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Custom, Conflict, and Traditional Authority in the Gloucester Weaver Strike of 1825
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2014
Extract
The Gloucester weaver strike of 1825 was part of a national revival of trade-union activity following Parliament's repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824. The strike also occupied a central place in Gloucester's economic history, marking a turning point in the evolution of its woolen trade from a protoindustrial to a factory-based system. For this reason, the strike embodied in its form the transitional state of the industry, combining characteristics of preindustrial “risings” with those of modern industrial disorders. And in this anomaly lay its distinctiveness and its special interest.
Scholars have little appreciated the strike's transitional quality, however, treating it inevitably as a straightforward confrontation between capital and labor. The Hammonds and, more recently, Julia de Lacey Mann have depicted the weavers as a homogeneous social group, their strike movement as autonomous, and their conflict with the clothiers as a unitary, year-long struggle for higher wages. Such treatment, moreover, reflects widely held assumptions about the nature of class and class consciousness in the English Industrial Revolution.
This essays offers a different perspective. The strike was organized and led by master weavers whose interests could differ from those of their journeymen and apprentices. Nor was their movement completely autonomous since the deference they displayed permitted elements within the employing and governing class to manipulate them. Those engaged in such manipulation pursued the interests of their own social group, however sincerely they invoked the values of paternalism. Indeed, the dominant pattern of conflict followed a traditional vertical arrangement; a hint of modern class conflict emerged only in the strike's final phase.
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References
1 “Protoindustrialization” refers to a system of cottage-based rural industry geared to the international market and constituting the stage of economic development immediately antecedent to the factory system. For an early formulation of the theory, see Mendels, F. F., “Proto-industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972): 241–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and for a more recent treatment,Kriedt, Peter, Medick, H., and Schlumbohn, J., Industrialization before Industrialization (Cambridge, 1981), esp. chaps. 1, 6Google Scholar. For a recent critique, see Coleman, D. C., “Proto-industrialization: A Concept Too Many?” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 36, no. 3 (August 1983): 435–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 Hammond, J. L. and Hammond, B., The Skilled Labourer, 1760–1832 (London, 1920), pp. 162 ff.Google Scholar; de Lacey Mann, Julia, The Cloth Industry in the West of England, 1640–1880 (Oxford, 1971), pp. 167–68, 235–36Google Scholar.
3 E. P. Thompson has offered a nominalist definition of class, one based largely on the mentalité of the subject and the broader category of culture to which it gave rise. For his now-classic treatment of the subject, see Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1964)Google Scholar, passim, “Eighteenth Century English Society. Class Struggle without Class,” Social History 3 (1978): 133–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture,” Journal of Social History 7 (1974): 382–405CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Perkin, Harold, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969), esp. chap. 6Google Scholar; and Tholfsen, Trygve, Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England (New York,1977), esp. chaps. 2–4Google Scholar.
4 See Sec. III below.
5 The findings of this study affirm several “structuralist” criticisms made of Thompson's work. He has been accused of underestimating the realities of occupational differentiation as determinants of class and class consciousness and of conflating critical changes within the Industrial Revolution period as a whole. (See Anderson, Perry, Arguments within English Marxism [London, 1980], esp. chap. 2Google Scholar; and Calhoun, Craig, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution [Chicago, 1982], pp. 17–23 and passim.)Google Scholar
6 Mann, pp. 186, 190; Tann, Jennifer, “Some Problems of Water Power—a Study of Mill Siting in Gloucestershire,” Transactions of the Bristol and Gloucester Archeological Society 84 (March 1966): 53–77Google Scholar; Gregory, Derek, Regional Transformation and Industrial Revolution: A Geography of the Yorkshire Textile Industry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 69–74CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Each of these studies emphasizes Gloucester's ostensible underutilization of steam power through a combination of entrepreneurial failure and market constraint. For a different emphasis, focusing on the problem of excess capacity as a significant factor, see Urdank, Albion M., “Economic Decline in the English Industrial Revolution: The Gloucester Wool Trade, 1800–1840,” Journal of Economic History 45, no. 2 (June 1985): 427–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
7 Sales of mills with steam engines located in the lower district appear earlier and more frequently in Gloucester Journal advertisements than do sales of steam-powered mills from Stroud. Before 1825, the great turning point in the emergence of the factory system, at least six such mills were sold in the lower district and three at Stroud, though mean horsepower capacity remained about equal at 18.2 (N = 5) and 21.3 (N = 3), respectively (t = 0.323, df = 6, prob t at .10 ≥ 1.440). The t-value, being considerably smaller than the 1.440 minimum, suggests a probability of significance very much lower than 90 percent. For mill sales in the lower district, see Gloucester Journal (November 9, 1818; November 29, 1819; April 7, 1821; July 20, 1823; December 13, 1824; January 5, 1825), and for sales of steam-powered Stroud mills, see Gloucester Journal (December 17, 1821; February 21, 1825; March 20, 1825).
8 Mann, pp. 132–33.
9 British Parliamentary Papers (BPP), Sessional Papers, vol. 24 (1840), p. 448Google Scholar: “The master weaver,” noted a contemporary observer, “rented large premises on which were buildings to hold the looms of his journeymen“; for other examples of master weaver property, see nn. 25 and 26 below.
10 “Sale of Stonehouse Mills,” Gloucester Journal (January 20, 1812)Google Scholar; the premises, however, were occupied by several “undertenants” and not by one firm, which accounts for the especially large capacity of the mill in this early period.
11 Gloucester Journal (November 21, 1829)Google Scholar.
12 Ibid. (December 26, 1829).
13 Ibid. (April 29, 1837).
14 “Sale of Machinery,” ibid. (April 1, 1837).
15 Gloucester Journal (April 26, 1813).
16 Ibid. (January 5, 1805; October 27, 1804; March 17, 1806).
17 Ibid. (January 18, 1808).
18 Hill, Richard L., Power in the Industrial Revolution (New York, 1970), p. 92Google Scholar; Mann (n. 2 above), p. 131; Gloucester Journal (October 27, 1804; January 19, 1805; March 17, 1806).
19 BPP, Sessional Papers, vol. 24 (1840), p. 426Google Scholar.
20 References from which these data have been drawn appear in Urdank, Albion M., “Dissenting Community: Religion, Economy and Society in the Vale of Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, 1780–1850: An Economic, Tenurial, Social and Demographic Study” (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1983), apps. 5.1, 5.2, pp. 531–53Google Scholar.
21 The sales and lettings of workshops, because of their infrequency, have been added to the category of machinery and stock without reference to a mill, which here represents the small clothier and to whom they were clearly related. Similarly, all mill sales—with or without machinery—have been grouped into one category. Sales of machinery at a mill (without the corresponding sale of the mill) and lettings of mills have been left to stand separately. The former indicated the turnover of lessees, who tended to be intermediary clothiers. Mill sales often indicated the turnover of the owner/occupier, but sometimes a mill was sold by its owner after the expiration of a tenant's lease or retirement from trade.
22 Table 1 presents the observed values, gathered from the Gloucester Journal. For a discussion of chi-square, see Floud, Roderick, An Introduction to Quantitative Methods for Historians (Princeton, N.J., 1973)Google Scholar.
23 Horsely Parish Census Enumerator's List (ca. 1811), Gloucester Record Office (RO), P181/OV7/1.
24 “There were many master weavers who were rather respectable men and who kept four to six looms in their houses if they had room,”Mann quotes one contemporary source. “They kept journeymen and women and gave the journeyfolk about two-thirds the price of the work. Some ill feeling always existed on account of this for the master weaver always became too pressing.”(Mann, pp. 229–30.)
25 Gloucester Journal (February 24, 1817); see also ibid. (August 20, 1836), a sale of two tenements at Wotton with a four-loom weaving shed attached to one of them.
26 Craftsmen, such as carpenters, masons, and blacksmiths, have been grouped separately from weavers, and both categories have been distinguished from laborers. The enumerator's list did not distinguish between agricultural laborers and day laborers employed in the cloth trade.
27 Testing the difference in proportions between craftsmen and weaver landlords, Z = 1.200, prob Z ≥ 1.200 = .12; the probability, in other words, of obtaining a Z-value greater than or equal to 1.2 is 88.0 percent, which I find to be an acceptably high level of significance.
28 Nor was there a significant difference in mean household size between any occupational group. By this date, journeymen and apprentices were unlikely to have lived in the master's house, especially if the master rented his work premises.
29 This point is worth emphasizing because we have grown accustomed to think, erroneously, of country weavers as mere cottagers (see, e.g., Medick, Hans, “The Proto-industrial Family Economy: The Structural Function of Household and Family during the Transition from Peasant Society to Industrial Capitalism,” Social History 1, no. 3 [1976]: 291–315CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sharp, Buchanan, In Contempt of All Authority: Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1588–1660 [Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980]Google Scholar; and Tilly, Charles. As Sociology Meets History [New York, 1981])Google Scholar.
30 For an account of early weaver resistance to repeal of the apprenticeship statutes, see Mann, pp. 143–49.
31 See the debates among weavers over the origin of truck payments in the Gloucester Journal (March 21, April 4 and 11, 1829)Google Scholar. Both sides in the dispute admitted this fact.
32 See a weaver's reply to a critic in ibid. (June 20, 1825); and Thompson, E. P., “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present, no. 38 (1967), pp. 76–86Google Scholar.
33 BPP, Sessional Papers, vol. 24 (1840), pp. 371, 451Google Scholar. “Chain”and “abb”are Gloucester terms for warp and weft, respectively (see Mann, p. 292). The length of the chain was measured by the number of threads, which were counted by the “hundred“; the hundred was a customary measure consisting of 190 threads. Two smaller customary measures were also used: one “beer” equaled thirty-eight threads, five beers equaled a hundred, and eighty beers equaled a 16 hundred chain; one “ell” equaled 84.4 threads, and thirty-six ells equaled a 16 hundred chain.
34 Gloucester Journal (November 22, 1824)Google Scholar.
35 Ibid.
36 Ibid. (June 20, 1825).
37 While the absolute length of the chain increased, the number of threads per inch remained constant at 27.4. The number of shoots in the abb increased with the progressive rise in the length of the chain. But if parity had been maintained, two shoots of abb per thread of chain would have been required at the 20 hundred chain level; instead we find an estimated 2.5 shoots of abb per thread.
38 BPP. Sessional Papers, vol. 24 (1840), pp. 451, 454Google Scholar.
39 Ibid. Samuel Marling of Ham Mills, e.g., paid about 27.5 percent below the weavers' reduced scale.
40 On the basis of an average of 40.5 ells per piece, covering the new range of 16–20 hundred length chains, an increase of 1d. per ell based on the weavers' scale came to only 3s. 4½d. per piece or 1s. 1¼d. per week when divided over a three-week period, the average time for completion of a piece. This was not sufficient to give master weavers the parity they claimed they needed with other skilled cloth workers.
41 BPP, Sessional Papers, vol. 24 (1840), p. 452Google Scholar; the weavers' petition stated that the master weaver's profit per piece came to As. 3d. or 8.8 percent of the total price paid by the clothier, in what appears to have been a considerable underestimation (Gloucester Journal [November 22, 1824])Google Scholar.
42 BPP, Sessional Papers, vol. 24 (1840), p.386Google Scholar.
43 Ibid., Wage Series, 1808–1838, p. 374; T. J. Y. Baker to Henry Hobhouse, May 4, 1825, Public Record Office (PRO), Home Office (HO) 40/18/169–70.
44 BPP, Sessional Papers, vol. 24 (1840), p. 452Google Scholar; letter from a journeyman weaver, Gloucester Journal (June 20, 1825). Master weavers probably earned about 24s. per week, if 17s. 6d. was the average for all weavers and 11s. the average for journeymen.
45 Gloucester Journal (November 22, 1824)Google Scholar.
46 The observation s in table 4 are three-month moving averages of one week per month samples drawn from the market chronicle of the Gloucester Journal. Growth rates were calculated from the first and last trend values of the regression lines effected on the basis of the sample of weekly prices. Wheat prices, furthermore, correlated with the movement of prices of other consumables (see Lee, R. D.. “Short-Term Variation: Vital Rates, Prices and Weather,” in The Population History of England and Wales, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction, by Wrigley, E. A. and Schofield, R. S. [Cambridge, Mass., 1981], p. 357)Google Scholar. John Bohstedt has show n that the correlation between prices and popular disturbances, while statistically significant, was weak (see Bohstedt, John, Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790–1810 [Cambridge, Mass., 1983], pp. 18–21)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Master weavers, unlike their journeymen, would appear to have had different reasons for striking.
47 Budget of Risby, James, BPP, Sessional Papers, vol. 24 (1840), p. 421Google Scholar. See also letter from a journeyman weaver, Gloucester Journal (June 20, 1825)Google Scholar, which suggests that journeymen were peculiarly sensitive to short-term variations in prices. In complaining about his low wages (10s—12s. per week), the writer gives their amount as a three-year average. By comparison, the nominal weekly wages of ordinary Gloucester laborers came to 9s. 3d. in 1824 (see Gregory [n. 6 above], p. 76).
48 BPP, Sessional Papers, vol. 24 (1840), pp. 451–52Google Scholar.
49 My finding in this respect affirms Eric Hobsbawm's original observation about the influence of custom on wages (Hobsbawm, E. J., “Custom, Wages and Work-Load in Nineteenth Century Industry,” in Essays in Labour History, ed. Briggs, Asa and Saville, John [London, 1960], pp. 114–15)Google Scholar.
50 See Court of Bankruptcy Registers, PRO B3, in which examples of employees receiving promissory notes from employers for services rendered abound; see also Gloucester Journal (March 21, April 4 and 11, 1829), in which master weavers complained about the practiceGoogle Scholar.
51 BPP, Sessional Papers, vol. 24 (1840), p. 386Google Scholar: “The journeyman is always in so depressed a state,” noted one contemporary, “that the moment the master weaver employs him he is obliged to give him his daily food; and hence, in a great degree, the origin of truck.”
52 Ibid.
53 Gloucester Journal (November 22, 1824).
54 Thompson, , “Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture” (n. 3 above), p. 397Google Scholar.
55 Joyce, Patrick, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Mid-Victorian England (New Brunswick, N.J., 1981)Google Scholar; Newby, Howard, “The Deferential Dialectic,“ Comparative Studies in Society and History 15, no. 2 (1975): 139–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moore, D. C., The Politics of Deference: A Study of the Mid-Nineteenth Century English Political System (New York, 1976)Google Scholar; Roberts, David, Paternalism in Early Victorian England (New Brunswick, N.J., 1979)Google Scholar.
56 Joyce, pp. 144, 148–49, 151–52, and passim.
57 Ibid., p. 95.
58 Howard Newby, p. 149.
59 Ibid.; for studies of the limits of deference, see Fisher, J. R., “The Limits of Deference: Agricultural Communities in a Mid-Nineteenth Century Election Campaign,” Journal of British Studie 21, no. 1 (1981): 90–105CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and O'Gorman, Frank, “Electoral Deference in ‘Unreformed’ England: 1760–1832,” Journal of Modern History 56, no. 3 (1984): 391–429CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
60 In doing so, they have emphasized the persistence of face-to-face relations and have thereby undermined the Durkheimian notion that urban-industrial life was necessarily governed by a pervasive anomie (see Joyce, pp. 93–94; and Newby, pp. 156–57).
61 The topography of wood-pasture regions was characterized by hilly terrain and woodland, which usually gave rise to scattered, rather than nucleated, parochial settlements (see Rackham, Oliver, “The Forest: Woodland and Wood-Pasture in Medieval England,”in Archaeological Approaches to Medieval Europe, ed. Biddick, Kathleen [Kalamazoo, Mich., 1985], pp. 70–104Google Scholar; Thirsk, Joan, “The Farming Regions of England,”in Agrarian History of England and Wales, vol. 4, 1500–1640, ed. Thirsk, Joan [Cambridge, 1967], pp. 46–49, 67–69, 79–80Google Scholar; Mills, Denis R., Lord and Peasant in Nineteenth Century Britain [London, 1981], passim)Google Scholar. It has been argued that wood-pasture settlements weakened social control from the manor house and parish church and induced an antagonistic relationship between the establishment and the lower classes (see Mills, ; Everitt, Alan, Patterns of Rural Dissent: The Nineteenth Century [Leicester, 1972]Google Scholar; Obelkevich, James, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsey, 1825–1875 [Oxford, 1976], chap. 1)Google Scholar. For a different finding, in which the structure of paternalism remained intact in such a setting, see Urdank, “Dissenting Community,” chap. 2.
62 See the remarks by Hyett, W. H., M.P. for Stroud, quoted in Urdank, “Dissenting Community,” p. 334Google Scholar; and Joyce, pp. 111–16.
63 Quoted in Mann (n. 2 above), p. 247; Horner and Woolrich, the factory inspectors who rendered such harsh judgments of the Yorkshire clothiers, evidently concurred.
64 BPP, Sessional Papers, vol. 24 (1840), p. 451Google Scholar; Sheppard advanced the rates, ostensibly, to compensate for the increase in the size of the chain (see above). The quote is from ibid., p. 454.
65 For such concern, see Joyce, pp. 93–94 and chaps. 3 and 4 passim; Newby, pp. 150–51.
66 PRO, HO 40/18/185–86, May 8, 1825.
67 Uley Mills was sold as part of Sheppard's landed estate, described in the sales advertisement as “all that manor or lordship of Woodmanscote, or otherwise Woodmanscote with Nibley, within the parish of Dursley“ (Gloucester Journal [April 29, 1837]).
68 Moir, Esther, “The Gentlemen Clothiers: A Study of the Organization of the Gloucestershire Cloth Trade, 1750–1835,” in Gloucestershire Studies, ed. Finberg, H. P. R. (Leicester, 1957), pp. 195–290Google Scholar; for examples of other gentlemen-clothier families, see Urdank, , “Dissenting Community,” pp. 39–40, 43Google Scholar.
69 The phrase “gentlemanly ethic”belongs to Newby (see pp. 152–55). For the association of this ethic only with magistrates, see Landau, Norma, The Justices of the Peace, 1679–1760 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984), chap. 6, esp. pp. 175, 193Google Scholar; for instances of J.P. paternalism, see Hobsbawm, Eric, “Machine Breakers,” in Labouring Men (London, 1964), pp. 16Google Scholar; Gregory (n. 6 above), pp. 166–84; Munger, Frank, “Contentious Gatherings in Lancashire, England, 1750–1830,”in Class Conflict and Collective Action, ed. Tilly, Louise A. and Tilly, Charles (Beverly Hills, Calif., 1981), pp. 75–76Google Scholar. The integration of the governing class is treated at length in Urdank, “Dissenting Community,”chaps. 1, 2.
70 Joyce, pp. 93–94 and passim; Newby, pp. 150–51 and passim.
71 For a different view, see Thompson, E. P., “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,“ Past and Present, no. 50 (1971), pp. 76–136CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rudé, George, “The Pre-industrial Crowd,”in Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1973)Google Scholar. Thompson emphasizes the autonomy of the crowd even where he glimpses obliquely the license accorded it by figures of authority; Rudé takes the same view even in cases in which such figures assume the leadership of the crowd directly. John Bohstedt had modified this approach by describing crowd action as only partly autonomous and by according the “vertical, reciprocal relationships between the plebs and the powerful”a central place in its dynamics (see Bohstedt [n. 46 above], p. 203 and passim). See also Rollison, David, “Property, Ideology and Popular Culture in a Gloucestershire Village, 1660–1740,“ Past and Present, no. 93 (1981), pp. 70–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, a compelling reconstruction of an incident of “rough music“; Rollison depicts the conflict of interests between a capitalist farmer and his rentier landlord, with the local community mobilized in support of the former. Rollison's anthropological characterization of the farmer as a “Big Man”is another way of describing a structure of paternalism and deference.
72 Walsh, John, “Methodism and the Mob in the Eighteenth Century,”in Popular Belief and Practices: Studies in Church History, vol. 3, ed. Cumming, G. J. and Baker, Derek (Oxford, 1972), pp. 213–27Google Scholar; Shelton, Walter, English Hunger and Industrial Disorder: A Study of Social Conflict during the First Decade of George III's Reign (Toronto, 1973)Google Scholar; James, M. E., “Obedience and Dissent in Henrician England: The Lincolnshire Rebellion, 1536,“ Past and Present, no. 48 (1970), pp. 3–78Google Scholar. These studies place the initiative for crowd action more directly in the hands of the governing class than do Bohstedt and Rollison and thereby deprive the crowd of an even greater measure of autonomy.
73 James, p. 7.
74 See Sec. IIIA below.
75 See n. 65 above.
76 PRO, HO 40/18/190–91, May 10, 1825.
77 Quoted in Mann (n. 2 above), p. 237; for a similar assessment of the role of clothiers in the genesis of Luddism, see Hobsbawm, , “Machine Breakers,” pp. 14–15Google Scholar.
78 For weavers desiring to become clothiers, see Sec. IIIA below; and Mann, p. 111; for examples of prosperous weavers, see ibid., pp. 229–30. The mean personal wealth of weavers leaving wills in three Gloucester parishes, between 1780 and 1850, was £110 6s. (see Urdank, “Dissenting Community,”chap. 1).
79 This self-perception was especially obvious in the debates among master weavers over the issue of the origin of truck (see Gloucester Journal [March 21, April 4 and 11, 1829]). R. S. Neale has also classified artisans of this period as “petit bourgeois” (see Neale, R. S., Class in English Society, 1680–1850 [Totowa, N.J., 1981], p. 133)Google Scholar.
80 Newby ([n. 55 above], pp. 149–50) points out that empathy must occur within a framework of suitable social distance to act as a psychological basis of deference.
81 PRO, HO 40/19/1, January 31, 1826.
82 Gloucester Journal (May 16, 1825).
83 PRO, HO 40/18/185–86, May 8, 1825.
84 Letter from E. Sheppard to the Home Office, May 18, 1825, PRO, HO 40/18/202–3.
85 Gloucester Journal (May 16, 1825).
86 Ibid.
87 PRO, HO 40/18/190–91, May 10, 1825.
88 Letter from “An Old Manufacturer,” Gloucester Journal (May 30, 1825).
89 PRO, HO 40/18/190–91, May 10, 1825.
90 Ibid. Claiming the need for speed, he apologized for not addressing himself first to Edward Sheppard, who normally served as the clothiers' intermediary with the government. Distrust, very likely, was the real reason for Playne's contacting the government directly.
91 PRO, HO 40/18/202–3, May 18, 1825.
92 Gloucester Journal (June 13, 1825).
93 Ibid.
94 Ibid.; Quarter Sessions Proceedings, Gloucester RO, Q/SG2 TRN. 1825.
95 PRO, HO 40/18/216–17, June 4, 1825.
96 Gloucester Journal (June 13, 1825). PRO, HO 40/18/227–28, June 7, 1825. Gloucester Journal (June 13, 1825).
97 Mann (n. 2 above), p. 237.
98 The following account is drawn from the trial report, which appeared in the April 10, 1826, issue of the Gloucester Journal.
99 The cursory summary was perhaps deliberate, and in complicity with the judge's own bias, in order to prevent the reader of the Gloucester Journal from arriving at an independent judgment of this delicate matter.
100 Master weavers, in 1825, did not complain about truck because many paid their own journeymen and apprentices in this way, only in 1829. under the pressure of the growth of loom factories, would they take up the issue as a vehicle of protest (see n. 31 above).
101 PRO, HO 40/19/1, January 31, 1826.
102 PRO, HO 40/18/231, June 8, 1825.
103 PRO, HO 40/19/1, January 31, 1826.
104 Gloucester Journal (January 23, 1826). PRO, HO 40/18/392, November 25, 1825.
105 PRO, HO 40/18/393, December 11, 1825.
106 Gloucester Journal (January 23, 1826). This pattern of leniency was common practice; “mercy,”writes Douglas Hay of the eighteenth-century legal system, “was part of the currency of patronage”(see Hay, Douglas, “Property, Authority and the Criminal Law,”in Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England, ed. Hay, Douglaset al. [New York, 1975], p. 45).Google Scholar
107 PRO, HO 40/19/1 ff., January 31, 1826.
108 Ibid.
109 Both were producers of cassimeres, and Plomer seems to have been the “Old Manufacturer” who had written to the Gloucester Journal in May 1825, for he reiterated the same position almost verbatim after the attack had been made on his mill (see Gloucester Journal [December 12, 1825]).
110 PRO, HO 40/19/1 ff., January 31, 1826.
111 For a characterization of artisan radicalism as “reactionary,”see Calhoun (n. 5 above), chaps. 3, 6.
112 Mann (n. 2 above), pp. 144–48.
113 PRO, HO 40/19/1 ff., January 31, 1826.
114 Mann, p. 249.
115 Lawrence Stone has criticized Thompson on this point, though he is wrong to think that the struggle of the “poor” against industrialism was any less defensive (see Stone, L., “The New Eighteenth Century,“ New York Review of Books [March 29, 1984], p. 45)Google Scholar.
116 Newby (n. 55 above), pp. 150–51.