On 31 October 1718, a group of Berkshire Whig JPs met to celebrate the anniversary of George I's coronation. They apparently had a good deal to drink and when they were ‘mellow’ decided they would light a bonfire to signal to the world how much they loved their king. At that point the local ‘bumpkins’, being a ‘very waggish and very insolent’ lot, decided to have some fun at the expense of their betters. They accordingly,

The significance of the humble root was, of course, that it was an unflattering allusion to George I. Everyone, even the Berkshire ‘bumpkins’, knew that a turnip signified poverty and was a reference to George's allegedly threadbare German origins, and one with candles stuck in it to suggest horns added injury to insult by proclaiming his humiliating status as a cuckold.

So why should we care if some English plebeians mocked their masters one autumn evening? They were a famously unruly people and incidents like it were commonplace by 1718. But therein lies its significance: it was a tree in a rather large wood. It is precisely its everyday quality that is so striking. Since 1714 plebeian English crowds had regularly and publicly mocked their king. For all the pomp and circumstance with which the new order carried itself in public, and despite the dreadful majesty of the law which made such seditious acts fraught with danger, the Hanoverian succession had brought on a crisis in social authority that implicitly undermined the power of the British state. The monarchy was the symbolic heart of that British state and, as Douglas Hay argued in 2002, ‘once Jacobite ritual became public it eroded both the legitimacy and dignity of the Hanoverian line’.