Agricultural History Review, Volume 56 Part 2 (2008), p. 226

This volume comprises a very wide and detailed survey, based on an impressive range of primary sources, and also utilizes the very numerous secondary works on the topic. It has already proved very popular with my undergraduates, though at this price one hopes a paperback version will soon follow.

Randall begins with an incisive analysis of power and authority as bolstered by the 1715 Riot Act passed shortly before the aborted Jacobite rebellion in Scotland. It remained on the statute book until 1919. Under its provisions ‘felonious violence’ could be met with what he dubs ‘summary judicial slaughter’ following the magistrates’ rendition of a proclamation enjoining a dispersal of assemblies within an hour. The main agency of riot control was the regular army, though its officers showed little enthusiasm for bloody confrontations, not least because in extremis the ranks might turn on their commanders. But, as Randall observes, magistrates rarely resorted immediately to the dispersal order, whether or not troops were available, but most commonly at least attempted to negotiate solutions, which regularly included the investigation of popular grievances as well as dispersal. In this scenario there was often a theatrical element.

Nevertheless the English especially, though not exclusively, were particularly prone to protest over a multitude of matters, some of them relatively minor, including the relocation of a central village pump to an awkward peripheral spot. However, historians of popular protest are virtually unanimous that the most common issue was high food prices in the Georgian era, notably in the second half of the eighteenth century, when demographic growth increasingly pressed on the capacity of the British agrarian sector to keep abreast of demand, particularly after substandard cereal harvest yields became recurrent features. Grain imports in wartime proved difficult, especially during the war against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, when the situation was further aggravated by consecutive harvest failures of 1794 and 1795, 1799 and 1800, and finally 1810 and 1811. ‘In any other country’, opined the President of the Board of Trade on conditions in 1800, they ‘would be called a famine’. Nevertheless, improved communications over the eighteenth century, facilitated the development of a national cereal market, notably in the mid-century creation of London’s Mark Lane exchange, where merchants, factors and millers dealt in grains based on samples exhibited. This move away from customary pitching markets was also reflected in dealings between farmers, corn-factors and millers, increasingly negotiated in the privacy of ‘market rooms’ in substantial inns, which came to replace the traditional public forum. Price speculation was also facilitated through the official London Gazette’s weekly listings of provincial cereal prices, originally designed for the price-mechanism governing the import and export stipulations under the Corn Laws, which Randall overlooks.

Unsurprisingly, his perception of disturbances over food issues is strongly coloured by E.P.Thompson’s famous study, of 1971 vintage, identifying the ‘moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, buttressed by the essay ‘The moral economy reviewed’ in his Customs in Common (1991). Randall defends Thompson’s analysis, but challenges his argument that during the wartime famines the customary ‘equilibrium between paternalist [local] authority and the crowd … was undermined … [by] acute anti-Jacobinism of the gentry [and] by the triumph of the new ideology of political economy’. Ironically, Randall shows that the first and especially the second famines produced a fundamental division between the government committed to orchestrating the rigorous suppression of food riots, and the senior judiciary led by Lord Chief Justice Kenyon who ruled that, under common law, traditional marketing offences remained illegal. Moreover, Pitt’s early 1801 resignation, usually attributed to George III’s resistance to full Catholic emancipation under the 1800 Act of Union, was dictated more by the fact that the current famine necessitated peace at any cost, which under Pitt was out of the question. Only one of Pitt’s cabinet survived, the experienced and forceful home secretary, the Duke of Portland, responsible for the state’s so-called ‘terror’ in the later 1790s, including the rigorous suppression of food riots; he was not replaced until the famine terminated in mid-1801. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that populist moral-economic perceptions survived amongst all ranks, including those comprising the critical agency, the unpaid magistracy, despite Portland’s very public denunciations of some justices.

Another major component of Randall’s study focuses on industrial protests, both before and during the principal Luddite explosion in 1811–3. Luddite antecedents were addressed in his earlier incisive and influential study Before the Luddites (1991). Here the focus is on the breakdown of Tudor legislation banning designated mechanical innovations, and technically still enforceable. This provoked affected workers to combine – not necessarily on a permanent basis – to demand protection through prosecutions of offenders, appeals to parliament, and militant physical intervention against new machinery. There seems to be little doubt that politicians were particularly concerned that recurrent violent industrial riots might trigger wider metropolitan protests, a possibility which manifested itself later with the Gordon riots, even if parliamentarians were far less concerned about provincial mobilizations. Randall addresses various militant protests from the early eighteenth century, before focusing on the fierce and prolonged riots in West Country woollens at the turn of the century, which spawned the Brief Institution, basically a trade union which also embraced their West Riding counterparts. Under its auspices, grievances were taken to Westminster, with select committees in the Commons interrogating witnesses in 1803 and again in 1806. The unionists advocated the enforcement of the ancient statutes, while substantial employers insisted on repeal. If these are rightly interpreted as ‘ideological confrontations’, the report of the 1806 committee, which recommended the repeal of no less than 76 ‘redundant’ statutes, enabled uncontrolled industrial capitalism, and comprised the state’s much trumpeted solution, but it was not to pass uncontested.

Randall’s coverage of the three well-known Luddite districts, hosiery in the East Midlands, the gig-mills of the West Riding woollens, and power-looms in Lancashire and Cheshire is penetrating, despite further recent studies. Quite rightly, he dismisses Thomis’ ‘compartmentalist’ thesis, which asserted that Yorkshire croppers’ violence reflected their non-unionization. Randall also accurately perceives that northern Luddism was more complex than its Midland counterpart, and much more violent, including resort to arms and arson attacks that targeted both domestic and business premises. This northern militancy was also intermixed with food rioting accompanying the third wartime famine, and conjoined with insurrectionary plots. In its two principal theatres, Northern Luddism was ultimately crushed by the army, tantamount to embryonic civil war in some witnesses’ estimation, and followed by mass hangings of activists convicted in Yorkshire. Evidence relating to Midland Luddites’ politics is thin. However, it is worth adding that the City of Nottingham was a major centre of popular radicalism in the 1790s and beyond, and the only known location for a political meeting of over fifty people authorized by two justices under the Seditious Meetings Act. This reviewer considers that the 1810–13 crises requires an holistic study, with coverage on a scale equal to the study of its two wartime precedents, a suggestion I suspect Randall would support. That should include government policy and intervention, and embrace Luddism in Cumberland and Westmorland, which await their historian.

It must also be acknowledged that Randall’s book embraces many other categories of popular protest, including entire chapters relating to the politically motivated, among them those associated with Wilkes and Gordon, and another on popular protest in the English countryside. The latter includes anti-Turnpike riots, reflecting what Randall rightly dubs the ‘privatization’ of previously publicly-owned roads, anti-Militia protests, notably by peasant and other small farmers opposed to the lottery-like enforced recruitment of their sons, who were vital sources of free labour. However, there is nothing systemic on opposition to enclosure, possibly reflecting the continued influence of Neeson’s fine monograph. There is more thorough consideration of the admittedly smallish mobilizations complaining about decisions and policies adopted by poor-law administrations in both urban and countryside parishes. Above all, Randall’s study emphasizes the remarkable capacity of the English propensity to mobilize – peacefully or violently or with a mixture of both – on a huge range of issues adversely affecting working-class people especially, but never exclusively.