Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Bristol: Prospects and Profiles
- 2 Voices in the Crowd
- 3 Authority, Class and Clientage in Bristol Politics
- 4 Wreckers from Without: Weavers, Colliers, Arsonists and Sodomites, 1729–34
- 5 Popular Jacobitism and the Politics of Provocation
- 6 Anger and Reprisals: The Struggle against Turnpikes and their Projectors, 1727–53
- 7 ‘It is better to stand like men than to starve in the land of plenty’: Food Riots and Market Regulation in Bristol
- 8 Naval Impressment in Bristol, 1738–1815
- 9 Bristol and the War of American Independence
- 10 A Loyal City? The Diversity of Dissent in Bristol in the 1790s
- 11 Hunt and Liberty: Popular Politics in Bristol, 1800–20
- 12 ‘This is the blaze of Liberty!’ The burning of Bristol in 1831
- Postscript
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History
12 - ‘This is the blaze of Liberty!’ The burning of Bristol in 1831
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 May 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- List of Abbreviations
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Introduction
- 1 Bristol: Prospects and Profiles
- 2 Voices in the Crowd
- 3 Authority, Class and Clientage in Bristol Politics
- 4 Wreckers from Without: Weavers, Colliers, Arsonists and Sodomites, 1729–34
- 5 Popular Jacobitism and the Politics of Provocation
- 6 Anger and Reprisals: The Struggle against Turnpikes and their Projectors, 1727–53
- 7 ‘It is better to stand like men than to starve in the land of plenty’: Food Riots and Market Regulation in Bristol
- 8 Naval Impressment in Bristol, 1738–1815
- 9 Bristol and the War of American Independence
- 10 A Loyal City? The Diversity of Dissent in Bristol in the 1790s
- 11 Hunt and Liberty: Popular Politics in Bristol, 1800–20
- 12 ‘This is the blaze of Liberty!’ The burning of Bristol in 1831
- Postscript
- Bibliography
- Index
- Studies in Early Modern Cultural, Political and Social History
Summary
They are the people who have no common interest with their fellow men, who have no stake in the country, who labour hard for insufficient food for their families, with no other prospect than the poor house before them. They are, however, powerful, and, like the mighty hurricane, are now sweeping everything into one common destruction before them.
Let us call to mind that not one personal injury was either intended or perpetrated – that wherever ‘property’ was threatened, life was spared – and that the only victims of their intemperance were themselves.
Neither historians nor heritage professionals have found it easy to come to terms with the extraordinary popular uprising of October 1831. There is, to this day, no commemorative monument to the several hundred unarmed men and women killed by direct and merciless military intervention on 31 October. We do not even know the number. As at Peterloo twelve years earlier, where the death toll was much smaller and the outcry greater, there was no public enquiry and only a few inquests, none of which asked particularly searching questions and city coroners were in no mood to be critical. The Whig mayor, Charles Pinney, was put on trial and acquitted; not for murder but for failing to bring the crowd to book more quickly. Military commanders boasted with impunity of the slaughter they had overseen while a Special Commission tried 114 rioters, convicted 81, transported 26 and executed 4. The earliest attempts at historical analysis, and much popular writing on the subject since, tended to coalesce around themes of public alienation, whether it be from the structures of central or local government, or simply from the principles of civilised social order. As one popular account put it, ‘Whenever such convulsions take place in a community, they will almost always be traceable to one cause, namely an unnatural state of society, arising from misgovernment.’ Specifically, it is argued, the people and their rulers were out of touch.
Government was out of touch because the Recorder, Sir Charles Wetherell, had been foolish enough to claim to his parliamentary colleagues that there was little interest in reform at Bristol. The corporation was out of touch because it was remote, corrupt and unaccountable.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Bristol from BelowLaw, Authority and Protest in a Georgian City, pp. 325 - 352Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2017