Barry Reay – The Last Rising of the Agricultural Labourers
Rural Life and Protest in Nineteenth-Century England

The Hernhill Rising of 1838 was the last battle fought on English soil, the last revolt against the New Poor Law, and England’s last millenarian rising. The bloody ‘Battle of Bosenden Wood’, fought in a corner of rural Kent, was the culmination of a revolt led by the self-styled ‘Sir William Courtenay’. It was also, despite the greater fame of the 1830 Swing Riots, the last rising of the agricultural labourers.
Read more…

John E. Archer – ‘By a Flash and a Scare’
Arson, Animal Maiming, and Poaching in East Anglia 1815-1870

‘By a Flash and a Scare’ illuminates the darker side of rural life in the nineteenth century. Flashpoints such as the Swing riots, Tolpuddle, and the New Poor Law riots have long attracted the attention of historians, but here John E. Archer focuses on the persistent war waged in the countryside during the 1800s, analysing the prevailing climate of unrest, discontent, and desperation.
Read more…

Buchanan Sharp – In Contempt of All Authority
Rural Artisans and Riot in the West of England, 1586-1660

Two of the most common types of popular disorders in late Tudor and early Stuart England were the food riots and the anti-enclosure riots in royal forests. Of particular interest are the forest riots known collectively as the Western Rising of 1626-1632, and the lesser known disorders in the Western forests which took place during the English Civil War. The central aims of this volume are to establish the social status of the people who engaged in those riots and to determine the social and economic conditions which produced the disorders.
Read more…

Malcolm Chase – The People’s Farm
English Radical Agrarianism 1775-1840

This book traces the development of agrarian ideas from the 1770s through to Chartism, and seeks to explain why, in an era of industrialization and urban growth, land remained one of the major issues in popular politics. Malcolm Chase considers the relationship between ‘land consciousness’ and early socialism; attempts to create alternative communities; and contemporary perceptions of nature and the environment. The People’s Farm also provides the most extensive study to date of Thomas Spence, and his followers the Spenceans.
Read more…

Roger Wells – Insurrection
The British Experience 1795-1803

On the 16 November 1802 a posse of Bow Street Runners raided the Oakley Arms, a working class pub in Lambeth, on the orders of the Home Office. Over thirty men were arrested, among them, and the only one of any social rank, Colonel Edward Marcus Despard. Despard and twelve of his associates were subsequently tried for high treason before a Special Commission, and Despard and six others were executed on 21 February 1803. It was alleged that they had planned to kill the King, seize London and overturn the government and constitution.
Read more…

Roger Wells – Wretched Faces
Famine in Wartime England 1793-1801

“The histrory of riots reaches its full maturity when riots break out of monographic case studies to be incorporated into full histories. Roger Wells includes riot as one dimension of his rich attempt to comprehend the whole range of responses of British society to the famines of 1794-96 and 1799-1801. These famines dramatically revealed the fragile equilibrium underpinning national subsistence, and its propensity to collapse. Wells explains how and why the archaic structure of state and society in Britain did just manage not to collapse.”
Read more…

Bob Bushaway – By Rite
Custom, Ceremony and Community in England 1700-1880

Bringing together a wealth of research, this book explores the view that rural folk practices were a mechanism of social cohesion, and social disruption. Through them the interdependence of the rural working-class and the gentry was affirmed, and infringements of the rights of the poor resisted, sometimes aggressively.
Read more…