by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)
Punishments varied, but you could expect a £5 to £20 fine for being caught with nets and snares but no game, or hiding game at home, and three months minimum in prison if found in the act of killing. Many poachers ended up in prison for not being able to pay the fine. The chances of being transported increased if you were thought to be in an organised gang, or were caught with a gun at night trespassing on private property. Both would be enough to send you to Australia.
An early capitalist market in game was developing, and the authorities seemed determined to stop it. On one occasion, baskets full of dead rabbits were traced back to the person who had put them on the stagecoach and the miscreant fined £5 per corpse. There was a demand for game but little supply, so it seems that much of the stealing that took place was done by poachers and corrupt gamekeepers who would send these to market.
It was similar to the modern drugs trade. Opponents of the Game Law pointed out that the main cause of poaching was the demand of people for the food, especially the ‘new rich’ who held no land but wanted to consume game, and that the London poulterers were the biggest connivers in breaking the law. Often, it was the aristocrats themselves who bought game while in London, knowing it to be stolen goods. However, the 1816 Game Laws were silent about those who stimulated demand by buying it, because these people were the wealthy, not the poor.
The fact that the authorities were aware of this, and the judiciary was more than ready to make an example of those people moving the contraband, shows that they were aware of the developing market. Some magistrates argued that the Game Laws increased the price of game, which in turn encouraged more poaching; the law was the fatal combination of ineffectual and counterproductive.
It seems that some people were arguing for a free, capitalist market in products, with licences issued to allow individuals to hunt on private land. Most people, especially those in power, thought that draconian punishment was the answer. In an era when the free market was painfully being formed, and fewer and fewer people had access to the countryside, this was another backward-looking law.
In the same budget that abolished the Property Tax, the Chancellor announced that the National Lottery in 1815 had made a £200,000 contribution to government funds. The aim of the lottery was solely to raise money for the Treasury. The money raised was used to repay the interest on the bonds held by the rich – it was not used for good causes – although the owners of government debt probably believed that they fell into this category.
Lottery tickets were traded as a government stock with a quoted and variable price depending on demand. Those such as Wilberforce and Cobbett, who opposed the lottery, were invited by the government to suggest other ways of raising the money to pay off the £834 million national debt. They could suggest nothing.3
Despite being called the ‘state lottery’, it was actually privatised. Contractors would bid for the right to run the lottery at a profit. Companies with names such as ‘Bish’, ‘Richardson Goodluck’, and ‘Hazard’ would offer tickets in advertisements in the paper. They would dominate the front pages; they boasted about the number of winning tickets they had sold and that their offices were ‘fortunate’. The Richardson Company had paid £50 to a Mrs Goodluck for the right to use her name. Hazard would regularly advertise in the press, advising customers to apply early if they wanted their lucky number.
These companies were based in London but to achieve nationwide distribution they would appoint agents all over the country. Booksellers were preferred, as it was thought that this added lustre to their brand, but highclass grocers, goldsmiths, and watchmakers were also acceptable. These were selected as places where the poor would not go, but they still did, and the lottery did nothing to make their lives better.
The lottery was another device that redistributed money from the poor to the rich. On most occasions there were 20,000 tickets and £200,000 in prize money. The two main prizes were of £25,000 each and 4,600 prizes of £10, with others in between. Basic mathematics showed that they were poor value for money. Each ticket had an intrinsic value of £10 (£200,000 in prizes divided by 20,000 tickets). However, a whole ticket, which the lottery contractors purchased from the state for around £14, was sold for £24. This was well beyond the means of all but the richest individuals. A sixteenth of a ticket could be purchased for just over a pound and that was the way the poor participated. This was still a significant amount for the poor to pay for a gamble on the lottery. Lottery clubs were organised illegally by the poor, where they would gamble on the results without buying an official ticket, usually by taking side bets whether a certain number would come out of the giant wheel used to pick winners but, like everything else in Regency Britain, the lottery was rigged against the poor.
Lord Byron had a trenchant view on the subject
To Wellington
… and I shall be delighted to learn who.
Save you and yours, have gained from Waterloo? 4
Chapter 4
Why People Rioted
Rioting was a common feature of late Georgian Britain and the motivations were easy to see. It was a period of high bread prices, and other basic commodities were heavily taxed. It was a time when jobs and lifestyles were being destroyed by new technologies and machines. This was exacerbated by laws that seemed designed to make the situation worse.
It was an age of transition, and this showed in the attitudes of the powerful towards the suffering of the poor. Two sets of conflicting ideas existed. Britain was still a community-minded society where the rich felt the need to help the poor under certain conditions. However, it was also one where market forces and laissez-faire economics were all the rage, and were used to condone the suffering of the poor. A more fatalistic view of suffering was developing as Britain industrialised.
Conflicting ideologies were evident in the speech ‘On Rioting’ by the Recorder of the Guildford Quarter Sessions, Sergeant Best. In October 1816, whilst summing up after the Guildford Riot, he favoured the jury with his thoughts on the current rioting problem. He started by accepting that the massive rise in the price of bread was the main cause. ‘Whether the recent increase in the price of bread in this town was justifiable, I am not prepared to say.’ Best’s audience would know that he was trying to blame the bread retailers, who were traditionally held culpable when prices rose. Criticism of millers and bakers were always popular with the public and these complaints became physical attacks when times were bad.
Sergeant Best then condemned anybody who had increased the price of bread through what he vaguely called ‘false reports’. He praised the assize of bread, which still monitored and sanctioned price increases. He praised the medieval institution for trying to help the poor. Then he became a little more modern and stated that ultimately, only the ‘exciting of competition can keep down the price of necessities’. Therefore he supported both free markets and traditional community control at the same time, neither of which were being any help to the poor.
Best’s ambiguity shows a society where the establishment could not make its mind up. One thing that had not changed was that there was absolutely no excuse for rioting. If you suffered in silence, you would be entitled to the pity and protection of your betters. This would bring all the people together, getting through the high prices caused by poor harvest that was God’s Providence, which must be endured but not questioned. Best came very close to the position of the evangelical, and lecturer of the poor, Hannah More, who believed that starvation was God’s way of reminding the poor how much they needed the rich.
Nothing could be done to reduce the price of bread, as only the law of supply and demand could decide. However it was possible to manipulate markets by a ban on imports until domestic grain reached the very high figure of 80s. Best did not mention the Corn Laws of 1815, which increased the danger of starvation dramatically; perhaps because it had led to four days of rioting in London, the ransacking of his own residence, and could not be explained by God’s providence.
Apr
il 1816 saw a traditional riot, but not of the ‘bread and blood’ variety that would dominate the rest of 1816. The tanners of Bermondsey organised a street fracas, their main complaint being the behaviour of William Timbrell. Timbrell owned a tanner’s yard in Bermondsey. He asked his workers to forego their two days traditional Easter holiday and to do paid work instead. This was, according to the papers, welcomed by the workers, and is not surprising as work was in short supply.
A group of 300 journeyman tanners turned up with fife and drums and tanners’ aprons on poles and asked the working tanners to ‘play out’ rather than work on a holiday. When the workers refused, the journeyman rushed Mr Timbrell senior and Mr Timbrell junior fired a gun over their heads. The protesters then spilled out of the street, assaulting Timbrell’s workers, dousing people with water, assaulting a pregnant woman thought to be the wife of a working tanner, and then marched to demolish Timbrell’s house in George Street.
This was a riot in an earlier tradition. The mob were attacking other workers for ignoring a historic holiday. The capitalists were not the targets, and in the spirit of forgiveness rather than class war, Mr Timbrell later asked for mercy for the six accused and it was given, reluctantly, by the magistrate. The Timbrells only asked for peace in return. They did not get it; by September the father was bankrupt, and by 1824 the son was in the King’s Bench debtors’ prison.
In May 1816, the Riot Act of 1714 was read to the manufacturing poor of Bridport who had assembled to complain peaceably about the price of bread and lack of employment, but then went on to rampage through the streets, breaking windows of bakers’ shops, and stealing three hogshead of beer from Gundry’s Brewery. The Riot Act, when read word for word by a Justice of the Peace, allowed punitive action if a group of twelve or more people refused to disperse after sixty minutes. Any local militia cavalry unit who maimed or killed after a failure to disperse would be immune from prosecution. There was, however, no such military force available in the area. Instead a group of local worthies entered into debate with the rioters, smashed their hogshead of beer and persuaded 2,000 to go home peacefully. The ringleaders were dispatched to prison and then the government sent a troop of the Light Dragoons to Radipole, which is nearer Weymouth than Bridport and probably an indication of how stretched the state’s machinery of coercion were.
At the Dorchester Assizes in August, eight men received prison sentences of between nine and twelve months; 16-year-old William Fry, who had stolen the beer, was one of them. Hannah Powell, Susan Saunders and Elizabeth Phillips were imprisoned, alongside three men who tried to prevent John Edwards from persuading the mob to go home. Mr Justice Holroyd dealt with this in one day and was still able to order his tea for 4 o’clock.
Nationwide rioting continued into May. On the same day as the Bridport disturbances, local press began to report with some unease that ricks and barns and other places that the rich stored food were being burned down at night. This kind of anonymous arson was typical of rioters who thought that there was no point in face-to-face negotiations, as the application of law and justice gave the landowners such great advantages. Rioting continued in Kent, Essex and all over East Anglia, particularly in Brandon, near Bury, and Norwich.
The Downham Riot of May 1816 acts almost as a ‘check list’ for Regency rioting. Desperate farmers converged on a local centre of population, armed with modified agricultural implements; their numbers increasing as each village was passed, in this case growing to over a thousand. Then an attack on a flour producer, in this case William Baldwin’s, followed by intimidation of retailers to make them lower their prices. Butchers’ shops were also looted and free beer was demanded from publicans. There were cries of ‘bread or blood’ and loaves were paraded on the end of pointed sticks. As their courage and drunkenness increased, there would be an attack on a particularly cruel magistrate, the reading of the Riot Act, a show of strength by the yeomanry cavalry using the safer, flat side of their swords, and then the sacrifice of a ringleader. It was almost choreographed – in an age which forbad workers forming unions to defend them; it was ‘collective bargaining by riot’.1
Two selected ringleaders were executed in Norwich Castle in September. It was theft that brought them to the scaffold, not rioting. Thoday and Harwood, both labourers in their twenties, had their execution delayed until 1.30 pm as there was a rumour of a pardon. When this rumour turned out to be untrue, Thoday had a shrieking panic attack and had to be restrained by six men before being hanged. Harwood used his time to say goodbye to his pregnant fiancée.
As prices rose, the poor were being urged to eat potatoes instead of bread. However, potatoes themselves had a value and were being exported. On Friday 17 May, a large group of men, women, and children armed with crude weapons appeared at Bideford docks to prevent their only remaining sustenance being placed on ships. An intermediary by the name of Watts had purchased most of the potatoes from local farms and intended to send them to London to achieve a higher price. The distribution of goods was far less efficient than today, and prices for basic goods could vary greatly across the country. Some secondary accounts of events say that the food was going abroad, but as far as the starving lower orders of Dorset were concerned, it might well have been.
Rioting against the movement of food was not new in British history – what was novel was the fact that the poor had been told by the rich that they should be eating potatoes, and now the rich would be eating these too. To many it was as if a bond had been broken – how were the rich helping the poor by exporting something once deemed only good enough for the Irish labourer? The potato scarcity was created by man, not God, and patient resignation to the divine will was not the appropriate response.
Four women were identified as the ringleaders. Using simple weapons and the support of about 150 others, they prevented the potatoes from being loaded. In the Regency period many of the small-scale ‘just price’ riots were initiated by women, who would obstruct the movement of goods and force supplies to be sold at the traditional price. In this case, they were detained in the local lock-up gaol by the forces of law and order without much difficulty. A local magistrate appeared at the quay with just enough special constables to quell the riot.
Traditionally, this is where the historic small town riot ended. Ringleaders would be punished and then the conditions that caused the riot would be ameliorated by the concerned principal citizens, usually in the form of a temporary reduction in prices and a public subscription for the non-rioting poor.
On this occasion, however, the lower orders of Bideford continued to resist. A group of 200 carpenters and apprentices, on hearing of the committal of the four women to prison, sailed into the harbour, met up with the 150 original protesters, and marched on the prison, intent on a Bastillelike liberation of the women.
It was 29-year-old Thomas Trace, a local shipwright and former soldier, who seemed to be co-ordinating the attack. It was he who demanded the release of the prisoners, ignored the reading of the Riot Act and arranged for a dozen men to smash down the doors of the prison with two 14ft pieces of timber. Trace also seemed to be behind the fight with the constables, the stoning of the guards and the eventual rescue of the four women. Trace was rewarded at the Exeter Assizes with the longest of all the sentences – two years in gaol which, due to the appalling conditions, was often a death penalty in another form.
Thomas Croscombe appeared to be Trace’s right-hand man and was later awarded a commensurate sentence of eighteen months. He seemed to have been involved in the provocative procession through the town, with the four women being held shoulder high by the mob. The town quietened at night, with the North Devon yeomanry cavalry patrolling the streets. These part-timers were stood down the next morning when the Inniskilling Dragoons arrived. Using their skills as naval shipwrights, the male ringleaders of the riot had escaped by sea.
Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary and Devon peer, was so outraged by the audacity of the lower orders that he sent his best detective
, John Stafford of Bow Street, to hunt down the escapees. Stafford was the state’s main spymaster and would later help to track down major revolutionaries and quash the attempt to assassinate members of the government in 1820. By August, the men had been found and were tried at the Exeter Assizes.
Presiding at Exeter was the same Lord Justice Holroyd that punished the Bridport rioters at Dorchester, but this time he was not able to stop for tea at 4 o’ clock. In a thirteen-hour session, Croscombe and Trace were convicted. William Mayrick and James Stapledon, who had fought with constables, were given a custodial sentence and George Veal received six months for the bad luck of being known by all the special constables who gave evidence. Hundreds went unpunished. The fate of these five men was designed by the government as a salutary lesson to all; although in Georgian Britain the death penalty was not used for riot unless other crimes had been committed. Even in the much more serious riots in Ely and Littleport in May, when Fenland farmers armed themselves to fight local troops and militias, the five ringleaders who were eventually hanged were convicted of robbery rather than riot.
Thomas Trace survived the British penal system, and was still living aged 64 in the Bideford Old Town in 1851 with his wife Elizabeth. He was marked in the records as a ‘former shipwright’, but this may be due to his retirement from his skilled job or a lifetime of being blacklisted. A reference to a Thomas Trace with the same named wife appeared on the 1841 census, but with the word ‘pauper’ where the occupation should be suggests that there was no happy ending in this case.
Part of the traditional Georgian riot was an attack on the machinery creating the unemployment that was making bread unaffordable. In May,1816 newspapers reported that in Essex ‘(the rioters) visited Rob Smith’s farm and destroyed a plough of a new construction that displeased them’.2 However, as industries grew and new industrial communities were created, the nature of rioting began to change.