Cricket Witness No 1 - Class Peace

15 Pre-Victorian Society; ‘Gentle And Simple’ In the wake of the French Revolution of 1789 radical opinion was both buoyed by its adherents and suspected by its opponents. Among several disturbances, there were the Spa Fields Riots of 1816, followed by the episode of the Cato Street Conspiracy in 1820, a desperate attempt to assassinate the prime minister and cabinet. With rumours of the employment of government spies and agents provocateurs , it was a messy business all round. The culmination of this unrest was the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, so called in mockery of the great victory at Waterloo a few years earlier. A crowd of 60/80,000 had gathered on St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, chiefly to listen to speeches favouring the reform of parliament but, as so often, against a background of social discontent. The authorities commanded cavalry and local yeomanry to disperse the crowd. Although, given the panic and chaos, numbers have a degree of uncertainty, around fifteen were killed and between 400 and 700 injured. Lord Liverpool’s government’s response was the swift passage of the ‘Six Acts’, each of them retaliatory and suppressive of movement, speech and publication. During a period when Britain was frequently at war there were further hazards, such as the costly burden of hostilities disrupting some elements of trade or demobilised soldiers and naval ‘press gang’ recruitment adding to anxieties. The militia and yeomanry which politicians like William Pitt the Younger sought to enlist, did most of their fighting at home, Peterloo being one instance. There was also actual warfare on the home front. Apart from two Irish Rebellions in 1798 and 1803, both put down by military means, there were the more famous Jacobite Rebellions of 1715 and 1745. The Jacobite Rebellions, attempts to reinstate the Stuart dynasty, were serious affairs. Both were suppressed by strong military action. In particular, the Battle of Culloden in 1746, the very last pitched battle to be fought on British soil, was a merciless and bloody affair. In consequence there followed the ‘Highland Clearances’, aimed at breaking up the clan system and also driven by the landowners’ wish to switch from small-scale agrarian units to large areas devoted to sheep-grazing and deer-stalking. The clearances were the equivalent of the English enclosures. They were intensified in the Regency era and accompanied by often brutal evictions, sometimes as many as 2000 such incidents in a day. In brief, neither the social environment of the age nor the character of its people was propitious for the evolution of a formalised, nationally accepted field sport of any kind.