- Email: [email protected]
Popular disturbances in England 1700–1870
105
REVIEWS
lists. The generalization of an initial exclusion followed by a progressive inclusion, varying in its pace and completeness with both events, especially the Glyndwr rebellion, and with location, remains acceptable. From the evidence here presented it is possible, therefore, to take two stands; indeed the editor does this himself, urging at once difference and variety and yet comparability and common character. The organization of the book runs directly counter to a view of a systematic urban history. As already indicated, common themes do emerge among which the most interesting are the economic development and differential growth of the chosen examples, as well as the process of inclusion of the Welsh population. Another is the character of suburban extension. It would have been more impressive, but very much more difficult, to have organized the book about such recurrent themes rather than to have used the least academic and least imaginative of bases. But that would have demanded a “state of the art” not yet achieved. It must be added that in this book topographical analysis is at a fairly general level without any attempt at detailed reconstruction which, it seems, the evidence in most cases is too frail to permit. But urban historians should now have passed the stage where it is considered to be sufficient simply to reproduce the plans of John Speed. These comments may sound carping and ungenerous, and to an extent they are. As the editor writes, this is a preliminary series of local studies, a stage only in the much larger process of producing a definitive study of medieval urbanism in Wales. In that context this is the most welcome of books. The rich array of well ordered material will delight any urban historian. It carries forward with authority and purpose the history of the Welsh medieval borough and will take its place alongside the major works mentioned at the outset of this review. University College of Wales, Aberystwyth KENNETH J. LOWE,
Popular Disturbances in Scotland 1780-1815
HAROLD CARTER
(Edinburgh:
John
Donald, 1979. Pp. 278. &800) JOHN STEVENSON,Popular Disturbances in England 1700-1870 (London: Longman, Themes in British Social History, 1979. Pp. vii + 374. ;E9-95and $5.95 softback)
Here are two books that have clearly derived their inspiration from George Rude’s study, The Crowd in History (1964). It is against that seminal work that they must be judged. Stevenson’s book is in many ways a much needed and thus welcome revision of the
history of the English crowd, revised in the light of the considerable body of research on that subject since 1964. The author has himself made two substantive contributions to the field and this primary research forms the basis for his fine chapters on food rioting and on popular disturbances in London between 1790 and 1821. Moreover, by focusing on only one country, Stevenson has felt able to extend the framework of his study to take in the whole of the period between 1700 and 1870. This allows him to chart the transition from the eighteenth-century mob to the eighteenth-century crowd, evoking the legitimation of a moral economy; and from that transition to discuss the violent clashes between classes in the early nineteenth century and so on to the ordered resolution of class conflicts by the 1870s. This is the thread by which Stevenson keeps the whole book together. Logue’s book is the long-awaited Scottish Crowd in History; indeed, it is more than that, for what he has achieved is to bring Rude’s anatomical approach in the study of social protest to a whole series of popular disturbances that occurred in Scotland between 1780 and 1815. We are thus presented in meticulous detail with descriptions and analyses of meal riots, the Scottish equivalent of food riots, disturbances associated with the Highland clearances, militia and anti-recruitment riots, political and industrial disturbances and a variety of other more minor disturbances. All this work has been based on detailed primary research. Logue’s book is not simply a synthesis of the author’s own research and that of other historians, as Stevenson’s is and Rude’s was. Thus the
106
REVIEWS
inevitable unevenness of such syntheses in terms of style, exposition and understanding are avoided by Logue but not by Stevenson. One of the great strengths of Rude’s book was the fact that he made cross-comparisons between France, England and to a lesser extent Wales. By contrast Stevenson and Logue rarely look over the national walls that bound their studies, thus weakening their analysis in places. In both books, for example, their examination of tollgate riots would have benefited from a consideration of the Welsh turnpike opponents, Rebecca and her daughters. True to the model set by Rude, the final chapter of Logue’s book does contain a comparative anatomy of the crowds involved in the different types of protest. This works very well. Stevenson, however, finds difficulties in attempting the same procedure for the much longer span of 170 years which he sets out to tackle. Indeed, his final chapter adds very little. The penultimate chapter on the transition to order in the midnineteenth century makes a more fitting end to the book. Both books also suffer from a tendency to put into different compartments protests that should be viewed together. Logue may be forgiven for this given the enormous task of primary research he had set himself; Stevenson cannot so easily be excused, particularly because on a number of occasions he does attempt an assessment of the possible intercommunity between particular popular disturbances, best shown in his excellent summary on labour disturbances before the Combination Laws. On other occasions the links are missed, for example in the case of food riots and industrial disturbances in the West Country, or the importance of continuity is not stressed, as for instance in the sequence of agricultural labourers’ protests in 1816,1822 and 1830-3 1 and the subsequent anti-Poor Law riots. Indeed, by contrast to Logue’s work, in Stevenson’s rural protests in general are not well covered. Stevenson seems much happier when untangling the flurries of activity in the capital than when piecing together the more slow-moving events of the countryside. In one respect both authors fail the promise of Rude’s study. Although both are clearly aware of the need to explore the geography of popular movements, they never seem to appreciate as fully as Rude does the importance of the geographical perspective. To be fair, Logue’s detailed locational maps do more than whet the appetite; they lead one to speculate and to test these speculations in a preliminary fashion. One wonders, for example, why there were so few food riots in the large towns and industrial areas of the Central Lowlands of Scotland compared, say, with Lancashire and Yorkshire. This is the type of question that Stevenson attempts to answer in his chapter on food rioting but unfortunately nowhere else in his book. Very welcome as both books are, in this aspect alone one might have expected more, for since 1964 a number of historians have attempted to reconstruct the geographies of various disturbances: Rude with Hobsbawm on “Captain Swing”, for example, Bohstedt and Williams on eighteenth-century food rioting, Amos on social protest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Essex, Harber on rural incendiarism in Suffolk in the 1840s. The historical geography of the class struggle in England and Scotland still awaits an edifice to surmount the foundations so expertly laid by Rude some sixteen years ago. ANDREW CHARLESWORTH
University of Liverpool ALAN MACFARLANEin
collaboration
with SARAH HARRWN and CHARLESJARDINE, Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Reconstructing Historical Communities (Cambridge:
Pp. xii + 222. E3.95) For the last seventeen years (although not continuously) Alan Macfarlane has been researching into the social and economic history of the villages of Kirby Lonsdale in Cumbria and Earls Colne in Essex during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For part of this period his researches have been supported by the SSRC ostensibly to promote a research methodology for the study of historical communities. In recent years that
REVIEWS
lists. The generalization of an initial exclusion followed by a progressive inclusion, varying in its pace and completeness with both events, especially the Glyndwr rebellion, and with location, remains acceptable. From the evidence here presented it is possible, therefore, to take two stands; indeed the editor does this himself, urging at once difference and variety and yet comparability and common character. The organization of the book runs directly counter to a view of a systematic urban history. As already indicated, common themes do emerge among which the most interesting are the economic development and differential growth of the chosen examples, as well as the process of inclusion of the Welsh population. Another is the character of suburban extension. It would have been more impressive, but very much more difficult, to have organized the book about such recurrent themes rather than to have used the least academic and least imaginative of bases. But that would have demanded a “state of the art” not yet achieved. It must be added that in this book topographical analysis is at a fairly general level without any attempt at detailed reconstruction which, it seems, the evidence in most cases is too frail to permit. But urban historians should now have passed the stage where it is considered to be sufficient simply to reproduce the plans of John Speed. These comments may sound carping and ungenerous, and to an extent they are. As the editor writes, this is a preliminary series of local studies, a stage only in the much larger process of producing a definitive study of medieval urbanism in Wales. In that context this is the most welcome of books. The rich array of well ordered material will delight any urban historian. It carries forward with authority and purpose the history of the Welsh medieval borough and will take its place alongside the major works mentioned at the outset of this review. University College of Wales, Aberystwyth KENNETH J. LOWE,
Popular Disturbances in Scotland 1780-1815
HAROLD CARTER
(Edinburgh:
John
Donald, 1979. Pp. 278. &800) JOHN STEVENSON,Popular Disturbances in England 1700-1870 (London: Longman, Themes in British Social History, 1979. Pp. vii + 374. ;E9-95and $5.95 softback)
Here are two books that have clearly derived their inspiration from George Rude’s study, The Crowd in History (1964). It is against that seminal work that they must be judged. Stevenson’s book is in many ways a much needed and thus welcome revision of the
history of the English crowd, revised in the light of the considerable body of research on that subject since 1964. The author has himself made two substantive contributions to the field and this primary research forms the basis for his fine chapters on food rioting and on popular disturbances in London between 1790 and 1821. Moreover, by focusing on only one country, Stevenson has felt able to extend the framework of his study to take in the whole of the period between 1700 and 1870. This allows him to chart the transition from the eighteenth-century mob to the eighteenth-century crowd, evoking the legitimation of a moral economy; and from that transition to discuss the violent clashes between classes in the early nineteenth century and so on to the ordered resolution of class conflicts by the 1870s. This is the thread by which Stevenson keeps the whole book together. Logue’s book is the long-awaited Scottish Crowd in History; indeed, it is more than that, for what he has achieved is to bring Rude’s anatomical approach in the study of social protest to a whole series of popular disturbances that occurred in Scotland between 1780 and 1815. We are thus presented in meticulous detail with descriptions and analyses of meal riots, the Scottish equivalent of food riots, disturbances associated with the Highland clearances, militia and anti-recruitment riots, political and industrial disturbances and a variety of other more minor disturbances. All this work has been based on detailed primary research. Logue’s book is not simply a synthesis of the author’s own research and that of other historians, as Stevenson’s is and Rude’s was. Thus the
106
REVIEWS
inevitable unevenness of such syntheses in terms of style, exposition and understanding are avoided by Logue but not by Stevenson. One of the great strengths of Rude’s book was the fact that he made cross-comparisons between France, England and to a lesser extent Wales. By contrast Stevenson and Logue rarely look over the national walls that bound their studies, thus weakening their analysis in places. In both books, for example, their examination of tollgate riots would have benefited from a consideration of the Welsh turnpike opponents, Rebecca and her daughters. True to the model set by Rude, the final chapter of Logue’s book does contain a comparative anatomy of the crowds involved in the different types of protest. This works very well. Stevenson, however, finds difficulties in attempting the same procedure for the much longer span of 170 years which he sets out to tackle. Indeed, his final chapter adds very little. The penultimate chapter on the transition to order in the midnineteenth century makes a more fitting end to the book. Both books also suffer from a tendency to put into different compartments protests that should be viewed together. Logue may be forgiven for this given the enormous task of primary research he had set himself; Stevenson cannot so easily be excused, particularly because on a number of occasions he does attempt an assessment of the possible intercommunity between particular popular disturbances, best shown in his excellent summary on labour disturbances before the Combination Laws. On other occasions the links are missed, for example in the case of food riots and industrial disturbances in the West Country, or the importance of continuity is not stressed, as for instance in the sequence of agricultural labourers’ protests in 1816,1822 and 1830-3 1 and the subsequent anti-Poor Law riots. Indeed, by contrast to Logue’s work, in Stevenson’s rural protests in general are not well covered. Stevenson seems much happier when untangling the flurries of activity in the capital than when piecing together the more slow-moving events of the countryside. In one respect both authors fail the promise of Rude’s study. Although both are clearly aware of the need to explore the geography of popular movements, they never seem to appreciate as fully as Rude does the importance of the geographical perspective. To be fair, Logue’s detailed locational maps do more than whet the appetite; they lead one to speculate and to test these speculations in a preliminary fashion. One wonders, for example, why there were so few food riots in the large towns and industrial areas of the Central Lowlands of Scotland compared, say, with Lancashire and Yorkshire. This is the type of question that Stevenson attempts to answer in his chapter on food rioting but unfortunately nowhere else in his book. Very welcome as both books are, in this aspect alone one might have expected more, for since 1964 a number of historians have attempted to reconstruct the geographies of various disturbances: Rude with Hobsbawm on “Captain Swing”, for example, Bohstedt and Williams on eighteenth-century food rioting, Amos on social protest in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Essex, Harber on rural incendiarism in Suffolk in the 1840s. The historical geography of the class struggle in England and Scotland still awaits an edifice to surmount the foundations so expertly laid by Rude some sixteen years ago. ANDREW CHARLESWORTH
University of Liverpool ALAN MACFARLANEin
collaboration
with SARAH HARRWN and CHARLESJARDINE, Cambridge University Press, 1977.
Reconstructing Historical Communities (Cambridge:
Pp. xii + 222. E3.95) For the last seventeen years (although not continuously) Alan Macfarlane has been researching into the social and economic history of the villages of Kirby Lonsdale in Cumbria and Earls Colne in Essex during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For part of this period his researches have been supported by the SSRC ostensibly to promote a research methodology for the study of historical communities. In recent years that