Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

14 In the chaotic atmosphere of the times, there was much petty theft and minor lawlessness, as a mass of people who had been driven from the land, drifted hither and thither, moving randomly about seeking for odd jobs or, perhaps more positively, trying to migrate into the merging industrial townships. In great alarm and with no police force of any effectiveness, the authorities reacted in a draconian fashion. The military were often called out and there were, on average, 115 executions every year. ‘Oligarchy moderated by riot’ is how one contemporary wag defined the Hanoverian era and its aftermath.. There was constant disorder. It was close to class war as the populace faced up to the government and the local squirearchy time after time. The frequent elections – there were ten in twenty years during one phase – were normally marked by violence and drunkenness at the open air meetings and public casting of votes. Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers , published 1836/37 but set some twenty or years earlier, includes a comical sketch of the Eatanswill election – ‘Fizkin’s people have got three and thirty voters in the lock-up coach house at the White Hart’ . Dickens had covered such contests as a copy journalist and his description has a realistic tone. There were innumerable ‘bread riots’ when prices were forced up by poor harvests, higher demand as population grew and the continuing protection against foreign imports of corn. There were as many as 200 bread riots in the decades from 1720 to the opening of the next century. The continuous economic woes were the cause of much trouble. In 1765 the Spitalfields Riots saw silk workers lay siege to Bedford House, the Duke of that ilk being a supporter of the importation of French silks. Come the application of new machinery with, suspected or genuine, the laying off of workers and there were outbreaks of desperate violence. The machine breaking campaign that came to be known as Luddism lasted intermittently between 1811and 1817; the riot so vividly described in Charlotte Bronte’s 1849 novel Shirley is set in this period. There was the 1817 March of the Blanketeers when Lancashire weavers attempted to walk to London to protest against harsh trading conditions, carrying a blanket as both an emblem of their trade and for nightly comfort. Troops, regular and local yeomanry or militia, were often used to put down such adventures, often with extreme violence. As a result of the ‘Captain Swing’ arson attacks on agricultural goods and equipment in 1830-32, 600 were imprisoned, 500 were transported and 29 were executed. There was unrest of a more political causation. The John Wilkes ‘Liberty’ riots of 1768 and thereafter, which included the incident in 1771 when a small knot of his supporters were killed by troops in the ‘Massacre of St George’s Fields’ is one such, while the Gordon Riots of 1780 in London is another. Fuelled by anti-Roman Catholic hysteria, the tale and the story of the baying crowd, burning and damaging Newgate prison and the homes of London ‘Papists’ is told in terrifying detail in Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge . It is unsurprising that the Riot Act, which allowed magistrates to call for the disbandment of an assembly of twelve or more people, was an 18 th century statute passed in 1714. Pre-Victorian Society; ‘Gentle And Simple’