Customs in Common, page 42
This is suggested by John Beattie in his authoritative article, “The Criminality of Women in Eighteenth-Century England”, Journal of Soc. Hist., viii, (1975), p. 113, note 57. Also Beattie, Crime and the Courts in England, 1660-1800 (Oxford, 1986), pp. 436-9.
Booth, op. cit., p. 106 finds that in the courts in Lancashire 1790-1801 “no differentiation seems to have been made between the sexes”.
Crown briefs in PRO, TS 11/1116/5728. Elizabeth Moody and Mary Nash were both pregnant, giving birth immediately after their trials, Mary Nash with twins: it is not clear whether their sentences were enforced. See Williams, op. cit., pp. 167, 170.
A little more can be worked out about the Gloucestershire accused.2 The Special Commission at Gloucester was restrained by a grand jury which refused to act as a rubber-stamp and perhaps by a reluctant petty jury. Of twenty-one women who were being prepared for trial, one was not indicated, presumably as feme covert. More than one-half of the remainder were either acquitted (eight) or the grand jury found “ignoramus” (three). Of seventy-five male prisoners, about the same proportion got off, with eighteen acquittals and twenty “no true bills”. And there is no great difference in the conviction rate: seven out of twenty-one women as against thirty-five out of seventy-five men. The marked difference is in the severity of the convictions and sentencing. Sixteen of the men were convicted of felonies, nineteen of misdemeanours, whereas only two of the women were found felons and five were found guilty of misdemeanours. Nine rioters were sentenced to death — all men, although in six cases the condemned were reprieved — and nine were sentenced to seven years’ transportation, of whom two were women.
Some of the following deductions depend upon rough annotations to the 2Gaol Calendar in PRO, TS 11/995/3707. On feme covert, see Blackstone, op. cit., iv, pp. 26-7 and John Beattie, op. cit., p. 238, note 71. op. cit.; Gloucester Journal, 22 Dec. 1766; Gloucester CRO, Q/SG 1767-70, Gloucester Gaol Calendar, 13 Jan. 1767.
A closer view of the cases does not tell us much. Six of the female acquittals were for a cheese riot at Farmer Collett’s, for which one man was also acquitted and one other man convicted. Mary Hillier ran after the mob in Minchinhampton and “told them Mr Butt was come home & had fired a gun and killed 2 children and desired them to come back and pull down the House”. The grand jury found no true bill. Elizabeth Rackley and Elizabeth Witts, both sentenced to transportation, were convicted of stealing 10d. worth of flour, but as part of several night-time break-ins of the mill of Richard Norris. It was the night-time breaking and entering which made the offence felony.1 The clearest case of gender discrimination concerned John Franklyn and Sarah Franklyn, his wife, jointly committed for entering a shop in Stroud and carrying off in their laps soap, glue and other things. But Sarah was not indicted, presumably because while acting with her husband she was, according to the legal doctrine of feme couvert, not responsible for her actions. That was fortunate for her, since John Franklyn was found guilty of grand larceny and was transported for seven years.2
Elizabeth Rackley was later pardoned.
Gaol Calendar in PRO, TS 11/995/3707. On feme couvert, see Blackstone, op. cit., iv, pp. 26-7 and John Beattie, op. cit., p. 238, note 71.
This suggests that the heavier exercises of the courts might fall a little less heavily on women. But the lighter exercises need not show the same gender inflection. Summary committals to Bridewells or convictions for minor public order offences were used by magistrates to cool off a crowd, without respect for differences of sex. For example, a letter from Lincolnshire in 1740 notes that “we have had a Disturbance by the Mobb at Bourn they Cutt Some Sacks of Wheat in the Boat & Obstructed its passage to Spalding for a time, but was Quel’d seasonably by the Officers of the Town & 5 Women Committed to the House of Correction”.3 Such episodes are unlikely to have left traces in national records, although after the 1760s they were more likely to be brought to Quarter Sessions.1
Letter of John Halford, 1 July 1740, in Lincs., Archives Office, 3 Anc. 7/4/14.
Ann Welford and Barbara Mason were sentenced to six months hard labour at Northampton Quarter Sessions in 1796 for trying, with a great number of persons, “principally women”, to stop a market wagon: Northampton Mercury, 9 Apr. 1796. My thanks to Jeanette Neeson.
John Bohstedt tells us that “repression did not know gender”, and he is right that troops were frequently ordered to fire into mixed crowds. From Anne Carter of Maldon, Essex, in 1629 to Hannah Smith of Manchester in 1812, a trickle of victims or heroines were sent to the gallows, while others were sentenced to transportation.2 Yet I am undecided; it remains possible that, while “examples” were made from time to time, the examples made of women were fewer, that they sometimes enjoyed the “privilege of their sex”, and that much depended upon place, time and the temper of the authorities.
For Anne Carter, see John Walter, “Grain Riots and Popular Attitudes to the Law: Maldon and the Crisis of 1629”, in Brewer and Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People, pp. 47-84, an excellent study which follows the rioters back into the local records. For Hannah Smith, see Thomis and Grimmett, op. cit., pp. 43-44.
If the central authorities insisted that examples had to be made, then gender did not matter. In 1766 government and law officers were pressing hard for capital offenders to be selected, and the Treasury Solicitor regretted that “at Leicester, the Evidence is very slight, against a Woman for throwing Cheese out of a Waggon to the Mob, which if not a Highway Robbery, is not Capital”.3 (Hannah Smith was convicted of highway robbery nearly fifty years later, for selling off butter cheaply to the crowd.) In the end, no women were hanged for the riots of 1766, although Sarah Hemmings was capitally convicted for her part in a riot in Wolverhampton: the town petitioned for her life, and the sentence was commuted to life transportation.4 In 1800 The Times correspondent lamented from Nottingham and its environs that “there is not even a prospect of the riot subsiding”, owing to the non-arrest of the women, who were “the principal aggressors”.1 In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, women rioters had been liminal people with an “ambivalent legal status at the margins of the law’s competence”. They claimed, in enclosure riots, “that women were lawlesse, and not subject to the lawes of the realme as men are but might. . . offend without drede or punishment of law”.2 If the sex had been disabused of that illusion in the eighteenth century, yet perhaps some notion of “privilege”, both among offenders and prosecutors, lingered on in such regions as the West.
Memorandum as to the state of evidence against food rioters (1766) from Treasury Solicitor in Shelburne Papers, Vol. 132, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; see also PRO, SP Dom 44/141.
Williams, “Midland Hunger Riots in 1766”, p. 277.
Wells, op. cit., p. 121.
John Walter in An Ungovernable People, p. 63; see also Roger B. Manning, Village Revolts (Oxford, 1988), pp. 96, 116.
Were there other peculiarities of the feminine input into food riots? I doubt the value of tabulating disorder and violence according to gender, partly because of the imperfect nature of the evidence, partly because all riot must involve disorder and violence of some kind. When an affair involved outright confrontation, with cudgels against fire-arms — the attack on a mill, the break-in to a keep to rescue prisoners — the predominant sex would be male. The women are more commonly reported as throwing missiles — stones or potatoes — and on one occasion, in the Midlands in 1766 “planted in rows five or six deep”, defending a bridge with stones and brickbats against horsemen.3 Whatever conclusions we reach as to the gender reciprocities and respect between women and men in these communities, it would be foolish to suppose that these dissolved sexual differences. Without doubt the physical confrontation of men and women, of soldiers and crowd, aroused sexual tensions, perhaps expressed by the women in robust ribaldry, by the male forces of “order” in a contest between the inhibition of violence and sexually-excited aggression.4 On occasion the military affected contempt for the women. The commander of troops sent to deal with a riot in Bromsgrove in 1795 complained loftily that they found the cause was “a parcel of old women. . . as in all pretended riots in this part of the country”. But this parcel of women (not all of whom were old) had given a good account of themselves, some seventy of them stopping a wagon and six horses, and carrying off twenty-nine sacks of wheaten flour.1
Williams, op. cit., pp. 273-4.
After “repeated solicitations” from a Captain of marines, the constable of Brentwood reluctantly arrested two women, in “The Ship” alehouse, who had been “singing a song in Brentwood Street reflecting on the military”: Essex CRO, Q/SBb 352/55 (Aug. 1793).
PRO, WO 1/1091, 5 and 8 Aug. 1795; Assi 2/26 and 5/116.
When women rioted they made no attempt to disguise their sex or to apologise for it. In my view there was very little cross-dressing in food riots, although once or twice there are unconfirmed reports of men in women’s clothes.2 These “rites of inversion” or, maybe, simple exercises in the most available disguise, were more commonly encountered in turnpike riots, in “carnival” protests, and, later, in Luddism.3 But inversion, whether intentional or not, was exactly what the women did not wish to achieve. So far from wishing to present an ominous androgynous image, they sought to present their particular right, according to tradition and gender role, as guardians of the children, of the household, of the livelihood of the community. That symbolism — the blood-stained loaves on poles, the banging of kitchen ware — belonged especially to the women’s protests. They evinced what Temma Kaplan has called “female consciousness” rather than feminist, which rested upon “their acceptance of the sexual division of labor” which is one which “assigns women the responsibility of preserving life”. “Experiencing reciprocity among themselves and competence in preserving life instills women with a sense of their collective right to administer daily life, even if they must confront authority to do so.1
Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 28 May 1757 reports a wagon of wheat taken away in Bath by a mob in women’s clothes. I have not found any eighteenth-century indictment for such an offence in a food riot.
See Natalie Davis, “Women on Top”, in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975). I think Professor Davis overlooks the fact that a woman’s gown was the most readily-available garment to disguise a collier or a cottager. Some of the upside-down symbolic effects (which she describes so well) were consequence rather than intention. Attacks on turnpikes had more military symbolism: “Deponent saith. . . they heard the Noise of Horns blowing. . . and soon after a great Number of Persons armed with Guns & Axes, some of them disguised with black’d faces and Womens Cloathes. . .”. This was an attack on a turnpike gate in Ledbury, Herefordshire. James Baylis, labourer, who was apprehended said that he had blacked his face with a burnt cork, and that the gown, apron and straw hat which he wore were his wife’s: informations in PRO, TS 11/1122/5824, 4 Nov. 1735.
Temma Kaplan, “Female Consciousness and Collective Action: The Case of Barcelona, 1910-1918”, Signs, vii, 3 (1982), pp. 545, 560, 565.
Nothing pleased female rioters more than the humiliation of pompous male “aggro”. In a Tiverton riot in 1754 a certain Lieutenant Suttie attracted the crowd’s notice by his zeal; he was heard to say to a JP, “Give me leave sir, to order the men to fire, and you shall see the fellows hop like peas”. The troopers were unleashed upon the crowd and they “rode through the streets hacking with their broad-swords and stabbing with their bayonets”:
While the troopers were dashing about in the execution of their orders, some women seized Lieutenant Suttie by the collar and took away his sword, which he never recovered. This was a sore blow to his pride, and a favourite subject of banter on the part of his friends, who, very cruelly, would not allow him to forget his skirmish with the women and the inglorious loss of his weapon.2
Snell, The Chronicles of Twyford, pp. 194-5. This was an election riot.
Not for the first or last time, disarming symbolised emasculation.
Men in authority still feared the violence and the incitement of the female tongue (see below pp. 501-2), and women could sometimes attain their ends by mockery, insult, or by shaming farmers or dealers by their expostulations. Susannah Soons was convicted in Norwich in 1767 for “uttering several scandalous and inflammatory speeches”, and Mary Watts in Leicester for “assaulting” the magistrates “with indecent and opprobrious Language and Gestures”.3 In Montrose in 1812, when the Riot Act was being read and the military were deployed to disperse the crowd, Elizabeth Beattie called out, “Will no person take that paper out of his hand?” and tried to snatch the Act from the magistrate.4
Williams, thesis, pp. 203, note 2, and p. 279.
Logue, op. cit., p. 22.
Elizabeth Beattie knew what she was doing. But so did Anne Carter, in 1629. She clearly despised the pomp of the local authorities, calling one of Maldon’s chief magistrates in 1622 “bloud sucker and. . . many other unseemely tearmes”. When the bailiff had questioned her about her absence from church, she had answered back: “that yf he woold prouid [provide] wone to doe hir worke shee would goe”. In the riots she described herself as “Captain”, calling out: “Come, my brave lads of Maldon, I will be your leader for we will not starve.”1 “General Jane Bogey” in Newcastle in 1740 knew what she was doing, and so did “Lady Ludd”, the title claimed by leaders of riots in 1812 in both Nottingham and Leeds.2 So too did fifty-four-year-old Hannah Smith who “headed up the mob” for some days in Manchester in the same year, bringing down the prices of potatoes, butter and milk, and boasting that she could raise a crowd in a minute.3 It was lack of deference as much as rioting which got Anne Carter and Hannah Smith hanged. What clergyman was likely to give a character reference, what nobleman to intercede, on behalf of such viragos?
Walter, op. cit., pp. 58, 72.
Ellis, op. cit., p. 340; Thomis and Grimmett, op. cit., p. 31.
Ibid., pp. 43-5.
The women’s riots may not have been precisely of the same violence quotient as the men’s, but they were not shrinking, demure affairs. Frequently they came to a climax when women led off the fore-horses, climbed aboard the wagons and threw down the sacks to their fellows, sometimes took the horses out of the shafts and pulled the wagon back themselves to a place for convenient distribution of its load.4 In the engagement at Newport Pagnell in 1740 (above pp. 319-20), the women fought with the farmers for a considerable time, declaring that they were “unwilling that so much Wheat should go out of the Kingdom, while they wanted bread, [and] swore they would lose their lives before they would part with it”. At length “with great acclamations of joy the waggons were unloaded”. The reporter of the Northampton Mercury found that the affair merited a little comment:
For examples, see Derby Mercury, 10 July 1740 (Derby 1740). Elizabeth Beer and Elizabeth Bell were each sentenced to 7 years transportation for their part in this riot. Information of Thos. Higgins against Ann Burdon, who stopped his wagon in Long Handborough in August 1795, took the horse out of the shafts, and got into the shafts to prevent the horses being put back in: PRO, Assi 5/116.
The Conquerors are now holding a Grand Council to consider what to do with it among themselves. Such uncommon Bravery and Resolution appearing in the soft & tender Sex is a Matter of Surprize to those who stile themselves their despotick Sovereigns, & the Lords of Creation.1
Northampton Mercury, 2 June 1740; Ipswich Journal, 7 June 1740.
Such bravery was not uncommon. Repeatedly women faced troops and were fired upon. In one of the only letters that survives from a food rioter, he wrote of a great riot in Nottingham (1800): “your hearts would have ached to have seen the women Calling for Bread and Declaring they would fight till they died Before they would be used so any longer. . . the conduct of the people. . . who stood the fire from the yeomanry with such undaunted courage that astonished the gentlemen for they poured such showers of stones on them in all directions that they could load their pieces no more after they had fired them. . .”.2
Intercepted letter of J. and L. Golby to “Dear Brother and Sister”, dated Nottingham 7 Sept. 1800, in PRO, HO 42/51. Extracts of the letter are in Quinault and Stevenson (eds.), op. cit., pp. 58-9 and in Wells, Wretched Faces, pp. 120-2.
Perhaps the poor of both sexes partnered each other better in bad times than we suppose. Maybe men were more prominent in food riots than women, and maybe not.3 But if one adds up all that is already known (and there is much still to find out) there were an awful lot of women involved in food riots, sometimes on their own, more often in mixed affairs in which there was a loyal gender partnership.
Or maybe the answer differed according to place and time. Walter, op. cit., p. 62 writes that “women were present in almost every food riot in the period [i.e. early seventeenth century] and some riots were exclusively feminine affairs”.
For two hundred and more years these food riots were the most visible and public expressions of working women’s lack of deference and their contestation with authority. As such these evidences contest, in their turn, the stereotypes of feminine submission, timidity, or confinement to the private world of the household. Robert Southey (p. 234) may not have been so silly after all. Indeed, when once aroused the women may have been more passionate than men in their eloquence, less heedful of the consequences, and, in their role as guardians of the family, more determined to get quick results.1 Perhaps — as John Bohstedt suggests — many women were more immersed than were men “in the moral, less in the market, economy”, and they were among the last to give the practices of the moral economy up.2
