Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Starting in mid-April 1816 the so-called Bread or Blood riots represented the first of a series of three English rural collective disturbances in the period of the post-Napoleonic Wars depression. Unlike the 1822 East Anglian laborers' protests or the Swing Riots of 1830, the events of 1816 were remarkable for their heterogeneous set of causes, protest techniques, and activists. Here field and fen workers, petty landowners and small farmers, workers in the decaying local textile industries, artisans, and urban tradesmen united. The protests of 1816 effectively combined both traditional market town-based food rioting and anti-enclosure riots with more novel attacks on industrial and agricultural machinery . The initial protests occurred simultaneously and quite unconnectedly on April 17 at Mile End Heath in Essex, where threshing tackle was destroyed, and at Gedding in Suffolk, where threshing machines and the mole ploughs used to create field drainage on the heavy lands of Essex and Suffolk were destroyed. Whereas the Essex protest apparently inspired no further protests, the Gedding disturbances were instrumental in motivating machine-breaking at neighboring Rattlesden and riots for higher wages at nearby Wattisham and Hitcham. Notwithstanding a proclamation issued by the magistrates at the Bury Quarter Sessions, this localized intensification acted as the trigger for more widespread ... log in or subscribe to read full text