administrators preferred a more respectable tenantry. From December 1838, Newall’s Buildings became the main committee room for the Anti-­Corn Law League, and after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, the buildings became the base for the supporters of Richard Cobden and the Liberal party electoral committee.93 The Free Trade Hall in Manchester was the ultimate physical landmark to a single-­issue political campaign. The very site as well as the symbolism of the building was loaded with political signification and challenge over the meaning of place. Cobden initially gave use of his land on the edge of St Peter’s Fields for a temporary pavilion for the anti-­corn law conference in 1840.94 There could be no more obvious act of claiming of place: the liberal middle classes appropriated the site of Peterloo for their own aims and to oppose the Chartists associating the site with the campaign for universal suffrage. The original Free Trade Hall was erected in 1843, accommodating 10,000 people in a luxurious interior and imposing exterior. The Manchester Guardian boasted that the classical columns were ‘the same as those used by Mr Barry at the Manchester Athenaeum, and we believe in the new houses MT, 12 April, 23 August 1834. MT, 19 December 1835; NS, 15 September 1838; Morning Chronicle, 19 August 1838. 93 Morning Chronicle, 12 January 1839; MT, 9 July 1842, 25 January 1845; Bolton Archives, ZHE­ /​ 43­ /​ 22, Heywood papers, Duffield to Heywood, Newall’s Buildings, 19 June 1847. 94 H. Ashworth, Recollections of Richard Cobden M.P. and the Anti-­Corn Law League (London, 1876), p. 40; MG, 10 December 1842. 91 92

212

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

of parliament’.95 The connotations of ancient grandeur were thus combined with an imitation of national government. In 1853, the Leaguers cemented their victory at the princely cost of £40,000 for a rebuilt stone-­clad building that still stands on Peter Street, a permanent monument to Mancunian liberalism.96 Gendered uses of spaces The prospectuses for halls of science often justified their necessity with the claim that ‘the want of large public rooms wherein the working class might assemble with their wives and children, to acquire and communicate useful knowledge, and wherein they might have innocent recreation and rational amusement at so trifling an expense as to be within the means of the poorest when employed, has been long felt and is generally admitted’.97 Female activism was an integral part of Chartism and Owenite socialism. There were over 150 female Chartist associations in England, reviving the activities of their predecessors who had campaigned a generation previously.98 The movements against slavery and for factory reform in the early 1830s gave women the experience to translate into Chartism, but the real forging fire was the anti-­new poor law movement, which involved women in more active tactics of demonstrating. William Farish of Carlisle recalled in his memoirs, ‘As in 1819, so in 1838, the Cumberland women were well to the fore, subscribing, signing petitions and collecting as well as the men’. Carlisle Female Radical Association formed in December 1838 at Sinclair’s beaming machine room, the usual workshop site of meeting of the male radicals. They claimed a membership of 400. The continuity of ‘veteran’ female leadership seems to have been particularly strong. Peggy Catherall, who, as the Goddess of Freedom, had presented the cap of liberty to the chairman of the Radical Reformers in 1819, joined the deputation that presented an embroidered scarf to Feargus O’Connor twenty years later. They were the only female society explicitly named as giving a contribution of five guineas to the National Convention in February 1839.99 MG, 1 February 1843. P. A. Pickering and A. Tyrell, The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti-­ Corn Law League (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), pp. 204–6. 97 Yeo, ‘Robert Owen’, p. 93. 98 A. Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1995), p. 228. 99 Farish, Autobiography, pp. 35–6; Charter, 24 February 1839; Barnes, ‘Popular Protest’, pp. 329–30. 95 96



Constructing new spaces213

The role of women in the reform movements nevertheless remained problematic for the leadership. The 1832 Reform Act explicitly excluded women from the vote, but the more complex issue for radicals was their own definition of representation. Some women were highly active. Mary Holberry, for example, was arrested along with her husband Samuel for their part in the Sheffield rising, but was discharged a few days later, having refused to betray any information about her husband.100 But Chartists drew from their predecessors’ rhetoric of domesticity and emphasised women’s role in educating their children as citizens.101 Benjamin Rushton of Halifax recalled in his memoirs how when he moved to his uncle’s house to work as a warehouse-­boy, it was his aunt, whom he described as a ‘famous politician, a Chartist and a great admirer of Feargus O’Connor’, who first introduced him to politics. Yet Chartists and socialists differed over whether citizenship was a human right shared by all or a status to be earned as patriarchal head of the household.102 How women activists negotiated gendered practices in the spaces of meeting is also difficult to ascertain. Catherine Hall contended that radical sociability became increasingly institutionalised in the first half of the nineteenth century, and thus presented more challenges to access by women, not least in the form of unsuitable meeting hours and the taint of irrespectability. As Christina Parolin points out in relation to the supporters of Richard Carlile in London in the 1830s, Hall’s model applies more to the middle classes than to the working classes, for whom respectability had different meanings and applications.103 Female radical groups still regularly met in pubs, and the environment was not alien to women who were also active in friendly societies who had long used such spaces. Hull Female Patriotic Society held weekly meetings on Monday evenings in the Chartist headquarters, the Royal Oak, Blackfriargate, from November 1838, so regularly that later accounts of their activities referred to the ‘Female Patriotic Society Rooms’. C. Godfrey, ‘Chartist prisoners, 1839–41’, IRSH, 24:2 (1979), 205–7. A. Clark, ‘The rhetoric of Chartist domesticity: gender, language and class in the 1830s and 1840s’, JBS, 31:1 (1992), 65; B. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Virago, 1983). 102 D. Thompson, Outsiders: Class, Gender and Nation (London: Verso, 1993), p. 84. 103 Parolin, Radical Spaces, pp. 253–4; C. Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Oxford: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 134–5. 100 101

214

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

Committee business was interspersed with religious elements and other entertainments. At their meeting on 8 July 1839, the cash accounts were audited, then ‘a patriotic hymn was next sung and then a short prayer was offered up, imploring the Great Creator of the Universe to protect and assist their glorious cause’.104 The picture of female participation is thus not as clear cut as ‘tea parties versus pubs’ suggests. In Elland in the West Riding, the Radical Association Room hosted the public meeting where twenty-­nine women enrolled in the new Female Radical Association in March 1838. Perhaps in these more tightly knit communities, with a large proportion of women working in factories, a tradition of family activism meant that this development was easily accepted as a natural extension of the role of the head of the household. The Elland female association was headed by Elizabeth Hanson, wife of the prominent local reformer Abraham Hanson, who had been active since 1830 and who became secretary and then chairman of Elland Radical Association. Elizabeth herself was already well known for her activism, having taken a direct part in the anti-­new poor law campaign only the previous month when she and other women ambushed several assistant new poor law commissioners outside the workhouse. As Chase argues, Chartism enabled her and her husband to find ‘a place on a wider political stage’.105 Tea parties and other ‘respectable’ entertainments were designed with women in mind. At Manchester, for example, ‘a great many females’ were present among the 500 attendees at a radical tea party at the Carpenters’ Hall in honour of the birthday of Henry Hunt on Monday 4 November 1839. Yet although it is difficult to find out how women felt about using such venues, there is some evidence of various types of separation. Although celebrations to commemorate Hunt’s birthday were mixed gender events, toasts in the honour of radical leaders past and present at such occasions served to construct an ideal manly type for the fraternity of Chartists, and while women also took part in the ritual, they were never the subjects nor the proposers of the toasts.106 Male and female Chartist branches were segregated by time of use. On Wednesday 20 November 1839, the Chartists held a public tea party in Bradford Oddfellows’ Hall, but ‘females took tea in the hall and the men were obliged to go to the Schoolroom adjoining’. The Wapping branch of the Bradford Chartists met at the North Tavern on Sunday evenings, while their female counterparts met at the same pub on Wednesday Blackburn Standard, 28 November 1838; NS, 13 July 1839. NS, 24 March 1838; Chase, Chartism, pp. 23, 25. 106 Roberts, ‘Chartism, commemoration and the cult of the radical hero’, 18. 104 105



Constructing new spaces215

evenings.107 Working-­class women, despite their rhetoric of ‘militant domesticity’, were marginalised from Chartist leadership. They acted as delegates to only the most local of radical bodies, and all the delegates to the National Conventions were men.108 The ‘people’ included everyone, but the leadership had to be male, though this was as much an understandable tactical choice to ensure the best chance of being accepted as part of the governing body politic as it was a result of male prejudice. Financial problems and loyalist opposition The new buildings were a huge achievement for the political movements of the 1830s and 1840s. They nevertheless ran into two problems: financial and legal insecurity, and attempts by the authorities to close them down. Working-­class halls were built on financially precarious foundations. The standard one-­pound share was, even with the incentive of weekly instalments, a major ask of working-­class supporters. As with many aspects of working-­class finances, funding relied on an ‘economy of makeshifts’, including mortgages from friendly societies and Oddfellows (Bradford), profits from co-­operative stores (Sheffield), and more desperate ways of eking money out of those using the halls, as at Bradford where even the tea kettle and trestle tables incurred small charges.109 In many towns, the working class fought against the odds in attempting to construct their own spaces out of elite control. In Huddersfield, the Owenites faced difficulties securing the land for their hall, as almost all the town belonged to the loyalist Anglican Ramsden family. Bradford Gas Company, run by members of the corporation, refused to supply the Hall of Science with gas. Manchester Hall of Science was targeted by an arson attempt while it was still being built.110 After Owen laid the foundation stone on Camp Field, Reverend William Kidd, the incumbent of nearby St Matthew’s church, formed a committee ‘for the NS, 9, 30 November 1839, 30 October 1841. A. Clark, ‘Manhood, womanhood and the politics of class in Britain, 1790– 1845’, in L. Levene Frader and S. Rose (eds), Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 278; H. Rogers, ‘“From monster meetings to fireside virtues”: radical women and the people in the 1840s’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 4:1 (1999). 109 E. Yeo, ‘Early British labour movements’, in J. Kok (ed.), Rebellious Families: Household Strategies and Collective Action in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Berghahn Books, 2002), p. 33. 110 Royle, ‘Owenism and the secularist tradition’, p. 203; New Moral World, 9 November 1839; Morning Chronicle, 20 April 1840; MT, 13 June 1840. 107 108

216

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

counter-­action and suppression of that hideous form of infidelity which assumes the name of Socialism’. Within a week of the hall’s opening in June 1840, he prosecuted the three door stewards for ‘having received money for the admission of persons to lectures on Socialism’, in contravention of 39 Geo III c.79, that is the Unlawful Societies Act of 1799. The Owenites claimed that the hall was licensed as a religious place of worship and was therefore exempt, but being atheists, they were unable to take an oath in court, and were each fined £20.111 Owenites and Chartists knew they were treading a fine line of legality. Local authorities continued to put pressure on publicans to prevent and suppress their meetings. In Oldham, Butterworth recorded in October 1841 that ‘Mr James Dawson of Lees who was fined £20 for presiding at a Chartist meeting held in an unlicensed room at Lees, has been committed to three months imprisonment to Salford Gaol for non payment of the fine’.112 The prosecution of Dawson continued to have an impact, as a November 1842 issue of the Northern Star explained how to apply for a licence, as the newspaper had ‘frequently been applied to for information upon this subject’, especially since the prosecution. The column outlined the pro forma application for registering a place of worship according to the act of 22 Geo III c.155 (29 July 1812), thereby reinforcing how Chartists and other groups were using the act to register their meeting rooms as dissenting chapels and schoolrooms.113 In 1844, the mayor of Hull banned the popular freethought lecturer Emma Martin from giving a talk against Christian missions, and he physically locked her out of the lecture room. When she hired the Cross Keys Hotel instead, its publican was fined and the radical bookseller Richard Johnson was charged for taking money at the door of an unlicensed room, again contrary to 39 Geo III c.79. Johnson appealed to the Queen’s Bench, supported by a committee led by the radical printer Henry Hetherington, who attempted to use more recent legislation to claim that the local police superintendent did not have sufficient authority to initiate prosecutions. However, the appeal was rejected and the magistrates were awarded their costs.114 That they were prepared to go to the highest authority demonstrated that this was not just a minor scuffle over a padlock but a fight over free speech; the authorities’ fear of a socialist, secularist female lecturer showed how far ideologies and forms of radical organisation had evolved since the 1790s. MG, 13 June 1840; Royle, Victorian Infidels, p. 66. Oldham Local Studies, D-­BUT F­/​75, Butterworth news reports, 1841; NS, 13 November 1841. 113 NS, 5 November 1842. 114 Royle, Victorian Infidels, p. 85. 111 112



Constructing new spaces217

Further legislation threatened societies’ solvency. An 1843 act (6 & 7 Vic c.36) enabled scientific, literary and fine art societies to gain exemption from local rates on land and buildings if they registered with the county solicitor in charge of registering friendly societies. Mechanics’ Institutes and Lit and Phil societies took advantage of this new exemption, and the Sheffield Hall of Science was able to register with the West Riding quarter sessions in 1844.115 By contrast, the Manchester overseers of the poor wrote to the Poor Law Commission, singling out the Hall of Science as ineligible because its rules allowed any profit or property to be divided among its members. This was contrary to the stipulation in the act that the society should be non-­profit making (which ironically the halls ended up being). Their main concern was for the loss of income to the union rather than from any political motives, as they listed the Portico Library and the Athenaeum as also ineligible for the same reason. The Poor Law Commission ruled in the overseers’ favour and the hall had to pay the rates. Its building association was never able to repay its loans and in 1847 the socialists let it out as a musical hall while they decamped to a small cottage off Deansgate.116 The financial risks involved in such enterprises were heightened by the fact that under the legislation following the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824, legal protection did not apply to labour combinations and their funds, which must have dissuaded the most careful workers from depositing their hard-­earned savings with such bodies (a lesson learned the hard way when the Chartist National Land Company collapsed and lost the entire contributions of more than 44,000 shareholders).117 Within weeks of opening, the Oldham Hall of Science had to be let out as a casino and was finally sold for half its original cost to the temperance society, a failure attributed in part to competition from the Chartist working men’s hall, which also closed within two years, re-­ opening as a theatre.118 Although working-­class leisure sites were sorely needed, the Oldham case perhaps suggests that the town was not big WYAS, Wakefield, QE 30, West Riding registration of scientific and literary societies, including QE 30­/​30, Sheffield Hall of Science, 1844. 116 TNA, MH 12­/​6041­/​375–9, Lings and Heron to Poor Law Commission, 9 May and reply, 17 June 1844. There are no surviving records of any registrations of halls of science or similar in Lancashire County RO, QDS, registration of societies. Royle, Victorian Infidels, p. 101. 117 Chase, Chartism, pp. 328–9. 118 E. Butterworth, Historical Sketches of Oldham (Oldham, 1856), p. 239; Yeo, ‘Early British labour movements’, pp. 33–4; Vernon, Politics and the People, p. 222. 115

218

Spaces of the body politic in the 1830s and 1840s

enough for the both of them. In Huddersfield, the large cost of the Hall of Science was difficult to maintain during the severe economic depression of the mid-­1840s. The Owenites let out the hall on alternative Sundays to the Chartists, but by August 1847, they admitted financial defeat and sold the buildings to the Unitarians, dispersing its library of over two hundred books.119 At Hyde, the trustees mortgaged out their institute, and in 1841, its owners put it up for auction, ‘as the Hyde Chartists had neither paid off the mortgage nor paid any of the five per cent interest’. No buyer was found until 1844, when Reverend Charles Prescot, the rector and JP of Stockport, bought the building for the Anglican diocese. The application stated, with an obvious overtone of vindication at their failure, that the building was ‘originally intended for a mechanics’ institute in which the Chartists, Socialists, and other seditious, irreligious and unprincipled men were in the habit of meeting’.120 In Sheffield, the Hall of Science reported in 1842 that its Rational School was to close, largely because George Holyoake had ‘grown tired of it’. The Owenites maintained their hall in Rockingham Street, but did little with it from the mid-­1840s.121 The O’Connorite Chartists could also only sustain their own base for so long. By 1847, their rooms were incorporated into the Fig Tree Inn by the licensee Joseph Knapton, who placed an advertisement in the Sheffield Independent ‘that he has opened the above house and the large Room adjoining, originally known as the “Chartist Room”’, which, ‘from its size, is well adapted for the holding of Public Meetings, Lodge Meetings or Clubs, being capable of accommodating from 450 to 500 persons’.122 The momentum waned as the movements struggled to deal with the financial and legislative problems and the sheer physical effort of organising a holistic alternative way of life in these buildings. Owenism, Chartism and other movements were able to reach the non-­activist sections of the working classes more deeply and widely than their predecessors through the activities of everyday life. They offered opportunities for education, entertainment and consumption that sought to change the individual much more than occasional attend Royle, ‘Owenism and the secularist tradition’, pp. 203–4; J.Wolffe (ed.), Yorkshire Returns of the 1851 Census of Religious Worship: West Riding (South) (Borthwick papers, 108, York, 2005), p. 24. 120 Cheshire RO, P 154­/​8­/​6–9, typescript speech of Thomas Chaloner, n.d. 121 Garnett, Co-­Operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities, p. 150; Royle, Victorian Infidels, p. 99. 122 Sheffield Independent, 3 April 1847. 119



Constructing new spaces219

ance at a mass meeting could. Self-­education and the study of culture was a form of struggle for most of the panoply of social movements in the 1840s.123 Eileen Yeo emphasised that the halls of science were a physical expression of working-­ class culture and identity.124 It is debatable however whether the buildings could represent what was in fact a complex ‘culture’, of which communitarianism, utopianism and auto-­ didacticism were only one part. Middle-­ class and conservative initiatives such as mechanics’ institutes and operative Conservative societies were also popular, offering similar opportunities with a different political complexion. Whether the socialist and Chartist halls ultimately changed the character of everyone who stepped foot in them is also hard to prove. There are few surviving recollections that testify to their influence. Emma Griffin’s study of working-­class autobiographies underlines the role of mutual improvement and trades societies in training future Chartist leaders in political skills, but does not suggest anything about the halls, particularly for the rank and file.125 Moreover, there were only so many hours in the day, and most of those were filled with the struggle to get on with the challenges of everyday life and work. Nevertheless, these sites and their usages were an expression of independence. They were testimony to the determination of reformers to oppose the restrictions of government and local authorities on their freedom to meet and to speak.

Chase, Chartism, p. 146. Yeo, ‘Robert Owen’, p. 161. 125 Griffin, ‘The making of the Chartists’, 587. 123 124

III

Region, neighbourhood and the meaning of place

7

The liberty of the landscape

THE BLACKSTONE-­EDGE GATHERING On the 2nd of August, 1846 Air­– ­‘The Battle of Hohenlinden’ O’er plains and cities far away, All lorn and lost the morning lay, When sunk the sun at break of day, In smoke of mill and factory. But waved the wind on Blackstone height A standard in the broad sunlight, And sung, that morn, with trumpet might, A sounding song of Liberty. And grew the glorious music higher, When pouring with his heart on fire, Old Yorkshire came, with Lancashire, And all its noblest chivalry … Though hunger stamped each forehead spare, And eyes were dim with factory glare, Loud swelled the nation’s battle prayer, Of—death to class monopoly!1

On 2 August 1846, around 30,000 people processed up to Blackstone Edge, a wild outcrop of millstone grit marking the Lancashire-­Yorkshire border in the Pennines near Rochdale. The high ridge was difficult to access by cavalry and became an important site for Chartist mass meetings in the 1840s. Ernest Jones conveyed the sense of freedom given by climbing the ridge in his hymn, printed in the Northern Star. The imagined rural idyll of the moors, its fresh wind and ‘broad sunlight’, NS, 22 August 1846; E. Jones, Poems, http:­/​­/​gerald-­massey.org.uk­/​jones­/​c_​ poems_​2.htm, accessed 14 June 2014.

 1

224

Region, neighbourhood and place

contrasted with the smoky and dark factory towns from which the processions marched. Jones’s poetry was optimistic for change, but also expressed a sense of defiance, ‘death to class monopoly!’ As Chartists, socialists and other oppositional political groups found it increasingly difficult to find suitable meeting sites in town centres, they looked beyond urban boundaries to more rural areas. The ‘camp meeting’ on the moors or in a field became a classic feature of the repertoire of protest, and the large processions up to Blackstone Edge were the apogee of the movement. As we have seen in chapter 2, postwar radicals favoured placing their platform in fields outside urban jurisdiction. Particular rural sites, including Hunslet Moor in Leeds and Kersal Moor in Manchester, were used for mass meetings by successive political movements. Meeting on such sites gave political groups an instant connection to a longer heritage of oppositional activity.2 Rural sites were associated with liberty to practise religious and political dissent, free from the control of landowners, urban magistrates and the established church. Towards the end of this period, as enclosure began to spread to even the wildest of spaces available in northern England, Blackstone Edge was one of the few remaining sites where radicals could truly feel free from repression. So far this book has focused on contests over space. This part shifts its attention to the meaning of place for social movements. Place was shaped by memory, custom and usage. Rural meetings in particular reflected a deep attachment to the land and its customs and connections. The urban working classes maintained proximity (both spatial and psychological) to the land, feelings which inspired and shaped a radical agrarianism among social movements, urban and rural, throughout this period.3 The popularity of the Chartist Land Plan as we will see was testimony to a popular search for the liberty of the land; the plan formed a powerful critique of the hierarchy of property and landowning in British society. Romanticism is a common feature of many historical and modern social movements. In common with much of the popular poetry and dialect balladry concerning the ‘condition of the working class’, the Chartists produced reams of poetry along the theme of the rural idyll.4 K. Navickas, ‘Moors, fields and popular protest in South Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1800–1848’, NH, 46:1 (2006).  3 M. Chase, The People’s Farm: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).  4 M. Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 118; A. Janowitz, ‘The Chartist picture-­ esque’, in S. Copley and P. Garside (eds), The Politics of the  2



The liberty of the landscape225

Rural meetings reflected integral parts of popular culture and everyday life, especially the camp meetings and itinerant preachers of Methodism, the routes of tramping artisans and working-­class enthusiasm for rambling and rural recreation.5 They illustrated the role of the ‘neighbourhood’ in protest: the participation of ‘country folk’ in collective action was even more integral when the action occurred on their doorstep. Protests should not therefore be divided strictly into urban and rural. These were permeable boundaries with inhabitants who felt comfortable in both cultures and combined what elements they needed from both. Footpaths and the radical defence of the right to roam There was a long tradition of opposition to the building of new roads in northern England. David Hey argues that the famous Kinder Scout mass trespass of 1932 has overshadowed the more substantive late Victorian and Edwardian movements for access to moorland.6 But the ‘right to roam’ movement began even earlier. Major riots against the new system of turnpikes had broken out across the West Riding in 1752–3.7 Enclosure of common land and ‘wastes’ gathered pace during the Napoleonic wars, resistance to which is examined in the next chapter. A corollary to enclosure was the Stopping Up of Unnecessary Roads Act, passed in 1815, which quickly became a rubber stamp enabling landowners to reshape routes across the landscape. It is significant that postwar radicals took on the cause of the right to roam. After Peterloo, middle-­class radicals chose to use the campaign to contest the politics of space legitimately through challenges to landowners in the courts. York reformers formed the first society for the preservation of footpaths in 1824, with Manchester following suit in 1826. Prominent members included Archibald Prentice, John Shuttleworth and the Potter brothers.8 Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics Since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).  5 J. Walton, ‘The northern rambler: walking and the popular politics of industrial England, from Peterloo to the 1930s’, LHR, 78:3 (2013).  6 D. Hey, ‘Kinder Scout and the legend of the mass trespass’, Agricultural History Review, 59:2 (2011).  7 MM, 10 July 1753; A. Randall, Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Hanoverian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 165; M. Freeman, ‘Popular attitudes to turnpikes in early eighteenth-­ century England’, Journal of Historical Geography, 19:1 (1993).  8 A. Prentice, Historical Sketches and Personal Recollections of Manchester (Manchester, 1851), pp. 285–95; W. Darby, Landscape and Identity:

226

Region, neighbourhood and place

In 1833, under the initiative of Whig-­liberal MPs for the new industrial boroughs, the House of Commons set up a select committee to investigate ‘public walks’. Conservative paternalists romanticised the rural idyll as much as the Peterloo reformers. Their testimonies to the select committee revealed how middle and working classes differed over geographical knowledge and conceptions of what rural space was for. For Tory radicals and social reformers like Richard Oastler and James Phillips Kay, recent author of The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes of Manchester, the purpose of working-­class access to the countryside was as a pressure release, a means of keeping workers happy as well as healthy and thus economically productive and politically inert. Ellis Cunliffe Lister, MP for Bradford, was decidedly proud of his paternalism in allowing Bradfordians to walk along the ‘excellent flagged way’ in his estate at Manningham: ‘I leave it open as possible for them to view the deer; they come in immense numbers on the Sunday’. John Parker, MP for Sheffield, misleadingly claimed that the town had no public footpaths at all, and despaired that although there were great expanses of moorland on its outskirts, ‘it would require a long time to change the sedentary habits of a great population’.9 The legislative response to the report was slow and piecemeal, the government being naturally fearful of upsetting landowners and their defence of private property. The 1845 General Inclosure Act empowered, although did not require, independent commissioners to set aside land on enclosed commons for recreational use. This went in tandem with the emergence of the civic philanthropic endeavour of the Victorian public parks movement.10 Yet the new parks were also products of middle-­class paternalism and social control. Ostensibly inclusive, they were in fact bounded and exclusive. Their paths and borders were not open like the moors, but rather carefully designed so that the working classes could exercise leisure in an open but nonetheless controlled space watched by wardens Geographies of Nation and Class in England (Oxford: Berg, 2000), pp. 108–9; J. Barrell, The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place, 1730–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), p. 87; A. Wallace, Walking, Literature and English Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 10.  9 Parliamentary Papers 1833 (15), Select Committee Report on Public Walks, pp. 53, 67. 10 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, vol. 37, House of Commons, 9 March 1837, cols 162–4, http:­/​­/​hansard.millbanksystems.com, accessed 14 June 2014; Darby, Landscape and Identity, pp. 108–9; H. Conway, People’s Parks: The Design and Development of Victorian Parks in Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).



The liberty of the landscape227

and locked up at night. The parks subsequently became a source of contention over the right to protest (and what ‘public’ meant) in the later nineteenth century, notably in battles over the uses of Hyde Park in London.11 Footpaths mattered because rambling and pedestrianism were hugely popular pastimes among inhabitants of both town and country. Naturalism was an essential element of working-­class auto-­didacticism. The reformer Absalom Watkin recalled using his dinnertimes to venture from his work in a Manchester warehouse to pick wild flowers in Broughton and blackberries on Kersal Moor in 1817.12 Samuel Bamford’s Early Days (1849) recalled an adolescence of rambling in the fields and dells north of Manchester, and his Walks in South Lancashire (1844) was intended to educate urban dwellers whom he felt were losing touch with the environment of the neighbourhood.13 The phenomenology of walking and the memory of previous visits to particular sites fostered what some geographers have termed topophilia, a sense of attachment to place, particularly associated with independence and local identity.14 Familiarity with the environment was further built up by ‘bearing home’, the weekly journey of workers in textile trades between workshop and warehouse.15 Knowledge of the routes of everyday life and leisure enabled political activists to use topography to their advantage. On 28 March 1817, in J. M. Roberts, ‘Spatial governance and working-­class public spheres: the case of a Chartist demonstration at Hyde Park’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 14:3 (2001); A. Taylor, ‘Commons-­stealers, land-­grabbers and jerry-­builders: space, popular radicalism and the politics of public access in London, 1848– 1880’, IRSH, 40:3 (1995); N. McMaster, ‘The battle for Mousehold Heath, 1857–1884: popular politics and the Victorian public park’, P & P, 127 (1990). 12 M. Goffin (ed.), The Diaries of Absalom Watkin: A Manchester Man, 1787– 1861 (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1993), p. 26. 13 S. Bamford, Early Days and Passages in the Life of a Radical (London, 1849), chapter 8, http:­/​­/​gerald-­massey.org.uk­/​bamford­/​b_​walks.htm, accessed 14 June 2014. 14 Y.-­F. Tuan, Topophilia: A Study of Environmental Perception, Attitudes, and Values (Engelwood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1974); J. Wylie, Landscape (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 166. 15 R. Poole, ‘Samuel Bamford and northern identity’, in N. Kirk (ed.), Northern Identities: Historical Interpretations of the North and Northernness (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); H. R. Southall, ‘The tramping artisan revisits: labour mobility and economic distress in early Victorian England’, Economic History Review, 44:2 (1991). 11

228

Region, neighbourhood and place

the aftermath of the March of the Blanketeers, radical delegates were arrested at a ‘private meeting’ at Ardwick Bridge outside Manchester. Fearful of spies, Bamford had advised his compatriot Joseph Healey to go to Bolton to ‘keep out of sight’, noting: His best way would be to avoid Manchester, and go over Kersal Moor and Agecroft bridge ­… We had appointed to meet at Rhodes, Healey taking a circuitous road over Bowlee, whilst I went a nearer but still indirect way through Alkrington wood.16

Absalom Watkin later became familiar with this route. He recalled taking a walk in June 1831 with J. E. Taylor, editor of the Manchester Guardian: ‘We went by the riverside to Agecroft and passing over the bridge came to the road leading to Mrs Byrom’s house. We went down this lane, which is a private road, and passing Kersall Hall ­… came out through the fields at Mrs Wolfendale’s farm on Kersal Moor’.17 This route over Agecroft Bridge towards Kersal Moor became a pathway of protest for radicals in and around Manchester.The procession of the Bolton Chartists to the mass meeting on Kersal Moor in September 1838, for example, was directed to go ‘down the Bolton Road over Agecroft Bridge on to the Moor by the Griffin and Turf Tavern. Leigh district to join the Bolton district at the end of Agecroft lane’.18 Significantly, the Manchester Society for the Protection of Footpaths defended the routes to Kersal Moor. At their annual dinner in October 1830, the society noted: ‘the new Bury Road is … ­ rapidly proceeding, and it must be the business of the society to see that the once beautiful footpath leading to the moor is in some respect restored’. Thus although liberal reformers like Prentice would oppose the Chartists, their actions a few years previously had kept the customary routes open for them in Manchester. The dinner also celebrated ‘the erection of a new bridge ­… restoring to the inhabitants of Smedley and Cheetham Hill, the regular road to Blackley, and to the Blackley people the road to Manchester’.19 This road had been the route that Samuel Bamford took his procession from his home village to Peterloo. Walkers on stopped-­ up footpaths or private roads were enacting protest, subverting the control by landowners and local authorities of boundaries or paths. By performing such actions, as geographers of resistance have claimed, they ‘unenclosed’, albeit temporarily, those Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, chapter 12. Diaries of Absalom Watkin, p. 132. 18 NS, 22 September 1838. 19 MT, 30 October 1830. 16 17



The liberty of the landscape229

spaces in protest.20 In using their bodies, they were embodying the space. The performance of drilling in particular challenged elite control over space in a threatening manner. The secret night-­time military manoeuvres of United Englishmen and the Luddites in the Pennines and on the edges of towns were elemental experiences, relying on sound and touch to direct bodies in the darkness. The nocturnal meetings enabled radicals to exercise control over these liminal sites outwith the jurisdiction of elites. Drilling was associated with political freedom. Samuel Bamford attempted to justify radicals’ military manoeuvres before Peterloo as part of a right to arm drawn from Magna Carta. He was acutely aware of the preciousness of open space north of Manchester, and thus romanticised these drillings on the moors and in fields after work and on Sunday mornings: In the grey of a fine Sunday morn, we would saunter through the mists, fragrant with the night odour of flowers and of new hay, and ascending the Tandle Hills, salute the broad sun … ­ Maidens would sometimes come with their milk cans from the farms of Hoolswood or Gerrard-­hey ­… when they [the drilling youths] broke for a little rest, would follow a jumping match or a race, or a friendly wrestle, or a roll down the hill amid the laughter of others sitting in the sun.21

This thick dollop of nostalgia, embellished with no-­doubt rosy-­cheeked milkmaids, was a retrospective attempt to prove their innocence. John Barlow, a Middleton weaver questioned by Bamford at Hunt’s trial in 1820, insisted on the ‘public’ nature of the drillings on Tandle Hill and Barrowfield, with ‘200 or 300 women and children standing by as spectators’.22 Prosecution witnesses sought to prove the seditious nature of nocturnal drilling. Drilling at night was reported in the hills around Manchester, Carlisle, Sheffield and Huddersfield, including Crossland Moor, which the Yorkshire Gazette was keen to note was ‘the place where the late respected Mr Horsfall was shot’, thereby again framing the agitation within the memory of the Luddite agitation of 1812.23 K. Olwig, ‘Recovering the substantive meaning of landscape’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 86:4 (1996); Wallace, Walking, p. 10. 21 Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, chapter 24. 22 R. Huish (ed.), History of the Private and Political Life of Henry Hunt (London, 1836), p. 402. 23 Yorkshire Gazette, 28 August 1819; WYAS, Leeds, WYL 250­/​6/­​2/­​box 2, lieutenancy correspondence, Taylor to Lascelles, 13 December 1819; Cumbria RO, Carlisle, D­/​LONS­/​L1­/​2­/​136, Blamire to Lowther, November 1819. 20

230

Region, neighbourhood and place

Often the men leading the exercises were military veterans; Bamford recalled that, ‘our drillmasters were generally old soldiers of the line, or local militia regiments; they put the lads through their facings in quick time’.24 Most of the men tried for leading the failed ‘general risings’ at Barnsley and Huddersfield in April 1820 had served in military regiments during the Napoleonic wars.25 Leeds magistrate John Beckett was at Barnsley on 3 December 1819 and wrote of radicals, suspected to be connected to Garforth Miners’ Union Club, drilling in a field off the Sheffield Road near to Union Row. He noted, ‘the whole town was prepared to go to see the Exercising, as they would go see a review’. This area was already well known to reformers, who had assembled on the Sheffield Road (most likely at their chairman Reverend Ellis’s Calvinist chapel) to process to the reform meeting on 8 November 1819.26 The government prohibited armed parading in the second of the Six Acts, the Training and Drilling Act, passed on 9 December 1819.27 Chartists attempted to regain the right to drill, defending it in the same terms as their radical predecessors as the constitutional right to arm. But they more boldly used it to demonstrate elements of physical force and threat. Edwin Butterworth recorded that on the night of 24 April 1839, ‘several hundreds of the Chartists mustered in a field near Birchen Bower, Hollinwood, and were exercised quite in military style, under the direction of old soldier Hicks’.28 The continuity of the spaces of drilling was also significant. The same area north of Manchester described by Bamford in the 1810s and Watkin in the 1830s was used by Chartists for drilling in 1839. In the build up to the ‘sacred month’ in 1839, alarmed by numerous reports of arming and drilling, Lord Melbourne’s government issued a royal proclamation against illegal drilling on 3 May.29 Each evening for several Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, chapter 24. Barnsley Archives, Burlands annals, ‘memoranda of the insurgents’, 1820; TNA, TS 11­/​1013­/​4132, Yorkshire summer assizes, 1820. 26 WYAS, Leeds, WYL 250­/​6­/​2­/​box 2, lieutenancy correspondence, Beckett to Lascelles, 3 December 1819; Barnsley Archives, Burlands annals, 8 November 1819. 27 Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, vol. 41, House of Lords, 29 November 1819, cols 405–6. 28 Oldham Local Studies, D-­ BUT F­ /​ 63, Butterworth papers, ‘news reports’ (hereafter Butterworth news reports), 1839. 29 TNA, HO 40­/​37­/​282, magistrates of Todmorden to Home Office, 4 May 1839; F. C. Mather, Chartism and Society: An Anthology of Documents (London: Bell and Hyman, 1980), p. 152. 24 25



The liberty of the landscape231

days in the lead up to the mass meetings on Whit weekend, ‘a number of men, probably about a hundred’ practised military manoeuvres ‘in a somewhat retired lane leading from the southerly side of Oldham Road, just beyond the Newton Heath toll bar, towards Bagley Fold and Clayton Hall (about three miles from Manchester)’. Seven Chartists were arrested. Although it is difficult to generalise whether the arrested men were typical of those drilling, all were aged between seventeen and twenty-­three apart from one, aged twenty-­nine, and all were employed in cotton textiles in the centre of Manchester and in Salford. The men lived in the working-­class residential districts of New Cross and Ancoats, or off Deansgate in central Manchester.30 These were urban dwellers practising on the margins of the city. Newton Heath was a favourite location for political drilling because of its situation outside the town boundary and accessibility to weaving communities along the route. Handloom weavers and mule spinners had held open air meetings on the heath during strikes in 1794.31 Long-­distance political pedestrianism Drilling was a site-­specific performance, reflective of protesters’ knowledge of place. But social movements also spread through mobility over much larger geographical horizons, and their greater goals inspired much longer and sustained feats of political pedestrianism. Cross-­ regional travel, with the aim of approaching the source of power directly, was exemplified first by the Blanketeers in 1817, but their repression dissuaded any later movements from repeating their attempt. Claims for representation turned their focus to the pan-­ regional rather than towards the metropolis. York maintained a regional pull. Reformers from Leeds marched to the county meeting at York Castle yard on 14 October 1819 to protest about Peterloo.32 The largest act of cross-­regional political pedestrianism occurred on Easter Monday, 23 April 1832. Several thousand men made the long journey from the woollen districts of the West Riding to York Castle where a mass meeting was held to campaign for factory reform and Michael Sadler’s Ten Hours bill. Samuel Kydd’s semi-­autobiographical History of the Factory Movement noted with admiration, ‘the nearest factory town to York was Leeds, a distance of twenty-­four miles; many of the outlying districts

MG, 5 May 1839; TNA, TS 11­/​1067, Liverpool assizes, August 1839. Oldham Local Studies, diaries of William Rowbottom, 1794. 32 LM, 16 October 1819. 30 31

232

Region, neighbourhood and place

were from forty to fifty miles from the place of meeting’.33 The woollen workers sought to represent their West Riding economic identity to the rest of the county, in a place they perhaps rarely visited unless, like their Luddite predecessors, they faced the wrong side of the law at the gallows there. The procession moved in divisions and walked throughout the day and night, reaching York Castle early on Tuesday morning. The physical and material experience of the journey was a trial: the ‘foot-­ sore men’ braved the ‘most inclement’ weather ‘within memory’, and ‘scenes of immense confusion and misery took place, both at Leeds and at York, and especially at Knavesmire, where the supply of bread which had been expected did not arrive’. The processions tackled the difficulties of travelling across moorland at night with the aid of ‘torches, composed of old ropes, and the undulations of the road afforded many views of illuminated groups, successively rising over the hills and disappearing the next instant’. Kydd was keen to couch his description of the event in religious overtones, likening it to the Pilgrimage of Grace, with the wearied pilgrim rebels battling against the elements and raising their leader Richard Oastler to the status of a saint. It is evident however that Oastler and fellow campaigner and future Chartist Lawrence Pitkethly, travelling on horseback from Knavesmire, only just managed to keep a potential mutiny of wet, tired and hungry workers at bay.34 Chartists and other later social movements learned from these great feats but kept their processions sub-­regional rather than pan-­ regional. There were nevertheless several occasions when the main leaders attracted big crowds from across a region. When Feargus O’Connor was released from imprisonment in York Castle at the end of August 1841, some of the original Ten Hours processors may have retraced their steps of 1832 to meet him. The Northern Star reported, ‘the streets were filled with crowds of pedestrians, from all parts of Yorkshire, some of whom had walked forty miles to hail the release of their beloved friend. At the head of about fifty persons carrying flags, was Mr J. Linney of Manchester, who had walked from that place’.35 Itinerant lecturers were also crucial in the spread of political move S. Kydd, History of the Factory Movement from the Year 1802 to the Enactment of the Ten Hours Bill, 1847, vol. 2 (London, 1857), p. 235. 34 Kydd, History of the Factory Movement, pp. 237, 241; York Herald, 28 April 1832; LM, 28 April 1832; J. Martin, ‘Popular political oratory and itinerant lecturing in Yorkshire and the North East in the age of Chartism, 1837–60’ (PhD dissertation, University of York, 2010), p. 67. 35 NS, 4 September 1841. 33



The liberty of the landscape233

ments. Following the establishment of the National Charter Association in July 1840, the densest areas of Chartist activity established regular lecturing plans. The organisation of local lecturers directly mirrored the various Methodist systems of preachers and circuits. The Home Office were sent the South Lancashire Chartist lecture plan for 1841, which was tabulated in the same way as a Methodist circuit plan, with preachers undertaking a regular rota of Manchester and its satellite cotton towns.36 Professional county lecturers were employed to cover tours over much larger areas. The material experience of travel in difficult terrains and conditions was as much part of the purpose of itinerant lecturing as the ideological message orated in the speeches. In some respects, walking was the ideology, representing, as Phillip Howell argues, ‘a discourse of hard-­won communication and enlightenment in the service of a political public’.37 The credibility of the long-­distance itinerant lecturers, as Janette Martin has shown, was established by their audience’s appreciation of the material effort required in walking from place to place. The lecturers built upon the romantic tradition of radical walking and the lone missionary battling the elements to honour communities with a visit.38 In the first fortnight of October 1843, Chartist David Ross conducted a lecture tour starting in Leeds. Though he took the new train to Dewsbury, he then walked through Huddersfield, Holmfirth, Mossley, Mill Bottom, Rochdale, Bury, Chorley and Preston to Clitheroe, a total distance of nearly a hundred miles. Describing his hike over Saddleworth Moor between Holmfirth and Mossley, he equated the experience of roaming free among the ageless features of nature with political liberty: ‘The partridge and plover alone inhabit these wild regions, where liberty and man might love to dwell’. As well as his romantic literary prose, however, he also emphasised the travails of the journey, walking from Rochdale to Bury ‘through the rain, which came down with cruel perseverance’, arriving ‘much fatigued’, only eased by the reception he received from ‘warm-­hearted and well-­ minded Democrats’. Itinerant lecturers saw their role as a vocation but they faced a reaction of parochial xenophobia among the authorities, TNA, HO 45­/​46, in D. Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (New York: Allen Lane, 1975), p. 105. Most of the local lecturers stuck to their home town. 37 P. Howell, ‘Diffusing the light of liberty: the geography of political lecturing in the Chartist movement’, Journal of Historical Geography, 21:1 (1995), 32; H. Southall, ‘Agitate, agitate, organise! Political travellers and the construction of a national politics’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 21:1 (1996), 177. 38 Martin, ‘Popular political oratory’, p. 35. 36

234

Region, neighbourhood and place

reflective of fear of itinerants in general, especially of trampers, Irish and religious preachers promoting ‘enthusiasm’.39 The topography of Pennine towns and torchlight processions The power of the landscape in protest was illustrated most spectacularly in the torchlight processions of late 1838. Torchlight processions had long featured in the ‘grand entries’ into town of political leaders, partly for the practical reason of lack of street lighting along main routes into towns and in working-­class residential areas. During the general election of November 1831, Henry Hunt arrived at Preston to contest the seat; the road into town and the outdoor meeting site were lit by ‘sixty or seventy tar barrels and flambeaus’.40 Admittedly, it was also Guy Fawkes’ night, so the crowd combined customary ritual with the spectacle of the election, as well as perhaps alluding to the threat of the Swing riots blazing across southern England. The torchlight processions of 1838 brought physical force Chartism into the national foreground. They were charged with an undercurrent of threat deliberately orchestrated by Feargus O’Connor and Reverend Joseph Rayner Stephens, who were present at almost every event. As James Epstein noted, the events ‘pushed the boundaries of the right of public assembly to the limit’.41 Torchlight processions were a tactic specifically developed in hilly towns dominated by large-­ scale textile manufacturers, especially Stockport, Ashton-­ under-­ Lyne, Stalybridge and their surrounding ‘neighbourhoods’.42 Cotton manufacturers in Stockport and Heywood sacked workers who intended to attend the mass Chartist meeting on Kersal Moor on 22 September 1838. The Northern Star reported that on 1 October, the dismissed workers in Stockport met Feargus O’Connor en route to a public meeting with a band, banners and lit torches, and marched in triumph through the principal streets.43 The NS, 21 October 1843; Martin, ‘Popular political oratory’, pp. 40, 44. Preston Chronicle, 12 November 1831. 41 J. Epstein, The Lion of Freedom: Feargus O’Connor and the Chartist Movement, 1832–1842 (London: Croom Helm, 1982) p. 119. 42 TNA, TS 11­/​1067, depositions regarding torchlight meetings in Hyde and Rochdale, November 1838; W. Steinberg, ‘Riding the Black Lad and other ritualistic actions’, in M. Hanagan, L. Page Moch and W. te Brake (eds), Challenging Authority: The Historical Study of Contentious Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 20. 43 NS, 29 September, 16 October 1838; Manchester and Salford Advertiser, 6 October 1838; Epstein, The Lion of Freedom, p. 119. 39 40



The liberty of the landscape235

practice spread quickly to Oldham, Bolton and Prestwich and then across the Pennines.44 In Lancashire and Cheshire, the processions generally emerged from the neighbourhood and converged into the main streets of a town; in the West Riding, by contrast, the processions moved out from the main town to a mass meeting point. In Leeds, torchlight processions led the way to the mass meeting on Hunslet Moor on 22 October, which, the Northern Star commented, was ‘an idea for which we owe everlasting gratitude to our friends at Stockport’. The paper again emphasised the element of defiance of employer control inherent in the tactic: ‘We can now be even with the Factory Tyrants. We have no need to ask them for permission to attend our meetings’.45 Surrounded by flames, with the lines of light highlighting the dark Pennine neighbourhoods in an atmosphere of gothic sublime, O’Connor and local leaders, Stephens, Peter McDouall and R. J. Richardson, forged a distinctively northern Chartism. At Prestwich, according to an enthusiastic reporter for the Champion: The whole place seemed alive, and though the night was dark and foggy, the brilliance of the torches, which were very numerous and good, rendered the darkness and the fog totally unimportant. The meeting was held upon a rising ground, just above the village; and when the procession, headed by a most effective band, and all the torches had arrived, the effect, as you looked up at the meeting from the village below, was most imposing.46

The Chartists manipulated the perspectives cast by the moorland landscape like stage scenery. Meeting in the dark was a necessity but also a risk. Criminal law treated nocturnal crimes more harshly than those committed during daytime.47 The authorities’ fear of disturbance was amplified not just because of the fiery oratory of O’Connor and Stephens and the spectacle of the flames, but more because of the ominous contrast of the rhetoric with the orderly form of the processions, ‘fully marshalled’.48 The fear arose from their unpredictability; they might at any time break out into insurrection. General Wemyss and other military officials believed that little could be done to suppress the meetings because there was no evidence of TNA, HO 40­/​38­/​241, handbill, ‘Torchlight meeting’, Bolton, 30 October 1838; HO 40­/​38­/​243, Wemyss to Phillips, 31 October 1838. 45 NS, 16 October 1838. 46 Champion, 18 November 1838. 47 M. Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 38. 48 NS, 3 November 1838. 44

236

Region, neighbourhood and place

breach of the peace. The Champion claimed that the Hyde magistrates asked the Home Office for extra powers, and this resulted in the royal proclamation banning all nocturnal meetings. It is clear that the government were concerned well before this request, as the Home Office had already instructed magistrates on 22 November to suppress the torchlight meetings.49 The Chartists were forced to back down, though they regarded the proclamation a denial of the right to public assembly. R. J. Richardson warned the inhabitants of the mining towns of Worsley and Leigh not to hold their planned meeting on 15 December because ‘the Whigs have sent spies to entrap you’.50 O’Connor made sure to attend one of the final scheduled meetings at Bury but the arrest of Reverend Stephens on 27 December, for having ‘attended an unlawful meeting at Hyde on 14 November’, extinguished the final flames of the tactic. O’Connor feared dissension within the movement and turned his attention to organising the National Convention in London.51 Camp and ‘monster’ meetings Camp meetings in fields and on moors were a regular feature of the summer timetable of Chartists and Owenite socialists. Bringing the activities of the halls of science into the open, they were festival, leisure outing and religious experience combined, and importantly included the whole family. Political camp meetings drew directly from the forms, rituals and spaces of Methodist camp meetings, including processions clothed in Sunday best to the same hillside sites, with singing of specially composed Chartist hymns and preaching of political sermons. In Oldham, the Primitive and New Connexion Methodists met on Oldham Edge, Hartshead Pike and Greenacres Moor throughout the 1830s and 1840s. All these sites were also used for trade union and radical meetings, and Chartist camp meetings attended by 2,000 people.52 With the same reasoning as using Sunday schoolrooms in the towns, Chartists and other political groups felt that authorities were perhaps less likely to disperse a religious-­style meeting. Outdoor sermons were not cover for political activities, however, but formed part of their very nature, emerg-

TNA, HO 40­/​38­/​243, Wemyss to Phillips, 31 October 1838; Champion, 11 November, 9 December 1838; Chase, Chartism, p. 39. 50 TNA, HO 40­/​38­/​613, handbill, 15 December 1838. 51 Chase, Chartism, p. 39. 52 Oldham Local Studies, D-­BUT F­/​1, 14, 57, 79–80, Butterworth news reports, 1830–42. 49



The liberty of the landscape237

ing organically from Christian Chartists’ experiences and beliefs.53 On Sunday 22 September 1839, Sheffield and Barnsley Chartists held a joint camp meeting on Hood Hill, situated seven miles from each town, on the edge of the Peak District. They sent a delegation to Earl Fitzwilliam to request use of his land, but before the messengers returned, they held the celebration on the property of the more sympathetic Duke of Norfolk. The service commenced with a hymn composed by Ebeneezer Elliot of Sheffield, the ‘Corn Law Rhymer and Poet of the Poor’: We seek the dewy daisied plain, or climb thy hills to touch thy feet; There far from splendour’s hearthern flame, Thy weary sons and daughters meet. Where wheeling wide the plover flies O’er field and flood and rock and tree, Beneath the silence of thy skies, Isn’t a crime to worship thee.54

The Northern Star described the area as ‘a deep hollow, in the shape of a crescent, the hills round which formed a beautiful romantic gallery on which was seated the delighted assemblage’.55 Elliot’s paean to the landscape expressed the populace’s sense of escape from industrial urbanity together with a plea questioning the authorities’ attitudes to mass meetings. During the plug strikes of August 1842, three camp meetings were held on Cronkey Shaw Common on the outskirts of Rochdale. The morning service opened with a Chartist hymn alluding to enclosure: They call the earth and land their own, And they give us back a stone.

The chairman, James Mills of Whitworth, a village over the brow of the hill, ‘opened the business of the day by stating that every chapter in the Bible breathes nothing but freedom and liberty; while the paid expounders of it­– t­ he state priesthood­– ­had been the greatest supporters of tyranny and oppression in all ages of the world’. His idea of place therefore meant freedom from employers, from enclosers, from religious E. Yeo, ‘Christianity in Chartist struggle, 1838–1842’, P & P, 91 (1981), 122. 54 Barnsley Archives, Burlands annals, 22 September 1839; NS, 28 September 1839. A different version appears in Elliot’s collected works: ‘An artisan’s outdoor hymn’, More Verse and Prose by the Corn-­Law Rhymer, vol. 2 (London, 1850), p. 4. 55 NS, 28 September 1839. 53

238

Region, neighbourhood and place

restrictions as well as from political restrictions to meet. Following the Primitive Methodist practice of female lay preaching, ‘a respectable looking woman, nearly sixty years of age, dressed as a Methodist or one of the Society of Friends’, from Oldham, addressed the meeting. She told of witnessing the extreme hunger of the strikers, and ‘concluded by exhorting the multitude to stand firm like the Israelites of old’.56 More radical religious sects used remoter Pennine sites, most notably the Hudsonites who met on the bleak rocky outcrop of the Basin Stones overlooking Todmorden. This sect, active between 1840 and 1848, were led by James ‘Pope’ Hudson, and were drawn from a couple of districts of Todmorden. Their radical theology mocked conventional Christianity but also testified that the land was the birthright of the people. They wore green coats, the colour of political radicalism, although it is difficult to prove whether members also attended the Chartist meetings on the site. The most famous Chartist meeting at the Basin Stones took place on 18 August 1842, at the height of the plug strikes. The meeting was immortalised in a painting by Arthur Walter Bayes, who depicted the respectable-­looking crowd listening to Benjamin Wilson, his performance, gestures and oratory in harmony with the bleak and elemental millstone grit of the stones on which he stood.57 Chartist ‘monster’ meetings shared some of the features of camp meetings, but were more directly the inheritors of the mass platform demonstrations on moors and fields in 1819. These were huge events involving a complex organisation of processions from across a region. They were called to elect and ratify delegates to the National Convention and for signatures to the National Petition, but served also to encourage mass local participation in Chartist culture.58 R. G. Hall argued that open air meetings were ‘a dramatic way of asserting their right to participate in the public sphere and of communicating their message to ordinary men and women, many of whom remained to a large extent outside print culture’.59 But the mass meeting was not the public sphere, or even a counter-­public sphere in the strict sense: it was rather a formation of the plebeian body Halifax Guardian, 20 August 1842. L. Croft, John Fielden’s Todmorden: Popular Culture and Radical Politics in a Cotton Town, 1817–50 (Todmorden: Tygerfoot Press, 1994), p. 71; A. W. Bayes, ‘A Chartist Meeting at Basin Stones, Todmorden’, 1842, now in Todmorden Town Hall. 58 Epstein, The Lion of Freedom, p. 110. 59 R. G. Hall, ‘Creating a people’s history: political identity and history in Chartism, 1832–1848’, in O. Ashton, R. Fyson and S. Roberts (eds), The Chartist Legacy (Rendlesham: Merlin, 1999), p. 240. 56 57



The liberty of the landscape239

politic in relation to particular places as well as a statement of intent to the wider radical community who would read about it in the Northern Star. Particular moors and fields gained radical heritage through being used repeatedly by successive generations for protests and meetings from at least the 1790s to the 1840s and beyond. Kersal Moor outside Manchester, Hunslet Moor outside Leeds and Hartshead Moor otherwise known as Peep Green outside Dewsbury were the major sites of radical meetings and trades gatherings throughout this period.60 Other prominent moors used for political meetings throughout this period included: Almondbury Bank near Huddersfield; Skircoat Moor near Halifax; Crookes Moor, Castle Hill, Sky Edge and Attercliffe Common, Sheffield; Woodhouse Moor, Leeds; Bradford Moor and further out, Wibsey Low Moor and Fairweather Green; May Day Green, Barnsley; and Preston Moor and Chadwick’s Orchard, Preston. At ports, the sites were flatter and naturally low-­lying, including Carlisle Sands and Hull Dock Green.61 Hartshead, Hunslet and Kersal moors in particular became synonymous with Chartist meetings. Delegates were elected on Hartshead Moor for the national conventions in October 1838 and Whit weekend 1839, and a mass Chartist meeting was held there in March 1848. The Great Northern Union of Chartists was officially inaugurated on Hunslet Moor in June 1838, and the moor was used by striking workers in 1839 and 1842.62 Protesters combined place, ritual and collective memory to connect their movement to the ongoing narrative of radical heritage. For example, the banner heading the procession from the mining town of Leigh to the mass meeting on Kersal Moor on Monday 24 September 1838, was painted in memory of ‘the slaughter of our unarmed and peaceable brethren on the plains of Peterloo’.63 Kersal Moor then hosted the monster Chartist meetings on Whitsun 1839, and miners and ‘plug’ strikers met there in August 1842. The Chartists could not meet on the moor during the last wave of mass agitation in 1848 because the military were deliberately encamped there.64 Navickas, ‘Moors, fields and popular protest’, 98; WYAS, Leeds, WYL 250­/​ 6­/​2­/​box 2, lieutenancy correspondence, 1819; TNA, HO 52­/​13­/​336, Shaw to Somerset, 17 October 1831; MG, 21 June 1834; LM, 2 May 1812, 19 June 1819, 4 May 1833, 20 May 1837. 61 NS, 27 October 1838, 25 May 1839, and passim. 62 NS, 16 October 1838, 25 May, 21 December 1839, 20 August 1842; MG, 17 October 1838; Epstein, The Lion of Freedom, p. 104. 63 MG, 26 September 1838; NS, 29 September 1838. 64 NS, 27 August 1842; MG, 8 May 1839; TNA, TS 11­/​137­/​part I, Liverpool winter assizes, 1848. 60

240

Region, neighbourhood and place

Monster meetings held at the same time across the North in September 1838, Whit weekend in May 1839, August 1842 and May 1848, were simultaneously pan-­regional in scope and a statement of national intent, yet still particularly local in identity. Bronterre O’Brien wrote the Northern Star’s call for West Riding inhabitants to attend the mass meeting on Hartshead Moor on Monday 15 October 1838: The noble example of Kersal Moor is before you­– ­the eyes of the country are upon you. South Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire are the two most important counties in England, because the most populous and most industrious … ­ the voice of these two counties will, therefore, in a great measure, determine the voice of England.65

Of course this was hyperbole, but it did illustrate the feeling of confidence, and how the locus of popular politics had shifted to the industrial north. The contrast between the windy moor of a camp meeting and the strict formality of a Victorian public park was clear. At the mass meeting on Blackstone Edge to celebrate the third French Revolution in July 1848, Irish Confederate leader George Archdeacon was reported to have proclaimed in his speech: We commented at great length on the police and said dare the police come here to stop our meeting. We are not now in the narrow streets where they can call upon Special Constables. We are on a broad field of free discussion­ – ­and such are the places where we ought to meet.66

By comparing moorland and town with freedom and enclosure, his speech confirmed the centrality of space to political discourse and radical thinking about liberty. The pan-­regional spread of these mass meetings can be seen in the range of banners reported in the newspapers. At least eighteen groups carried banners to Peep Green for the mass meeting on 15 October 1838 (see figure 13). Some were from local radical societies in the neighbourhood of Huddersfield and Dewsbury, while the others justified the naming of the event as ‘the great West Riding meeting’.67 The furthest came from the linen-­weaving districts of the south-­east of the county, Barnsley and Worsborough Common, a distance of about fourteen and a half miles, that is, a good four or five hours’ walk. The average distance travelled by all the groups represented as the crow flies was 6.8 miles, though in practice this would have been longer from out-­townships and NS, 13 October 1838. TNA, TS 11­/​137­/​part II, Liverpool winter assizes, 1848. 67 NS, 16 October 1838; MG, 17 October 1838. 65 66



The liberty of the landscape241

13  Map of groups attending Chartist mass meetings at Kersal Moor, Blackstone Edge and Peep Green, 1838.

following roads up and around hills. The Kersal Moor meetings were more Mancuno-­ centric, attracting groups from the circle of satellite cotton towns, carefully arranged in divisions meeting on each radial road and bridge to avoid overcrowding in Manchester town centre before they converged on the moor. The average distance travelled to the meeting on 24 September 1838 was 7.8 miles. The radicals of Macclesfield were an important exception, having journeyed over eighteen miles to get there (presumably stopping overnight in Stockport), and thus showing Manchester’s importance as a pan-­regional centre in the north-­west. The delegate meeting on Blackstone Edge on Sunday 28 May 1848 attracted a smaller number of groups, from similar distances as to Peep Green.68 They included representatives from both sides of the Pennines, the furthest coming from Manchester (over 14.5 miles). The average distance travelled was 7.6 miles as the crow flies, though again, the effort and actual distance to ascend the ridge would have been much greater. The Northern Star commented on the Peep Green meeting of October NS, 22 September 1838; 3 June 1848.

68

242

Region, neighbourhood and place

1838: ‘Judging by the swarms which lined the whole road, and being continually augmented as each bye-­lane poured out its tributary streams from the adjoining villages, one would have supposed that all Yorkshire was literally on foot’.69 Newspapers reported meetings from the perspective of the observer on the horizon; the Manchester Times described the processions to a camp meeting on Blackstone Edge in June 1848: ‘Sometimes they first became visible on the top of a neighbouring hill; at others, they were seen like a dark line moving slowly along the valley and then mounting the bye-­paths and the winding highway which led from Littleborough to the summit of the hill’.70 The natural references common in such accounts were also perhaps reflective of what geographers would term the ‘more-­than-­human’ geographies of the moorland meetings.71 The phenomenology of the Chartists climbing those byways lay at the level of the earth rather than the horizon; they knew those paths, and like the itinerant lecturers, many constructed their experience in Old Testament terms, battling the elements on a pilgrimage to freedom. Typically for Rochdale, it rained particularly hard on that summer’s day. Chartist, socialist and trade union mass meetings had similar rituals and forms. But each site of meeting’s environment, topography, size and transport connections were different. So the processions from Manchester to Kersal Moor journeyed through a predominantly urban setting and as Paul Pickering has pointed out, crossed concentric circles of class-­based residential districts.72 Their experience differed from the Huddersfield and Halifax processions following footpaths through the still predominantly agricultural rolling hills and small hamlets surrounding Hartshead Moor. Some sites prominently overlooked the towns, such as Castle Hill adjoining the radical hotspot of Almondbury, Huddersfield, which deliberately amplified a show of force or mass support to the magistrates and loyalists. Other sites were cautiously out of sight (and mind) of the urban authorities. The materiality of the landscape shaped the location and experience of meetings. Some of the Pennine sites were chosen because their topography provided a natural ampitheatre, important when orators had to rely solely on the NS, ‘Extraordinary edition’, 16 October 1838. MT, 13 June 1848. 71 C. Griffin, ‘More-­ than-­ human histories and the failure of Grand States schemes’, Cultural Geographies, 17:4 (2010), and further discussed in chapter 8. 72 P. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists and Manchester and Salford (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 18–19. 69 70



The liberty of the landscape243

projection of their voice to get their message across a windy landscape, but also enabling more of the crowd to see the stage. As Pickering has argued, however, the purpose, or at least the effect, of the meetings for the majority of those who attended, did not involve listening intently to the speeches of radical leaders. At the Chartist monster meeting on Peep Green in May 1839, the Northern Star admitted that not even 10 per cent of the vast crowd were able to hear the speakers.73 The sites were part of the familiar landscapes of everyday life and leisure for both rural and urban inhabitants. Many were places used for fairs and seasonal festivals, foot-­racing, pedestrianism and gambling, and were what historians of popular recreation recognised as a temporary enaction of a world-­turned-­upside-­down. Kersal Moor was a popular racecourse from 1730 to 1846.74 The Manchester Guardian commented sardonically about the Chartist mass meeting on 24 September 1838: ‘it would be matter of great surprise if, from all the populous towns and districts in this neighbourhood, both in Lancashire and Cheshire, there could not be got together a tolerably large concourse of people of all ages and both sexes, as a place so well known to the lovers of amusement in this part of the country as Kersal Moor’.75 The days out borrowed the culture and structure from Whitsuntide and friendly society ‘club walks’. Halifax Chartist Benjamin Wilson’s recollections of the mass meeting on Peep Green on Whit Monday 1839 emphasised the ‘bands playing and flags and banners flying’ of the different groups joining the Halifax procession at Hipperholme and Bailiffe Bridge en route to the moor.76 The Chartist camp and monster meetings ostensibly offered an inclusive space for women and children similar to that of the postwar mass platform. An advert in the Northern Star exhorted the ‘women of Manchester and the surrounding districts’ to ‘rally round the Standard of Liberty placed upon the heights of Kersal Moor’ at the forthcoming NS, 25 May 1839; P. A. Pickering, ‘Class without words: symbolic communication in the Chartist movement’, P & P, 112 (1986), 166. 74 See the radical Michael Wilson’s ballad, ‘Jone’s ramble fro’ Owdham to Karsy Moor races’, in B. Hollingworth, Songs of the People: Lancashire Dialect Poetry of the Industrial Revolution (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), pp. 31–3. 75 MG, 26 September 1838. 76 B. Wilson, ‘The struggles of an old Chartist’ (Halifax, 1887), in D. Vincent (ed.), Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working Class Politicians, 1790–1885 (London: Europa, 1977), p. 197; TNA, HO 40­/​51­/1 ​ 67, magistrates of Huddersfield to Home Office, 22 May 1839. 73

244

Region, neighbourhood and place

mass meeting on 24 September 1838.77 But it was rare to see women speaking on stage, and this separation of roles belied the atmosphere of inclusivity. The processions were hierarchically structured, a mirror of the civic processions to which they formed an alternative, stratified by political leadership, geography and gender. The procession to Kersal Moor out of Manchester for instance was headed by the two marshals and the president and vice-­presidents of the Manchester union, followed by the secretary and two treasurers, accompanied by trumpeters and the concert band. The trades’ societies followed, and only upon these radical notables passing could the societies from the surrounding townships, and female friendly societies, join in.78 Women had taken a step back from their predecessors of 1819. The lay preacher at Cronkey Shaw Common in 1842 was unusual, perhaps reflecting the active role taken by women in the plug strikes in some areas. Rather, enacting the Chartist emphasis on domesticity, families formed part of the body on the landscape but not its main actors. At Skircoat in 1839, Benjamin Wilson recalled, ‘I saw such a sight as I had never seen there before, the moor being literally covered with men and women, the bulk of them sat down getting something to eat which had been given them on their way. Where the Orphanage now stands were fields, and a number of men mounted the walls to speak’.79 The Northern Star described the monster meeting on Blackstone Edge at Whitsuntide, June 1848, somewhat dismissively as having the appearance of ‘a huge pic-­nic party rather than of a meeting having a political object’.80 The (male) editorial writers were perhaps seeking a more aggressive demonstration in the last push for the Charter in the revolutionary year, but we cannot blame the families for, having marched from as far as Manchester and Halifax (distances of sixteen and ten miles respectively) and up the steep ascent in the rain, opening up their packed lunches to feed themselves and their children when they arrived. Urbanisation, industrialisation and enclosure restricted the openness and availability of some of the customary sites. The processions and meetings on moors enacted symbolic and physical occupations of privatised space and an expression against exclusion. Hartshead Moor Enclosure Act was passed in 1802 and awarded in 1806, although its implementation only took place from 1838.81 Todmorden Enclosure NS, 22 September 1838. Champion, 30 September 1838. 79 Wilson, ‘Struggles of an old Chartist’, p. 200. 80 NS, 17 June 1848. 81 WYAS, Kirklees, KMA 929, Hartshead Enclosure Act documents, 1840; KMA 924, Act for Enclosing Lands in the Parish of Kirkheaton, 1821. 77 78



The liberty of the landscape245

bill was enacted in 1836. Skircoat Moor was enclosed from 1839 but the freeholders resisted the plans of the lord of the manor, Sir George Savile, in 1842, and the site was turned into an open public park and thus still accessible for mass meetings, with or without permission of the owners.82 As James Vernon has pointed out in Oldham, the enclosure of much of the town’s commons and moors from 1807 onwards pushed radicals to sites such as Boardman’s Edge and Saddleworth High Moor, requiring over an hour’s hard walking to get there.83 Reaching Blackstone Edge and Stoodley Pike overlooking Todmorden involved serious hikes. The shift to more remote moors had consequences for the timing and organisation of events. Mass meetings were no longer an event that could be held during a lunchtime or on a Monday, often taken as a holiday by artisans and handloom weavers. As the factory timetable began to predominate working lives, meetings were increasingly scheduled for Sundays instead.84 Some employers prohibited their workers from attending mass meetings on Mondays or dismissed those who had attended. The mass platform meeting on Hunslet Moor on Monday 19 July 1819 was held at noon, and the newspapers remarked ‘the hour at which this meeting was held was considered unfavourable for the labouring classes and some of the factory proprietors had intimated to their workmen that if they did not return from dinner at the usual time, they would be discharged’.85 We have seen how the dismissal of workers in Stockport and Heywood for attending the Kersal Moor meetings in 1838 led to the tactic of torchlight processions. From 1839 onwards, therefore, mass meetings usually took place at weekends and on holidays such as Whitsun weekend. Friday and Saturday were rarely used for meetings. When Feargus O’Connor visited Manchester upon short notice in July 1843, for example, the Northern Star remarked that the large attendance was surprising, ‘Saturday night being the very worst night in the week for a meeting of any purpose in Manchester’.86 WYAS, Calderdale, HXT 503–504, Skircoat valuation books, 1839–63; HXT 511, Skircoat township vestry book, 1835–94, meeting of freeholders, 8 December 1842. 83 J. Vernon, Politics of the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 209. 84 M. Harrison, Crowds and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns, 1790–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 121; D. Reid, ‘The decline of Saint Monday, 1766–1876’, P & P, 71 (1976). 85 LM, 24 July 1819. 86 NS, 15 July 1843. 82

246

Region, neighbourhood and place

Magistrates took a carefully vigilant approach to policing the mass meetings on moors and fields. Borough magistrates were more concerned about the potential for disorder when the processions returned to the town centres, and there was less they could do when the meetings went beyond urban boundaries. County magistrates were keen to have the military in readiness. At Kersal Moor in September 1838, ‘in conformity with the previous arrangement made by the authorities, Mr Thomas, deputy constable, only sent half a dozen of his officers to the moor, with the police van, giving them instructions to interfere with no political matters or disputes’.87 Although radicals and trade unions ignored the instructions of landowners not to meet on their property, magistrates allowed the processions and meetings to take place, observing from afar and using spies to check for any inflammatory content of the speeches. One of the largest meetings on Carlisle Sands was held on Whit Tuesday, 21 May 1839. The Chartists were well aware of the magistrates’ suspicion of their arming, so ‘it is particularly requested that no persons come to the meeting armed with any offensive weapons of any description’, but they also hoped that ‘the master manufacturers will see the propriety of allowing their workpeople to attend the meetings’.88 The magistrates ordered George Lockley, a ‘professional short handwriter and reporter’, to attend the meeting to ‘take accurate notes of any language used by several speakers that might be calculated to promote a breach of the peace’. They hoped that this would occur so that they could arrest the perpetrators, but, to their dismay, Lockley reported that no such language was used and indeed, ‘most speakers recommend the people to abstain from the commission of any act’ of violence.89 The Carlisle radicals were clearly being extra careful. Fear of repression by the authorities meant that marshals ensured the processions remained orderly, but this was also to demonstrate strong solidarity as a united working class. In the West Riding, John Brown, a labourer from Taylor Hill, Almondbury, was anxious to demonstrate to the magistrates the peacefulness and marshalled nature of the processions at the Peep Green meeting in October 1838: When I got near to Cooper Bridge I joined a procession that was there forming, there were two or three bands and several standard colours, as the procession moved away many persons wished to go on the footway which is a nearer road to the Green. I saw Mr Lawrence Pitkethly of Huddersfield

MG, 26 September 1838. TNA, HO 40­/​41­/​390, handbill, May 1839. 89 TNA, HO 40­/​41­/​408, Lockley to Fawcett, 24 May 1839. 87 88



The liberty of the landscape247 preventing them from going [on] the footway and desiring them to follow in the procession like men.90

Use of the main roads and turnpikes was thus seen as a defiant occupation of public space rather than retreating to customary footpaths, perhaps associated with secrecy and privacy. Cooper Bridge was near the site of the Dumb Steeple, rendezvous for Luddites in 1812 and the ‘rebels’ of 1820. In towns where the policy of municipal Chartism succeeded, moreover, radicals and trade unions were able to re-­claim use of meeting sites. This strategy proved to be crucial in both allowing and protecting meetings in Oldham, and also in Todmorden, where, in February 1843, Chartists elected their candidate to the post of township constable for Langfield; hence camp meetings were held at Stoodley Pike from 1843.91 As tensions heightened in 1842 and 1848, the military and police presence was ramped up at mass meetings, but authorities were nevertheless still keen to avoid another Peterloo. The Land Plan The Chartist Land Plan was the ultimate expression of radical attachment not just to the countryside, but to a wider conception of the land. The aim of the Chartist Co-­operative Land Company, founded in 1845, was to transplant the surplus industrial population from the urban slums to new settlements of self-­sufficient smallholdings in planned settlements in southern England. The Land Plan was very much Feargus O’Connor’s personal project, and opinion was split among the other Chartist leaders as to its purpose and efficacy. Contemporaries and later historians denigrated the plan for distracting the movement from the main goal of achieving universal suffrage.92 But the Land Plan was hugely significant in the history of working-­class movements in this period. Malcolm Chase and J. L. Bronstein emphasise the vitality of the movement and its parallels in land reform movements in America at the same time.93 The scheme had about 70,000 members at its peak, most WYAS, Leeds, WYL­/​250­/​6­/​2­/​box 2, lieutenancy correspondence, 1839. Croft, John Fielden’s Todmorden, p. 70. 92 A. Hadfield, The Chartist Land Company (Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1970), p. 19. 93 Chase, People’s Farm, p. 174; J. L. Bronstein, Land Reform and the Working-­ Class Experience in Britain and the US, 1800–62 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); M. Chase, ‘Chartism and the land: “the mighty peoples question”’, in M. Cragoe and P. A. Readman (eds), The Land Question in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010). 90 91

248

Region, neighbourhood and place

of whom were northern industrial workers in search of a better life.94 The huge numbers who signed up reflect how the success of many social movements relies on combining hope of achieving long-­term goals with practical solutions to the problems of everyday life. Entering a ballot for a smallholding offered a more tangible piece of liberty than signing yet another petition for universal suffrage doomed to be rejected by parliament. The Land Plan had precedents in earlier smaller projects set up by co-­ operative and trades’ societies. Some were tinged with communitarian utopianism, such as the Manchester Social Community Company, who attempted an experiment of co-­operative landholdings on the reclaimed Chat Moss in 1832 (as advertised in the pan-­regional Lancashire and Yorkshire Co-­ operator) before the new Manchester to Liverpool railway became the main physical feature of the Moss. The trades’ schemes offered more immediate and practical benefits, all the more necessary after the new poor law discouraged the use of old parish allotment schemes. The Oldham spinners’ union and Bradford woolstaplers both set up allotments for their unemployed members to work on in 1845.95 All endeavours sought practical solutions to poverty and the Malthusianism of the new poor law. Much of the propaganda was tinged with nostalgia: though the names of ‘O’Connorville’ and ‘Charterville’ situated the settlements in the political moment, the adverts depicted idyllic landscapes of neat cottages set in picturesque arable countryside. The rhetoric also played on religious imagery and constitutionalist tropes: lecturers often spoke of the land being ‘the only hope of salvation’ and ‘the inalienable birthright of the people’.96 Yet as we will see in the next chapter, inhabitants of northern industrial towns and villages also understood the land as a ‘taskscape’. They envisaged the settlements as an attractive alternative to a precarious existence as a factory ‘hand’ reliant on the whims of a laissez-­faire employer or the harsh judgement of the poor law guardian, and crammed into an insanitary terrace house with increasingly restricted access to nature. The list of receipts to the Chartist Co-­operative Land Company as soon as September 1845 demonstrates the popularity of the scheme. TNA, BT 41­/​474­/​2659, subscription lists of the Chartist Co-­operative Land Company, 1847. 95 NS, 25 January 1845; Chase, People’s Farm, p. 171; Bronstein, Land Reform, pp. 191–3; J. Burchardt, The Allotment Movement in England, 1793–1873 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2002), p. 80. 96 Bronstein, Land Reform, pp. 195, 197; Preston Guardian, 25 September 1847.  94



The liberty of the landscape249

Fifty-­ three places in northern England sent subscriptions, from the large (Manchester, sending a total of £192), to the specific, including ‘Preston, O’Connor Brigade’ (reflecting a split in Preston Chartists for and against the leader), and a concentration of branches in the hill towns and villages in the Ribble and Rossendale valleys, including Bacup, Barnoldswick, Burnley, Clitheroe, Colne and Oswaldtwistle.97 The latter places were probably attracted to the scheme because of the creeping enclosure of the Pennines on their doorsteps as well as the desperate condition of the handloom weavers in the district, whose only other option was to emigrate. Bronstein points out that the regional variations were also due to the relative strength of other options for political activity, not least offered by the Anti-­Corn Law League and operative Conservative societies, as well as to the energy of local leaders in promoting the scheme. Rochdale’s attachment to the Land Plan was strengthened, for example, by Chartist leader Thomas Livsey, a shareholder in the Land Company, who controversially encouraged the Oddfellows to send £100 to O’Connor’s National Land and Labour Bank, set up to fund the scheme. The weekly meetings of subscribers in ‘land company rooms’ across the North contributed to reviving a flagging Chartism in towns that had suffered after the end of the 1842 strikes and agitation.98 Nearly 1,500 members were eligible for the first ballot in April 1846, and textile workers from across the northern industrial regions formed a large proportion of the lucky receivers of allocations.99 But the Land Plan could not cope with the economic and political problems inherent in such an ambitious enterprise. A combination of financial mismanagement, hostility from the government, who set up a parliamentary select committee to enquire into the legality of the company in 1848, and the sheer difficulty for factory workers unused to agricultural labour to maintain subsistence on poor-­quality land, led to the failure of the scheme in 1851.100 Denied meeting spaces in urban areas, radicals and Chartists drew their strength from the ‘neighbourhood’, its inhabitants, everyday life and practices, and its countryside. In walking, processing, meeting and praying in rural sites, protesters produced spaces of resistance, deepened NS, 4 October 1845. MG, 24 February 1844; NS, 7 February 1846; Bronstein, Land Reform, pp. 193, 200.  99 NS, 25 April 1846; TNA, BT 41­/​474­/​2659, subscription lists of the Chartist Co-­operative Land Company, 1847. 100 Chase, Chartism, p. 330.  97  98

250

Region, neighbourhood and place

their connection with place and developed networks that linked local to regional to national communities of interest. Symbolism was integral to the processions and mass meetings: the routes, banners and words of the political hymns expressed a challenge to an elite construction of the landscape defined by straight new roads and enclosed fields. The experience of the environment was physical and elemental, particularly the hard rambles of itinerant lecturers and the secret drilling of radicals at night. The popularity of the Land Plan among northern industrial workers demonstrated how radicals’ utopian visions of a better life lay in the land as well as the vote. The moorland meetings also reflected a deep attachment to the environment that, as the next chapter will show, informed and inspired other types of protest and movements.

8

Rural resistance

This book has so far focused mainly on the concentration of political action in the industrial parts of northern England. In rural areas, collective action faced greater barriers to effective organisation. Many historians have assumed that such factors as agricultural tenants’ deference to landlords and plebeian illiteracy prevented the development of any meaningful activity at all.1 This chapter examines why Chartism and other ‘urban’ movements failed to take hold in certain regions, but also other forms of collective action, including agitation against enclosure of common land and the Swing riots of the early 1830s, which show that rural areas were far from politically inactive. Different narratives, layers and indeed topographies of protest could occur concurrently with or at different times to mass political movements. Rural resistance fits awkwardly in the progression model that assumes greater organisation and bureaucratisation of political movements by the nineteenth century. Charles Tilly and E. P. Thompson confined rural protest to the eighteenth century and ignored the Swing riots. And indeed, the great historians of Captain Swing, Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, sought but failed to find class consciousness among agricultural labourers.2 By contrast, more recent studies have rethought the role and meaning of rural resistance. They argue that rural resistance was far from backward, but rather was widespread, arranged in different but still complex ways from urban movements, and was engaged with wider political currents.3 As Carl Griffin has shown in his study J. Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 1700–1832 (London: Longman, 1992), p. 270.  2 C. Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991); E. Hobsbawm and G. Rudé, Captain Swing (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973).  3 S. Poole and A. Spicer (eds), Captain Swing Reconsidered: Forty Years of  1

252

Region, neighbourhood and place

of Swing agitation in southern England, rural protesters learned their tactics and forms of organisation not from political activity in the towns but from customary subaltern practices such as smuggling and poaching.4 Moreover, urban inhabitants involved in radicalism and trade unionism continued to use and indeed adapt to their own tactics and campaigns particular customary forms of resistance learned from their rural predecessors in the ‘neighbourhood’. Responses to Chartism The collected correspondence to the central council of the Chartist National Convention from 1838 onwards contains myriad letters from radical groups and working men’s associations proudly declaring which delegate they had chosen, the popularity of their meetings and the signing of the National Petition in their towns. Kendal in Westmorland however felt ignored by the Chartist leadership. In March 1839, the secretary of the Working Men’s Association, James Spedding, enquired ‘whether it is likely we may expect to be favoured with the presence of a missionary to deliver an address to the people of Kendal’. He noted with a passive aggressive undertone, ‘we trust that the Convention in its wisdom will not overlook Kendal but direct that some popular agitator of the just rights of the unrepresented classes may visit our Town, believing that an address would be attended with the most beneficial results’. Their ‘anxiety on the subject’ was clearly a product of their belief that they could not operate on their own, but needed personal connections with the national leadership to keep the movement going in an area far from any other agitation. Spedding wrote again in May with another desperate plea for someone to come and address them.5 Chartist and trades activity continued in Kendal in the 1840s, fuelled in part by continued opposition to the predominant Lowther aristocratic interest in politics and the economy, but Westmorland was a weak base for the movement. Political movements drew their strength from a combination of various factors. These included good communications with other towns, Rural History from Below, special issue of Southern History, 32 (2010).  4 C. Griffin, Protest, Politics and Work in Rural England, 1700–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).  5 BL, Add MS 34245A, Papers on the Chartist National Convention, fo. 115, Spedding to Lovett, 11 March 1839; fo. 404, Spedding to Lovett, 4 May 1839.



Rural resistance253

enabling regular visits from itinerant lecturers and national leaders; a long tradition of political and religious dissent, often fostered by successive generations of families of activists; ‘open’ parishes and boroughs with several landowners or contesting authorities; a sustainable level of in-­migration and economic diversity; and a large and concentrated population with structures and facilities to meet. Social movement theorists highlight the central role of personal networks in building political movements, but also emphasise that national networks are never homogeneous; local conditions affect the operation and survival of connections.6 Chartism spread through a regional delegate system based around major nodes of population bolstered by a national system of local and regional lecturers. Some areas were receptive to this missionary activity, but where the sense of support was felt to be lacking, energies waned. Nascent political organisation in the North and East ridings was even harder than Westmorland to reach or sustain. In the coastal town of Scarborough (pop. c.3,600 in 1841), there had been some reform agitation in 1820 and 1832, and its seamen conducted a militant strike in 1825, but activity during the Chartist era was muted. Twenty miles up the coast at the large port of Whitby (pop. c.11,000), the Chartist John Watkins eventually set up a working men’s association in February 1839, but at its inaugural meeting only thirteen men enrolled as members.7 Port towns had a mixed experience with Chartism, which their distinctive geographical position exacerbated. Though port towns were linked directly by navigations and canals to the inland manufacturing towns and by sea to other ports, they did not have the critical mass of neighbouring towns or townships who could travel short distance to regular meetings. In the East Riding, Chartism only really flourished in Kingston-­upon-­Hull and, to a lesser extent, in the minster town of Beverley. Hull was a prosperous port (pop. c.13,000), with a long-­ standing radical heritage among the working classes of the district of Sculcoates (pop. c.3,000). Hull also had active leaders. William Hill, pastor of a Swedenborgian church, combined his religious and Chartist activities. Chartist orator Henry Vincent was a Hull man and one of the speakers at several meetings held on Dock Green in the town. D. Della Porta and M. Diani, Social Movements: an Introduction (2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), p. 123.  7 NS, 23, 30 March 1839; R. P. Hastings, Chartism in the North Riding of Yorkshire and South Durham, 1838–48 (Borthwick papers, 105, York, 2004), p. 5; R. P. Hastings, Essays in North Riding History, 1780–1850 (Northallerton: North Yorkshire County Council, 1981), pp. 103–4.  6

254

Region, neighbourhood and place

T. P. Thompson, MP for Hull 1835–7, supported universal suffrage.8 By contrast, Chartism in Liverpool waxed and waned throughout this period. Liverpool had always had a more moderate and middle-­class reform contingent: the ‘Friends of Peace’ never risked arrest or exclusion in the 1790s, and the wide freeman franchise before 1832 (up to sixty per cent of the adult male population) meant that lack of representation was a lesser issue. Kevin Moore attributes the quiet nature of Liverpool Chartism to the absence of an anti-­ new poor law movement: the authorities had already reformed the system in 1821 so there was much less resistance by 1837. Moreover, the Anti-­Corn Law League, Orange lodges, operative Conservative societies and especially the O’Connellite repeal movement among the town’s huge Irish population proved effective rivals to Chartism, soaking up potential membership and fostering opposition to Feargus O’Connor. It was only in 1848, as we will see in the next chapter, that Liverpool Chartists regained their strength in an alliance with the Irish Confederates.9 Chartist leaders made some effort to proselytise the rural ridings. Peter Bussey, firebrand orator from Bradford (but born in Bedale), embarked on a missionary tour of the North Riding in March 1839. He visited Malton and the linen making towns including Pickering, Guisborough and Northallerton, and then Richmond and York. He was initially well received by the inhabitants, especially in York, where the Radical Association was already active. Accounts then arose that farmers had threatened to dismiss their labourers who supported the Charter.10 The market town of Northallerton (pop. c.4,800 in 1831) had a linen industry with a prior history of industrial action in the 1820s. A Chartist hatter was boycotted by local Whigs and Tories in 1839, and Chartist lecturers visited the town in 1842, leading to at least one rally, co-­organised with the weavers of the nearby village of Brompton. Northallerton House of Correction became a byword for J. Markham, Nineteenth-­Century Parliamentary Elections in East Yorkshire (Beverley: East Yorkshire Local History Society, 1982), p. 6. See T. P. Thompson, Letters of a Representative to his Constituents (Hull, 1836); M. J. Turner, Independent Radicalism in Early Victorian Britain (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004).  9 K. Moore, ‘This Whig and Tory ridden town: popular politics in Liverpool in the Chartist era’, in J. Belchem (ed.), Popular Politics, Riot and Labour: Essays in Liverpool History, 1790–1840 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992), pp. 40, 48–9; TNA, TS 11­/​137­/​part II, Liverpool winter assizes, 1848. 10 Hastings, Chartism in the North Riding, p. 4.  8



Rural resistance255

penal repression. The deaths of William Brook and John Clayton, and the mistreatment of Samuel Holberry of Sheffield, who subsequently died in York Castle, caused a public outcry over the use of the treadmill. Brompton Chartists raised a fund for the prisoners and made weekly visits. But Northallerton produced no Chartist delegates and no signatures to the National Petition.11 Perhaps its industry had declined so much by that point that there were few activists to hold any form of collective action together. The North and East ridings could not sustain speakers financially and had to suspend the appointment of the sole itinerant lecturer for the regions in 1842. By the time of the National Assembly in 1848, of the ten delegates allocated to Yorkshire, nine represented West Riding industrial towns and the tenth was Hull. The Land Plan had pockets of interest in Scarborough, York and Malton, but as a whole the West Riding industrial districts dominated its subscriptions.12 The agricultural labourers and declining linen weavers probably regarded emigration to North America as a more immediate solution to rural poverty: Robert Sharp of the village of South Cave in the East Riding peppered his diary with references to former inhabitants writing home from Canada and America, having gone there with help either from the parish or from an emigration club.13 Isolation was a significant reason for the weak response to Chartism and other political movements. The North and East ridings lacked a node town equivalent to Manchester, Leeds, Carlisle or Newcastle. Population decline and lack of economic opportunities were unconducive to a lively reform movement that used mass meetings, lectures, committees, education and leisure activities­– a­ ll requiring substantial temporal, financial and indeed emotional investment­– ­as its main forms of organisation. The dichotomy between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ parishes meant more in the East and North ridings than it did in the industrial districts elsewhere, with major landowners taking much more direct control over appointments to local office and elections. Popular political activity was already muted in other forms, especially as North Riding Northern Liberator, 21 December 1839; NS, 9 April, 2 July 1842; TNA, HO 20­/​10, ‘reports on the conditions of political prisoners’, January 1841; H. L. Fairburn, ‘Chartist prisoners in Northallerton’, North Yorkshire County RO Review (1999), 41; D. J. Rowe, ‘The Chartist Convention and the regions’, Economic History Review, 22:1 (1969), 64. 12 Hastings, Chartism in the North Riding, pp. 13, 27, 31. 13 J. E. and P. A. Crowther (eds), The Diary of Robert Sharp of South Cave: Life in a Yorkshire Village, 1812–37 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 1. 11

256

Region, neighbourhood and place

parliamentary boroughs remained ‘closed’, and Richmond, Malton and Northallerton were solidly liberal and uncontested. At Northallerton the same Liberal candidate was returned unopposed from 1832 to 1859.14 Although the regions did not manage to rustle up a continuously active political movement, this does not mean that they had no political culture. The rest of this chapter examines the different forms of action in rural areas that concerned both local grievances and a wider awareness of political and economic changes affecting the inhabitants. It follows historians of early modern rural protest in arguing that there were other means of collective action, other forms of resistance, other narratives.15 Agitation against enclosure On 11 December 1792, Thomas Young did his rounds as assistant town crier in the small market town of Pocklington (pop. c.1,500), on the eastern slopes of the Wolds of the East Riding. Elsewhere across the country, his fellow town criers were announcing public meetings to draw up loyal addresses to the king in reaction to the French Revolution. Young, however, shouted a different message, ‘that if the Town of Pocklington did not allow the poor inhabitants some Fire Elding they ­… would break up the hedges in the parish’. He was tried at the assizes, but was let off with a fine of a shilling. The magistrates deemed the real culprit to be Hannah Skelton, a labourer’s wife, who had employed the town crier to proclaim her threat. Skelton was sentenced to a month in Beverley House of Correction.16 Though there is no evidence that any hedges were actively pulled up, the case is indicative of tensions and resistance that often fall beneath the radar of historians of more mainstream types of political agitation. Though seemingly no one else was involved, Skelton, through the town crier, was claiming to speak for the poor. Her means of protest involved verbal threats of physical violence against property, a form of protest more immediate and accessible than the printing of a handbill. The cry was designed for the whole community to hear. As Carl Griffin has argued, rural protest usually occurred in the context of a fracture of community relations, typically at the scale of the township

Hastings, Chartism in the North Riding, p. 32. B. Reay, Rural Englands: Labouring Lives in the Nineteenth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 146–7. 16 East Yorkshire RO, QSF­/​339­/​B­/​4, indictment, December 1792. 14 15



Rural resistance257

or parish.17 Skelton may have been disallowed fuel perhaps because the parish deemed her undeserving. Outdoor relief in material form was an integral but diminishing part of the ‘economies of makeshifts’ upon which the poor had to survive. East Riding parishes were moving away from giving relief in kind during the French wars.18 Other issues at stake were property and how customary uses of property changed as industrialisation and the agricultural revolution impacted on the economy and society of northern England. We should therefore examine the broader changes affecting Pocklington. Robert Denison was a former Leeds clothier who sold his successful business and, like many wealthy merchants, retired to an estate, at Kilnwick Percy in 1784. Denison actively and indebtedly cultivated his manors. In 1792, he took over the adjoining manor of Pocklington from the recusant Dolman family, who had taken little part in the affairs of the town. He also served as assistant overseer of the parish and magistrate for the East Riding, and thus had an active interest in convicting those who threatened his property.19 Pocklington had already been enclosed in 1759, but Denison, who controlled the woodhouse and woods, took a much more active role in managing his estate and improving agriculture than his predecessors (he founded the Yorkshire Agricultural Society and the Great Yorkshire Show).20 Perhaps Skelton was reacting against this new aggressive expansion and practices of agricultural improvement. We cannot prove whether her actions were supported among her peers in the town, but her demand for elderwood for fuel echoed conflicts and negotiations in parishes, villages and towns across Britain over customary rights in common and their removal. These were contests over place, and inhabitants’ position and rights within place. The French and Napoleonic wars were the major period for both private and parliamentary enclosure of moors and wastes on the edges Griffin, Protest, Politics and Work. N. Mitchelson, Poor Relief in the East Riding (York: East Yorkshire Local History Society, 1953), p. 5; A. Tomkins and S. King, The Poor in England: An Economy of Makeshifts, 1700–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). 19 R. G. Wilson, Gentlemen Merchants: The Merchant Community in Leeds, 1700–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), p. 227; www. pocklingtonhistory.com­/​district­/​kilnwickpercy­/​timeline­/​index.php, accessed 21 July 2014. 20 East Yorkshire RO, DDKP­/​7/­​26, release for property in Pocklington, April 1794; Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Useful and Ornamental Planting (London, 1832), p. 46. 17 18

258

Region, neighbourhood and place

of industrial towns throughout northern England. About thirty-­seven per cent of the West Riding was enclosed by 1848 (650,011 acres), including a last significant wave under the 1845 General Inclosure Act. In Lancashire more than forty acts, public and private, were passed from 1789 to 1815. Almost fifty-­eight per cent of the parliamentary enclosure of north Lancashire was concentrated in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, more than in most other regions.21 In the East Riding, there were three periods of enclosure: the 1760s–1870s, during the French wars, and after 1816. The majority of enclosure covered the chalk-­based Wolds, which were traditionally used for extensive sheep pastures and had always been more ‘open’ than the old-­enclosed areas of the Holderness lowlands. By 1848, 44 per cent of the county was enclosed.22 Evidence for physical resistance to parliamentary enclosure in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is rare. Indeed, customary tenants themselves often pressed their lords of the manor to enact enclosure, seeking to take advantage of high wartime prices.23 Another reason was that much moorland and waste had already been encroached upon. Nor was there a rapid shift from communal uses to capitalist mass production to displace a swathe of landless labourers who would build up grounds for resistance. In Clitheroe, Lancashire, for example, the agricultural system was already market-­ driven before enclosure and remained relatively unchanged after the town moors were divided at the turn of the century.24 Opposition was generally diffused into commissioners’ procedures and the process of consultation, in part because conflict was often concerned with long-­disputed rights over titles and R. Kain, J. Chapman and R. Oliver, The Enclosure Maps of England and Wales, 1595–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 132, 138; I. Whyte, Transforming Fell and Valley: Landscape and Parliamentary Enclosure in North West England (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2003), p. 24; J. Chapman, ‘The extent and nature of parliamentary enclosure,’ Agricultural Historical Review, 35:1 (1987), 32. 22 J. Crowther, ‘Enclosure, topography and landownership in Eastern Yorkshire’, in M. Turner and D. Mills (eds), Land and Property: The English Land Tax, 1692–1832 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1986), p. 78;S. Neave and S. Ellis (eds), A Historical Atlas of East Yorkshire (Hull: University of Hull Press, 1996), pp. 62, 52. 23 Whyte, Transforming Fell and Valley, p. 36. 24 M. Osborn, ‘The weirdest of all undertakings: the land and the early industrial revolution in Oldham, England’, Environmental History, 8:2 (2003), 8; H. French, ‘Urban common rights, enclosure and the market: Clitheroe Town Moors, 1764–1802’, Agricultural History Review, 51:1 (2003). 21



Rural resistance259

dues. The case of Saddleworth, for example, ran from 1810 to 1834, involving complex legal claims to rights concerning encroachments on the commons.25 Debates about the nature and ownership of property and rights to fuel and pastureland were nevertheless most strained during periods of high food prices and economic depression. Enclosure could be opposed through refusals to sign petitions, counter-­ petitions and other acts of non-­compliance, as was the case in Aughton and elsewhere in the reclaimed marshes of west Lancashire.26 Open and physical resistance to enclosure by contrast usually took the form of opposition to specific features of its enactment, especially, as we saw in the previous chapter, the building of new roads. Women were as involved as men in defending customary access to land, as in the case of five women and eight men tried at Chester assizes for destroying hedges and fences in Chorley, Cheshire, in June 1819.27 There is some evidence of resistance to the removal of common rights in lowland areas with distinctive ecological features. In May 1810, Isaac Worthington, the diligent steward of the Earl of Stamford and Warrington, reported that the cottagers at Fulshaw near Wilmslow, ‘destroyed the fences of new enclosures made on Lindow Common by Lord Stamford’s tenants on the moss rooms’ (strips of peat moss fields held in common). Stamford and other landowners in Cheshire were active in draining and enclosing peat mosses and planting woods. Fulshaw commoners had grazing and peat-­cutting rights on the common but conflicts over uses and encroachments were never far from the surface, erupting in physical resistance on occasions like this. A few days after the disturbance, about ten ‘very poor’ men were caught over two nights setting fire to heathland on Staley moors, also on Stamford’s estates. Worthington placed their incendiarism within the context of the extensive cotton spinners’ strike taking place across the region, claiming, ‘They are chiefly cotton weavers who are now out of employ on account of the dispute between the master spinners and the workmen’.28 Were the spinners’ actions an expression of A. J. Petford, ‘Enclosure in Saddleworth, 1625–1834’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 84 (1987). 26 Reay, Rural Englands, p. 156; G. Rogers, ‘Custom and common right: waste land, enclosure and social change in west Lancashire’, Agricultural History Review, 41:2 (1993); A. P. Coney, ‘Aughton enclosure in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the struggle for superiority’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 136 (1987). 27 Cheshire RO, QJF 247, Cheshire quarter sessions, 1819. 28 JRLUM, EGR 4­/​1­/​8­/​9­/​28, Worthington to Stamford, 20 May 1810; EGR 4­/​ 25

260

Region, neighbourhood and place

hostility to Stamford, or merely an expression of frustration at the slow progress of the strike? The steward negotiated with the men personally, reporting, ‘I find they are very persistent, and submissive, and willing to sign a submission to be inserted in the public papers’. This illustrates the private ways of dealing with discontent which meant that similar incidents rarely appear in the surviving archives, not least court records. But their ‘submissive’ nature perhaps also evinced the ‘deferential bitterness’ identified by Keith Snell among rural labourers and J. C. Scott’s ‘hidden transcripts’ of rural resistance.29 The practice of walking across enclosed land or plantations was also, as with continued gleaning of harvested fields and radical drilling in the moors, a defence of customary rights threatened by privatisation and enclosure. Sir Christopher Sykes, one of the largest landowners in the East Riding, for example complained in the early 1790s that ‘several persons have made a practice of going through the plantations in the avenue’ in his estate at Sledmere. This trespass may have well been just them following a shortcut, but Sykes also offered a reward for convicting people for having ‘chip[ped] several of the largest fir trees in the plantation and cut off the tops of several young fir trees’.30 Perhaps these small actions were a way for local inhabitants to express their discontent against the physical and economic transformation of the Wolds. The Sykes family’s ‘creation of an empire on the Wolds’ led to dramatic changes to the landscape from uncultivated chalk uplands to large wooded plantations and enclosures. Sir Christopher’s predecessor Richard Sykes had planted 20,000 trees at Sledmere in the early eighteenth century.31 Enclosing Sledmere from 1776 to 1800, Christopher Sykes planted more than a thousand acres with some four and a half million trees and miles of hedges on his estates. The enclosure bill was 1­/​8­/​2­/​28, Worthington to Stamford, 26 May 1810. Lindow Common was finally enclosed in 1851. 29 K. Snell, ‘Deferential bitterness: the social outlook for rural proleteriat in eighteenth and nineteenth-­century England and Wales’, in M. L. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe Since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification (Harlow: Longman, 1992), p. 158; J. C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). 30 East Yorkshire RO, UDD­/​SY­/​X1­/​62­/​16, Sykes of Sledmere, notices, 1790. 31 J. T. Ward, East Yorkshire Landed Estates in the Nineteenth Century (Beverley: East Yorkshire Local History Society, 1967), pp. 4, 13; B. English, The Great Landowners of East Yorkshire, 1530–1910 (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1990), p. 180.



Rural resistance261

opposed by Reverend Robert Clay Rowsby who owned the neighbouring estate of Croom and claimed that ‘divers public roads to the city and market towns of York, Malton and Driffield and other places’ had been stopped up and that the ‘common and immemorial carriage road’, by which the tenants of Croom used to get to Sledmere church had been enclosed ‘for some time’.32 But it is difficult to ascertain whether those damaging his property were deliberately asserting their former customary rights now lost, or more broadly protesting against his conception of the landscape as mono-­sylviculture. Outbreaks of open resistance continued to occur in industrial areas well into the nineteenth century, which again illustrates that we should not overstate the boundaries between urban and rural forms of protest. In March 1834, Oldham diarist Edwin Butterworth noted the case of a boy who had ‘pulled down the fences of a field at Royton Lane’. The middle-­class associations against the stopping up of footpaths would no doubt have condemned such direct physical resistance. Yet the perpetrators put forward their own view of the legality of their actions: custom and the notion of time immemorial­– ­common law definitions of land ownership often resorted to in enclosure disputes­– ­were validation enough: ‘The boy’s father contended that he was justified in so doing for he was only wanting to preserve an ancient right of footpath’.33 This was a period of heightened industrial agitation, culminating in riots emanating from a major strike at Bankside Mills. In April, seven people were taken into custody charged with involvement in the disturbances, and the newspapers reported that by dawn the next day: several groups of people were collected on the fence, and Mr Jones, the owner of the ground, sent a notice to some of the leading men that he should consider their assembling there a trespass and deal with them accordingly. Another person, who occupies some enclosures which had been much damaged, expressed himself similarly. Reverend Mr Mills read the Riot Act, and the meeting was adjourned to the Besom Hill at Sholver Moor, about three miles from Oldham.34

Thus customary methods of resistance accompanied urban-­industrial and indeed political protest.

S. Neave and S. Ellis (eds), A Historical Atlas of East Yorkshire (Hull: University of Hull Press, 1996), p. 75. 33 Oldham Local Studies, D-­BUT F­/​20, Butterworth papers, ‘news reports’, 1834. 34 Morning Post, 21 April 1834. 32

262

Region, neighbourhood and place Animal and tree maiming

Chapter 4 showed how protesters powerfully invoked ‘disembodied pain’ through effigies and machine-­breaking. In rural areas, animal and tree maimings were similar direct attacks on property and sources of economic production. Undertaken at night and anonymously, maiming offered psychological catharsis for the perpetrator and engendered genuine fear among the targets. J. E. Archer’s study on the ‘houghing’ (hamstringing) of cattle and horses in East Anglia, and Carl Griffin’s examination of tree maiming in southern England, have revealed such dark and often unreported forms of individual protest. Both historians stress the rarity of the tactic compared with arson.35 The records of private societies for the prosecution of felons­– ­set up in almost every village and town by local landowners to self-­insure their property­– ­nevertheless show that farmers and landowners were concerned about the problem. The problem of ‘injuring trees’ was endemic, including in old Luddite haunts of the West Riding and Lancashire and in areas enclosed during the last major wave of enclosure.36 At the North Riding sessions between 1817 and 1847, poaching formed 13 per cent of convictions; damage to property, including breaking hedges and cutting wood, constituted 4.7 per cent, which, given the difficulty in providing evidence and identifying offenders, was probably a low estimate of the extent of the practice.37 Prosecution societies often specified ‘injuring trees, barking, etc’, as an explicit part of their cover.38 Animal maiming was rarer, but still concerned farmers and landowners enough to invoke the services of the societies. The prosecution association of Stokesley in the North Riding, for example, issued reward notices in June 1833 for the apprehension of the person who ‘willfully and maliciously cut off one of the paps of a cow belonging to Mr James Phillips J. E. Archer, By a Flash and a Scare: Arson, Animal-­Maiming and Poaching in East Anglia, 1815–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); C. Griffin, ‘Protest practice and (tree) cultures of conflict: understanding the spaces of ‘tree maiming’ in eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­ century England’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 33:1 (2008). 36 D. Phillips, ‘Associations for the prosecution of felons’, in D. Hay and F. Snyder (eds), Policing and Prosecution in Britain, 1750–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 142. 37 Hastings, Essays in North Riding History, p. 94. 38 WYAS, Calderdale, SU 384, rules of Midgley prosecution society, 1838; East Yorkshire RO, DDCL­/​337, Snaith Cattle Protection Society minute book, 1847. 35



Rural resistance263

of Tanton near Stokesley’, and whoever was responsible for hamstringing of horses in the stables of Thomas Richlieu repeatedly in late 1834. Richlieu was listed in the directories as a joiner and cabinet maker, and had already been a target, with his windows being broken in May 1833.39 Although animal and tree maiming were usually anonymous acts targeted at individuals, the tactic could accompany and supplement more overtly political forms of action. Riots broke out in Kendal during the tumultuous Westmorland election in 1818, in part expressing tenants’ and workers’ hatred of Lord Lowther, Earl Lonsdale. John Nelson of Kirkland, who went round the pubs in Kendal treating Lowther’s supporters with beer, blamed belligerent canal navvies for not only fomenting the violence but also threatening him (Kirkland) personally in other ways. He alleged, ‘whether it is for giving ale, or supporting the Lowther interest I do not know; but my unoffending cattle have been cut, my gig injured and several other mischiefs done to my property by some evil disposed person’.40 The threat invoked was amplified during national unrest as in 1812 and the early 1830s. Peaks in rural crime correlated with periods of high rural unemployment and prices in 1818, 1830, 1834 and 1842.41 More directly, tree maiming accompanied the Swing agitation in Cumberland. In the early morning of 18 May 1831, over sixty trees in a plantation in Dalston belonging to Reverend Walter Fletcher either had their bark stripped or were completely cut down.42 Fletcher was a strong supporter of the Lowther interest. Other events in this large village hint at wider social tensions in Lowther-­controlled areas of Cumberland and Westmorland. Dalston Common was enclosed in 1807, with the bulk of the land being allocated to the major landowners. Wheat stacks were set on fire on the common shortly after Swing riots broke out in December 1830.43 The links with the enclosure of the arson and the attacks on Fletcher’s plantations were not direct, but suggest a build-­up of tension between landlord and tenant. Lowther, the Earl of Thanet and other estate owners had been buying out tenants in

North Yorkshire RO, ZEO, Stokesley association for the prosecution of felons, minute books, 1818–37. 40 T. Harrison, An Impartial Narrative of the Riotous Proceedings which Took Place in Kendal on Wednesday 11 February 1818 (Kendal, 1818), p. 19. 41 Hastings, Essays in North Riding History, p. 94. 42 Cumbria RO, Carlisle, SPC­/​44­/​8­/​1–9, printed notices, 1831; Carlisle Journal, 21 May 1831. 43 Carlisle Journal, 11 December 1830. 39

264

Region, neighbourhood and place

Cumberland and Westmorland, diminishing their customary rights.44 The Swing riots gave Cumbrian inhabitants the inspiration and opportunity to protest more actively. The use of tree maiming in Dalston in 1831 was a familiar tactic in the new circumstances of Swing. Within the wider context of incendiarism of stacks and threshing machines, it involved a defence of custom against encroachment by new definitions of property and agricultural capitalism. The popular response appears to have been channelled into attacks on private property with formerly customary uses. Several inhabitants were charged at the petty sessions with ‘damaging and destroying the rails inclosing the plantations’ of the Earl of Carlisle in 1834–5.45 Rural Luddism and Captain Swing The rural aspects of the Luddite outbreaks of 1811–12 have been under-­ appreciated, partly because historians focus on the ‘set pieces’ of the attacks on the largest mills.46 Both Luddism and the Swing agitation of the early 1830s employed some of the tactics from the repertoire common in rural areas, particularly the burning of hayricks and the sending of threatening letters. They featured charivari and other popular customs, especially being ‘led’ by an imaginary figure, cross-­dressing or wearing ribbons, to indicate ritually the imposition of community justice against transgressors of the moral economy of fair wages and skill.47 Luddism and Swing were not reactionary against technology for their own sake: they defended customary rights and uses of the landscape against privatisation and dispossession by large landowners and manufacturers. In geographers Tim Ingold’s and Iain Robertson’s formation, the land was a ‘taskscape’, which provided the necessaries of life: food and fuel, work and leisure.48 Protesters used customary tactics I. Whyte, ‘Political spaces and parliamentary enclosure in an upland context: Cumbria, c.1760–1840’, in B. Kumin (ed.), Political Space in Pre–Industrial Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), p. 99; N. Blomley, ‘Making private property: enclosure, common right and the work of hedges’, Rural History, 18:1 (2007). 45 Cumbria RO, Carlisle, CQ4­/​3–4, summary conviction books, 1817–35. 46 Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, p. 198. 47 K. Navickas, ‘Captain Swing in the north: the Carlisle riots of 1830’, HWJ, 71 (2011), 19; C. Griffin, The Rural War: Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 48 T. Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill (London: Routledge, 2000); I. Robertson, Landscapes of 44



Rural resistance265

to invoke a definition of rights in order to defend the taskscape of inhabitants’ working lives and skills. Luddites and Swing rioters parallelled movements in France, where machine-­breaking occurred in Rouen and other industrial districts in 1812, and the ‘War of Demoiselles’ defended customary rights of forest dwellers in the Ariège region of southern France in the early 1830s.49 The case of Matthew Tomlinson of Wakefield reveals continuities of place and protest. Tomlinson was the tenant farmer of Dog House Farm on the Lupset Hall estate, a mile south-­west from Wakefield. He wrote a detailed diary and, in 1812, he recorded instances of Luddite machine-­breaking accompanied by ancilliary activities, including drilling, arms-­dealing and trespassing, in the semi-­rural environs of Wakefield. Moreover, he expressed repeated fears that local woollen croppers threatened the agricultural machinery belonging to him and his neighbouring farmers. On 26 April, he wrote: ‘the Thrashing Machines are now all that are talked about, the rabble will have them all down, altho’ I believe that there is not a husbandman out of employ in this neighbourhood’. A barn containing a threshing machine was set on fire near Soothill Wood, a reputed site of nocturnal Luddite drilling.50 Nearby Horbury Common had been enclosed in 1809. In July 1811, four Horbury labourers were arrested for demolishing a stone wall and fence that stopped up a road on the new enclosure.51 In the rare books collection of Dunedin Public Libraries in New Zealand is a Swing letter, originally bought by a Victorian immigrant and antiquarian collector of letters.52 It is addressed to ‘Mr Matthew Protest in the Scottish Highlands after 1914: The Later Highland Land Wars (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013), p. 207; J. Wylie, Landscape (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), pp. 164, 167. 49 P. Sahlins, Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-­Century France (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1994); F. Jarrige, Au temps des tueuses de bras: les bris de machines à l’Aube de l’Ere Industrielle (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009). 50 Wakefield Local Studies, 920:TOM, journals of Matthew Tomlinson, vol. 5, 1812; K. Navickas, ‘Luddism, incendiarism and the defence of rural taskscapes in 1812’, NH, 48:1 (2011). 51 WYAS, Wakefield, A105, Horbury enclosure map, 1809; QS1­ /1 ​49­ /6 ​, Bradford quarter sessions, July 1810; QS1­/​150­/9 ​ , Wakefield quarter sessions, October 1811; TNA, HO 33­/​1­/1 ​ 71, Hart to Freeling, 11 May 1812; LM, 12 May 1810, 16 May 1812. 52 Grateful thanks to Anthony Tedeschi, Rare Books Librarian, Heritage Collections, Dunedin Public Libraries, New Zealand. He had not read my NH 2011 article when he sent me a copy of the letter, so as is the beauty of

266

Region, neighbourhood and place

Tomlinson, Dog House near Horbury, Wakefield’, and postmarked Wakefield, 10 December 1830. Written neatly across the page diagonally is: Sir, If you do not immediately destroy your machine you may expect an early visit from Swing, Yorkshire, 9 Dec’r 1830.

The letter is similar in form and language to the Swing letters collated by the Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding from his magistrates.53 That Tomlinson and his agricultural machinery were threatened again by perhaps a new generation in the new circumstances of Swing deepens the story of rural resistance in the neighbourhood of Wakefield. The existence of the letter creates more questions than answers, not least because unfortunately Tomlinson’s extensive diaries, which revealed so much about rural Luddism in the area in 1812, do not appear to have survived for 1830. So we do not know how he reacted to the Swing letter, whether his neighbours had also been threatened, or indeed why he was targeted again. If the Luddites had reacted to Tomlinson first installing labour-­saving machinery, why would their successors resist again nearly twenty years later, when mechanisation was solidly established in northern agriculture? Was the writer of the threatening letter aggrieved at Tomlinson himself, or rather at his landlord, Daniel Gaskell? In 1812, Gaskell had not yet moved into his new estate at Lupset Hall, but by 1830 was an active landowner and politician, and became the first (Unitarian and Liberal) MP for Wakefield in 1832.54 But it suggests a continuity of practice and more importantly the continuity of place in fostering and sustaining rural resistance. Whereas Luddism was characteristic of the textile districts of the North and Midlands, Swing is usually regarded as predominantly a phenomenon of the arable regions of the South. Most histories of Swing have stressed its particularly southern causes, including a response to Speenhamland-­style systems of poor relief, the desperate situation of landless labourers displaced by enclosure, and changes in the hiring and working practices during the agricultural revolution and the increasing use of threshing machines. Andrew Charlesworth mapped patterns of serendipitous coincidence, I was thrilled when I saw it was addressed to Tomlinson. 53 WYAS, Leeds, WYL 250­/​6­/​2­/​box 2, lieutenancy correspondence, 1830–2. 54 K. N. Cameron (ed.), Shelley and his Circle, 1773–1822, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), p. 155.



Rural resistance267

the spread of agitation from the starting point in Kent out along the main roads through Hampshire, Surrey and towards London.55 But many of these factors did not apply in northern England. Swing did not spread in the way it did in the South: there were no mass outbreaks, no marauding bands of agricultural labourers going from village to village. The straining of the old poor law exacerbated distress during the economic depression of the early 1830s, but the East and North ridings felt it less harshly and the Speenhamland system was not enacted.56 Threshing machines remained at risk, but as at Tomlinson’s farm, they had been a feature of northern agriculture for over thirty years. There were only a few Swing incidents recorded in the North Riding (see figure 14). A barn and stacks belonging to the constable of Haxby, five miles north of York, were burned on 19 December 1830. The most serious agitation occurred at Newborough near Thirsk on the edge of the North York Moors, which suffered three attacks of arson between December 1830 and January 1832. A few smaller incidents were recorded in Scarborough, Nidd Hall and Cleveland in 1831. Threatening letters were sent to the parson of Richmond, farmers in Whitby and near Oswaldkirk.57 The York Herald reported that ‘in the neighbourhood of Howden several farmers have received notices that unless their threshing machines be taken down, they may expect to share an equal fate with the southern farmers’.58 The West Riding had more incidents of agitation but they had no distinctive geographical or temporal pattern. Stacks were fired at the property of John Mitchell near Halifax on 6 December 1830; and then in Fairweather near Shipley; Sheffield; Denby; Kirkheaton near Huddersfield in the first week of December 1831(the property of John Beaumont was ‘fired three different times within the last fortnight’); Bentley near Doncaster; Rotherham, and Harewood.59 Swing letters were received by the mayor of Doncaster and a tenant of A. Charlesworth, An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain, 1548–1900 (London: Croom Helm, 1983), p. 151; Griffin, Rural War, p. 136. 56 G. Boyer, An Economic History of the English Poor Law, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 42. 57 Yorkshire Gazette, 18 November 1830; Cumberland Pacquet, 13 July 1830; Hastings, Essays in North Riding History, p. 99; Huddersfield and Halifax Express, 2 April 1831. 58 York Herald, 11 December 1830. 59 WYAS, Leeds, WYL 250­/6 ​ ­/​2­/​box 2, lieutenancy correspondence, 1830–2; TNA, HO 64­/​3­/​274, Harewood to Home Office, 29 January 1833; Wakefield and Halifax Journal, 17 December 1830; Huddersfield and Halifax Express, 2 April 1831. 55

268

Region, neighbourhood and place

14  Map of Swing incidents in Yorkshire, 1830-4, John Cary, map of Yorkshire, 1809, warped to scale.

Lord Manners at Ardwicke-­upon-­Dearne two miles from Doncaster, and Thomas Wilkinson of Rigton near Leeds.60 The East Riding was the main region in northern England where threshing machines and stacks were burned. Incendiarism followed a distinctive topography. Most Swing activity occurred in and around small villages situated where the eastern edge of the upland Wolds met the western edge of the marshy Holderness plain, or towards the southern edge of the Wolds. Arson of stacks and threshing machines occurred in Gransmoor, at the north-­eastern end of Holderness near Bridlington; Great Driffield; the villages around Beverley, including two threshing machines at Etton; and Ottringham and Welton, at the southern tip of Holderness near the Humber estuary between December 1830 and January 1831.61 Joseph Fairburn was committed to York Castle for WYAS, Leeds, WYL 250­/​6­/​2­/​box 2, lieutenancy correspondence, 1830–2. HO 44­/​21, ‘General remarks on the present state of things’, Hull, 25 October 1830; Hull History Centre, UDDHO­ /8 ​­ /5 ​, Lord Hotham’s agent letters,

60 61



Rural resistance269

having ‘threatened to burn and destroy several stacks of hay and corn and all the threshing machines and factories he could find’ at Hook, on the bend of the Ouse near Goole, in early December 1830.62 At Driffield, a strawstack was found alight in a field occupied by John Reaston on the evening of Monday 6 January 1831, ‘believed to be the act of an incendiary, it having been lately thrashed by machine’. A threshing machine and haystack were burned in an incident at Leconfield in November 1831.63 These were isolated events and, unlike southern Swing, attacks on threshing machines were acts of arson generally involving one or two people rather than collected gangs. The Wolds had a long history of popular agitation. Briony McDonagh’s study of the sixteenth-­ century East Riding highlights some of the same disputed places on the Wolds as sites of conflict over enclosure. Particularly related to the loss of customary rights, the disturbances often took the form of ploughing contested fields, which, McDonagh argues, were ‘undoubtedly organized forms of protest rather than spontaneous incursions on private property’.64 Enclosure offers one longer-­term context for later disturbances. Driffield was enclosed in 1740, with 18 per cent of the land allotted to yeomen owner-­occupiers and 68 per cent to aristocracy and gentry. Significantly, later enclosures did not benefit the declining small farmers as generously. Etton, enclosed between 1818 and 1820, had 94 per cent of the allotted land going to aristocracy and gentry large landowners.65 There is no evidence for the continuance of the tactic of ploughing after the sixteenth century, but perhaps, as Iain Robertson argues. performance and protest practices remained embedded within the ‘taskscape’, to be remembered and drawn from generations after the initial grievances or acts of dispossession had occurred.66

1830; J. D. Hicks (ed.), Journal of Joseph Robinson Pease, 1822–65 (Hull: East Yorkshire Local History Society, 2000), p. 55; Hull Packet, 14 December 1830; Hull Advertiser, 24, 31 December 1830; York Courant, 18 January 1831. 62 Hull Advertiser, 17 December 1830; Hull Packet, 14 December 1830. 63 Hull Advertiser, 14 January 1831; York Courant, 18 January 1831; TNA, HO 64­/​2/­ ​239, 273, Beverley magistrates to Home Office, 5 and 18 November 1831. 64 B. McDonagh, ‘Subverting the ground: private property and public protest in the sixteenth-­century Yorkshire Wolds’, Agricultural History Review, 57:2 (2009), 201. 65 J. Crowther, ‘Parliamentary enclosure in eastern Yorkshire, 1725–1860’ (PhD dissertation, University of Hull, 1983), p. 623. 66 Robertson, Landscapes of Protest, p. 155.

270

Region, neighbourhood and place

Threatening letters were a more common mode of action, requiring much less effort or collective co-­ordination than a physical attack on machinery or a stack. Robert Sharp of South Cave recorded in his diary on 5 December 1830, ‘we have had no Swing Letters here yet, but it is said that at Walkington they have, threatening the Farmers, that if the labourers have no their wages raised they must abide by the ­consequences’.67 On 8 December 1830, the postmaster intercepted an anonymous threatening letter to Dr Hull of Beverley, founder of the dispensary and a former mayor. The letter allegedly read: Doctor Hull, Ou have been long ateful to pore fokes. I wud warn you to treat them more like a friend, or luke for a visit from SWING.68

The language of the letter mirrored the sense of retributional ‘moral economy’ that Peter Jones found in southern Swing letters, though Speenhamland was not the issue.69 George Atkinson Staveley, aged twenty, was tried at the borough sessions in January 1831 but, with no bill against him, the case was dropped. Sharp noted on 17 December 1830 that Mr Raikes, the magistrate, had received threatening letters, and in consequence, 200 special constables were sworn in, but the fear lasted only a few days.70 Political and class resentment against local authorities was evident in some of the northern attacks and in the anonymous threatening letters. Cobbett’s Political Register was widely read and awareness of both revolution in France and the reform struggle in parliament provided the atmosphere if not the cause of such incidents. The radical influence was most evident in Cumberland, where incendiarism distinctively took place on the edge of the main towns. Swing agitation in Carlisle occurred soon after the working-­class radical political union had burned effigies of the Duke of Wellington and Robert Peel at the market cross in response to

Diary of Robert Sharp, p. 288; South Cave also had a history of resistance to enclosure: B. McDonagh, ‘Negotiating enclosure in sixteenth-­ century Yorkshire: the South Cave dispute, 1530–1536’, in J. Whittle (ed.), Landlords and Tenants in Britain, 1440–1660 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2013), p. 55. 68 York Herald, 11 December 1830, 8 January 1831; Hull Advertiser, 7 January 1831. 69 P. Jones, ‘Swing, Speenhamland and rural social relations: the “moral economy” of the English crowd in the nineteenth century’, SH, 32:3 (2007). 70 Diary of Robert Sharp, p. 291.

67



Rural resistance271

the rejection of the first reform bill in November 1830. The Swing disturbances were in part provoked by agents provocateurs employed by the authorities to burn stacks on the outskirts of the town in December 1830 in order to provide an excuse to implicate and arrest the radicals. The other incidents followed as perhaps copy-­ cat attacks.71 But the authorities appear to have underestimated the scale of discontent; the riots that followed importantly involved the excluded and marginalised: the immigrant handloom weavers of the Caldewgate district, weavers in Dalston and militant miners in Longtown. These were spectacular events. Crowds quickly gathered to the fires, using them as an opportunity to exact vengeance for their own grievances against the magistrates, the new police and authorities associated with Lord Lowther. Swing letters were received by the clerk of the peace and agent for Lowther, a Carlisle surveyor who had a threshing machine on his premises, and by farmers at Dalston.72 Even though it is impossible to determine whether the letters represented anything more than the work of individuals, the agitation was an expression of local tensions and situated in the middle of the reform bill crisis. There occurred occasional glimmers of connection between radicalism and arson. A stack of hay belonging to John Counsell near Blackburn, Lancashire, was fired in November 1832 allegedly because he had ‘refused to connect himself with the Political Union, of which he had been frequently urged to become a member’.73 Northern Swing did not however spread, in part because landlords used a combination of paternalism and coercion to prevent disorder. Hastings’s study of welfare in the North Riding suggests that incidents were rare because the ‘labourer in 1830, although under considerable pressure, was never pushed beyond the pale’. Incidents occurred in small closed townships in the southern vale of York and eastern moorlands where employment opportunities were limited and the roundsman system and low wages were rife throughout the 1830s.74 In the West Riding, agricultural labourers at least had some hope of finding alternative work in the industrial districts increasingly encroaching on their doorstep. Many of the correspondents to the Home Office were anxious to reassure the Home Secretary that fires were instigated out of ‘private spite and ­… nothing whatever to do with political feeling’.75 John Hall, farmer and agent to the 3rd Lord Hotham of Dalton Holme near Navickas, ‘Captain Swing in the north’, 13. Cumbria RO, Ca 2­/​472, lieutenancy papers, bundle 2, 1830. 73 TNA, HO 64­/​3­/2 ​ 10, clerks to Blackburn magistrates, 26 November 1832. 74 Hastings, Essays in North Riding History, pp. 99–100. 75 TNA, HO 64­/​3­/2 ​ 52, Newburgh to Melbourne, 9 January 1833. 71 72

272

Region, neighbourhood and place

Beverley, was concerned about the arson of two threshing machines on the Hotham estates near the village of Etton on 5 December 1830. The prior preparation enacted for the deed had been substantial; the Hull Packet reported that the perpetrators had ‘torn up several yards of a dead fence, which, with a large quantity of straw, they piled under and around the machine’.76 The tactics echoed those of enclosure rioters. Hall took down his own machine and offered rewards for information. It would be tempting to link the agitation to Hotham’s involvement in enclosure. The enclosure award of Etton was made in 1819 for over 2,000 acres, of which Hotham took the majority share. Hotham had been actively extending his estate in Etton since his initial purchase in 1783, culminating in a major acquisition from a former beneficiary of the enclosure, Robert Belt, in late 1830.77 It soon transpired however that he suspected neighbours at the nearby village of Cherry Burton over a private feud. He again blamed a neighbour in relation to the arson attack on a threshing machine at Gransmoor twenty miles away on 19 December 1830, although he linked the agitation with ‘many threatening letters going about’, including ’the “Swing”’ received by Hotham, ‘very well designed for its purpose and calculated to have a most mischievous effect’.78 It is evident, therefore, that the perpetrators of many suspected Swing attacks were local, and known to their victims, and that the attacks were more likely a result of long-­running private grievances rather than as part of a movement directed from the South. Swing and Ludd were rather ‘meta-­movements’, in which separate groups were linked by a myth of an imaginary military leader.79 The existence of the myth was arguably as important as actual incidents of incendiarism and machine-­breaking. Historians and sociologists previously dismissed emotion, rumour and popular imagination as irrational as they sought to emphasise how crowds took decisions based on a careful consideration of the economic situation or political opportunities.80 Hull Packet, 14 December 1830. G. White, Etton, a Village of the East Riding (Beverley: Hulton Press, 1992), p. 14; East Yorkshire RO, DDHO­/​30­/​125, Etton Enclosure Act, 1818; IA­/​ 56, Etton enclosure map, 1819. 78 Hull History Centre, UDDHO 8­/​5, Hotham papers, Hall to Hotham, 6, 9, 16 and 24 December 1830; Journal of Joseph Robinson Pease, p. 55; Hull Advertiser, 24 December 1830. 79 P. Jones, ‘Finding Captain Swing: protest, parish relations, and the state of the public mind in 1830’, IRSH, 54:3 (2009), 437. 80 G. Rudé, The Crowd in History, 1730–1848: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England (New York: Wiley, 1964). 76 77



Rural resistance273

More recent scholars of social movements have argued that emotions and rationality are not mutually exclusive: crowds were not irrational ‘mobs’, but neither did they coldly calculate every move in the light of hard ‘evidence’. J. M. Jasper and J. Goodwin argue that fear was an important facilitator for shaping both a movement and the authorities’ reaction to collective action.81 Andy Wood has indicated ‘the organising role of fear and anxiety in popular political culture’ during periods of early modern disturbance.82 The letters reveal a complex narrative of rumour, panic and imitation that went far beyond the immediate causes and consequences of arson and machine-­ breaking. They made the disturbances­– o ­ r how they were perceived­– d ­ istinctly ‘Swing’, rather than being just more rural incendiarism. As with Ludd, the myth of Swing gave the authorities and landowners a focus upon which they concentrated their energies. There was a clear sense of panic among the authorities, evidenced in the mass swearing in of special constables and organisation of rural watch and wards in the affected areas of all the ridings of Yorkshire.83 The East Riding landscape also shaped anxieties. The Hull Advertiser noted about the incendiarism at Great Driffield in January 1831 that because the township was ‘situated on the edge of the Wolds, the fire was seen and caused much alarm for many miles around’.84 Reports of suspicious strangers in the vicinity before Swing incidents drew from much deeper parish xenophobia of vagrants and beggars. Merriman’s study of outbreaks of arson in northern France in 1830 shows that incidents were linked not by direct connection between different incendiaries but by fear spread by rumour among inhabitants, the authorities and the press. The defensive response of local communities was often directed (as in English parishes) against ‘strangers’ whom they suspected of starting the fires.85 J. Goodwin and J. M. Jasper (eds), Rethinking Social Movements: Structure, Meaning and Emotion (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), p. 161; J. M. Jasper, F. Polletta and J. Goodwin (eds), Passionate Politics: Emotions and Social Movements (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). 82 A. Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2002), p.xii. 83 Hastings, Essays in North Riding History, p. 99; Yorkshire Gazette, 11 December 1830. 84 Hull Advertiser, 14 January 1831. 85 J. Merriman, ‘The Norman fires of 1830: incendiaries and fear in rural France’, French Historical Studies, 9:3 (1976); K. M. Snell, ‘The culture of local xenophobia’, SH, 28:1 (2003). 81

274

Region, neighbourhood and place

In this sense, it did not matter whether the incidents of i­ncendiarism, machine-­breaking, reports of suspicious strangers and threatening letters were related directly to Swing or not; what was important was that they were initially perceived to be so. Swing remained a powerful metonym associated with various forms of rural resistance into the later 1830s. In January 1837, Reverend Neale, vicar of Adling Fleet near Goole in the East Riding, complained to Lord Harewood: More of the school windows have been broken and more of my Trees cut down by partisans of these ill disposed young men who so cruelly assaulted my dear unoffending Boy. I have been myself most grossly insulted and told that those who ‘nicked my trees are ready swilling to nick me the first dark night they can catch me’ and ‘lay me swing where all Tithe eaters should be’.86

The old repertoires of resistance were used yet again, combined with physical attack and new rhetoric, this time in the general anti-­tithe agitation. The politics of rural resistance was rooted in locality, belonging and exclusion. It reflected a landscape formed by the productive and historical actions of its inhabitants, shaped by community culture, law and custom.87 It involved different understandings of landscape. We have seen in the previous chapter how drilling and other bodily performances in the landscape indicated that protesters had an emotional, physical, material and economic relationship with their surroundings, which in turn shaped those feelings and actions. Malcolm Chase’s study of radical agrarianism underlines radicals’ ‘ingrained, realistic’ notion of the land valorised according to its use rather than its exchange value.88 Protesters saw the land as ‘taskscape’ containing their rights to food and fuel, work and leisure.89 Luddites, Swing agitators and rioters against enclosure enacted a defence of communal rights against privatisation and laissez-­faire political economy. They fought for the vestiges of common rights but also the new rights of organised labour against the deskilling effects of mass capitalism in both industry and agriculture. They expressed different notions from their employers and landlords of WYAS Leeds, WYL 250­/​6/­​2/­​box 2, lieutenancy correspondence, Neale to Harewood, January 1837. 87 Wylie, Landscape, p. 20. 88 M. Chase, The People’s Farm: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). 89 Ingold, The Perception of the Environment; Wylie, Landscape, pp. 164, 167. 86



Rural resistance275

their relationship with nature and the products of nature. Rural resistance involved embodied practices that transcended the divide between cultural and natural perceptions of the environment. I won’t go as far as some cultural geographers in arguing for ‘more-­than-­human’ interactions of the environment with inhabitants, but certainly arson of hayricks, animal and tree maiming, and physical resistance to enclosure could not take place without the role of the environment being contested and used within the protests.90 Andy Wood and Steve Poole have cautioned historians not to class every act as political or to ‘read too much into what might have been habitual forms of rural pressure’. Incendiarism and other forms of covert action expressed the ‘social and structural difficulties of rural governance and community politics’ rather than being a signifier of a vague ‘popular protest’. Rural crime and arson were endemic, often intertwined with juvenile delinquency.91 And we should not exaggerate the level of agency in such actions: although not passive victims, protesters still had the weaker hand against the power of landlords and ‘principal inhabitants’. But such activity goes some way to explaining the limited response of rural areas to Chartist aims and organisation: they were fighting other battles, using other tactics in other spaces. They did not express a class identity through political demands and organisation in the same way as the Chartists or trade unions, but their threatening letters and actions certainly evinced a hatred of landowners, aristocracy and manufacturers betraying their paternalism to both the poor and skilled workers. 1812 and 1830–2 were periods when ‘deferential bitterness’ cracked in some areas into open resistance. Though it originated from specific historical and socio-­ economic contexts of place, rural resistance was not localised or bounded. Doreen Massey has powerfully argued that both historical opposition to enclosure and modern anti-­globalisation campaigns were ‘not local protectionism but a critique of dispossession’.92 On the one hand, Luddites and C. Griffin, ‘More-­ than-­ human histories and the failure of grand state schemes: sylviculture in the New Forest, England’, Cultural Geographies, 17:4 (2010), 13. 91 Wood, Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics, p. 16; S. Poole, ‘Forty years of history from below’, Southern History, 32 (2010), 9; E. Hobsbawm, ‘Distinctions between socio-­political and other forms of crime’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 25 (1972). 92 D. Massey, ‘Landscape­/​space­/​politics: an essay’, 2008, http:­/​­/​thefutureoflan​ dscape.wordpress.com­/​landscapespacepolitics-­an-­essay­/​ , accessed 21 July 2014. 90

276

Region, neighbourhood and place

Swing rioters were defending regionally-­specific industries and agricultures; but on the other hand, they were connected in wider critiques of the effects of privatisation and un-­placed mass production in displacing their skills and customary ways of life. In more abstract space, more­ over, the movements linked disparate and indeed localised groups pan-­ regionally through the anonymous mythical leader who signed their threatening letters and became a metonym for the agitation in the newspaper press and the popular imagination. Finally, the urban–rural divide was not sharp, nor complete: arson, threatening letters and other forms of rural resistance were still employed as effective tactics alongside more political means of organisation in urban movements.

9

Making Moscows, 1839–48

By pike and sword, your freedom strive to gain, Or make one bloody Moscow of old England’s plain.1 Handbill posted in Manchester, May 1839.

General Sir Charles James Napier, commander of the Northern District, found the above handbill posted in Manchester during Chartist agitation for the first petition in May 1839. This chapter examines how physical and symbolic conflicts over territory were central to contested conceptions of power and rights. Activists expressed these struggles within a multi-­layered language of place. The metonym of ‘making Moscow’ implied a city burned to the ground, as Napoleon’s troops had done in Russia in 1812.2 In July 1839, Stockport Chartist leader James Mitchell, warning of the consequences of government repression, proclaimed, ‘let the people be Peterloo’d and the whole country will be Moscow’d’.3 When an attempt at insurrection was made in Sheffield in January 1840, Samuel Holberry allegedly encouraged his fellow Chartists ‘to Moscow the town’.4 Though their rhetorical horizons stretched internationally eastwards, on the ground radicals’ battles over territory were decidedly and defiantly local. Revolution started at home. W. Napier (ed.), Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles James Napier, vol. 2 (London, 1857), p. 28.  2 In 1839–40, the Eastern Crisis roused anti-­Russian sentiment among opponents of Whig foreign policy, including Chartists: F. C. Mather, Chartism and Society: An Anthology of Documents (London: Bell and Hyman, 1982), p. 120.  3 Stockport Advertiser, 19 July 1839; R. Sykes, ‘Physical-­force Chartism: the cotton district and the Chartist crisis of 1839’, IRSH, 30:2 (1985), 220.  4 TNA, TS 11­ /​ 816­ /​ 2688, Sheffield treason trial papers, 1840; NS, 4, 11 January 1840; J. L. Baxter, ‘Early Chartism’, in S. Pollard and C. Holmes (eds), Essays in the Economic and Social History of South Yorkshire (Barnsley: South Yorkshire County Council, 1976), p. 149.  1

278

Region, neighbourhood and place

Physical force has always been a contentious issue in the history of popular politics, debated by Chartists in their national conventions and by historians ever since. Older histories of Chartism blamed the fiery orator Reverend Joseph Rayner Stephens for promoting physical force and insurrection in the northern industrial regions, thereby resulting in the arrest of leaders (including himself) and consequent dissension within the movement.5 The Chartist refrain of ‘peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must’, however, was always the baseline for constitutional agitation. Physical coercion and the ‘language of menace’ stretched across a spectrum that was responsive to political circumstances and the reaction of the military and local authorities.6 This chapter surveys the bitter conflicts between protesters, the military and magistrates from the attempts at a ‘national holiday’ and uprisings in 1839–40, the ‘sacred month’ and plug strikes in 1842 to the final push for the Charter in the revolutionary year of 1848. Protesters used their knowledge of urban and semi-­rural environments, and in response to repression, they developed new tactics, including occupations and barricades of contested buildings. The tools of protest were not just symbolic, but used the materiality of the environment in which they fought: the cobblestones of the streets, the glass in buildings’ windows and the topography of the urban landscape in town and neighbourhood. These were battles of knowledge over the landscape and the mastery of space. Policing unrest The policing of popular disorder in the Chartist period is surprisingly under-­researched.7 Modern studies of the policing of contemporary social movements show that both police and newspaper reports tend to reduce protesting crowds to a caricature of a mob and portray dis-

T. M. Kemnitz and F. Jacques, ‘J. R. Stephens and the Chartist movement’, IRSH, 19:2 (1974); Sykes, ‘Physical-­force Chartism’, 210.  6 Sykes, ‘Physical-­force Chartism’, 211; W. H. Maehl, ‘The dynamics of violence in Chartism: a case study in north-­east England’, Albion, 7:2 (1975), 101, critiquing T. M. Kremitz, ‘Approaches to the Chartist movement: Feargus O’Connor and Chartist strategy’, Albion, 5:1 (1973).  7 F. C. Mather, Public Order in the Age of the Chartists (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959); R. E. Swift, ‘Policing Chartism: the role of the specials reconsidered’, EHR, 122:497 (2007); N. Pye, The Home Office and the Chartists, 1838–48: Protest and Repression in the West Riding of Yorkshire (Pontypool: Merlin, 2013).  5



Making Moscows, 1839–48279

order spreading through contagion whipped up by agitators.8 These perceptions were endemic in eighteenth and nineteenth-­century reports of protests. The view of a mob led by rabble-­rousers was debunked historically by George Rudé in his work on the 1780 Gordon Riots and by E. P. Thompson’s model of the ‘moral economy’ of food rioters.9 The continuance of the language of mob and agitators underlines how in the nineteenth century, authorities’ actions in policing and suppressing protest were shaped by their prior perceptions of the crowd. And like the loyalist elites and associations faced by the earlier generation of radicals, the authorities were not a static ‘structure’ against which protesters resisted, but responded with their own tactics and principles. Neil Pye’s study of policing Chartism in the West Riding shows how the policies of the various home secretaries differed according to their personalities and prior experiences of governing disorder. Whigs Lord John Russell (Home Secretary from 1838 to August 1839) and Sir George Grey (1846–8) exercised constraint in their policies, whereas Lord Normanby (1839–41) and the Tory Sir James Graham (1841–6) were decidedly more heavy handed.10 Public order was difficult to maintain, not just because of the shortage of available troops and police forces, but because of the strained triangle of authority between Home Secretary, military commanders of the Northern District and the local magistrates. General Napier, who began his command of the Northern District in April 1839, was more sympathetic to Chartist claims to the right of assembly, but came into conflict with local magistrates’ concern to defend property and their towns. Tension built during the early months of 1839, with extensive arms-­ making and dealing, drilling and rumours of ‘ulterior measures’ if the Charter would not pass parliament.11 In response to fears of a general rising, Lord Melbourne’s government issued a royal proclamation against illegal assemblies and drilling on 3 May 1839. This enabled magistrates to ban daytime Chartist assemblies if they feared they would lead to disturbances. Local authorities responded by sending a flurry of D. Waddington, Policing Public Disorder: Theory and Practice (Cullompton: Wilan Publishing, 2007), p. 37; R. Bessel and C. Emsley (eds), Patterns of Provocation: Police and Public Disorder (Oxford: Berghahn, 2000), p. 3.  9 G. Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France And England, 1730–1848 (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964); E. P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, P & P, 50 (1971). 10 Pye, Home Office and the Chartists, p. 15. 11 TNA, TS 11­/8 ​ 15­/2 ​ 683, fo. 40, Northern Circuit assizes, 1839.  8

280

Region, neighbourhood and place

requests to the Home Office seeking clarification about whether particular Chartist meetings in their locality were illegal. Their main gauge of illegality was whether the Chartists, armed or not, caused ‘terror to the peaceable inhabitants’ by forceful language on the platform as well as by the appearance of arms. Home Secretary John Russell reassured Reverend Thursby of Burnley, for example, that he could suppress Chartist activity in his neighbourhood, ‘if any large meeting dangerous to the public peace should be expected to take place at which seditious inflammatory speeches are expected to be delivered’.12 For the Home Office, the proclamation was a stop-­gap measure to deal with immediate threats; but for local authorities, it confirmed, at least in the most ardent anti-­reformists’ minds, that mass meetings could be conflated with drilling and attempts at insurrection. Policing agitation reinforced the division between owners of property and the working classes, between the represented and unrepresented. Four days after the royal proclamation, Russell sent a circular to Lords Lieutenant and magistrates, instructing them to encourage the ‘principal inhabitants’ of their towns to form defence associations, and offering to equip them with arms at the government’s expense. The response from local elites was as enthusiastic as it had been during the volunteer levées in the 1790s and formation of defence associations in 1819. In Leeds, for example, woollen merchants and shopkeepers met in Park Row on 24 May to form a volunteer corps ‘for the purpose of protecting life and property against the lawless attempts of designing men’.13 The irony of the juxtaposition of the proclamation with Russell’s circular was not spared on the Chartists. Stockport Working Men’s Association issued a sardonic handbill proclaiming that 10,000 ‘good men and true’ had attended a meeting at the back of the Stanley Arms, and as they were ‘interested in the protection of life and property’, they had applied to the Home Secretary for 11,000 stand of arms and ammunition.14 The government understandably turned down their request, together with that of the Salford Radical Association.15 Chartists nevertheless scored an unusual victory at Barnsley petty sessions in June, when they brought a charge against four men, includ TNA, HO 41­/​14­/​18, Phillips to Thursby, 10 May 1839. WYAS, Leeds, WYL 250­/​6/­​2/­​box 2, lieutenancy correspondence, Horsfall to Harewood, 26 May 1839; also in Wakefield: TNA, HO 40­/​51­/1 ​ 05, Hurst to Maherty, 10 May 1839. 14 TNA, HO 40­/​41­/​131, printed paper, 7 June 1839. 15 TNA, HO 40­/​37, Derby to Russell, 16 May 1839; Mather, Chartism and Society, p. 93. 12 13



Making Moscows, 1839–48281

ing a bank clerk, a warehouseman and a shopkeeper, for drilling and training as part of a defence association, in violation of the royal proclamation. The Barnsley radicals employed William Cobbett’s son as their prosecution solicitor, who argued that, ‘according to the terms of that Proclamation, it could only have a salutary effect if equally applied to the rich man and to the poor man’. The scene marked a deliciously ironic reversal of roles, with the main prosecution witness giving a deposition against the defence association using the same language and structure as had been previously used against radicals for drilling: ‘On the 19th of May, he was standing in the row where he lives, between 9 and 10 o’clock at night. He then saw four of the defendants … ­ they were in a line, across a road, in company with many others’.16 The court itself became a theatre. E. P. Thompson argued that the eighteenth-­ century court was a theatre for imposing the cultural hegemony of law by elites.17 But in this case, protesters were able to use the rituals of the theatre for their own ends: ‘a most awful scene of uproar, groaning, and hissing’ which forced the magistrates to adjourn the court. The Barnsley case demonstrated that the law and its definition was a space­– a­ nd a space that gave Chartists and other subaltern groups the tools to contest elite hegemony over legitimacy. Though the defence witnesses, including publicans, decried the trial as a joke, the judge bailed the four men to appear at the next quarter sessions, where, however, elite control over justice was reasserted and their case was dismissed.18 Social movements nevertheless used the theatre of the court and the ‘lawscape’ in other ways. Christopher Frank has shown how trade unions had great success with lawyers sympathetic to Chartism to defend workers prosecuted under the Master and Servant law in the 1840s.19 Occupations of churches, squares and streets Another site of contestation over socio-­ spatial hierarchies was the Anglican church. In the midst of the agitation of 1839, the Chartists NS, 8 June 1839; Sheffield Iris, 16 July 1839. E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), p. 259. 18 NS, 8 June 1839; Sheffield Iris, 16 July 1839; Mather, Chartism and Society, pp. 152–3. 19 C. Frank, Master and Servant Law: Chartists, Trade Unions, Radical Lawyers and the Magistracy in England, 1840–1865 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010); N. Graham, Lawscape: Property, Environment, Law (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), p. 70. 16 17

282

Region, neighbourhood and place

c­ onducted the bold and powerful tactic of the ‘march on the churches’. This involved highly planned and ritualised processions to Sunday service at the parish churches of most of the industrial towns in the North.20 The tactic most vividly represented the connections made between occupying symbolic spaces of power, the class tensions heightened by authorities’ attempts to arrest leaders and clamp down on public meetings, the proclamation and the rejection of the first national petition. The first church demonstration was proposed at a meeting in Stockport on 20 July 1839, after the House of Commons had rejected the Chartist petition.21 At an open air meeting attended by 600 at Hulme township south of Manchester on 31 July, the Chartists resolved to strike on 12 August, before which, ‘it was intended that the working men should meet at the Collegiate Church Gates at 10 o’clock on Sunday­– [­they] must make their best appearance­– ­and hear what the good parson had to say’. A show of respectability was of the essence. After the church demonstration, the Chartists processed to St Peter’s Fields, thereby linking their new tactic with the historic place of radical sacrifice.22 The language of the local elites certainly suggests that they regarded the march on the churches as an occupation and takeover of their space and property. Ellis Cunliffe Lister, Liberal MP and owner of Manningham mills, and the other magistrates of Bradford wrote to the Lord Lieutenant on 6 August: ‘Our large Parish Church was taken possession of by the Chartists and their followers on Sunday last; many hundreds being unable to get in and so well did they obey the instructions of their leaders that not any interruption took place to the performance of the Service’.23 The orderliness of the Chartists at church scared local elites; it was a show of respectability and religiosity, but was simultaneously a skilful use of the perceived hypocrisy of rituals and symbolism of established authority designed to exclude.24 They harked back to the hierarchies displayed at the civic patriotic-­loyalist meetings in churches in the 1790s. A different sort of people, unfamiliar faces, sitting in the ‘wrong’ seats­– ­that is, the paid for pews at the front of the M. Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 97; Mather, Chartism and Society, p. 274; Huddersfield and Halifax Express, 24 August 1839. 21 E. Yeo, ‘Christianity in Chartist struggle, 1838–1842’, P & P, 91 (1981), 124. 22 TNA, PL 27­/​11, trial of John Kay, 19 August 1839. 23 WYAS, Leeds, WYL 250­/​6­/​2­/​box 2, lieutenancy correspondence, Lister and Bradford magistrates to Harewood, 6 August 1839. 24 Yeo, ‘Christianity’, 131. 20



Making Moscows, 1839–48283

church rather than the ‘poor pews’ at the back­– ­overturned the unwritten rules of behaviour and use of space that determined who was part of the church community, and the established state. In Bradford, Lister was unable to take his pew as it was occupied by some colliers, hence his exasperated letter to Harewood. Convention delegate and orator, Peter Bussey, sat in a pew close to the altar and thus again subverted the usual social hierarchy represented in the space.25 The Chartists justified their action in the same way as they negotiated meeting in town halls: by arguing that the churches were public property, paid for by the hated church rates, and thus open to all. A handbill in Barnsley requested the ‘working men’ to attend Sunday service at St Mary’s church, in order to ‘assert your rights to those places of Divine Worship, which have been built for you [and] me’.26 The tactic was also a show of their Christianity, a counter to elite perceptions of working-­class ‘irreligion’ or the radical tendencies of evangelical nonconformity. This was expressed dramatically by their genuine albeit sardonic requests for the vicars to preach on biblical passages with particularly resonant themes about poverty and injustice. Vicars sometimes acceded to these requests in order to calm the situation down; others defiantly refused, however, as at Ashton-­under-­Lyne, where the cleric preached provocatively on the verse ‘is it not written my house shall be called of all nations the house of prayer: but ye have made it into a den of thieves’. As soon as the reverend finished reading, the Chartists stood up and walked peaceably out of the church, again ritually demonstrating their exclusion. They then went on to offer alternatives. At Bolton, after the service the Chartists processed to the new market place, where the crowds heard a sermon by a local preacher. There was some dissension among the different radical groups about the range of tactics, as in the evening, ‘infidel’ freethinker Richard Carlile delivered a lecture (as part of his tour of the northern districts), ‘exposing some of their follies’, but he recommended that they ‘continue their attendance at church, which he said belonged to the people’.27 The march on the churches only turned violent in reaction to authorities’ suppression in Sheffield. On 8 September, the authorities stationed detachments of police ‘in several parts of the church and at the doors; and orders were given to permit any man who pleased to enter, but on no pretence to suffer any one to come out till the conclusion of the service’.28 Yeo, ‘Christianity’, 131. TNA, HO 40­/​51­/​361, handbill, 6 August 1839. 27 MG, 7 August 1839; Mather, Chartism and Society, p. 274. 28 MG, 18 September 1839. 25 26

284

Region, neighbourhood and place

15  ‘Old Paradise Square, Sheffield’, c.1850.

The Sheffield agitation was particularly significant because it led to a further inventive evolution of tactics. The Chartists held nightly silent meetings in Paradise Square (figure 15) as protest against the royal proclamation and their treatment in church. Silence not only made it impossible to be arrested for seditious words; it also overturned the usual and expected aural experience of Chartist occupation of public space, that is, noise, speeches or music. The Chartists stood in defiance of any potential for the authorities to ‘kettle’ them or enact another Peterloo (which may have had even more brutal consequences as, unlike St Peter’s Fields, Paradise Square is enclosed on all sides with only narrow exits). The demonstrations were preceded and followed by processions, and Eileen Yeo described the mass procession following the silent meeting on 9 September as ‘almost as if beating the bounds of public property’.29 This was another defensive measure against the spaces of assembly closing in on them. After four successive evenings of protests, the magistrates issued a placard prohibiting public meetings in the square and sent in the police to disperse the crowds. The Chartist committee retreated to E. Yeo, ‘Culture and constraint in working-­class movements, 1830–1855’, in E. Yeo and S. Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1560–1914 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1981), p. 159.

29



Making Moscows, 1839–48285

their rooms in nearby Fig Tree Lane, but decided to continue the processions to church on the following Sunday. On Sunday morning, the police were stationed in Paradise Square to prevent the Chartists from assembling, and the churchwardens of the parish church disallowed any meeting in the churchyard, locking the church gates prior to the service.30 The clash of authority passed off peacefully but showed the symbolic potency of public spaces and further exclusion of radicals from them. We have seen how throughout this period local elites attempted to impose control over public and private spaces through improvement, enclosure, licensing and tenantry restrictions and increasingly, policing. Yet protesters exerted spatial agency, particularly in spaces unfamiliar to the authorities or where the forces of order were outnumbered. Fran Tonkiss’s study of modern social movements highlights their ‘practical form of spatial knowledge’ that is used against opponents: ‘the more fraught, contested, or threatening the urban scene, the more crucial street wisdom becomes as a spatial strategy’.31 The term ‘guerrilla’ was brought to Britain from the experience of the military officers fighting Wellington’s front in the Peninsular war. Though the Luddites in effect enacted guerrilla tactics by patrolling moorland roads at night and ambushing mills, the term was first recorded in relation to working-­class collective action during the rolling strikes in the cotton districts in 1818. Manchester magistrate James Norris wrote in desperation to the Home Office, ‘we are in this place at present almost in a state of military law ­… the species of warfare carried on by the mob is the guerrilla and, as you suppose, most harassing. They assemble and execute their mischievous purpose, after which on the least intimidation of the military coming they are dispersed’.32 As urban development packed the working classes and poor in courtyards and cellars, rioters (and also criminals) had a larger choice of passageways in which to hide and back routes to explore. During the Chartist agitation in Bolton in August 1839, the Charter reported that, ‘no sooner were the crowds driven from one part of the streets than they made their appearance in another, and for two hours the people TNA, HO 40­/​51­/​559, Sheffield town hall to Normanby, 14 September 1839; Northern Liberator, 7 September 1839; NS, 7 September 1839; Baxter, ‘Early Chartism’, p. 144. 31 F. Tonkiss, Space, the City, and Social Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), p. 71. 32 TNA, HO 42­/​180, Norris to Clive, 1 September 1818, in A. Aspinall (ed.), The Early English Trade Unions: Documents from the Home Office Papers in the Public Record Office (London: The Batchworth Press, 1949), p. 282. 30

286

Region, neighbourhood and place

and the authorities appeared to be playing at “hide and seek” with each other’.33 Suppressing riots using cavalry, the usual method, was particularly a problem in certain towns, notably Bradford, Colne and Oldham, which sprawled up steep hills, and in other settlements nestled along narrow valleys, especially the string of woollen towns along the river Calder in the West Riding. Rioters used the streetplans to their advantage. They formed what modern socio-­geographical theorists term a ‘defensible space’, albeit watched over by residents not forces of law and order.34 During the anti-­new poor law riots in Bradford in November 1837, soldiers rode through the ranks of the crowd in an attempt to disperse them, but the inhabitants formed up again behind them and stoned the soldiers from behind. Ironically the tools of attack were provided by improvement, cobbles having recently been laid in the new Leeds road. The guardians barricaded themselves inside the court house, but were forced out and had to take shelter in a warehouse. Military reinforcements arrived from Leeds, but the response of the inhabitants was to ‘retreat to the alleys and passages, where they annoyed the military with impunity’.35 The crowd clearly exploited the fact that the cavalry could not climb the steep hills, especially when the rain made the cobbles slippery, and hid in the alleyways to launch crossfire as the military attempted to ascend. Richard Maclaine, a private in the Hussars, stationed in the yard of the Talbot Inn half way up Kirkgate, recounted, ‘I had occasion to dismount for a moment as I could not get my mare up some steps in a passage near the Talbot Yard where there were people throwing stones at us’.36 The inhabitants demonstrated their mastery of the urban environment against the military authorities. In late 1839, Colonel George Huband, stationed at Bradford, sent a plan of action The Charter, 18 August 1839. P. Belford, ‘Work, space and power in an English industrial slum: The Crofts, Sheffield, 1700–1850’, in A. Mayne and T. Murray (eds), Explorations in Slumland: The Archaeology of Urban Landscapes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 111. 35 Northern Liberator, 25 November 1837; T. Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban Society: Bradford, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 335; J. James, History of Bradford and its Parish, vol. 1 (London, 1866) pp. 181–2. 36 TNA, MH 12­ /​ 14720, Bradford poor law union correspondence, 1837; P. Carter (ed.), Bradford Poor Law Union: Papers and Correspondence with the Poor Law Commission (Martlesham: Yorkshire Archaeological Society, 2004), p. 201. 33 34



Making Moscows, 1839–48287

to Napier, and it is no surprise that he depicted the town as a difficult urban battlefield: If I had time I should send you a plan of the streets which would shew you that no body of cavalry however large unassisted by Infantry could protect the peace of this town. Every ten yards up both sides of the main streets are narrow passages and steps down the hill sides to which the Mob invariably betake themselves in a riot and it is impossible for mounted men to follow them up and down stone steps­– ­and so are pelted with impunity as has been the case three times here … ­ the commonest thing for a mob to do here is to attack the Mills to destroy machinery. I have been to inspect several and I do not see how I could with mounted men get at some of them­– ­their position is such­– ­All this town is built against the sides of slopes and the lanes are crooked and narrow and mounted men in confined places are of little or no use.37

General Napier was well aware of these problems. He was satisfied that ‘the Lancashire towns occupied by Troops are on comparatively level ground’, but noted: On the Yorkshire side, the Towns so occupied are chiefly among the roots of the hills before they blend into the Yorkshire planes. They are built on the mountain streams and most of their streets are narrow and steep. To protect these towns with Cavalry was very well against ordinary rioters but now the nature of disturbance is changed, and Cavalry becomes less suitable. The Chartists have openly expressed their belief in the inefficiency of Cavalry among the narrow streets. It is therefore to be apprehended that unless the Cavalry be supported by Infantry, the Chartists of these towns may be tempted to try their strength.38

Napier, like his predecessor General Maitland in 1812, found that the most effective tactic against mobile insurgents and strikers was keeping small bodies of soldiers moving constantly about at night, especially on the Pennine borders of Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire.39 The military commanders nevertheless also felt hindered by the politics of conflicting authorities over place. Tensions between the Home Office, military generals and local magistrates reflected their different priorities and scale of their jurisdictional geographies. The defence of property and capital investment was the priority for manufacturers and BL, Add MS 54546, fo. 63, Huband to Napier, 24 November 1839. TNA, HO 50­/​451, ‘General Napier’s report on the state of barracks and improvements in the Northern District, 23 May 1840’; Pye, Home Office and the Chartists, p. 115. 39 Mather, Chartism and Society, p. 157. 37 38

288

Region, neighbourhood and place

their allies on the judicial bench, but this was not always the main tactical aim for military generals. Napier planned to concentrate his forces and build new barracks but this led him into further extended conflicts with the local authorities over costs and locations.40 He sent a circular to his officers in April 1839, asking about the state of order in their districts using a channel of information which, he believed, gave him ‘a sort of military surveillance all over the north of England, independent of the information furnished by the magistrates, and much more impartial, as the latter are all under personal fear and political prejudice’.41 Magistrates feared that the cost of building new barracks would fall on the local rates. They preferred to billet the military in small groups at inns in the centre of towns, which not only caused resentment among the innkeepers seeking financial recompense for lodging them, but also meant that calling out the military was a more complex process. Captain John Hopkin replied to Napier’s circular about his concern for his troop, which was billeted in no fewer than twenty-­one pubs in Halifax, and therefore would, ‘in case of a well organised plan of attack, particularly at night, be easily overpowered and disarmed in their quarters’. He identified the two most significant buildings in Halifax for his troop to occupy at short notice in case of riot: the Northgate Hotel (one of the largest and most prestigious pubs often used for magistrates’ business), and the Piece Hall (the largest open space and as a commercial exchange, representative of the woollen wealth of the town).42 Political differences among the magistrates complicated the situation further. Napier noted in his own records about Halifax in April 1839, ‘the town’s magistrates are liberal from fear of the populace; the country bucks are too old and too far gone Tories to have hopes of gaining popularity now by being Radical, so they labour to get troops near their own houses’. A month later, he reported to the Home Office about his problems co-­ordinating forces over the Pennines in Manchester: ‘the boroughreeve and mayor are more hostile to each other than can be described, between them there is no conceit … ­ they would not unite 43 though Manchester were in flames’. The incorporation disputes in Manchester and Bolton, as we have seen, resulted in a tangled web of conflicting authorities, including two rival police forces. The destruction of Little Bolton town hall on 13 August 1839 was a defining moment. The day after arrests on the ‘national holiday’ of 12 August, inhabit Pye, Home Office and the Chartists, p. 117. Napier, Life and Opinions, p. 11. 42 BL, Add MS 54545, fo. 33, Hopkin to Napier, 16 April 1839. 43 Napier, Life and Opinions, pp. 7, 36. 40 41



Making Moscows, 1839–48289

ants attempted to rescue the Chartist prisoners George Lloyd and John Warden. After the military were ordered ‘to clear the streets with as little bloodshed as possible’, the crowd forced thirty special constables to take refuge in the town hall. According to the Liberal mayor, Robert Heywood, ‘for two hours and a quarter the Hall was at the mercy of the Mob’, who included workers turned out of nearby mills. The special constables barricaded themselves in an upper room, and in response, the crowd attempted to set fire to the building. Although it is difficult to ascertain who instigated the attack, the violence escalated out of control in part because of the confusion over policing caused by the incorporation struggle. Miscommunications arising from the confusion of authority meant that no military were dispatched before the riot got out of hand.44 The violence of the crowds, initially defensive against the authorities, evolved into offensive action when the magistrates swore in electors as special constables. Whether their anger was incited by this division between represented and unrepresented is unclear, but the situation quickly moved beyond the control of Chartist leadership. Indeed, during the debate on the reading of the Bolton Police bill in the House of Lords on 20 August 1839, introduced deliberately and immediately in response to the agitation, the troubles were attributed to the mayor having enrolled Chartists as special constables, who were ineffective in putting down the disturbances.45 Elsewhere, the employment of special constables set class against class: Hyde sessions’ minute book listed employers enlisting mass ranks of workers from the town’s extensive cotton mills to put down disturbances and strikes throughout 1842 and 1848.46 The general strike of 1842 Two elements of the agitation of 1842 distinguished it from normal periodic turnouts of single trades and the previous ‘national holiday’ of 1839. First, this was in effect the first general strike. Overall, thirty-­two counties were hit by strikes from a whole range of industries, with the turnouts most extensive in the industrial districts of Bolton Archives, ZHE 35­/6 ​ 1–62, Heywood papers, ‘riots at the Little Bolton town hall’, 1839; BL, Add MS 54545, fo. 179, Cairncross to Napier, 20 August 1839; TNA, HO 40­/​44, 9 August 1839. 45 Swift, ‘Policing Chartism’, 691; Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, vol. 50, House of Lords, 20 August 1839, cols 427–34, http:­/​­/​handsard.millbanksys​ tems.com, accessed 14 June 2014. 46 Cheshire RO, QPH 1­/​1, Hyde sessions minute book, 1837–48. 44

290

Region, neighbourhood and place

Lancashire, Cheshire, Staffordshire, the West Riding, Cumberland and Lanarkshire.47 The strike was spread by large bodies of strikers moving from one town to the next in the form of flying pickets, who turned out mills and mines en route. The strike was organised in nodes of particularly militant towns: Bury, whose delegates and pickets headed northwards, Stalybridge heading south-­east, Todmorden east of the Pennines, and Stockport to the south. The nodes and routes reflected the travel networks and patterns of industrialisation within the regions.48 Second, the strikes provided a unique opportunity, albeit ephemeral, for co-­operation between trade unions and the reform movement. Chartists were keen to use the power of the unions for political ends, especially those leaders who had a foot in both camps, such as Richard Pilling of Ashton, the weavers’ leader who was the first to call for a strike for the Charter at a Stalybridge strike meeting on 29 July.49 Manchester was the epicentre of organisation of both. Daniel and Maurice Donovan were both delegates to the National Convention and president and secretary respectively of the powerloom weavers’ union, whose tactic of pulling out the plugs from the boilers providing steam to the machinery gave the strikes their name. In the week beginning 12 August, the Chartists held their National Convention in the Carpenters’ Hall, while on 15 and 16 August, more than two hundred delegates representing twenty-­five trades and more than twenty localities met in a congress held at the Sherwood Inn on Tib Street (the same pub had been the Elephant Inn where the ‘Thirty Eight’ met in 1812).The majority of trades crucially voted to strike until the passing of the People’s Charter. This decision marked a huge shift in policy, though some trades stuck to pursuing economic goals only.50 The relationship between Chartists and trade unions was however typically tense and temporary. On 13 August, the government issued a royal proclamation offering a reward for the Chase, Chartism, p. 212; TNA, HO 45­/​264­/​102, ‘account of the strike, Ashton, August 1842’. 48 TNA, HO 45­/​268­/​10, Arbuthnot to Clive, 10 August 1842; HO 45­/​264­/1 ​ 02, ‘account of the strike, Ashton, August 1842’; HO 45­/​269­/​152, Wemyss to Graham, 9 August 1842; NS, 13, 20 August 1842. 49 Chase, Chartism, p. 214; A. G. Rose, ‘The plug riots of 1842 in Lancashire and Cheshire’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 67 (1957); M. Jenkins, The General Strike of 1842 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980); F. C. Mather, ‘The general strike of 1842’, in J. Stevenson and R. Quinault (eds), Popular Protest and Public Order (London: George Allen, 1974). 50 Jenkins, General Strike, p. 143; MG, 17 August 1842. 47



Making Moscows, 1839–48291

apprehension of strike leaders and Chartist agitators, and the Home Secretary forwarded instructions to the military commanders and magistrates that they should forcibly resist the turnouts. Chartists opposed the continuation of the strike as it got out of hand in later August, and enrolled as special constables in order to suppress the violence.51 The neighbourhood was again a crucial context for the agitation: this was a movement through river valleys and along cross-­country roads. Strikers organised early each morning by meeting on sites often used previously for open air political and trades meetings. In town centres, scrubland between houses and on the edge of working-­class residential districts were sites of meeting. Strikers met every day at the Haigh off the Manchester Road in Stalybridge; on waste ground behind Thacker’s Foundry in Ashton-­under-­Lyne; on the waste ground near Cheapside in Hyde, and on Waterloo Ground in Stockport.52 Oldham strikers met every day from 8 to 13 August on Curzon ground behind the Albion Inn on Lord Street, a site previously used for election hustings, anti-­new poor law demonstrations and Chartist meetings.53 In Carlisle, turnouts met in their regular place, ‘a lot of vacant ground amongst the houses in Rigg Street, Caldewgate’, and in Bradford, Chartist and trades delegates met on a ‘brick ground outside Mr White’s’ on Manchester Road.54 Often strikers used fields on the outskirts of towns after their initial meetings, usually in market places, were dispersed by the magistrates.55 The tensest incidents of the plug strikes involved physical barricades and sieges of key economic and political sites, and strikers using flying pickets. Again, the effective suppression of the strikers was hindered by each authority’s conflicting tactics. The new commander of the Northern District, General Wemyss, had to face the procession from Ashton snowballing in size as it approached Manchester on 9 August 1842. This incident demonstrated how the problems of suppressing the strike were in part because the different tactical geographies of the military and the local authorities had not been resolved by experience of the Chase, Chartism, p. 223. The Trial of Feargus O’Connor Esq and Fifty-­Eight Others at Lancaster (Manchester, 1843), pp. 14, 22, 29–33, 43; MT, 27 August 1842; Jenkins, General Strike, p. 74. 53 Oldham Local Studies, D-­BUT F­/​81, Butterworth papers, ‘news reports’, 1842. 54 TNA, HO 45­/2 ​ 43­/​2, Mounsey to Graham, 22 August 1842; NS, 20 August 1842. 55 NS, 20 August 1842; Trial of Feargus O’Connor, pp. 29–33. 51 52

292

Region, neighbourhood and place

agitation of 1839. The Ashton strikers aimed to head to the commercial exchange in Manchester to negotiate directly with the major manufacturers. Wemyss and Sir Charles Shaw, chief of the Manchester police, decided to employ the strategy of a military blockade. They brought out the troops from the small barracks on Tib Street (notably only a few hundred yards away from where the trades were holding their conference) and stationed them ‘across the end of Pollard Street, effectively blocking up the passage with Ancoats’, where the Ashton strikers were heading. Mr Maud, the magistrate, however, disagreed with this military solution, correctly predicting that it would cause violent resistance. Maud believed in a controlled compromise of allowing the strikers to process through Ancoats, but Wemyss ‘thought it objectionable, because it would be taking them through a part of the Town filled with Irish’. Wemyss described his orders to the troops as a military operation, sending them ‘to take possession of Stevenson Square, forming across it’, and placing some dragoons across Piccadilly to prevent the procession from going down Market Street to the Exchange. The paraders obviously did not follow the constraints determined by the authorities: ‘many of them, instead of following the proper route, broke off and turned into Portland Street’. Wemyss had to call some of the dragoons from Piccadilly and ‘threw them across Portland Street and thus cut off their progress’. After a considerable period of negotiation, the strikers were able to continue to Granby Row Fields to hold a meeting, that is, much further south and nearer the factories along the Medlock than Maud and Wemyss originally allowed (see figure 16). The question for Shaw was whether the procession was parading or marching in defiance of the 1819 and 1839 legislation against armed parading with banners. The attorney general claimed that the Ashton strikers induced fear because they were marching ‘in something like military array, six or seven abreast’. Shaw commented that he had warned Maud not to put himself at the head of the procession, exclaiming, ‘I will not be mixed up with this affair, all I can ever do is to count the enemy who are attacking the town’, and that the strikers’ attempt to evade the prescribed route was inevitable. On their return, parties of strikers resumed turning out mills along the Oldham Road.56 The huge size of Manchester meant that policing was increasingly complex. Sir William Warre defended the town centre by means of a system of ward stations situated in the chain of turnpike tollbars. More than forty TNA, HO 45­/​268­/​129, Wemyss to Arbuthnot, 31 August 1842, enclosing Shaw, ‘Statement of what occurred in Manchester on 8th and 9th of August’; Morning Chronicle, 13 October 1842.

56



Making Moscows, 1839–48293

16  ‘Scene at Granby Fields during the riots’ (Manchester), Illustrated London News, 27 August 1842.

mounted special constables were employed to communicate between each station and both the military central HQ at the York Hotel (the former town hall of the new corporation) and the magistrates in the town hall on King Street, and to ride out several miles along the main roads to keep watch for approaching strikers.57 Elsewhere, the plug strikes reached high levels of tension, notably in Preston, where on 12 August, the mayor and magistrates ordered the military to fire on the strikers in a show of force, leaving over a dozen dead or seriously wounded.58 In Cumberland, the strike of the miners and handloom weavers was in full swing as late as 23 August. When threatened, strikers again employed the tools of urban topography. Major Leigh Goldie reported the response to his regiment’s arrival and parade through Wigton in the evening: ‘on the approach of the Troops, the rabble retreated up the alleys from which they pelted the Troops’. Goldie lamented that part of the problem of restoring order in the mining town was due to the lack of civil authority, not least because the main magistrate, Mr Matthews, ‘is an infirm old Gentleman ­… hardly MG, 13, 17 August 1842; Bolton Archives, ZHE 38­/​37, Maud to Heywood, 16 August 1842; Lancashire County RO, DDX 227­/​2, plan of communications in Manchester, 1842. 58 The Times, 15 August 1842; Mather, Chartism and Society, pp. 159–60. 57

294

Region, neighbourhood and place

equal to the severe task of patrolling the streets before a Mob’. With only three paid constables in the town, ‘there is a total absence of any Civil authority in this town and the presence of the military tends to increase excitement’.59 Agitation in Cumberland was however dampened by lack of Chartist support. During the weekend of 20–21 August, the cotton spinners of Dixon, Slater and Chambers’ mills decided to strike, but ‘the operatives were not unanimous and the three principal leaders of the Chartists [Arthur, Bowman and Hanson] were pronounced traitors by many because they would not countenance it’. Arthur, one of the Chartist delegates, had been to Manchester, and returned to tell the meetings ‘to expect punitive instructions in the Northern Star’, but the  paper’s decision to denounce further agitation ‘did not altogether please them’.60 The West Riding experienced one of the most dramatic physical battles for territory of 1842, which resulted briefly in a pan-­regional movement. Early in the morning of 15 August, Halifax strikers met on Skircoat Moor and processed four miles along the valley, turning out mills en route. They converged with three other groups of strikers at the Pennine rendezvous of Luddenden Foot: the inhabitants of Hebden Bridge and its neighbouring towns of Sowerby Bridge and Todmorden, a large group of woollen weavers from Bradford, and finally and most significantly, strikers from Lancashire. The latter travelled from Oldham and Rochdale through Bacup, over the tops, spending the night outside, and through Todmorden. The four groups, numbering an estimated 5,000 strikers, assembled back along the valley at the King’s Cross on the Burnley Road, making ‘one immense procession filling the whole breath of the road and stretching to a vast length’ to enter Halifax.61 The joining together of different trades, localities and regions produced a relational space for working-­class defiance. Reaching the North Bridge at the top of Halifax about noon, ‘the military and police were drawn up, so as to occupy the whole road and prevent the passage of people, the cavalry being posted in front, the infantry next, and behind them the people and special constables’.62 Benjamin Wilson recalled in his autobiography marching with the procession until they met the soldiers by TNA, HO 45­/​243­/​19, Goldie to Whingates, 24 August 1842; HO 45­/2 ​ 43­/2 ​ 5, Messenger to Graham, 24 August 1842. 60 TNA, HO 45­/​243­/​2–5, Mounsey to Graham, 22 August 1842; Illustrated London News, 27 August 1842. 61 NS, 20 August 1842. 62 TNA, HO 45­/​264­/​77, Waterhouse to Home Office, 15 August 1842; Chase, Chartism, p. 217. 59



Making Moscows, 1839–48295

17  ‘Scene at North Bridge’ (Halifax), Illustrated London News, 27 August 1842.

Berry’s Foundry, where the magistrates read the Riot Act and declared that they could not enter the town: ‘I was not far from the front, but seeing the impossibility of forcing our way through them, we made our way over the walls and through the fields, which were not built upon at that time, and came down Range Bank to Northgate’.63 The Illustrated London News depicted an invading army besieging a fortified town (see figure 17). But this was an army of its own inhabitants attempting to reoccupy their own town from the military. Eventually, the standoff was broken, prisoners were taken, and groups of strikers left the main procession to turn out more mills in the neighbourhood and the crowd regrouped on Skircoat Moor.64 The next day, 16 August, strikers and their supporters sought revenge. The prisoners taken at Halifax were sent to Elland railway station to travel on to Wakefield prison. A rescue attempt failed, but the populace then planned to ambush the carriage of soldiers on their return to Halifax. F. H. Grundy, an engineer working on the railways and whose office was on the Elland Road, noted the heterotopic atmosphere in the morning: ‘like a road to a fair or to the races … ­ all busy, women B. Wilson, ‘Struggles of an old Chartist’, in D. Vincent (ed.), Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working Class Politicians, 1790–1885 (London: Europa Publications, 1977), p. 200. 64 Jenkins, General Strike, p. 103; Illustrated London News, 27 August 1842. 63

296

Region, neighbourhood and place

18  ‘Salter Hebble’, Illustrated London News, 27 August 1842.

as well as men, rushing along the various lanes over my head with arms and aprons full of stones’. Benjamin Wilson recalled, ‘thousands were waiting, some on the roofs of houses and others on the hillside’.65 The soldiers, defenceless in the dip of the road, were ambushed from the embankment above with a volley of stones (see figure 18). The rest of the day was marked by ugly confrontations between strikers and troops in Halifax, resulting in at least three fatalities, including one soldier.66 The magistrates and observers presumed that the agitators were Lancashire interlopers. In any case of riot, newspapers and authorities tended to report that their local inhabitants were loyal and thus had been stirred up by outsiders. The Lancastrians certainly stood out from the crowd: the Halifax Guardian noted that the women’s accents and dialect marked them out, as well as their militancy: The women were extremely excited and we heard several urging the men to rescue the prisoners who had been taken in the morning. One exclaimed, ‘If I wor a man, they sud’nt be long there’, another said, ‘Ye’re soft, if ye don’t fetch ’em out to neet’. These instigations from the women, who appeared from their dialect, to be chiefly Lancashire women, who had marched D. Thompson, The Early Chartists (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1971), p. 294; Wilson, ‘Struggles of an old Chartist’, p. 200. 66 TNA, HO 45­/​264­/​112–14; Chase, Chartism, p. 218. 65



Making Moscows, 1839–48297 with the men from the various Lancashire districts, were not without their effect.67

But though the cross-­Pennine and female co-­operation was hugely significant, the agitation was not instigated by strangers. Rather, the defence of both Halifax and Salterhebble demonstrated a sense of community and neighbourhood defending place against the military barricade and attempting to reclaim their locality. Benjamin Wilson insisted that the people who attacked the soldiers on the bridge were ‘neither Lancashire people or people from a distance, but principally young men from the surrounding districts’.68 Major Leeds manufacturer John Marshall was surprised to find out that the prisoners taken in his town ‘belonged to the neighbourhood and were not strangers’. He noted sadly, ‘workpeople here, though well disposed to protect person and property, sympathise strongly with their fellows, whom they think their own’.69 Chase notes the dire situation of these men during this period of severe economic depression. A carpet weaver involved at Salterhebble, Charles Greenwood, spent the night hiding in a drain; when he returned home in the morning, he discovered that his son had died of tuberculosis and starvation in his absence.70 Yet the strikers were not acting violently out of sheer desperation; the strike was well planned, and violence erupted out of the passion of defending place and workers’ rights. The agitation was dampened only after arrests of the main Chartist leaders, including Feargus O’Connor, and the petering out of financial support, though strikes continued into the autumn in individual trades and towns. The number of arrests testifies to the extent of the agitation but also to the scale of repression: over 1,500 were arrested in the North West and 150 were sentenced at Yorkshire assizes.71 Repression was not uniform or one-­sided everywhere. In Congleton in Cheshire, the prosecution of the strikers was delayed until the Knutsford sessions in November. The prosecuting employers, Reades silk manufacturers, alleged that ‘the plain reason was that there was no hope of justice from the boro’ authorities’, especially because William Warrington, JP and former mayor, was the president of ‘a newsroom in Congleton where Halifax Guardian, 20 August 1842. Wilson, ‘Struggles of an old Chartist’, p. 200; E. Webster, ‘Chartism in the Calder Valley, 1838–50’, Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society, n.s. 2 (1994), 62–3. 69 Leeds University Brotherton Library, Marshall papers, MS 738­ /​ 1, 5–6, August–September 1842. 70 Chase, Chartism, p. 218. 71 Chase, Chartism , p. 226. 67 68

298

Region, neighbourhood and place

the Northern Star and all the Chartist publications are taken and to which the principal notorious Chartists of the town and neighbourhood are in the habit of resorting’, the social institution in Market Street. The Home Secretary considered criminal proceedings against the mayor and magistrates for neglecting their duty to enforce order, but the law officers of the Crown decided against it.72 1848: a year of revolutions Chartists prepared for the presentation of their third petition during the European revolutions of 1848. Some historians have treated the agitation of 1848 as an untidy postscript to their neat argument that Chartism was defeated by Robert Peel’s social legislation and the economic stability of the mid-­1840s. Yet the huge wave of demonstrations and violence that resurged with the return of severe economic distress in the textile industries cannot be regarded as an anomaly. It marked rather a continuity of the aims, tactics and leadership that had characterised the movement since the 1830s. The third petition was backed by the last burst of mass platform radicalism that had long precedents in previous constitutionalist campaigns.73 But the events of 1848 were not just another repetition of the mass meetings, conventions, petitioning and small groups threatening to ‘rise’. The agitation was conducted within the atmosphere of European revolution, a feeling perhaps not experienced since the reform crisis of 1830, bringing with it new continental theories of socialism and democracy. The reams of correspondence and seized pamphlets and posters sent to the Home Office show the extent of concern that local authorities from across the North had about the potential for revolution.74 In August, the newspapers alleged that itinerant delegates were stirring up the industrial areas by calling for ‘the erection of barricades’ and the ‘proclamation of Lancashire and Yorkshire as a republic!’75 Fanciful statements aside, the battles over territory in 1848 were more fierce, Cheshire RO, DCB 2114­/​138, Congleton jury presentments, 28 November 1842; W. B. Stephens (ed.), The History of Congleton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1970), p. 96. 73 J. Belchem, ‘1848: Feargus O’Connor and the collapse of the mass platform’, in J. Epstein and D. Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-­Class Radicalism and Culture 1830–1860 (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. 270, 272. 74 TNA, HO 45­/​2510, correspondence and posters, 1848. 75 BO, 17 August 1848. 72



Making Moscows, 1839–48299

physical and indeed violent than previously, but the motivations also more difficult to disentangle. There were indeed barricades, as well as occupations, marches, drilling and violent conflicts over space. Both the forces of order, and the number of oppositional movements, moreover, were wider and stronger. A panoply of different groups, from militant Chartists, socialists and trade unions to Irish nationalists faced confident and defensive divisions of new police as well as the military and mass ranks of special constables on a scale never before seen. The military leadership of the Northern District had learned lessons from 1842, and proved a strong force under General Sir Thomas Arbuthnot.76 Halifax magistrate Robert Stansfield produced a pamphlet outlining the ‘provisions of the law’ in response to the mass Chartist meeting on Kennington Common in London on 10 April 1848. The pamphlet indicated how precedent shaped the evolution of justices’ interpretation of how to police mass meetings. It quoted the charge of the Lord Chief Justice to the Grand Jury of the trial of the Bristol reform rioters in 1832, which confirmed the common fear that political crowds were prone to contagion that needed to be suppressed early: ‘though cases may occur in which the object of such assemblies is at first defined and moderate, they rapidly enlarge their powers of mischief’. The definition of an ‘illegal meeting’ was, moreover, taken from the example of Peterloo, illustrating its continued centrality in the shift of thinking about how to prosecute mass collective action. The pamphlet quoted Justice Bayley at the trial of Henry Hunt about a crowd committing sedition not by its actions, but from the appearance of its intentions to ‘excite terror, alarm and consternation’.77 Again, middle-­class and gentry fear was used to measure the extent of the suppression needed. Battles over public space continued, especially over the use of squares. Chartists held three successive mass open air meetings in Sheffield’s Paradise Square from Monday 6 to Wednesday 8 April 1848. The proprietors of the Freemasons’ Hall, Ebeneezer Smith and Son, refused to allow the steps to be used for public meetings, ‘as considerable damage had been done to the property on such occasions’. Councillor and democrat Isaac Ironside and other leading Chartists who arrived early on the Monday morning argued with a tenant of an adjoining pottery shop who claimed that the ground was private property. Taking up his J. Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 139; Pye, Home Office and the Chartists, p. 163. 77 WYAS, Calderdale, STA 185, Stansfield papers, ‘Unlawful Riotous Meetings, 10 April 1848: Provisions of the Law’ (Halifax, 1848). 76

300

Region, neighbourhood and place

‘position as usual on the steps’, Ironside declared ‘this flight of steps belongs to the people­– ­(Cheers)­– ­that this square belongs to the people­ – (­Continued cheering)’. He legitimated his claim with reference to the past: Twenty years ago, I stood on these steps by the side of the senior magistrate of the town, Hugh Parker Esq, and proposed an amendment to a resolution which he had proposed. Ever since that period, these steps and this square have been sacred to the cause of freedom and liberty. These steps have been used by the people and belong to the people, so far as the justice of the case goes.

Ironside then outlined his interpretation of the legal right to meet on the steps: ‘Is there not a public thoroughfare under these steps? And if the road or land belongs to the public, does not all above it to the sky belong also to the public?’78 This repeated the radical justification made throughout this period; occupation of public space was an integral part of claiming part of the body politic and representation. By contrast, in Manchester, Chartists and Irish Confederates did not need to battle with the authorities over public spaces: they met almost every day between April and July 1848 in Stevenson’s Square and New Cross or in their ‘own’ indoor sites, including the Hall of Science, People’s Institute in Ancoats and the Carpenters’ Hall, with large Sunday mass meetings held on Blackstone Edge.79 The pace of activity was relentless and intense. The overthrow of the French monarchy was a catalyst to action; addresses of congratulation were drawn up at meetings in Stockport and elsewhere in early March; a tricolour was hoisted on the New Cross in Manchester.80 But the central geographical characteristic of the movements in 1848 was the Irish influence. Organisation was strongest and most militant in areas with large and concentrated immigration. The Irish famine of 1846–7 flooded the industrial north of England with thousands more migrants. The relationship between Repealers who supported Daniel O’Connell and Irish Chartists supporting Feargus O’Connor was fractious. But after O’Connell’s death in 1847, the Confederates, who had seceded from his repeal movement, offered a more appealing nationalist organisation for the Chartists to work with. Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 11 April 1848. TNA, TS 11­/​137­/​part II, Liverpool winter assizes, 1848. 80 TNA, HO 45­/​2510­/​398, posters, Oldham, 2 April 1848; TS 11­/​137­/​part II, Liverpool winter assizes, 1848, ‘Address of the inhabitants of Stockport to the people of Paris ­… March 9th, 1848’. 78 79



Making Moscows, 1839–48301

Manchester and Salford had sixteen Confederate clubs, with a membership of over seven hundred. Liverpool, with an Irish population estimated at 100,000, in particular awoke from its usual political slumber to lead the way, with over a dozen Confederate clubs. Three days of Chartist-­Confederate meetings over St Patrick’s weekend in and around Manchester climaxed in a mass meeting on Oldham Edge, where the crowds swore to set both England and Ireland free. Green repeal flags took pride of place in Chartist processions.81 The battle over Adelaide Street in Bradford was a particularly violent and politically complex incident that underlines the role of contested space and place in the events of 1848. Bradford had the highest proportion of Irish-­born inhabitants in the West Riding, estimated by the poor law union clerk at 20,000, about one-­sixth of the already rapidly increasing population.82 The economic downturn hit the West Riding woollen industry particularly hard, and, unlike in surrounding textile districts, the number of paupers claiming relief in Bradford continued to rise after April 1848. The sudden introduction of woolcombing machinery exacerbated unemployment further. Tensions had already been raised when the Tory magistrates established a permanent barracks to the east of the town in 1841. As we have seen, anti-­new poor law agitation and the plug strikes were particularly fierce in Bradford. The ongoing battle for incorporation was only resolved in 1847, when the middle-­class liberals took control from the Tories on the council. Outwith party politics, the Bradford Chartist Council were strong, unlike their peers in other towns, and decided to organise militantly by forming firm links with the Irish Confederates and by mustering a National Guard.83 Early on Monday morning, 29 May, the police superintendent led a hundred special constables into the Manchester Road area on a mission to arrest two local radical leaders, David Lightfowler and the blacksmith Isaac ‘Wat Tyler’ Jefferson. The area was a warren of courts and alleys, a distinctive locale that was usually inaccessible to the elites, another ‘defensible space’. Saville and Belchem stated that the area was

TNA, TS 11­/​137­/​part II, Liverpool winter assizes, documentary evidence, 9 December 1848; MG, 22 March 1848; J. Belchem, ‘The Waterloo of peace and order: the United Kingdom and the revolutions of 1848’, in D. Dowe, H.-­ G. Haupt, D. Langewiesche and J. Sperber (eds), Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001), p. 246. 82 PP 1854–5 (18), House of Commons Select Committee Report into Poor Law Removal, p. 74. 83 Saville, 1848, p. 144. 81

302

Region, neighbourhood and place

dominated by poor Irish woolcombers.84 Analysis of the 1851 census returns for Adelaide Street however indicates a more mixed picture. Woolcombers indeed formed the majority of inhabitants (50 out of 95 heads of households and their lodgers), but this was not completely an Irish ‘ghetto’. Twenty-­seven heads of households had been born in Ireland, but they lived next door to or around English households. There were also several families originating from Devon and Wiltshire, suggesting that the decline of the West Country woollen industry had pushed them to migrate.85 The Adelaide Street area was thus made up by the economically and socially marginalised, brought together from different regions. Forewarned of their approach, the Chartists escaped, and the special constables ‘found themselves surrounded by more than one thousand men, women and children, who pounced upon them from every avenue and completely hemmed them in the narrow street’. They were forced to retreat back to the court house. The newspapers alleged that the Chartists sent out carrier pigeons to alert the neighbourhood to forthcoming trouble, ‘a mode of communication that has been notoriously practised by the Chartists of the West Riding for the last six weeks or more’.86 Rather than waiting for the agitation to calm down, Lord Lieutenant Earl Harewood, Major-­ General Thorn and Colonel Tempest, commanding the Bradford district, decided to nip the problem in the bud with a show of force. The second round of the rout shows how much this was a battle for territory and the determination of both sides to claim the ground. At four o’clock in the afternoon, the authorities ordered the whole of the police force, armed with cutlasses, one thousand special constables, the magistrates and mayor, 200 infantry and two troops of dragoons out from the court house and back to Manchester Road and Adelaide Street. The special constables were severely beaten and driven back; the authorities’ tactical mistake was to place the military behind them, who were thus unable to offer any protection when the thousands of police crammed into the narrow streets. The cavalry eventually dispersed the crowds, but not before the newspapers could pick out the obligatory Amazon defending her patch: Mary Mortimer was arrested in her doorway after having ‘tossed stones with the greatest intrepidity and fierceness; swore like a trooper; and declared that she was a Chartist and would die like a Chartist’. Seventeen prisoners were taken to the Belchem, ‘1848’, p. 289; Saville, 1848, p. 144. TNA, HO 107­/​2309, census returns for Little Horton, 1851, www.findmy​ past.co.uk. 86 NS, 3 June 1848. 84 85



Making Moscows, 1839–48303

court house, and the military marched back through town in a victory parade. The newspapers again commented on the effect of the topography of Bradford: spectators were able to watch from further up the hill and the ‘crowds at the end of every street in Manchester Road were watching the movements of the invading forces who had just established a sort of military law in their dominions’.87 The coming together of the different authorities forged a change in class relationships, resulting in the final co-­option of the new industrial bourgeoisie into the ranks of the old elites. The Bradford mayor, Robert Milligan, was a self-­made liberal-­radical dissenter, who notwithstanding the previous decade of battles over incorporation, felt compelled to defend property against the Confederates and Chartists alongside Joshua Pollard, a major county magistrate and Tory landowner and ­mineowner.88 The gap between elite and populace was demonstrated physically in their defence of property against occupation by the working classes. This hardening of attitude of the middle classes was equally evident in Liverpool, where the merchants, liberal as well as Tory, became gripped with fear of insurrection in July during the short-­lived Irish rebellion. Both local authorities and the government strongly suspected Confederate links with Irish emigrants in America, who threatened to send their Irish Brigade from New York to use Liverpool as a launch base for invasion of Ireland. Over a thousand inhabitants, headed by the mayor and magistrates, signed a petition to the House of Commons, praying that the recently passed act suspending habeas corpus in Ireland should also be applied to Liverpool in order to put down the Confederate clubs in the port. Though radicals raised a counter-­petition and the press ridiculed the request, the Liverpool authorities were genuinely concerned about the threat of insurrection. Twenty thousand special constables were sworn in, and the police raided the clubs and made a large number of arrests.89 Agitation faded quickly in mid-­1848 also because, as was often the case in political movements, alliances were tense and temporary. The Chartists sought more benefits from the Confederates than they could give back in return, especially when their aims diverged. At the end of May, the trial of the Irish republican leader John Mitchel, who was the first to be convicted under the new Crown and Government Security BO, 1 June 1848; TNA, HO 45­/​2410­/​5, fos 1002, 1017–23, 1038, 1048, disturbance correspondence, May–June 1848; Saville, 1848, p. 149; Chase, Chartism, p. 318. 88 Saville, 1848, p. 150. 89 Belchem, ‘The Waterloo of peace’, p. 246; Saville, 1848, pp. 154–6. 87

304

Region, neighbourhood and place

Act, both united and divided Chartist-­Confederate agitation across the North. Chartist leader Ernest Jones sought a large head count of attendees at simultaneous mass meetings at Whitsun as a show of strength. But many Irish migrant activists abandoned the alliance to go underground to join the Dublin rebels.90 Bolton authorities warned millowners that their property was under threat from arson by Confederate clubs as late as the end of July.91 The rank and file in Lancashire and Cheshire formed Chartist National Guards in imitation of the French revolutionaries.92 Conflicting evidence presented at the trials of Chartists for drilling makes it difficult to disentangle what involvement the Chartists or the trades had in planning for insurrection. A policeman was shot in Ashton-­under-­Lyne on 14 August as striking workers erected a barricade on the road to the barracks. But the perpetrator of the murder was an informer who testified against the leader of the National Guard at his trial. Striking miners at Hyde were headed by another spy.93 After the withdrawal of the Chartist petition and the collapse of the National Assembly, however, the national leadership and many local groups distanced themselves from outbreaks of violence and plans for a general rising. 1848 was the last year of mass Chartist agitation. The movement was undoubtedly hampered by the huge number of arrests, both of national leaders and the second tier of activists who ran organisations locally on the ground, whose convictions were secured through unreliable evidence and venal witnesses. The agitation was also dampened by the failure of the Irish rising and the split with the Confederates, and O’Connor’s disavowal of violence.94 Above all, General Arbuthnot was able to employ huge numbers of the military, police and special constables in a more coherent military strategy than had been possible in 1839 or 1842. Unlike the previously fractious relationship that former commanders of the Northern District had with the Manchester authorities, Arbuthnot was able to co-­operate effectively with Elkanah Armitage, Lord Mayor, and his fellow magistrates. The mainly liberal dissenting Saville, 1848, p. 132; Belchem, ‘The Waterloo of peace’, p. 251; TNA, HO 45­/​2510, has dozens of posters advertising meetings across the North to consider the case of Mitchel, May 1848. 91 TNA, HO 45­/​2510­/​510, magistrates of Bolton to Fulcock, 26 July 1848. 92 TNA, TS 11­/​137­/​part II, Liverpool winter assizes, 1848, pp. 140–2. 93 TNA, HO 45­/​2510­/​302–4, depositions, August 1848; HO 45­/​2510­/​644, report from Ashton town hall, 15 August 1848; BO, 17 August 1848; Belchem, ‘1848’, p. 298. 94 Belchem, ‘1848’, p. 269; Saville, 1848, p. 163. 90



Making Moscows, 1839–48305

middle-­class magistrates’ attitudes hardened by May 1848, and they struck a more hardline stance that aligned them more closely with both Arbuthnot and the Tory county gentry wishing to suppress working-­ class collective action once and for all.95 Revolution was in the air, but it was not possible in England, although the physical clashes with the authorities undoubtedly strengthened class and community solidarities. The movements, strikes and physical confrontations of protesters with authorities throughout this period were battles for territory. The streetscapes and neighbourhood were not the background for conflict but formed the tools and point of contest. Barricades and occupations were defiant spatial strategies that heightened the claiming of space. But, like the rural protesters discussed in the previous chapter, the defence of locality and place was not reactionary or bounded. The agitation of 1848 in particular was a complex web of geographical connections and influences. The movements had something of the multi-­ethnic and transnational connections that David Featherstone found in the Wilkesite riots of 1768 and the activities of the London Corresponding Society in the 1790s.96 Protesters produced a relational space in their connections with Ireland, France and America as well as with cross-­regional and national networks of radicals and trade unions. Radicals combined ‘militant particularisms’ with pan-­national horizons, a vision examined further in the next vignette.

Saville, 1848, pp. 140–1. D. Featherstone, ‘Towards the relational construction of militant particularisms: or why the geographies of past struggles matter for resistance to neoliberal globalisation’, Antipode, 37:2 (2005).

95 96

Vignette 3

New horizons in America

Loyalist restrictions on the freedom to meet and to speak caused many radicals to look to wider horizons. Political and religious dissenters had always sought exile in America, where links were well established through trade and emigration. The ‘Friends of Peace’ in Liverpool, more cosmopolitan and also less pressured by loyalists than their Pennine counterparts inland, looked out along the river Mersey to the Atlantic. In July 1793, Dr James Currie, Presbyterian physician of Liverpool Infirmary, wrote to a relative in Virginia that America would become ‘the refuge and asylum of those active and enterprising minds who cannot find, in Europe, scope for their exertions ­… I may never leave England; but possibly I may, for I see the clouds gathering, that are likely to burst in a fearful storm’.1 Dr Currie indeed did not leave, but several prominent British radicals sought refuge in the States. Joseph Priestley of Birmingham was one of the most well-­known emigrants, but some northern radical leaders and printers also went into exile, including the Manchester printers Matthew Falkner and William Birch, the Bolton Unitarian merchant Thomas Cooper and Joseph Gales, printer of the Sheffield Register.2 In chapter 1 we saw in Winifred Gales’s memoirs how the fear of arrest and Church-­and-­King repression forced them to flee to Philadelphia in 1794. Radicals followed the general migration pull-­factor of pre-­existing networks of kin, friends and religious contacts who helped their passage with introductions and recommendations. Gales noted ‘in Philadelphia, we found many persons W. W. Currie (ed.), Memoir of the Life, Writings and Correspondence of James Currie, vol. 2 (London, 1831), p. 38.  2 J. Mee, ‘Morals, manners and liberty: British radicals and perceptions of America in the 1790s’, in E. Dzelzainis and R. Livesey (eds), The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776–1914 (Basingstoke: Ashgate, 2013); M. Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1997).  1



Vignette 3: New horizons in America307

who, like ourselves, had sought refuge from the political storm which threatened destruction to all those English friends of Reform’. They joined Priestley’s Unitarian chapel. William Birch was already establishing himself as a leading engraver in the town.3 British radicals in the nineteenth century were still drawn to America. Manchester radical John Knight, though staying active at home, published a collection of letters by northern emigrants in 1818, with a preface citing a verse from Isaiah, ‘let the oppressed go free and break every yoke’ to promote a vision of America as an idyll of liberty and agricultural abundance.4 In the 1840s, Chartist leaders William Ashton of Barnsley and Peter Bussey of Bradford and some trade unionists emigrated in a search for a better life, particularly attracted by the liberal constitutions of new states like Iowa and Wisconsin.5 Radicals envisaged the American wilderness as utopia, with freehold farms underpinning democracy. These ideals coalesced with Paineite ideas of republicanism.6 Yet from well before independence, this picture of American liberty was a construct: it could not have been otherwise, as their main information and connections with the country were from people like them, activists with hopeful visions of a better world. Radical dreams of liberty were quickly punctured on arrival. In July 1798, the Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, which paralleled the very legislation from which British emigrants had escaped; indeed Thomas Cooper was prosecuted for publishing pro-­Republican newspaper editorials. The Act for the Punishment of Certain Crimes against the United States, like the Two Acts, targeted ‘conspiracies against the government’ University of North Carolina, Digital Southern History Collection, 02652-­z, Gales family papers, ‘Recollections’, 1831–3, p. 142, www2.lib.unc.edu­/​mss­/​ inv­/​g­/​Gales_​Family.html; S. Cotlar, ‘Joseph Gales and the making of the Jeffersonian middle class’, in J. Horn, J. E. Lewis and P. Onuf (eds), The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race and the New Republic (Charlottesville: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2002), p. 340.  4 J. Knight, Important Extracts from Original and Recent Letters Written by Englishmen in the United States of America (Manchester, 1818), p. 2.  5 R. Boston, British Chartists in America, 1839–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971), p. 21; M. J. Turner, Liberty and Liberticide: The Role of America in Nineteenth-­Century British Radicalism (Landham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014).  6 W. Verhoeven, Americomania and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, 1789–1802 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 25; W. Verhoeven, ‘Land jobbing in the western territories’, in A. Gilroy (ed.), Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel, 1775–1844 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 198.  3

308

Region, neighbourhood and place

and ‘seditious’ publications. Traditional accounts of the legislation state that the Federalists used the threat of war with France to justify their attempt to quash Democratic-­Republican opposition and propaganda. The outcry against the acts ultimately destroyed the Federalist cause and helped Thomas Jefferson to gain the presidency in 1801. More recent American historians have shown that this was not however a simple case of party conflict between Federalists and Jeffersonian Democratic-­ Republicans. Rather the debate about the anti-­ seditious legislation formed part of a wider anxiety among both political elites about ‘the unbounded freedom of democracy’. The parallels with Britain were clear: all sections of the political propertied elites were seeking ways of dealing with the implications of mass demands for representation. Jefferson’s temporary return to power, furthermore, could not overturn land-­jobbing or unscrupulous speculation and a shift towards industrialisation. Radical pastoralism became unobtainable, if it ever was.7 Joseph Gales moderated his Paineite radical views considerably into liberalism. He edited the main Republican newspaper and moved in middle-­class political circles who shared apprehensions about the power of the masses. Winifred Gales also wrote in her memoirs of her discomfort of being ‘induced’ to buy black slaves for domestic servants when they settled in Raleigh in North Carolina, despite ‘the idea of purchasing slaves [being] most revolting to our feelings’. Her account suggests a retrospective self-­justification of their actions.8 Chartists quickly became disillusioned with several aspects of mid-­ nineteenth-­century America: a lack of genuine democracy in the political system, the persistence of slavery and the difficulty immigrants faced acquiring land. Owenite socialists clung to their utopian dream. In 1842–3, twenty-­ five socialists emigrated from Huddersfield, including their secretary, while Utilitarian Co-­operative Emigration Society branches were formed in Huddersfield and Manchester. But they too became disappointed with the effects of unbridled capitalism in every state.9 Chartist leaders and American reformers supported the campaign J. B. Freeman, ‘Explaining the unexplainable: the cultural context of the Sedition Act’, in M. Jacobs, W. J. Novak and J. E. Zelizer (eds), The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), p. 24; Verhoeven, ‘Land jobbing in the western territories’, p. 198.  8 Cotlar, ‘Joseph Gales’, p. 333; University of North Carolina, Gales papers, Winifred Gales, ‘Recollections’, p. 149.  9 E. Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–1866(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1974), p. 100; J. L.  7



Vignette 3: New horizons in America309

for land reform in 1848, but back in Britain, the rank and file saw a more tangible material outcome in the Land Plan. Feargus O’Connor indeed denounced emigration as a solution to poverty at home. Disillusionment was deepened by reports from several northern leaders about their visits to America. Lawrence Pitkethly of Huddersfield published an exposé in the Northern Star of the poor conditions of workers, while William Aitken of Ashton-­under-­Lyne wrote a fascinating if bitter travelogue, Journey Up the Mississippi River, in 1845. Aitken deplored the continuance of slavery after attending an auction and speaking to slaves in New Orleans. Upon witnessing a mob attack on an abolitionist newspaper editor, Aitken warned, ‘so the Chartists in England and the Repealers in Ireland, will see that they are far more secure than an Abolitionist in the slave-­holding states of America’. He also lamented the working conditions of emigrants, which replicated the situation in England that they had sought to escape: at Nauvoo in Missouri, he met an emigrant called Greenhaulgh from Bolton, who warned that workers were paid in truck rather than wages.10 Perhaps Greenhaulgh should have gone to France. In the 1790s, British and Irish radicals repeatedly strove to co-­ ordinate with the French revolutionaries but the volatile nature of the revolutions meant that alliances were always fragile.11 But after the end of the Napoleonic wars, thousands of British workers emigrated to the burgeoning French textile and railway industries. Fabrice Bensimon has shown how British emigrants took their forms of political and trades organisation with them. Intriguingly, the Chartist Land Plan had branches in Boulogne and Rouen. ‘A stern Chartist’, Ralph Kerfoot of Chowbent near Bolton (a former Luddite stronghold), emigrated to Rouen after being involved in the ‘national holiday’ of 1839. He was one of the first lucky ‘fustian landlords’ to receive a two-­acre plot in the Land Plan settlement at O’Connorville, Hertfordshire in 1846, and went to England to exchange it for a plot on another settlement in Worcestershire. He returned to

Bronstein, ‘From the land of liberty to land monopoly’, in O. Ashton, R. Fyson and S. Roberts (eds), The Chartist Legacy (Woodbridge: Merlin, 1999), p. 148; G. Claeys, ‘The example of America: a warning to England?’, in M. Chase and I. Dyck (eds), Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), p. 71. 10 W. Aitken, A Journey Up the Mississippi River from its Mouth to Nauvoo, the City of the Latter Day Saints (Ashton, 1845), pp. 14, 37. 11 M. Elliott, Partners in Revolution: The United Irishmen and France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).

310

Region, neighbourhood and place

France to settle his affairs but died soon afterwards.12 Kerfoot perhaps wanted to leave France because he and his fellow emigrants found opportunities for collective action even more restrictive than in Britain: it was illegal to hold political meetings of over twenty people, to set up trade unions or publish newspapers. British workers attempted all three, and the disturbances that followed no doubt reminded them that they had a relative measure of freedom in Britain. The fall of the July monarchy in February 1848, moreover, led to anti-­English rioting and widespread redundancies in the industrial areas, forcing most emigrants back home.13 An even better option may have been Australia. Luddites, the Pentrich risers, Swing rioters, the Bankside mill strikers and other trade unionists of 1834, and over a hundred Chartists arrived by convict ship rather than by choice. Although the Australian colonies were often depicted as the land of convicts, they could offer a land of liberty to the enterprising. Paul Pickering offers a positive view of the impact of these political prisoners and emigrants upon the politics of the nascent colony. Building a colony from scratch was difficult but offered more opportunities for democratic experiment and land reform than was possible in America or Britain. Following the decline of their movement, Chartists joined the waves of free emigration after 1850. In Victoria and South Australia, manhood suffrage, the ballot, abolition of the property qualification for MPs and triennial parliaments were introduced between 1856 and 1859. The Six Points were thus achieved in the self-­governing colonies at the same time as ‘reformers in Britain languished in the face of a wall of Palmerstonian indifference’.14

F. Bensimon, ‘British workers in France, 1815–1848’, P & P, 213 (2011), 172–3; NS, 18 April, 18 December 1846. 13 Bensimon, ‘British workers in France’, 180–1. Thanks to Fabrice for his advice on this topic. 14 P. A. Pickering, ‘A wider field in a new country: Chartism in colonial Australia’, in M. Sawyer (ed.), Elections: Full, Free and Fair (Sydney: The Federation Press, 2001), pp. 28, 37. 12

Conclusion

From 1789 to 1848, national and local governments, propertied elites and aspirant wealthy middle classes sought to deal with the rise of popular movements for reform and workers’ rights by restricting their opportunities to meet and to speak in public space and in the governing body politic. Protesters contested and claimed the symbolic and physical uses, and memory of, particular sites of meeting. There was not, and could not be, however, a complete clamp down on uses of public space. Loyalists were not repressive in all areas. Government legislation throughout this period was intermittent and contained enough loopholes for social movements to find ways to protest and hold meetings. Loyalist repression in Britain was most extensive and effective from below rather than directly from the state. Local elites, magistrates and their spies created an atmosphere of suspicion, closing down arenas for public debate and enacting summary justice, in the courts and on the street, against radical printers and meetings of reform societies and trade combinations. The Six Acts of 1819 were the most repressive legislation but they placed the main responsibility on the magistrates to decide whether a political meeting could go ahead, and to license meeting rooms and societies. The royal proclamation against seditious meetings in 1839 again relied on magistrates to shut down popular assemblies. Bound by associational and familial bonds, especially through loyalist and Orange societies, magistrates in the industrialising regions saw it as their mission to protect property and capital against mass collective action, and Paineite ideas of equality and the breaking down of social hierarchy. The loyalist reaction to popular radicalism throughout this period shaped the formation of class identity, and to a certain extent, struggle. The structural changes caused by industrialisation pitted worker against employer, and weakened the responsibilities that patrician elites had towards plebeians. But as E. P. Thompson argued, political culture shaped the parameters in which the different classes understood their identity and relationship to each other. By 1848, governing forces of

312

Region, neighbourhood and place

order had learned by trial and error how to suppress mass collective action through a combination of force and negotiation. The wealthy Whig-­liberal local elites rallied with their old Tory gentry predecessors to protect their property and capital against Chartists, socialists and trade unions. Yet there was no effective possibility of revolution. Most sections of social movements throughout this period sought constitutional change and protection, by government, of their customary rights, not complete destruction of the existing system. Political and social movements critiqued their dispossession from a series of interconnected ideas, structures and spaces. These included the mythical ancient constitution and the right to representation, participation in the civic body politic, and use of common land and public space in towns. In protesting, they defended particular conceptions of place defined by both customary rules and usages, and by its inhabitants, who themselves were defined by trade, gender, religion and ethnicity. They sought to protect workplaces and environments defined by skill and the land, against elite evaluations of both workers and the land solely by their economic worth. They demanded the political representation of communities and individuals defined by the rights of man and a broader conception of the ‘public’ than the existing system confined to the propertied ‘principal inhabitants’. Machine-­breakers, trade unions and reform movements were not reactionary, resisting capitalist progress in a misguided vision of a golden age; rather they sought a different type of progress that valued the representation of the non-­propertied and the rights of workers, with some legislative restrictions on what governing elites and major employers could do. All these defences of place were not solely ‘militant particularism’. A more fluid and relational definition of space describes the networks of social and political movements that developed in early nineteenth-­ century Britain.1 The corresponding societies, United Englishmen, Hampden clubs, political unions and trades combinations were founded through struggles with local elites and contested the right to meet and speak locally as well as nationally. They relied on their attachment to place and community to attract membership. The material experience of industrialisation was varied across the North, but radical and trades movements succeeded in attracting adherents through appeals to their customary rights and combining familiar rituals with the novelty of D. Massey, For Space (London: Sage Publications, 2005), p. 5; D. Featherstone, ‘Towards the relational construction of militant particularisms: or why the geographies of past struggles matter for resistance to neoliberal globalisation’, Antipode, 37:2 (2005).

1



Conclusion313

mass processions and demonstrations.2 Owenite socialists envisaged unity above sectionalism, though they never achieved it in practice. The inward-­looking nature of some political groups was forced upon them by an understandable fear of arrest and of being infiltrated by spies as well as concern about hostile newspaper reporters. Hence movements spread cautiously, with periodic periods of heterotopy followed by contraction, and, for more subversive groups, a structure of cells and tickets to maintain anonymity. The main obstacle to working-­class collective action was loyalist repression of the ability to meet and speak. Government legislation was repressive, but the ways in which it was enacted in practice by magistrates and local elites made the real impact. Political opportunities for mass action opened up in the 1830s with the Whig governments providing a different kind of opposition. The huge rise in population in industrial areas was also a major factor; there were simply more people to organise into mass demonstrations by the 1840s. Historians should not assess the success of social movements or indeed measure class-­ consciousness by the longevity of national organisations.3 As studies of Chartism have shown, radical movements throughout this period were popular because they were locally based and loosely federated rather than homogeneous.4 The goals of parliamentary reform, universal suffrage and workers’ rights were simultaneously national and translated into local circumstances by a diverse range of political and social groups. The two co-­existed and indeed interacted with each other, rather than the local being transmuted to a more generalist national identity or consciousness. They shared similar values and connections pan-­regionally and nationally, with influence from America and France. By the 1840s, radicals, Chartists, Owenite socialists and trade unions had developed a wide panoply of protest tactics and organisations, and refined directly political understandings of and solutions to their grievances, in ways unavailable to their radical predecessors in the 1790s and perhaps even unimaginable to the ‘lower orders’ of the earlier eighteenth century. Whatever the internal divisions J. Belchem, ‘The Waterloo of peace and order: the United Kingdom and the revolutions of 1848’, in D. Dowe, H.-­ G. Haupt, D. Langewiesche and J. Sperber (eds), Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001), p. 248. 3 E. Griffin, ‘The making of the Chartists: popular politics and working-­class autobiography in early Victorian Britain’, EHR, 129:538 (2014), 597–8. 4 P. A. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (London: Macmillan, 1995), p. 54. 2

314

Region, neighbourhood and place

and failures of each movement, we cannot accuse them of want of trying. Class, as E. P. Thompson and Doreen Massey conceptualised, was a continuing process of contestation between different identities, cultures and ideas rather than being a taxonomy strictly defined by economics. This process drew strength from locality and culture rather than obliterating such distinctions as it developed. As Malcolm Chase notes, early Victorian radicalism evinced a particular sense of urgency and opportunity that was shaped by ‘a perception of economic and political exclusion being the consequences of very recent processes, continuing, but not predestined and immutable’.5 Oppositional groups experienced the effects of urbanisation and elite restrictions on collective action, but they realised there was room for negotiation and contestation within those spaces. There was a sense of desperation and fear among many political groups, but they were nonetheless sustained by optimism and utopianism. Owenite socialists and Chartists were motivated as much by a sense that another, fairer, political and social system was possible, as by their reaction to the loyalist and reactionary elites who attempted to deny them the opportunity to try to create it.

M. Chase, The People’s Farm: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775–1840 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), p. 180.

5

Select bibliography

For secondary literature, see the references in the main text. Archival sources Barnsley Archives MF Burland, J. H. Burland, ‘Annals of Barnsley and its environs’, 1744–1864 Bolton Archives FP­/2­/2, minute books of watch and ward, 1808–28 ZBR­/5­/2­/57, petition opposing incorporation, 1838 ZHE­/35–8, Robert Heywood papers and correspondence, 1839–40 ZZ­/130, handbills and papers, 1818–38 ZZ­/530­/2–3, diaries of John Holden, 1803–42 Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, University of York HALIFAX­/A.4, papers of Sir Francis L. Wood, including: 7–9, papers on militia and political meetings in Sheffield, 1817 10, correspondence with Earl Fitzwilliam, 1819–20 British Library, London Add(itional) MS 16923–5, John Reeves papers, 1792–3 Add MS 27835, Francis Place papers, 1799–1842 Add MS 34245A, papers on the Chartist National Convention, 1839 Add MS 54545–7, General Sir Charles James Napier correspondence, 1839 Brotherton Library, University of Leeds Special Collections MS 193­/203–5, Benjamin Gott papers, 1830–1 MS 200­/738, John Marshall papers, August–September 1842 MS 277­/1­/1–36, T. P. Thompson correspondence, 1839 Cheshire Record Office, Chester CJP 9­/1, Congleton constables’ occurrence book, 1839–40 DCB 2114­/138, Congleton jury presentments, 1842

316

Select bibliography

P 154­/8­/6–9, speech of Thomas Chaloner, typescript, n.d. QJF 247, Cheshire quarter sessions, 1819 QPH 1­/1, Hyde sessions minute book, 1837–48 Chetham’s Library, Manchester Cambrics scrapbook of broadsides, 1739–1848 Mun. A.2.79, Manchester Pitt Club minutes and account books, 1812–31 Mun. A.6.45, minutes of the Manchester Association for Preserving Constitutional Order against Levellers and Republicans, 1792–9 Cumbria Record Office, Carlisle Ca 2­/11, Carlisle corporation minute book, 1824 Ca 2­/204–8, petitions and addresses, 1830 Ca 2­/472, Cumberland lieutenancy papers and special sessions, 1830 CQ 2­/8–11, indictment books, 1780–1832 CQ4­/3–4, summary conviction books, 1817–35 D­/HOD 13­/61–150, assizes and sessions papers, 1831–6 D­/LONS­/L1­/2­/131–6, 164, Lord Lowther correspondence, 1812–20, 1826 D­/LONS­/L2­/13, 67, 76, Lord Lowther diaries, 1813–19 D­/MH­/10­/5­/13, rules of Carlisle Pitt Club, 1814 SPC­/44, Dalston select vestry minutes and notices, 1827–40 East Yorkshire Record Office, Beverley DDBC­/6­/3, Beverley quarter sessions, 1821–33 DDHO­/30­/125, Etton Enclosure Act, 1818 LT 9­/67, loyal declarations at Beverley, 1792 QSF, Quarter sessions indictments for trespass and riots, 1782–92 UDD­/SY­/X1­/62­/16, Sykes of Sledmere, notices, 1790 Halifax Local Studies Library Handbills 17–47, 1819–36 L632­/P329, Halifax Constitutional Society pamphlet, 1794 Hull History Centre UDDHO­/8­/2–5, Lord Hotham’s agent letters, 1820–31 UDX­/150­/9, reform posters, 1831 UDX­/150­/22­/1–2, reward notices, 1823–7 John Rylands Library, University of Manchester EGR 4­/2­/3­/1, 6–7, correspondence of the Earl of Stamford and Warrington, 1817–19, 1830–6 Lancashire County Record Office, Preston DDHu 48­/133–73, Hulton MS, correspondence on trade unions, 1830 DDHu 53­/82­/81–5, Bolton notices, 1810–16



Select bibliography317

DDHu 59­/82­/11, papers of Bolton Pitt Club, 1813 DDK 1686, Earl of Derby papers, correspondence, 1842 DDMc 34­/22, Ulverston loyalist association, 1793 DDPr 138­/82, trial of Andrew Ryding, 1823 DDSP 29­/1­/2­/7, Colne statement to the poor law commissioners, 1841 DDX 104­/acc 9666 box 9, Chartist riots correspondence, 1842 DDX 113, Henry Hunt correspondence, 1819 DDX 211­/4, Lord Lilford papers, 1816–31 DDX 227­/2, plan of communications in Manchester, 1842 DDX 351­/1–2, depositions of George Shaw, 1794 DDX 752­/86­/2, Colne Reform Association documents, 1835 DP 282, Bolton handbills, 1818–26 PR, prosecution societies’ records QDV­/4­/69, record book of dissenting meetings, 1818–19 QJC 1, calendars of prisoners, Lancaster Castle, 1801–32 QJD 1, information on riots, 1826–42 QSP 2920­/67, Salford quarter sessions, 1829 Leeds Local Studies SR 920.4 H247, R. B. Harrison, diary, 1848 Manchester Archives and Local Studies BR F 324.942733, John Shuttleworth scrapbook, 1810s–1830s BR FF 942.72 S176, book of broadsides, 1820s–1830s BR MS F 324.473 M5, Manchester representation committee, 1827–8 F1788–1815, broadsides, 1788–1815 M3­/3­/11, Manchester vestry and overseers’ book, 1830–5 M9­/30­/9­/1, reports of Manchester Police Commissioners, 1828 M9­/61­/1­/2, letters on the Coronation procession, 1831 M9­/62­/1­/1, Police Commissioners’ letter book, 1822 M62­/1­/2, Woods of Didsbury ledger, 1791–7 M71­/2, boroughreeve and constables’ orders for civic processions and dinner committees, 1828–37 M91­/30­/7, 9, Police Act committee minutes, 1828 M91­/M1, boroughreeve and constables’ minutes, 1821–38 M116­/2­/4­/3–4, Quarter sessions rolls, 1839–42 M173­/11­/5­/1, Orange lodge no. 8 papers, 1817–31 M219­/1­/1–6, Absalom Watkin papers, 1830–2 M270­/1­/7­/2, J. Phythian’s book, 1832 MF 2615, diary of Ernest Jones, 1841–6 MISC: 53­/Lloyd, letters on 1688 celebrations, 1788 MISC: 333­/1–5, letters by Robert Peel, 1829–30 MISC: 724, Samuel Bamford correspondence, 1847 MS F 363 D1, Hampden club documents, 1816–17 MS F 367 M60, Manchester assembly rooms, papers, 1811–50



Making Moscows, 1839–48301

Manchester and Salford had sixteen Confederate clubs, with a membership of over seven hundred. Liverpool, with an Irish population estimated at 100,000, in particular awoke from its usual political slumber to lead the way, with over a dozen Confederate clubs. Three days of Chartist-­Confederate meetings over St Patrick’s weekend in and around Manchester climaxed in a mass meeting on Oldham Edge, where the crowds swore to set both England and Ireland free. Green repeal flags took pride of place in Chartist processions.81 The battle over Adelaide Street in Bradford was a particularly violent and politically complex incident that underlines the role of contested space and place in the events of 1848. Bradford had the highest proportion of Irish-­born inhabitants in the West Riding, estimated by the poor law union clerk at 20,000, about one-­sixth of the already rapidly increasing population.82 The economic downturn hit the West Riding woollen industry particularly hard, and, unlike in surrounding textile districts, the number of paupers claiming relief in Bradford continued to rise after April 1848. The sudden introduction of woolcombing machinery exacerbated unemployment further. Tensions had already been raised when the Tory magistrates established a permanent barracks to the east of the town in 1841. As we have seen, anti-­new poor law agitation and the plug strikes were particularly fierce in Bradford. The ongoing battle for incorporation was only resolved in 1847, when the middle-­class liberals took control from the Tories on the council. Outwith party politics, the Bradford Chartist Council were strong, unlike their peers in other towns, and decided to organise militantly by forming firm links with the Irish Confederates and by mustering a National Guard.83 Early on Monday morning, 29 May, the police superintendent led a hundred special constables into the Manchester Road area on a mission to arrest two local radical leaders, David Lightfowler and the blacksmith Isaac ‘Wat Tyler’ Jefferson. The area was a warren of courts and alleys, a distinctive locale that was usually inaccessible to the elites, another ‘defensible space’. Saville and Belchem stated that the area was

TNA, TS 11­/​137­/​part II, Liverpool winter assizes, documentary evidence, 9 December 1848; MG, 22 March 1848; J. Belchem, ‘The Waterloo of peace and order: the United Kingdom and the revolutions of 1848’, in D. Dowe, H.-­ G. Haupt, D. Langewiesche and J. Sperber (eds), Europe in 1848: Revolution and Reform (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2001), p. 246. 82 PP 1854–5 (18), House of Commons Select Committee Report into Poor Law Removal, p. 74. 83 Saville, 1848, p. 144. 81



Select bibliography319

PCO 4­/13, rules for the constables under the commissioners of police, 1827 UDR 2­/4­/5­/10­/28–9, Royton vestry minutes, 1827–36 Sheffield Archives ACM­/S­/70, 465–6, Sheffield enclosure papers, 1791–1805 WWM F 44–6, Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, disturbances papers, 1791–1817 Tameside Archives, Ashton-­under-­Lyne DD 8­/5, diagram of bomb sent to William Hegginbottom, 1830 IC­/STA­/13, Stalybridge constables’ log book, 1830–1 L322, broadsides and posters, 1836–42 PCA DUK­/1­/1, Dukinfield select vestry minutes, 1832–40 Wakefield Local Studies 920:TOM, diaries of Matthew Tomlinson, Dog House Farm, Lupset, Wakefield, 1804–39, 11 vols (only vols 5, 9 and 11 survive) Boxes 2231A, 2237, Cryer collection of handbills, 1826–35 West Yorkshire Archive Service (WYAS), Bradford BRA 1839 PEA, plan of Bradford Moor to be converted into barracks, 1839 DB 3­/C4­/1­/1, Reuben Holder broadsheets, 1830s DB 3­/C38–9, letters on the woolcombers’ strike, 1825–6 DB 4­/C1­/3, minute book, Bradford Operative Conservative Society, 1837 DB 16­/C32, John Clark notebooks, ‘History and annals of Bradford’, n.d. DB 27­/C1, Balme papers on the Ten Hours Bill, 1835–50 SpSt 3­/26, Spencer-­Stanhope MS, letters on Barnsley riots, 1829 SpSt 11­/5­/6, tracts and broadsides, 1792–1803 WYAS, Calderdale, Halifax FLD 986, Fielden collection of newscuttings, 1838 FLD 998, Todmorden valley millowners’ minute book, 1803–46 HAS B­/2­/2­/7–2­/4­/9, Halifax town meetings and improvement act, 1832–40 HAS 624­/2, Halifax prosecution society, 1821 HAS 768, Skircoat prosecution society, 1811 HXM 36–7, Halifax trustee minutes, 1780–1822 HXT 511, Skircoat township vestry book, 1835–94 RMP 1060, diaries of Elizabeth Wadsworth, 1761–1814 SH 7­/ML­/669–997, Anne Lister correspondence, 1833–37 STA 185, Stansfield papers, pamphlet, ‘Unlawful Riotous Meetings, 10 April 1848: Provisions of the Law’ (Halifax, 1848) STN 64–286, volume of notices, 1810–32 STN 378–9, resolutions of meeting on income and property tax, 1815 SU 384, rules of Midgley prosecution society, 1838 TOD 1­/1, Todmorden resolution book, 1801–36

320

Select bibliography

WYAS, Kirklees, Huddersfield DD HF­ /Z­ /1–3, Horsfall papers, notes on trial regarding William Horsfall, 1813 DD HF­/Z­/11, broadside on Queen Caroline, 1820 KC 120­/1, Liversedge vestry minutes, 1819–24 KC 165­/291–2, Marsden prosecution society, 1816 KC 174­/box 5­/8, Tomlinson collection, broadsides and handbills, 1808–19 KMA 924–9, Hartshead Enclosure Act documents, 1821–40 KMA 1531–8, Kirklees Hall, Armytage papers, 1807–34 WYAS, Leeds WYL 22, Richard Oastler correspondence, 1832–43 WYL 250­/6­/2­/boxes 1–2, Harewood papers, West Riding lieutenancy disturbances correspondence, 1812–39 WYL 383­/49­/1–8, Edward Baines correspondence, 1826 WYAS, Wakefield A105, Horbury enclosure map, 1809 QD 1­/231, special general sessions, Huddersfield, 1812 QD 5­/9­/4, Wakefield enclosure act, 1793 QS 1­/139–174, West Riding quarter sessions papers, 1800–39 QS 7­/1–5, calendar of prisoners, 1819–39 Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Leeds MD 335, Bradfer-­Lawrence MS, including: ­/1­/8­/4­/48, Lister papers, 1808 ­/1­/8­/4­/54, Ribblesdale papers, 1812 MD 401­/1–31, Horbury constables papers, 1812 Printed primary sources An Account of the Trial of Andrew Ryding on a Charge of Attempting to Commit Murder on S. Horrocks Esq MP in Preston, Sunday 27th July 1823(Preston, 1823) A Correct Report of the Proceedings on the Trial of Thirty-­ Eight Men (Manchester, 1812) Bentham, J., The King against Sir Charles Wolseley and Mr Joseph Harrison, Schoolmaster, Sent Down for Trial at Chester (London, 1820) Bridge Street Banditti: Report of the Trial of Mary Anne Carlile for Publishing Richard Carlile’s A New Year Address to the Reformers of Great Britain (London, 1821) Hunt, H., To the Radical Reformers, Male and Female, of England, Ireland and Scotland (London, 1820) Knight, J., Important Extracts from Original and Recent Letters Written by Englishmen in the United States of America (Manchester, 1818)



Select bibliography321

Kydd, S., History of the Factory Movement from the Year 1802 to the Enactment of the Ten Hours Bill, 1847, 2 vols (London, 1857) Neale, W. B., Juvenile Delinquency in Manchester (Manchester, 1840) Oastler, R., West Riding Nomination Riot: a Letter to Viscount Morpeth MP (London, 1837) Papers Relative to the Internal State of the Country, Presented to Both Houses of Parliament (London, 1819) Proceedings at Large on the Trial of John Horne Tooke for High Treason, 2 vols (London, 1795) The Proceedings of the Public Meeting held on Crooke’s Moor at Sheffield (Sheffield, 1795) The Trial of Feargus O’Connor Esq and Fifty-­ Eight Others at Lancaster (Manchester, 1843) The Trial of Henry Hunt Esq, John Knight, Joseph Johnson and others for conspiracy (London, 1820) Walker, T., A Review of Some of the Political Events Which Have Occurred in Manchester During the Last Five Years (Manchester, 1794) Autobiographies and edited papers Acland, J., The Hull Portfolio: or Memoirs and Correspondence of James Acland, 4 vols (Hull, 1831–2) Bell, A. and Eadon Leader, R. (eds), Peeps into the Past, Being Passages from the Diary of Thomas Asline Ward (Sheffield, 1909) Cartwright, F. D. (ed.), The Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright, 2 vols (London, 1826) Crowther, J. E. and Crowther, P. A. (eds), The Diary of Robert Sharp of South Cave: Life in a Yorkshire Village, 1812–1837(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) Goffin, M. (ed.), The Diaries of Absalom Watkin: A Manchester Man, 1787– 1861 (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1993) Hicks, J. D. (ed.), The Journal of Joseph Robinson Pease, 1822–1865(Hull: East Yorkshire Local History Society, 2000) Journal of the Life, Labours, and Travels of Thomas Shillitoe, 2 vols (London, 1839) Napier, W. (ed.), Life and Opinions of General Sir Charles James Napier, 4 vols (London, 1857) Prentice, A., Historical Sketches and Personal Recollections of Manchester (Manchester, 1851) Wilson, J. (ed.), The Songs of Joseph Mather (Sheffield, 1862) Editions of primary sources Aspinall, A. (ed.), The Early English Trade Unions: Documents from the Home Office Papers in the Public Record Office (London: Batchworth Press, 1949)

322

Select bibliography

Aspinall, A. (ed.), English Historical Documents, 1783–1832 (Oxford: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1959) Carter, P. (ed.), Bradford Poor Law Union: Papers and Correspondence with the Poor Law Commission, October 1834–January 1839 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2004) Thale, M. (ed.), Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society, 1792–1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) Vincent, D. (ed.), Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working Class Politicians, 1790–1885 (London: Europa, 1977) Parliamentary Papers (PP) PP 1794 (31), Second Report from the Committee of Secrecy, 6 June 1794 PP 1825 (417), Select Committee Report on the Combination Laws PP 1831–2 (36), Parliamentary Representation: Returns of Voters Polled and Numbers of Freemen PP 1833 (15), Select Committee Report on Public Walks PP 1840 (23), Report of the Commission on Handloom Weaving Poor Law Commission, Local Reports on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population (London, 1842) Newspapers Bolton Chronicle Bradford Observer Carlisle Journal Carlisle Patriot Chester Chronicle Cowdroy’s Manchester Gazette Cumberland Pacquet Huddersfield and Halifax Express Hull Advertiser Leeds Intelligencer Leeds Mercury Manchester Chronicle Manchester Guardian Manchester Mercury Manchester Observer Manchester Times Manchester and Salford Advertiser Northern Star Poor Man’s Guardian Voice of the West Riding Westmorland Gazette



Select bibliography323

York Courant Yorkshire Gazette Digitised sources (accessed 30 November 2014) Bamford, S., Early Days and Passages in the Life of a Radical (London, 1849), http:­/­/gerald-­massey.org.uk­/bamford­/b_​radical_​index.htm British Library Nineteenth Century Newspapers, http:­/­/gale.cengage.co.uk British Parliamentary Papers, http:­/­/parlipapers.chadwyck.com Dale, J., ‘A brief synopsis of the Irish in the St George sub-­registration districts’, www.rootsweb.ancestry.com­/~irlmayo2­/manchester_​irish_​census_​stgeorge_​ 16–29_​1841.html Find My Past, (MALS) M9­/40­/2, Manchester ratebooks, 1816–39; parish registers; (TNA) HO 107­/574­/8, censuses of England and Wales, 1841–51, www. findmypast.co.uk. Gales family papers, ‘Recollections’, 1831–3, University of North Carolina, Digital Southern Historical Collection, 02652-­ z, www2.lib.unc.edu­/mss­/ inv­/g­/Gales_​Family.html Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, http:­/­/hansard.millbanksystems.com History of Parliament Online, www.historyofparliamentonline.org Newman, I., Pubs of Manchester blog, http:­/­/pubs-­of-­manchester.blogspot.co.uk

Index

Acland, James 122–3 agency xii, 5, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 115–16, 204, 275, 285 Aitken, William 309 America 25, 37, 48, 49, 50, 57, 247, 255, 303, 305, 306–9, 313 Anti-Corn Law League 13, 123, 168, 172, 211, 249, 254 Ashton-under-Lyne 42, 63, 78, 80, 103, 104, 106, 143–4, 151, 158, 162, 193–4, 196, 209, 234, 283, 290, 291–2, 304, 309 assembly rooms 2, 23, 24, 32, 33 Australia 310

Bradford 10, 23, 29, 33, 55, 65, 106, 135, 136, 138–9, 157, 160, 161, 175, 191, 194, 199, 200, 214, 215, 226, 239, 248, 254, 282, 283, 286–7, 291, 294, 301–3, 307 Adelaide Street riots (1848) 301–3 Bristol 9 Brougham, Henry 57, 64, 91, 95–6 Burnley 128, 135, 144, 204, 249, 280, 294 Bury 35, 42, 233, 236, 290 Bussey, Peter 254, 283, 307 Butterworth, Edwin 143, 162, 216, 230, 261

Bacup 249, 294 Bagguley, John 68, 74 Bamford, Samuel 35, 46, 62, 63, 64, 69, 73, 77, 90, 96, 98, 227, 228, 229, 230 Bancroft, Reverend Thomas 38 Barnsley 66, 72, 80, 81, 92, 94, 104, 200, 230, 237, 239, 240, 280–1, 283, 307 Barrell, John 25, 32 Beverley 23, 30, 55, 167, 253, 256, 268, 270, 272 Birmingham 39, 121, 306 Blackburn 61, 77–8, 79, 80, 194, 196, 203, 271 Blackstone Edge 223–4, 240–2, 244, 245, 300 Bolton 23, 36, 37, 38, 55, 58, 60, 63, 70, 71, 73, 86, 92, 102, 103, 104, 123, 143, 157, 161, 169, 170, 196, 228, 235, 283, 285–6, 288–9, 304, 306, 309 Bolton Reformers’ Club 58–60

camp meetings, religious 13, 62, 236 see also Chartism, Chartists, camp meetings; Methodism Carlile, Richard 74, 113, 122, 192, 195, 197, 206, 213, 283 Carlisle 23, 36, 44, 62, 65–6, 90–2, 94, 95–6, 104, 106, 128, 132, 148, 151, 154, 162–3, 170, 171–2, 173, 206–7, 212, 229, 239, 246, 255, 270–1, 291 Caldewgate 62, 66, 90, 106, 128, 271, 291 Cartwright, Major John 57–8, 68, 81 Catherall, Peggy 212 Chadderton 43, 82 chapels 23, 31, 37, 39, 62–3, 74, 80, 92, 190–6, 197, 202, 206, 216, 230, 307 Chartism, Chartists camp meetings 4, 224–5, 236–8, 242, 247 Land Plan, Chartist Co-Operative



Index325

Land Company 13, 114, 115, 224, 247–50, 255, 309 municipal 154–76, 247 National Convention 115–16, 173, 199, 208, 212, 215, 236, 238, 239, 252, 278, 290 National Petition 1, 154, 238, 252, 255, 282 principles 1–2, 107, 115, 159, 175–6, 190, 206, 247, 252–6, 278, 313–14 see also mass meetings; protest tactics; radicalism; social movements Chase, Malcolm 11, 84, 99, 101, 172, 209, 214, 247, 274, 297, 314 Chester 27–8, 43, 44, 94, 96, 259 cholera 108, 132–5, 186–7, 192 Chorley 121, 233 churches 1, 4, 5, 23, 38, 42, 55, 92, 125–6, 156–8, 177, 178, 180, 182, 184, 186, 190, 196, 198, 224, 261, 281–5 class 105, 111, 123–4, 128, 133, 145, 149, 175–6, 182, 186–7, 204, 223, 224, 251, 270–1, 275, 282, 289, 303–5, 314 Clitheroe 233, 249, 258, cloth halls 184–5 Cobbett, William 61, 64, 79, 99, 162, 173, 270, 281 coffee houses 7, 25, 32, 40, 78, 204 Colne 128, 135, 142, 144–5, 249, 286 Confederates (Irish) 109, 114, 240, 254, 300–4 Congleton 23, 208, 297, 298 Cooper, Thomas 28, 306, 307 court houses 23, 33, 70, 136–7, 138, 154, 184, 286, 302–3 Crewe 205 Curwen, John Christian 91, 95 custom rights xiii, 8, 11, 13, 16–19, 150, 152, 155, 160, 168, 224, 252, 257–61, 264–5, 269, 312 traditions and rituals 16–19, 36, 90–2, 98–9, 131, 144, 145, 148, 152, 177, 224, 234, 264, 276 Denison, Robert 257 Dewsbury 81, 92, 141, 233, 239, 240 Doherty, John 149, 192

Doncaster 267–8 Dukinfield 158, 203 edgelands 59–60, 65–6, 74, 88, 189, 291 Edinburgh 30, 45, 64, 133 elections general 20, 55, 64, 95, 102, 155, 161, 172–4, 206, 234, 263 local 4, 154, 155, 161, 168–70 emigration 49, 249, 255, 306–10 enclosure 17, 53, 224–6, 244–5, 262, 263, 269, 272 see also social movements, antienclosure Epstein, James 7, 14, 25, 34, 79, 92, 99, 234 Etton 268, 269, 272 Failsworth 36, 67, 188, 209 Featherstone, David 18, 29, 305 Fielden, John 139, 160, 161, 162, 173, 195, 202 fields 5, 52, 66, 80, 208, 236–47, 259–60, 269, 291–3 Fitzwilliam, Earl 96, 237 Fletcher, Colonel Ralph 38, 58, 71 footpaths 66, 143–4, 148, 225–8, 242, 247, 261 France 2, 24, 25, 40, 51, 56, 140, 265, 270, 273, 305, 308, 309–10, 313 Frost, John 25 Gales, Joseph 24, 28, 41–2, 47–8, 50, 306, 308 Gales, Winifred 24, 42, 48–9, 75, 308 Gaskell, Daniel 266 George IV 101, 178, 182, 187, 188 Gisburn 128 Griffin, Carl 12, 18, 131, 251–2, 256–7, 262 Griffin, Emma 115, 204, 219 guild halls 23, 51, 54, 90 Habermas, Jurgen 7, 8 Halifax 23, 29, 33, 54, 55, 87–8, 89, 92, 139, 169, 174, 175, 191, 195, 200, 203, 213, 239, 242, 243, 244, 267, 288, 294–7, 299 halls of science 189, 195, 200–5, 209, 215, 217–18, 300 Hanson, Abraham 214

326

Index

Hanson, Elizabeth 214 Hanson, Joseph Broom 171, 173, 294 Harrison, Reverend Joseph 72, 74, 77, 96–7, 100 Haslingden 92 Hay, Reverend William 85, 111 Heckmondwike 65, 189 Hetherington, Henry 216 Heywood 196, 234, 245, 289 Heywood, Abel 122, 165, 203 Hobsbawm, Eric and George Rude, Captain Swing (1969) 12, 251 Hobson, Joshua 1–4, 16, 18, 122, 123, 138, 164, 169, 171 Holberry, Mary 213 Holberry, Samuel 198, 213, 255, 277 Home Office 20, 38, 41, 48, 49, 61, 74, 86, 89, 93, 100, 111, 112, 147, 191, 196, 199, 233, 236, 271, 279–80, 285, 287, 288, 298 see also informers, spies; Sidmouth, Lord Hotham, Lord 271–2 Huddersfield 4, 29, 54, 80, 92, 101, 106, 122, 136–8, 141, 160, 175, 193, 195, 196, 199, 200, 202, 209, 215, 218, 229, 230, 233, 239, 240, 242, 246, 267, 308–9 Almondbury 80, 106, 122, 239, 242, 246 Hull xiv, 23, 48, 51, 54, 63, 72–3, 80, 122–3, 160, 206, 213, 216, 239, 253–4, 255 Hunt, Henry 46, 64, 67, 78, 80, 81, 82–6, 92, 93, 96, 99, 100, 104, 113, 121, 133, 157, 180, 192, 210, 214, 229, 234, 299 Hyde 196, 203, 209, 218, 236, 289, 291, 304 improvement, urban xi-xii, 2–4, 44, 64, 65, 142, 145, 148, 163, 164–5, 176, 178, 182, 184, 285, 286 informers and spies 7, 35, 45, 49, 50, 61, 69, 108, 150, 228, 236, 246, 271, 304, 311, 313 Ingham, William 139–40 Ingold, Tim 16, 264 Irish immigrants 50, 67, 71, 107–9, 111, 113, 114–15, 134, 140, 151,

209, 240, 254, 292, 299, 300–2, 303–4, 309 see also Confederates (Irish); United Irishmen Ironside, Isaac 166, 169–70, 299–300 itinerant lecturers 57, 62, 89, 101, 199, 225, 233–4, 242, 250, 253, 255, 298 Jackson, John 1–2, 169 Jones, Ernest 174, 223–4, 304 Jones, Peter 152, 270 Keighley 136, 195 Kendal 50, 94, 95, 162, 252, 263 Knaresborough 23, 103 Knight, John 57, 58–60, 69, 73, 89, 96, 307 Lancaster 23, 45, 94, 96, 112, 128, 142 Leeds 1–4, 18, 23, 29–30, 48, 49–50, 54, 72, 80–1, 88–9, 92, 102–3, 104, 123, 128, 132, 142, 148, 163, 164, 165, 169, 170, 171, 175, 182–7, 200, 206, 207–8, 224, 231, 232, 233, 235, 239, 257, 268, 280 Free Market, Kirkgate 1–4 Park Row 184–5, 186, 280 Leeds Society for Constitutional Information 29 Lefebvre, Henri 14, 15 legislation Act Against Tumultuous Petitioning (1661) 68 Anatomy Act (1832) 133–4, 152 Combination acts (1799–1800) 6, 56, 57, 58, 149, 151, 217 General Inclosure Act (1845) 226, 258 Master and Servant Act (1823) 134, 149, 281 Municipal Corporations Act (1835) 3, 130, 155, 168, 169, 171 Poor Law Amendment Act (the new poor law) (1834) xiii, 130, 134, 135–41, 152, 156, 159–63, 195, 217, 248 Reform Act (1832) 121–9, 130, 132, 156, 160, 168, 171, 174, 178, 192, 213, 271 Riot Act (1714) 53, 55, 70, 83, 137–8, 148, 261, 295



Index327

royal proclamation against nocturnal meetings (1838) 6, 235–6 royal proclamation against seditious meetings (1839) 6, 279–80, 311 royal proclamation against seditious writings (1792) 24 Rural Constabulary Act (1839) 130, 141–4, 166–7 Seditious Meetings Act (1795) 6, 45, 53–6, 80 Seditious Meetings Act (1817) 69–70, 71–2, 75, 80 ‘Six Acts’ (1819) 6, 19, 84, 96, 97–100, 101, 105, 123, 230, 311 Stopping Up of Unnecessary Roads Act (1815) 225 Sturges Bourne Parish Vestries Act (1818) 156–7, 163, 165 Unlawful Societies act (1799) 56 Vagrancy Act (1824) 145 Leigh 63, 78, 196, 228, 236, 239 Lister, Anne 87–8 Liverpool xiv, 29, 31, 47, 63, 64, 65, 69, 71, 93, 114, 132, 151, 186, 196, 200, 203, 254, 301, 303, 306 Liverpool, Lord 6, 59, 69, 70, 80, 88, 121 Liversedge 189 Lloyd, John 74–5, 100 locales 20, 90, 102, 106–17, 145, 160, 193, 301 London 6, 7, 14, 18, 24, 25, 28, 30, 31, 34, 43, 45, 47, 48, 53, 54, 58, 63, 64, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 78, 99, 101, 108, 111, 135, 145, 192, 194, 213, 227, 236, 267, 299, 305 London Corresponding Society 28, 29–30, 31, 32, 45, 47, 53, 56, 305 Lowther, Lord, Earl of Lonsdale 85, 94, 95, 252, 263, 271 loyalism 69–71, 93–6, 311 addresses 23–4, 26–7, 44–5, 70, 94, 95, 256 associations 24, 26–7, 31, 33–4, 39–45, 55, 70–1, 280, 311 principles 24, 35–7, 45–6, 50, 70–1, 311 see also Orange lodges, Orangemen; Pitt clubs Luddites, Luddism xiii, 12, 41, 57, 104, 136, 149–50, 229, 247, 262, 264–6, 272–5, 285, 309, 310

Macclesfield 23, 37, 68, 81, 196, 200, 241 magistrates xi, 6–7, 13, 23, 26, 27, 28, 33, 38, 41, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49–50, 51, 53–4, 61, 68, 70–1, 80, 82, 82–7, 88, 93, 97, 103, 127, 128, 137, 138, 143, 145–6, 147–8, 157, 160, 162, 164, 166, 168, 186, 200, 216, 224, 236, 246, 279, 281, 287–9, 292–3, 298, 301, 302–3, 304–5, 311, 313 Malton 167, 168, 254, 255, 256, 261 Manchester xi-xii, xiv, 28–30, 31, 37–43, 46–7, 55–7, 60–1, 66–73, 75–8, 82–7, 100, 107–17, 123–8, 133, 140, 142, 144, 145–7, 156–7, 164–6, 168–9, 173, 178–82, 186–8, 191–3, 196–7, 201–3, 206, 208, 210–11, 217, 227–8, 241, 243, 288, 290, 292–4, 300–1, and passim Ancoats 57, 60, 68, 100, 107–17, 140, 145, 180, 192, 231, 292, 300 Bull’s Head Inn 38–42, 46, 55–6 Camp Field 55, 124–6, 201–2, 215 Carpenters’ Hall 115, 196, 197, 214, 290, 300 Collegiate Church 38, 42, 56, 178, 180, 186, 282 Cropper Street 111–14 Free Trade Hall 193, 201–2, 211–12 George Leigh Street 60, 73, 78, 100, 104 St Ann’s Square 38–9, 43, 109, 178, 180 St George’s Fields 67, 107, 109, 113, 127, 180, 206 St Peter’s Fields xi, 61, 66–8, 82–4, 87–9, 100, 111, 112, 126, 157, 180, 193, 197, 211, 282, 284 see also Peterloo Massacre (1819) Stevenson Square 180, 292, 300 Manchester Constitutional Society 28–9, 39–40, 43, 55, 125 Manchester Guardian 123, 228 Manchester Observer 46, 62, 73, 82, 89, 99, 102, 104, 157 March of the Blanketeers (1817) 67–9, 77, 111–12, 114, 115, 124, 228, 231

328

Index

marketplaces 1–4, 16, 33, 36, 38, 41, 65, 78, 95, 128, 139, 152, 164, 171, 182, 194, 206, 283, 291 Martin, Emma 216 mass meetings, mass platform 5, 47, 52–4, 61, 65–7, 69, 80–1, 85–6, 88–91, 96–7, 104, 111, 125–7, 161, 180, 182, 186, 208, 219, 223–4, 228, 231, 235, 237–47, 250, 255, 280, 298, 299–301, 304 see also Chartism, Chartists, camp meetings; protest tactics Massey, Doreen xiii, 18–19, 275, 314 Mather, Ruth 79, 101, 103 mechanics’ institutes 136, 190, 202, 205, 208, 217, 218, 219 Methodism Independent 191 New Connexion 62, 191, 194, 197, 236 Primitive 191, 195, 209, 236, 238 Unitarian 62 Wesleyan 13, 62, 72, 77, 91, 92, 173, 190–1, 192, 193, 195, 209, 225, 233, 236 see also chapels; Chartism, Chartists, camp meetings Middleton 35, 42, 62, 63, 64, 73, 82, 142, 162, 190, 196, 229 militant particularism 18, 81, 305, 312 military forces 39, 74, 83, 86, 127–8, 134, 137, 138, 140, 147, 148, 168, 172, 177, 180, 230, 235–6, 239, 246, 247, 278, 279, 285–9, 290, 291–7, 299, 302–4 Mitchell, Joseph 71, 89 Montgomery, James 48, 49 moors 53, 77, 80, 88–90, 93, 94, 150, 182, 184–6, 211, 223–47, 250, 257–8, 259–61, 267, 271, 285, 294 Hunslet 80, 88, 90, 185, 186, 224, 235, 239, 245 Kersal 182, 186, 211, 224, 227–8, 234, 239–41, 242–6 Peep Green, Hartshead 137, 208, 239, 240–3 Skircoat 88–9, 239, 244, 245, 294, 295 Mottram 196

Nadin, Joseph 57, 83, 85 Napier, General Charles James 144, 277, 279, 287–8 New Moral World newspaper 4, 209 new poor law see legislation, Poor Law Amendment Act (1834) North Riding of Yorkshire xiv, 27, 54, 103, 151, 167–8, 174, 255, 262, 267, 271 Northallerton 167, 254–5, 256 Northern Star newspaper 4, 170, 190, 192, 200, 205, 210, 239, 294, 298, 309 see also O’Connor, Feargus Oastler, Richard 137–8, 160, 161, 195, 226, 232 O’Connor, Feargus 171, 173, 192, 195, 198, 199, 200, 210, 211, 212, 213, 232, 234–6, 245, 247–9, 254, 297, 300, 304, 309 Oddfellows 98, 200, 214, 215, 249 Oldham 7, 10, 33–4, 36, 42–3, 46, 55, 61, 62, 66, 67, 73, 75, 78, 80, 82, 99, 100, 103, 135, 143, 161–2, 172, 173, 175, 188, 191, 194, 194–5, 196, 197–8, 199, 204, 209–10, 216, 217–18, 231, 235, 236, 238, 245, 247, 248, 261, 286, 291, 294, 301 Orange lodges, Orangemen 27, 34, 38, 70–1, 74, 85, 87, 98, 114, 254, 311 Otley 92 Overend, Wilson 134–5 Owen, Robert 4, 202, 203, 204, 205 see also socialists, Owenite Paine, Thomas 5, 36, 41, 42, 70, 99, 103, 128, 210 Rights of Man 24, 39, 41 see also radicalism, Paineite Parolin, Christina 6, 7, 14, 213 patriotism 24, 27, 34, 36, 39, 50, 56–7, 66, 178, 182, 184, 187–8, 210, 282–3 Peterloo Massacre (1819) xi, xii, xiii–xiv, 6, 11, 19, 34, 46, 51, 70, 78, 82–97, 100–1, 103–5, 112, 113, 114, 124, 125, 126, 127, 133, 147, 156, 162, 180, 187, 191, 192, 193, 208, 211, 225, 228, 229, 231, 239, 247, 277, 284, 299



Index329

see also Manchester, St Peter’s Fields petitions 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 11, 26, 28, 32, 33, 51, 54–7, 67–9, 71, 80–1, 87, 98, 113, 123, 124, 128, 132, 154, 167, 190, 212, 238, 248, 252, 255, 259, 277, 282, 298, 303, 304 Pitkethly, Lawrence 137, 232, 246, 309 Pitt clubs 27, 33, 70–1, 87 Pitt the Younger, William 6, 25, 39, 47, 50, 51, 53, 54, 80 place xii-xiii, 224, 227, 237–8, 243, 248, 249–50, 257, 264–5, 273–4, 274–6, 278, 305, 312 custom and 8, 224, 257–61, 264–5, 269, 274 plug strikes (1842) 114, 142, 150, 168, 192, 194, 198, 237, 238, 239, 244, 289–98, 301 Pocklington 103, 256–7 policing xii, 27, 46, 64, 85–6, 93, 104, 107, 127–8, 134, 140–8, 152, 156, 164–9, 216, 240, 246, 278–89, 292–4, 299, 301–4 see also legislation, Rural Constabulary Act (1839) Poole, Robert xi, 11, 46, 84, 85, 86 Poole, Steve 9, 12, 275 poor, paupers 17, 130, 132–6, 140, 145, 152, 255, 266–7, 301, 309 see also legislation, Poor Law Amendment Act (1834); social movements, anti-new poor law post-structuralism 4–5 Potter, Richard 123, 127, 165, 225 Power, Alfred 136, 163 Prentice, Archibald 41, 43, 46, 69, 87, 124, 156, 167, 169, 225, 228 Preston 103, 104, 121, 133, 180, 196, 233, 234, 239, 249, 293 processions 14, 23, 24, 27, 36, 52, 82, 90–3, 98–100, 114, 130–1, 177–88, 203, 224, 228, 232, 234–6, 238–9, 242–7, 250, 282, 284–5, 291–2, 294–5, 301, 313 torchlight 234–6 protest tactics 5, 13, 16, 26, 92, 130–1, 228–9, 231–2, 238–9, 249–50, 259–60, 265, 272–6, 277–8, 282–3, 290–1, 298–9, 312–13 animal and tree-maiming 262–4, 274

arson 12, 128, 215, 262, 265–9, 271–3, 275, 276, 304 barricades 138, 278, 291, 297, 298–9, 304, 305 drilling 79, 93, 97, 99, 150, 229–31, 250, 260, 265, 274, 279–81, 299, 304 effigy burnings 36–8, 41, 103, 128, 131–2, 137, 209, 262, 270 guerrilla 285–6 loitering 145–8 marching, parading 5, 77, 90, 92, 98, 102, 103, 128, 133, 146–8, 151–2, 185, 230, 291–2, 294 ‘march on the churches’ 92–3, 282–5 occupations 281–5, 305 threatening letters 131, 264–6, 267, 270, 272, 274–6 violence 10, 37–8, 41, 45, 50, 86, 93–4, 130–1, 132–48, 149–52, 263, 289, 291, 297, 298, 304 see also Chartism, Chartists; Luddites, Luddism; mass meetings; processions; riots; social movements; Swing riots; trade unions, strikes public sphere 6–7, 8, 25, 28, 32, 78, 79, 238 pubs 5, 31–5, 41–4, 61, 78, 99, 109, 111, 199, 213–14, 263, 288 ‘Queen Caroline affair’ (1820) 101–4 radicalism Paineite 5, 50, 124, 165–6, 307, 308, 311 principles 2, 8–9, 113, 124, 158–9, 165–6, 205–6, 307, 311–12 revolutionary 10, 50, 59, 68, 84, 98–9, 101, 127, 244, 278–9, 298, 300 ‘risings’ 41, 56, 71–2, 93–4, 97, 101–2, 128, 136, 141, 188, 191, 198, 213, 230, 278, 279, 298, 304 ‘war of the unstamped’ 4, 8, 98, 122–3 see also Chartism, Chartists; March of the Blanketeers (1817); Peterloo Massacre (1819); ‘Queen Caroline affair’ (1820); societies; women, radical

330

Index

Redhead Yorke, Henry 47–8, 49, 174 Reeves, John 24, 27, 44 revolutions, American 4 French (1789–1815) 4, 5, 27, 30, 35, 40, 47, 50, 108, 256, 309 French (1830) 121 French (1848) 240, 300, 304 Ribblesdale, Lord 128 Richardson, R. J. 124, 126, 166, 192, 197, 208, 235, 236 Richmond 103, 104, 167, 254, 256, 267 riots 10, 11, 15, 18, 39, 45, 52, 53, 72, 86, 90, 97, 99, 113, 121, 127–8, 131–5, 136–44, 148, 150, 152, 157, 205, 225, 234, 251, 261, 263–4, 265, 271, 272, 274, 279, 286–9, 293, 299, 305, 310 see also legislation, Riot Act (1714); protest; social movements, antinew poor law; Swing riots Ripon 23 Roberts, Samuel 134 Robertson, Iain 16, 264, 269 Rochdale 23, 41, 62, 66, 78, 80, 104, 107, 135, 157, 161, 162, 172, 174, 175, 196, 223, 233, 237, 242, 249, 294 Roscoe, William 31 Rowbottom, William 55, 66, 100 Royton 35, 43, 55, 63, 78, 99, 104, 106, 162, 204, 261 Saddleworth 23, 54, 77, 233, 245, 259 Salford 23, 37, 39, 41, 42, 70, 85, 87, 97, 103, 109, 111, 115, 124, 164, 166, 175, 178, 182, 187, 196, 216, 231, 280, 301 Salterhebble 296–7 Scarborough 103, 253, 255, 267 Scholefield, Dr James 191–2 schoolrooms 60, 73–4, 80, 100, 189, 191, 192, 205, 209–10, 214, 216, 236 Scotland 16, 195, 202 Scott, James C. 12, 260 seditious meetings acts see legislation Sewell, William 15, 59 Sheffield 23, 28, 30–2, 36, 41–2, 47–9, 52, 64, 75, 94, 96, 99, 134, 166, 169–70, 174, 187, 196, 198–9,

200, 213, 215, 217, 218, 226, 229, 237, 239, 255, 267, 277, 283–5, 299–300, 306 Fig Tree Lane rooms 198, 218, 285 Freemasons’ Hall 31–2, 299 Paradise Square 31, 64, 198–9, 284–5, 299 Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information 28–9, 30–2, 41–2, 47, 49, 53 Shepherd, William 31, 64 Shuttleworth, John 57, 126, 165, 225 Sidmouth, Lord 69, 78, 85, 86, 96, 146 Skelton, Hannah 256–7 social institutions 196–7, 199, 203 social movements xi-xiii, 26, 59, 89–90, 272–3, 275, 285, 298–9 anti-church rate 156–8 anti-enclosure xiii, 13, 16, 17, 53, 240, 256–61, 263, 265, 269, 272, 274, 275 anti-new poor law xiii, 20, 124, 135–41, 154, 158, 159–63, 166, 173, 188, 193–4, 195, 197, 202, 204–5, 212, 214, 254, 286, 291, 301 anti-slavery 13, 28, 39, 113, 134, 172, 212, 309 see also Chartists, Chartism; protest tactics; radicalism; socialists, Owenite; societies; trade unions socialists, Owenite 20, 73, 122, 172, 189, 195–7, 199, 202, 203–9, 212, 215, 216, 218, 236, 308, 313–14 societies 27–32, 47–50, 58–66, 80, 100, 104, 123–4, 312 co-operative 205–6, 215, 248 female 75–9, 88–9, 198, 212–15 Hampden clubs 58–9, 61–3, 64, 69, 100, 104–5, 312 operative conservative 34, 160, 164, 188, 219, 249, 254 political unions 72, 91, 113, 121–6, 156, 182, 192, 199, 270, 271, 312 preservation of footpaths 225–8, 261 short time committees 122, 135, 136, 154 working men’s associations 154, 252, 253, 280



Index331

Soja, Edward 14, 15, 16 space 13–16, 18–19, 102–3, 117, 226, 228–9, 240, 282–5, 301, 305, 311–12 privatisation of xi-xii, 5–6, 16, 25–6, 133–5, 148, 198, 224–8, 237, 240, 274–6, 283–5, 311–12 see also enclosure public xi-xii, 1–3, 16, 25, 124, 133–5, 148, 171, 284–5, 299–300, 311 spatial turn xii, 14 special constables 41, 46, 64, 70, 86, 127–8, 140, 143, 144, 172, 240, 270, 273, 289, 291, 293, 294, 299, 301–4 see also policing squares xi, xii, 2, 3, 5, 15, 16, 31, 38–9, 43, 52, 64, 66, 71, 84, 102, 109, 114–15, 140, 144, 178, 180, 184, 198, 199, 284–5, 292, 299–300 St Helens 23, 43, 44, 45 Stalybridge 171, 193, 205, 234, 290, 291 Stamford and Warrington, Earl of 158, 259–60 Stockport 29, 30, 42, 55, 63, 68, 72–3, 74, 77, 78, 79, 80, 85, 96–7, 100, 104, 122, 147, 196, 200, 203, 206, 218, 234, 235, 241, 245, 277, 280, 282, 290, 291, 300 Sandy Brow 85, 96 Swedenborgians 60, 191, 197, 253 Swing riots xiii, 12, 121, 127, 128, 131–2, 134, 150, 152, 234, 251–2, 263–76, 310

75, 82, 85, 87, 101, 127, 137, 138, 155, 156, 157–8, 161, 163–4, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 182, 226, 279, 301, 303, 305, 312 town halls 3, 23, 124, 126, 166, 168, 171–2, 177, 178, 182, 197–8, 283, 288–9, 293 trade unions xiii, 5, 6, 56, 59, 66, 67, 79, 98, 104, 124, 125, 129, 132, 134, 141, 143, 146–52, 166, 181, 184, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 193, 197, 198, 202, 204, 236, 242, 246, 247, 252, 275, 281, 290, 299, 307, 310, 312, 313 strikes 1, 5, 18, 72, 104, 109, 121, 146–8, 150–2, 194, 197, 200, 202, 231, 238, 253, 259–60, 261, 282, 285, 287, 289–97, 301, 310 see also Plug strikes (1842)

Taylor, John Edward 123, 228 Thaxter Saxton, John 89 Thompson, E. P. xiii, 11–12, 17, 34, 81, 105, 111, 150, 251, 279, 281, 311, 314 The Making of the English Working Class xiii, 9–10, 105 Tilly, Charles 11, 12, 251 Todmorden 139–40, 160, 202, 238, 244–5, 247, 290, 294 Tomlinson, Matthew 188, 265–7 Tonkiss, Fran 15, 285 Tories 6, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 46, 47, 71,

Wakefield 2, 36, 44–45, 54, 65, 72, 81, 188, 265–6, 295 Walker, Thomas 28, 39–40, 41, 43–4, 45, 47, 50, 55 ‘war of the unstamped’ 4, 7, 8, 98, 122–3 Ward, Thomas Asline 96, 187 Warrington 23, 29, 42, 70, 94, 158, 196, 259 Watkin, Absalom 123, 126–7, 227, 228, 230 Wemys, James 90 Wemyss, General 235–6, 291–2

Ulverston 30, 94 union rooms 58–63, 73–5, 78, 99, 104, 169, 206 Unitarians 31, 37, 39, 47, 172, 202, 218, 266, 306, 307 United Englishmen 56, 108–10, 150, 209, 229, 312 United Irishmen 108–9 urban development 2–3, 65, 107, 115, 184, 285 see also improvement, urban vestries 53, 64, 137, 156–9, 163–6, 175, 197 Victoria, Queen 34, 184, 187 Voice of the West Riding newspaper 4, 122

332

Index

Whigs 3, 13, 20, 41, 51, 54–5, 72, 95–6, 98, 121, 130, 137, 141, 152, 155, 156, 161, 165, 166, 170, 171, 173, 174, 182, 189, 226, 236, 254, 279, 312, 313 Wigan 23, 70, 93, 172, 196 Wilberforce, William 54–5 Wilkes, John 18, 52, 305 William IV 187 Williams, Raymond 18 Wilson, Benjamin 175, 238, 243, 244, 294–5, 296–7 Wolds, East Riding 256, 258, 260, 268–9, 273 Wolseley, Sir Charles 96–7 women Chartist 206, 212–5, 238, 243–4, 296–7, 302

loyalist 40–1, 87–8 radical 75–9, 83, 88–9, 101–2, 113 see also Catherall, Peggy; Gales, Winifred; Holberry, Mary; Lister, Anne; Martin, Emma Wood, Andy 17, 273, 275 Wooler, T. J. 72 working men’s halls 189, 190, 196–200, 204, 206, 217, 252 Yeo, Eileen 204, 219, 284 York 23, 54, 70, 72, 90, 94, 96, 139, 174, 225, 231–2, 254, 255, 261, 267, 268, 271 Castle 96, 231–2, 255, 268 Yorke, Henry Redhead 47–9, 174