The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  In view of the depressing conditions which the mass of the people had to endure, this was no surprise. Economic historians have calculated that for most people there was little or no increase in their wages and incomes during the first half of the eighteenth century and that in the second half there may even have been a slight reduction. In the crisis years of 1766, 1795–6 and 1800–1 many people endured severe hardship. In the largely rural county of Staffordshire, for example, – not one of the least wealthy – around 10 per cent of families could not afford to buy bread at certain times of the year. In the towns, an increasing number of artisans and craftsmen were losing their independence and becoming wage dependent. A popular mindset of traditional rights had to contend with the steady dismantling of paternalist regulation of wages, prices and quality of goods. Consequently, the economic sources of popular unrest are not far to seek.

  The cycle of popular festivity still turned on the traditional calendar of the church, with the feasts and the fairs of Saints’ days, but these coexisted with secular celebrations deriving from an older, pagan calendar, spiced with local variety, and closely related to the seasons of the agricultural year. After New Year’s Day and Twelfth Night, Plough Monday marked the traditional resumption of agricultural work after the Christmas break and saw festive parochial celebrations, including parish feasts and mummers’ plays. Thereafter, most communities celebrated Candlemas, Shrovetide (a national holiday for apprentices, marked by sporting events and pancakes), Lady Day, Palm Sunday and then Easter, a period of relaxation and festivity marked by inter-village rivalries and (often quite violent) sporting events. There followed the universally popular May Day and Whitsuntide celebrations, opportunities in the first for maintaining floral, dancing and courtship traditions and, in the second, for indulging culinary and sporting tastes. After Whitsuntide, the middle months of the year were punctuated by Midsummer and Lammas before Michaelmas, Hallowe’en and Guy Fawkes Day signified the transition to the autumn months. The years ended in celebration of the greatest Christian festival of them all, but one already heavily secularized, Christmas, with its presents, plays and dancing, and not least its energetic displays of eating and drinking.

  In addition to all these the annual parish feast (or wake) provided a familiar and lengthy (usually week-long) means of local, social renewal; friends and relatives who had departed the parish often made an effort to return for the occasion. These wakes were commonly celebrated on the Sunday after the day of the saint to whom the parish church was dedicated. In the early eighteenth century the mass of the people had not yet come to use the formal calendar of days and months, preferring to date events of significance from the nearest saint’s or feast-day. These celebrations, whether religious or pagan, did much more than provide entertainment. They brought the different classes and orders of the local community together, affirmed its basic religious and secular purposes, did something to resolve underlying tensions and, to some extent, lent a human face to a society which knew enormous inequalities and very considerable suffering and hardship. They perhaps enabled the individual to locate himself and his family within a broader, communal identity, softened the harsh routines of life and, in some cases, promoted not only personal contact between different social groups but also charity and almsgiving. At a more mundane level, such events must have done much to encourage the production, judging, marketing and sale of local produce of an almost infinite range and quality while promoting crafts and activities – musical, athletic, cultural and, of course, religious – of all kinds.

  Other displays of popular sentiment had a national and patriotic orientation. The birthday of William III on 4 November almost exactly coincided both with his landing at Torbay and with Guy Fawkes Day (5 November). Furthermore, the accession date of Queen Elizabeth I (17 November) was still celebrated in the first half of the century. Military and naval victories were another opportunity for popular celebration. These became more numerous as the century wore on. Most of these celebrations were harmless enough, but occasionally they acquired political significance. In the early eighteenth century politics was already experiencing the mobilization of public opinion, albeit intermittently. As a number of events illustrated, public opinion could be a powerful and unpredictable force: Sacheverell, the ‘15, the Excise Crisis, among others. The emergence of Admiral Vernon as a national hero after 1738 in many ways prefigured the emergence in the 1760s of John Wilkes as an anti-government symbol. Popular idolatry of the victor of Porto Bello in March 1740 was seen in numerous consumer artefacts such as prints, pottery, ballads and maps, but more particularly in the numerous celebrations of his birthday (over fifty in twenty-five counties) in November of the same year. Many of these were spontaneous eruptions of popularity in the sense that they were not organized by local elites and corporations but by local merchants and tradesmen. Standing at the head of massive popular antagonism towards Walpole’s government, the figure of Vernon represented a vibrant, largely urban, commercial opinion, common to all classes, which was, after 1738, hostile to Walpole’s government and to its supporters.

  On the one hand, these displays of opinion may have encouraged the perpetuation of attitudes hostile towards the social hierarchy. On the other, they may have acted as a safety valve which permitted the expression of dissatisfaction, a periodic release which was absolutely vital to the stable functioning of a hierarchical society. It is difficult for the historian to resolve such an issue because it is impossible to penetrate the opinions of the masses. One key that may open doors to further analysis, however, is provided by the widespread phenomenon of rioting.

  Rioting of one kind or another was a customary aspect of eighteenth-century popular culture, a regular manner of expressing protest and dissatisfaction. Although popular disturbances of one kind or another were common, most were ephemeral and caused little permanent damage. Riots, however, were more serious, longer in duration and more complex in their structure than the largely peaceful assemblies of crowds which acted as audiences for parliamentary elections, civic ceremonies, coronations and celebrations of military and naval victory. Crowds rioted for religious, for political but, most commonly, for economic reasons. Crowds rioted about prices, wages, taxes, turnpikes and food shortages. Rioting was normally local, directed at some immediate objective and usually confined to the members of the local community. On rare occasions, such as the Sacheverell riots of 1710 and the Gordon Riots of 1780, rioting could cause serious problems and even threaten social anarchy. Most riots, however, were communal, defensive and conservative, directed to preserving and protecting rights, customs and existing practices. In the absence of trades unions, consumer groups and national trades associations people took matters of all kinds into their own hands and used traditions of collective behaviour to protect their interests and to make their feelings known. More effective, and a good deal speedier than peaceful petitioning, riotous behaviour was not only tolerated but also acknowledged as a healthy sign that the ‘Freeborn Englishman’ was alive and kicking. There is, moreover, evidence that in the years after the Glorious Revolution the frequency of rioting was beginning to accelerate quite markedly, especially in London and the larger towns.24

  The word ‘riot’ conveys an anarchic picture of the lower orders engaged in mindless violence. The reality of rioting, however, was very different. It is a serious error to imagine either that rioters were usually very poor or that riots represented anything more than the protest of the very poor against the very rich. Those engaged in rioting were only rarely from the poorest classes. Depending on the matter in contention, rioters might be members of a church or a trade or a craft; they might be clients or customers or, not least, housewives responding to changes in prices or the quality of goods and produce. Most rioters had some standing in the community. They were engaged in work or apprenticeships, and they were usually members, often heads, of a household. Very few rioters were vagrants, itinerants or criminals. Frequently, passers-by might spontaneously join the rio
ters if they sympathized with their objectives, thus rendering the riot a dynamic and changing event in the tumult of street culture.

  Crowd action was often triggered by a minor incident. Once triggered, it was direct action designed to secure rough justice. There was nothing haphazard about the pattern of crowd behaviour. It was normally directed at the property rather than the persons of their dislike. Its actions were directed by local self-appointed leaders, sometimes termed ‘captains’, who, reflecting the innate disciplines of those involved, preferred to threaten and to intimidate rather than to unleash crowd violence. The overwhelming majority of incidents that may be termed ‘riots’ were peaceful. Crowd actions were grounded on a traditional sense of fairness: the idea of a ‘just price’, principles of ‘fair dealing’ and the assumption that traditional liberties and rights protected the interests of the community. If crowds were prepared to break the law when it suited them, it was usually in defence of a more traditional form of ‘law’. They normally did not intend to repudiate the existing social order and its principles of hierarchy, obedience and inequality. What they demanded was fair treatment for all within the existing social framework.

  By the middle of the eighteenth century rioting over food, its price, quality and availability, had become the most common form of rioting in the parishes of Britain and Ireland. In the two decades following the Glorious Revolution, there had been serious food shortages only in the years 1693–5 and 1708–10. Otherwise these decades were relatively trouble-free. Indeed, government records reveal no food rioting at all between 1660 and 1709 in Wales or in the northern counties of England. Between 1708 and 1709, however, numerous protests against the movement of grain out of local areas swept many parts of the country. Thereafter, food rioting became much more common. In 1727 and again in 1729 the tin miners of Cornwall protested at high food prices, to notably little effect. After the harsh winter of 1739 serious food rioting was to be found over the entire country. It was particularly serious in those areas where it appeared for the first time, the West Riding of Yorkshire, Teesside and Tyneside. From there the rioting swept northwards into the area around Edinburgh. Such rioting was frequently, although by no means universally, influenced by popular attitudes towards a ‘just price’ for food and, more generally, by a set of ethical standards accompanying food transactions which have been described by E. P. Thompson in terms of a ‘moral economy’.25 Food riots in the 1740s were, however, only partly inspired by such ideals and were accompanied by more direct and more persistent forms of popular action. They were, correspondingly, harshly suppressed. Serious problems of food supply in 1746 were merely a rehearsal for the much more serious shortages of 1756 and the near-famine conditions of 1766–7. At times, indeed, the intensity of food rioting gives the impression of something approaching a regional agitation. Nevertheless, as such riots became more widespread they became, on the whole, more peaceful, less protracted and more firmly characterized by ‘moral economy’ qualities.

  Disputes over land were a further potent source of direct, popular action. In a period in which land was cleared for enclosure at the expense of common right this was not surprising. Most enclosures of the second half of the seventeenth century had proceeded by local agreements and were not publicly contentious. (Indeed, only two enclosure riots have been noted during the period 1660–1714.) Only when enclosure was achieved by statute – and there were to be over 2,000 Enclosure Acts during the eighteenth century – did popular action occur on any scale. Even then, it usually required not only the enclosure of common land but also the closing of wasteland or the threat of eviction to stimulate popular action.26 Isolated enclosure riots would not unduly trouble the authorities. However, those in the forests of Northamptonshire (1710) and in the Forest of Dean (1688, 1696, 1707 and 1735) were severe. In Galloway in south-west Scotland the ‘Levellers Revolt’ of 1724 represented a regional protest against enclosures and subsequent evictions. Opposed by the landowners, the army, the law and the church, the rising collapsed and the enclosures proceeded. Of equal if not greater intensity were those riots concerned with ‘blacking’, a response to royal and aristocratic attempts to enlarge deer parks. Such parks were both a practical and a symbolic assault upon traditional means of subsistence. Even the notorious Black Act of 1723 failed to suppress popular resistance, even if it was diverted into such activities as arson, fence-breaking and animal-maiming.27

  The most dangerous form of rioting was that connected with politics and religion. Every general election threw up a number of examples in which electoral boisterousness got out of hand, even leading to severe injuries and death. The prominence of the Tories in the more open constituencies accustomed them to appeal to a wide audience and probably encouraged them to flirt dangerously with popular agitation, as they did during the Excise Riots in 1733–4. National prejudice was another potent source of rioting. The Glasgow Malt Tax riots of 1725 and the Porteous Riots in Edinburgh in 1736 were both motivated by powerful anti-English and anti-Union sentiment. Rioting over religious questions could be even more dangerous. Rioting in defence of the ‘church in danger’ occurred not only in London in 1688 but also in a number of constituencies in 1710, at the accession of George I and during and after the 1745 rising. Thereafter, religious rioting remained localized. In 1780, however, the Gordon Riots were to serve as a timely reminder of the power of religious prejudice to inflame thousands of people in the capital.

  The participation of women in rioting has caused considerable interest. Although they were not involved in rioting to the extent of their counterparts in France, women were nevertheless very visible especially, but not only, in food riots. Female participation in rioting accompanied that of men and sometimes dominated it. In London in the early eighteenth century women amounted to one-third of rioters bound over at Quarter Sessions. The market place was, of course, frequented by women, who enjoyed greater knowledge of the price and quality of goods than their menfolk. Women did not act under the instructions of men. They pursued a specific, often less violent tactic in riots. They had their own experience of riots and their own networks of contacts and communication. Their readiness to protest reflects the prominent role they played in popular political and social action in the eighteenth century, and one that should not be underestimated.

  How dangerous was popular culture to the Hanoverian regime? Many contemporary observers tended to exaggerate the danger, not least the upper classes themselves, who during the first half of the century very frequently behaved as a very jumpy garrison indeed, and convey the impression that outbursts of popular hostility were never far away. Walpole’s comments during the excise debates in 1734 have often been repeated: ‘As for faction and sedition, I will grant that in monarchical and aristocratical governments it generally arises from violence and oppression; but in democratical governments it generally arises from the people’s having too great a share in the government.’ In the age of Jacobite rebellions, the threat of foreign invasion and the absence of a police force, such timidity was perfectly understandable. No doubt the crowd could be touchy and its sensitivities easily offended. On the other hand, as we have seen, much riotous activity occurred in reaction to particular incidents or individual exactions. Most riots were short in duration. Even riots which had a political content did not endanger the regime. They looked to the law or to Parliament to remedy the grievance complained of. Indeed, the very currency of protest and popular defiance acted as a means of informing the regime and warning its officers when they were treading dangerously. On issues such as the excise and Jewish naturalization the government was prepared to back down. In this way, protest, negotiation and renegotiation were inherent features of the Hanoverian regime. As even Walpole learned to his cost in the 1730s, politics was liable to be heavily influenced by the intervention of the popular voice.

  The people of Britain had no great love for the Hanoverian monarchy between 1714 and 1756, but in the last analysis, they accepted, albeit grudgingly, the Hanoverian
regime. In some ways, the regime had much to be said for it. People were at least allowed to grumble and to complain, unlike – it was widely believed – the state of affairs in continental, Catholic countries. Moreover, in Britain, people were housed and fed. If economic hardship was not uncommon, at least famine on a national scale was unknown. Even in Scotland and Ireland food rioting was rare. More generally, the expectation as well as the practice of paternalism did something to soften the harshness of social inequality. Military victories against France and the noisy trumpetings of patriotism may have done something to stifle, or at least to diminish, popular resentment against a foreign dynasty. By the middle of the century the growing status of Parliament, increasing national pride in the Glorious Revolution and the ostensibly successful establishment of parliamentary monarchy were beginning to bolster the security of the regime. Although there could be no denying the fact that there now existed a political constituency beyond the formal political nation, this was not necessarily a threat to the stability of the Hanoverian regime. Fortunately, the vast majority of the English and Welsh, and most of the Scots, had no serious religious grievances which might have given grounds for dangerous discontent. Finally, most people accepted their place in Hanoverian society because no alternative conception of social relationships existed. Popular attitudes in Britain were saturated by hierarchical patterns of life and thought which by the middle of the century were scarcely diminishing in their intensity.