Category: Events

Prehistory: Why is it so entrancing?

Circles without Class Ceilings

Why can prehistory be so entrancing?

Why do some people find prehistory so entrancing?
Why do they become so spellbound
When walking by, let’s say, a long barrow?
How do they become so transported in time and space?
What’s it all about?

Is it because a standing stone, a circle,
A tumulus, barrow, or whatever,
Demonstrates the fragility of knowledge,
The equivocal nature of understanding,
In a sense, the ‘negative capability’ of John Keats:
Being conscious, simultaneously,
Of knowing and yet not knowing?
The recognition that sometimes any presumption
Of understanding the meaning of an edifice,
Can only be speculative
(Despite the accumulation of evidence and artefacts,
Despite measurement, mensuration and comparison,
Despite a commitment to the rigours of empiricism),
And a reflection of who we are in the here and now –
Or can Homo sapiens merely develop
A restricted trope of meanings, recognizable
And familiar, across time and space …
So some speculations are bound to be valid …
Or is signification, itself, a trope of modernity?
Nature and Nurture:
How circumscribed are we by time and space?
And how universal are we across the same?
What do these structures reveal and indicate
About what is quintessentially human?

So, prehistoric structures,
In an a priori, apostrophizing, manner,
The manner of an innocent wonderer,
As yet unread on the subject,
I question your meaning:
What were you for?

Circles without Class Ceilings

Why can prehistory be so entrancing?

Why do some people find prehistory so entrancing?
Why do they become so spellbound
When walking by, let’s say, a long barrow?
How do they become so transported in time and space?
What’s it all about?

Is it because a standing stone, a circle,
A tumulus, barrow, or whatever,
Demonstrates the fragility of knowledge,
The equivocal nature of understanding,
In a sense, the ‘negative capability’ of John Keats:
Being conscious, simultaneously,
Of knowing and yet not knowing?
The recognition that sometimes any presumption
Of understanding the meaning of an edifice,
Can only be speculative
(Despite the accumulation of evidence and artefacts,
Despite measurement, mensuration and comparison,
Despite a commitment to the rigours of empiricism),
And a reflection of who we are in the here and now –
Or can Homo sapiens merely develop
A restricted trope of meanings, recognizable
And familiar, across time and space …
So some speculations are bound to be valid …
Or is signification, itself, a trope of modernity?
Nature and Nurture:
How circumscribed are we by time and space?
And how universal are we across the same?
What do these structures reveal and indicate
About what is quintessentially human?

So, prehistoric structures,
In an a priori, apostrophizing, manner,
The manner of an innocent wonderer,
As yet unread on the subject,
I question your meaning:
What were you for?

Do you indicate liminality:
A corridor to another world:
A sacred, spiritual, site of worship?
Cotswold barrows:
Were you positioned high on the Wolds
So as to be close to the sun, stars, planets and moon?
Or merely because the soil was thin up there,
And high above the flood plains;
Or were you territorial markers,
Boundary-points, socio-political in meaning;
Or were you topographical in intent,
Adding meaning to a landscape;
Were you part of a network and fretwork
Of communication channels, made visible?

How did the practice of stone circle structure spread?
And why?
Was stone seen as sentient?
It warmed with the sun,
It cried with a thaw,
It spread patterns with lichen and moss,
It could be scented,
It could groan and cry out in anguish –

Or small stone and flints for tools,
Giant stones for thanks and worship,
The Gods of the Earth united with the Gods of the Sky
In calendrical geometry …
Or to demonstrate power over stone
In a belief-system’s symbolic display,
So as to ensure the continued production
Of rather more prosaic, but necessary, tools
That guaranteed survival and prosperity?

Now for a sort of social-psychological perspective,
Or is it anthropological …
Did everyone regard these structures,
And, indeed, the labour involved in their construction,
In a unified and collective way?
Were there, as it were, renegades,
Left field outliers, individualists,
Eccentrics and so on who questioned it all?
Commonality and cohesion are always assumed,
It seems to me on initial reading memory …
How was hierarchy, assuming it existed, revealed?
Doesn’t the assumption of hierarchy,
As both consequent cause and consequence
Of specialization- warriors and priests and rulers –
Merely reflect the assumptions
Of Western post-Enlightenment Capitalism …
Couldn’t those deposits –
Both human and artefact –
Symbolize the collective,
And be both part and representative of all?

The past might just be a different country,
After all,
And a prehistoric past might yet be a signpost
To a more sharing, caring future,
A collective rather than individualist one,
One that rejects hierarchy,
One that rejects celebrity,
One that embraces caring and sharing:
Circles without Class Ceilings …

Party like it’s 2500BC: Stonehenge building secrets unearthed

The process of building Stonehenge – and having a party at the same time – may have been more important than the finished monument, English Heritage has said.

Experts believe that choosing the stones, moving them and setting them up on Salisbury Plain, may have been a way of bringing people together to socialise and celebrate.

Over this weekend visitors, people who live close to the monument in Wiltshire and schoolchildren are being invited to try to move and set up a four-tonne stone similar in size and shape to the sarsen lintels at the famous stone circle.

The idea is not to puzzle out in a scientific way engineering aspects of moving and setting up the stones, but to bring people together to enjoy a communal experience.

English Heritage’s senior historian, Susan Greaney, said: “In contemporary western culture, we are always striving to make things as easy and quick as possible, but we believe that for the builders of Stonehenge this may not have been the case.

“Drawing a large number of people from far and wide to take part in the process of building was potentially a powerful tool in demonstrating the strength of the community to outsiders.

“Being able to welcome and reward these people who had travelled far, perhaps as a kind of pilgrimage, with ceremonial feasts, could be a further expression of the power and position of the community.”

Research showcased at Stonehenge reveals that prehistoric people brought animals to the site from as far afield as north-east Scotland, more than 500 miles away, to take part in lavish midwinter feasts.

Scientists examined some of the 38,000 bones and teeth (90% of them pig; 10% cattle) discovered at the site of a neolithic village called Durrington Walls, which lies about a mile and a half north-east of the main stone ring.

Durrington Walls was only settled for between 50 and 100 years but it is believed to have housed the circle’s builders and the first visitors after the sarsen stones were put in place.

Experts examined elements including strontium in the pig teeth found at Durrington Walls. Because isotopes of strontium differ chemically according to the geology of the place where the young animal fed, it is possible to discover where individual creatures came from.

They concluded cows and pigs were herded hundreds of miles along ancient byways and may even have been brought by boat to southern England. It suggested that in 2500BC Stonehenge was known across Britain as a place of pilgrimage and celebration.

Stonehenge experts have also been studying evidence from societies who more recently have practised moving huge stones – such as communities on the islands of Sumba and Nias in Indonesia, and in north-eastern parts of India.

Greaney said: “There are amazing photos from societies in Indonesia and parts of India within the last 100 years or so of people practising stone moving and raising. They show people in ceremonial dress, amazing feasts happening, hundreds of people coming together and having a good time.

“As soon as you abandon modern preconceptions that assume neolithic people would have sought the most efficient way of building Stonehenge, questions like why the bluestones were brought from so far away – the Preseli Hills of south Wales – don’t seem quite so perplexing.”

Over the weekend groups of about 40 people will use rollers and ropes to move a hunk of limestone (prosaically brought from a local quarry on the back of a lorry) before helping to erect it into a pre-dug hole. Visitors can simply turn up and join in.

Prehistory and Wormholes of Time

As the traffic rumbles past on Cotswold roads,
It’s hard to hear the chip of stone on flint,
Or the croak of corvids with their blood-drip beaks,
Or the breaking of the bones of a skeleton,
Or smell the rotting flesh on the capstone,
Or taste the ashes of the dead on the nightfall wind,
Or see the blood red sunset behind the silver river
Or the standing stone’s silhouette,
But try hard on a winter’s afternoon,
And you might just slip down a wormhole of time,
To rituals of death and memory,
And recognize the prehistoric past
For what it is and was:
Not something primitive and alien,
But something shared.

As the traffic rumbles past on Cotswold roads,
It’s hard to hear the chip of stone on flint,
Or the croak of corvids with their blood-drip beaks,
Or the breaking of the bones of a skeleton,
Or smell the rotting flesh on the capstone,
Or taste the ashes of the dead on the nightfall wind,
Or see the blood red sunset behind the silver river
Or the standing stone’s silhouette,
But try hard on a winter’s afternoon,
And you might just slip down a wormhole of time,
To rituals of death and memory,
And recognize the prehistoric past
For what it is and was:
Not something primitive and alien,
But something shared.

History But Not As You Did In School

Did you get bored in your history lessons?

Endless facts and dates.
A dreary litany.
Prehistoric Britain …
The Romans …

Those Anglo-Saxons and those Vikings …
Then came the Normans …
WELL HERE’S A NEW APPROACH
A RADICAL RETHINK

Questioning what we were taught and why
What did the great unwashed have to say?
A four-week course presented by
Stuart Butler and the Stroud Learners’ Circle

The Exchange, Brick Row

7-9pm.

Wednesday November 6 th : Prehistoric Gloucestershire – why are we fascinated by prehistory? What can we find? Where?
Wednesday November 13 th : What have the Romans ever done for us? A local probe and a national question.
Wednesday November 20 th : The imprint of the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings upon the county landscape.
Wednesday November 27 th : Domesday Gloucestershire, feudal Gloucestershire, the landscape and the Peasants’ Revolt

Booking essential – only £30 for the entire course.
Contact Gail Snyman to book at 01453 765955
or by email snyman.gail@gmail.com

Did you get bored in your history lessons?

Endless facts and dates.
A dreary litany.
Prehistoric Britain …
The Romans …

Those Anglo-Saxons and those Vikings …
Then came the Normans …
WELL HERE’S A NEW APPROACH
A RADICAL RETHINK

Questioning what we were taught and why
What did the great unwashed have to say?
A four-week course presented by
Stuart Butler and the Stroud Learners’ Circle

The Exchange, Brick Row

7-9pm.

Wednesday November 6 th : Prehistoric Gloucestershire – why are we fascinated by prehistory? What can we find? Where?
Wednesday November 13 th : What have the Romans ever done for us? A local probe and a national question.
Wednesday November 20 th : The imprint of the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings upon the county landscape.
Wednesday November 27 th : Domesday Gloucestershire, feudal Gloucestershire, the landscape and the Peasants’ Revolt

Booking essential – only £30 for the entire course.
Contact Gail Snyman to book at 01453 765955
or by email snyman.gail@gmail.com

John Thelwall: Radical thoughts on Slavery, Empire and Landscape

A Pedestrian Excursion Through Several Parts of England and Wales

John Thelwall’s account of his rambles
Between the years of the naval mutinies
of 1797 and the 1801 Peace of Amiens:

‘The cottages in general, are small, wretched and dirty. Some of them are built of brick, others are plastered and may exhibit nothing but miserable mud walls, equally naked without and within. They are wretchedly and scantily furnished; and few have even the advantage of a bit of garden. To complete the catalogue of misery, there is a workhouse in the parish, in which a number of deserted infants are consigned to captivity and incessant application…’

And even though Citizen John was being pursued,
Followed and shadowed by spies,
With consequent anxiety,
Thelwall could still write that …

‘The vivacity of conversation made the miles pass unheeded under our feet. We canvassed various subjects of literature and criticism, the state of morals and the existing institutions of society. We lamented the condition of our fellow-beings, and formed Utopian plans of retirement and colonisations. On one subject, and only one, we essentially differed – America. I cannot look towards that country with all the sanguine expectations so frequently cherished. I think I discover in it much of the old leaven. Its avidity for commercial aggrandisement augurs but ill even for the present generation; and I tremble at the consequences which the enormous appropriation of land may entail upon posterity.’

A Pedestrian Excursion Through Several Parts of England and Wales

John Thelwall’s account of his rambles
Between the years of the naval mutinies
of 1797 and the 1801 Peace of Amiens:

‘The cottages in general, are small, wretched and dirty. Some of them are built of brick, others are plastered and may exhibit nothing but miserable mud walls, equally naked without and within. They are wretchedly and  scantily furnished; and few have even the advantage of a bit of garden. To  complete the catalogue of misery, there is a workhouse in the parish, in  which a number of deserted infants are consigned to captivity and incessant  application…’

And even though Citizen John was being pursued,
Followed and shadowed by spies,
With consequent anxiety,
Thelwall could still write that …

‘The vivacity of conversation made the miles pass unheeded under our feet. We canvassed various subjects of literature and criticism, the state of morals and the existing institutions of society. We lamented the condition of our fellow-beings, and formed Utopian plans of retirement and colonisations. On one subject, and only one, we essentially differed –  America. I cannot look towards that country with all the sanguine expectations so frequently cherished. I think I discover in it much of the old leaven. Its avidity for commercial aggrandisement augurs but ill even for the present generation; and I tremble at the consequences which the enormous appropriation of land may entail upon posterity.’

A visit to Wilton House led to musing
On art, gardens, the classics, literature,

And …

‘Our walk over the house and gardens had already cost us six shillings; and we flattered ourselves, that we had no more exactions to encounter. But, as we were going past the porter’s lodge, a servant stopped us with a fresh demand, informing us, in plain language, that they were all stationed there for their fees, and nobody could come in or out without paying. We  accordingly submitted to be fleeced once more. I am told, that this kind of tax upon the curiosity of travellers is peculiar to this country; and surely it is somewhat surprising, that the pride and ostentation of greatness should not spurn the illiberal idea of supporting its servants on the alms of curiosity. But there is a nobleman in the county of Derby, who is reported not only to save the expense of wages by this expedient, but absolutely to make a bargain with his housekeeper for half the vails collected by exhibiting his splendid mansion.’

Before we hear of Thelwall in Wiltshire again,
Here’s another radical topographer,
Philip Alston, from the United Nations,
Commenting on the pauperisation
Of 20% of the UK population,

In the spring of 2019:

‘I think breaking rocks has some similarity to the 35 hours of job search for
people who have been out of work for months or years’:
‘A digital and sanitised version of the workhouse’,

And, here, Citizen John:

‘The daily toil of these little infants (who if they are ever to attain the vigour and healthful activity of manhood, ought to be stretching their wanton limbs in noisy gambols over the green)…’

John Thelwall and Slavery
It goes without saying that John Thelwall
Would be a committed abolitionist,
An activist, who also used his pen against slavery,
In his Jacobin novel The Daughter of Adoption,

And in this poem:
The Negro’s Prayer

(1807, commemorating the abolition of the slave trade)
‘O SPIRIT! that rid’st in the whirlwind and storm,
Whose voice in the thunder is heard,
If ever from man, the poor indigent worm,
The prayer of affliction was heard,-
If black man, as white, is the will of thy hand –
(And who would create him but Thee?)
Oh give thy command –
Let it spread thro’ each land,
That Afric’s sad sons shall be free!

…

If while in the slave-ship, with many a groan,
I wept o’er my sufferings in vain;
While hundreds around reply’ to my moan,
And the clanking of many a chain;-
If then thou but deign’st, with a pitying eye,
Thy poor shackled creature to see,
Oh thy mercy apply,
Afric’s sorrow to dry,
And bid the poor Negro be free!
If, here, as I faint in the vertical sun,
And the scourge goads me on to my toil,
No hope faintly soothing, when labour is done,
Of one joy my lorn heart to beguile;-
If thou view’st me Great Spirit! as one thou hast made,
And my fate as dependent on thee,
O impart thou thy aid,
That the scourge may be stay’d,
And the Black Man, at last, may be free…’

Here we see three of the four (sometimes five) stanzas –
The tone doesn’t do justice, perhaps,
To Thelwall’s ability to see slavery
As part of an imperial nexus –
He would have noted the links between war,
Empire, colonies, slavery, and Stroud Scarlet,
In his stay here with radical clothiers,
After his ten days at Nether Stowey
With Coleridge, Wordsworth, and a watchful spy,

In the summer of 1797…

‘Had the Maroons and negroes never been most wickedly enslaved, their masters had never been murdered.’

How he would have enjoyed walking past Capel’s Mill,

Reflecting on coincidence,
For as Michael Scrivener has written:

‘In 1793, trying to circumvent the political repression, Thelwall spoke at a
debating club, The Capel Court Society’;

But as regards the hidden colonial landscape around us:

‘That great family of human beings, every one of which, whatever be his name, his colour or his country, is the brother of all the rest, and ought to enjoy with them a community of rights and happiness’;
‘It would be a happy thing for the universe in general, and for Britain in particular, if there were no such thing as a colony or dependency…’

Citizen John’s visit to Stroudwater
Obviously had a profound impact on him –
This landscape is remembered,
Possibly subliminally, in his slavery novel,
With the names of two of the protagonists –
He met with radical dyers and clothiers –
The Partridges at Bowbridge Mill;
The Newcombes at Bowbridge House,
And the Nortons at Nailsworth,
On that excursion from Nether Stowey,
In the summer of 1797:

There is a Newcombe in the novel and a Captain Bowbridge, too…

Conclusion

John Thelwall, the ‘Jacobin fox’,
Pursued by William Pitt’s spies,
Puts William Cobbett in the shade
With a rather more radical typography,
Straddling, as EP Thompson said,

‘The world of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and the world of the Spitalfields
weaver’ –

But he straddled the ways of Socrates too,
For as Michael Scrivener has said:

‘Socrates was found, as usual, in the places of public resort – in the workshops of the artists, among the labourers in the manufactories, uttering seditious allegories, and condemning the desolating tyranny of the Oligarch’;

Or in Thelwall’s words:

‘Hence every large workshop and manufactory is a sort of political society, which no act of parliament can silence, and no magistrate disperse’…

But there is also something of the Rimbaud
About him too – something almost synesthesic
About the motto for The Tribune:
‘To paint the voice, and fix the fleeting sound’;

His imagery also possibly
Subliminally influenced William Blake –
Blake’s ‘mind-forg’d manacles’ seem to echo
These words of Thelwall:

‘For it is better, according to my judgment, – ten times better, to be immured oneself in a Bastille, than to have the Bastille put into one’s mouth to lock up one’s tongue from all intercourse and communication with one’s heart’;

Which is partly why,
In 1832, at the age of 69,
He was the sole eulogiser
For his old LCS colleague, Thomas Hardy,
His voice carrying to some 30,000 people,
Gathered at Bunhill Fields,

For this public ceremony and act of remembrance,
A reminder of the days forty years before,
When he lectured to audiences in their hundreds…
A reminder of the time when ‘pedestrian’
Meant wandering beyond accustomed paths,
Rather than its current meaning…

‘I have been rambling, according to my wanted practice, in the true democratic way, on foot, from village to village, from pleasant hill to barren Heath, recreating my mind with the beauties, and with the deformities of nature’

(ITLIC Tribune speech, 1795),
A pedestrian who could talk readily with anyone,
A writer whose mixed-genre The Peripatetic

Would influence Wordsworth’s rather more conservative The Excursion;
An activist who connected Nether Stowey with Spitalfields,
Spitalfields with Socrates and with Stroudwater too,

And Stroud scarlet with Empire;

He challenged the cultural hegemony of the classics,
He challenged aristocratic assumptions
About culture, hierarchy, and enlightenment:
The point of reading for Citizen John,
Was not to be elegantly learned and cultured,
But – to use the idiom of our age –
To empower and give agency
To the voices of the dispossessed,
In the triumph of Democracy over the Gothick,
In the triumph of a democratic sublime

Over that of Edmund Burke,
And in the triumph of collective walking
Over the solitary subjectivism of William Hazlitt:
A radical topography based on observation,
Discussion, inquiry and critique,
In language more lyrical than Wordsworth’s.

Post-script:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge:

‘We were once sitting in a beautiful recess in the Quantocks when I said to him – ‘Citizen John! This is a fine place to talk treason in!’ – ‘Nay! Citizen Samuel, ‘ replied he, ‘it is a fine place to make a man forget that there is any necessity for treason!’

Ghost Mills Walks

Free, but just a few places left only – contact me if you wish to go: 9.45 – approx 13:00 FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 13TH
A leisurely walk along the towpath follows past old mills to Bowbridge and thence Stroud.
Uncovering a colonial landscape whilst in the footsteps of that ‘Jacobin fox’, ‘the most dangerous man in Britain’, John Thelwall, who left London, fed up with William Pitt’s prying spies, and walked to Nether Stowey. He stayed with Coleridge and Wordsworth for ten days, in that hectic summer that would lead to the Lyrical Ballads, before walking to Stroudwater.
Here he stayed with sympathetic clothiers and dyers, visiting Chalford, Uley, Nailsworth and Bowbridge, writing poems on the hoof.
We recreate his stay in that annus mirabilis of 1797, with a performative walk from Chalford to Bowbridge, whilst uncovering a colonial landscape.
John Thelwall was a colleague of THOMAS SPENCE – and we have a show about Thomas as part of the Stroud Theatre Festival in the evening.

Free, but just a few places left only – contact me if you wish to go: 9.45 – approx 13:00 FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 13TH
A leisurely walk along the towpath follows past old mills to Bowbridge and thence Stroud.
Uncovering a colonial landscape whilst in the footsteps of that ‘Jacobin fox’, ‘the most dangerous man in Britain’, John Thelwall, who left London, fed up with William Pitt’s prying spies, and walked to Nether Stowey. He stayed with Coleridge and Wordsworth for ten days, in that hectic summer that would lead to the Lyrical Ballads, before walking to Stroudwater.
Here he stayed with sympathetic clothiers and dyers, visiting Chalford, Uley, Nailsworth and Bowbridge, writing poems on the hoof.
We recreate his stay in that annus mirabilis of 1797, with a performative walk from Chalford to Bowbridge, whilst uncovering a colonial landscape.
John Thelwall was a colleague of THOMAS SPENCE – and we have a show about Thomas as part of the Stroud Theatre Festival in the evening.
There is an early bus to Chalford FROM STROUD at 9.30
Meet at the bus shelter in Chalford at 9.45
As there are limited numbers, booking is essential:
email: stfc12@hotmail.com
part of Walking the Land’s #GhostMills exhibition, taking place at SVA’s John Street gallery in early September as a part of Stroud’s #woolandwaterFestival. SIT select The Museum in the Park Lansdown Hall & Gallery SVA Good On Love Stroud – What’s On Paper: Stroud Events Stroudwater Textile Trust

Peterloo-Wiltshire Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt Walk

Peterloo Memorial Walk 2019
About thirty of us braved Manchester weather on August 16th on a performative walk around Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt’s birthplace in Wiltshire. Pictures here tell the picture of the day.
We carried out a dialogue between 2019 and 1819 as we processed: the poem below from Robin Treefellow gives a flavour of how memorialization of Peterloo can reach out to the new Extinction Rebellion generation.

Chalk and Treason

To the chalk
we must go walk.
On the chalk where vipers bugloss brightens
we must go to rebel, debate, and reinvent
This green island
owned by a small land owning minority.

So depart that moribund Houses of Parliament
mired in out-dated oppositional bun throwing.

To the high dreamy chalk we must go like the bees to nectar
discovering what Britain dreams:
dreams like a giant with ammonites in its beard.
When we have lost our way,
when the ways are all privatised,
when society is manacled to linear profit centred greed:
to the chalk we must go walk.
In walking by the yellow of toadflax and melliot
there is waking,
with waking we can change.
This green island where feudalism has gone on too long,
equality,
the earth common to all,
we must learn from the biotic knit of ground sward
and abandon the tenure under our hidden landlords.
For Britain dreams!
The land will be free of chemicals,
to breath and flourish.
So shall our life return
Rude and willed,
modernisation discarded by the road where mugwort grows.
O Albion calls us all
to remember!
freedom, green of leaf and brown of root.
freedom, bright as flowers by the way.

Peterloo Memorial Walk 2019
About thirty of us braved Manchester weather on August 16th on a performative walk around Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt’s birthplace in Wiltshire. Pictures here tell the picture of the day.
We carried out a dialogue between 2019 and 1819 as we processed: the poem below from Robin Treefellow gives a flavour of how memorialization of Peterloo can reach out to the new Extinction Rebellion generation.

Chalk and Treason

To the chalk
we must go walk.
On the chalk where vipers bugloss brightens
we must go to rebel, debate, and reinvent
This green island
owned by a small land owning minority.

So depart that moribund Houses of Parliament
mired in out-dated oppositional bun throwing.

To the high dreamy chalk we must go like the bees to nectar
discovering what Britain dreams:
dreams like a giant with ammonites in its beard.
When we have lost our way,
when the ways are all privatised,
when society is manacled to linear profit centred greed:
to the chalk we must go walk.
In walking by the yellow of toadflax and melliot
there is waking,
with waking we can change.
This green island where feudalism has gone on too long,
equality,
the earth common to all,
we must learn from the biotic knit of ground sward
and abandon the tenure under our hidden landlords.
For Britain dreams!
The land will be free of chemicals,
to breath and flourish.
So shall our life return
Rude and willed,
modernisation discarded by the road where mugwort grows.
O Albion calls us all
to remember!
freedom, green of leaf and brown of root.
freedom, bright as flowers by the way.

The text below is about how we put this walk together, with a recce in the spring of 2019. It contains a guide to the walk and aims to stimulate discussion about Hunt might be memorialized in Wiltshire. There is a post-script with a list of flowers and grasses seen on our second recce in early July.

How Henry Hunt is not memorialized in Wiltshire
And how Captain Swing almost is

Henry Hunt’s onetime associate,
Rural Rides’ William Cobbett,
Came down this way in late August 1826:

‘The shepherd showed me the way … and a most beautiful sight it was! Villages, hamlets, large farms, towers, steeples, meadows, orchards, and very fine timber trees, scattered all over the valley … downs, very lofty and steep in some places, and sloping miles back in others … From the edge of the downs begin capital arable fields generally of very great dimensions … After the corn-fields come meadows on each side, down to the brook or river … I sat upon my horse and looked over Milton and Easton and Pewsey for half an hour, though I had not breakfasted…’

We travelled by the cherry red
Swindon-Salisbury double-decker,
To alight at Enford to view the church
At 10.45 at the end of February 2019:
‘Above the arch is the COAT OF ARMS of King William 1V dating from 1831. Royal coats of arms were much in vogue in this period to display the parish’s loyalty and to add colour to the church …’
But obvs no mention of Captain Swing
Or the threat of revolution at this time …

But we went left to the crossroads.
For the lane towards Littlecot
And East Chisenbury and the Red Lion,
Thatched cottages and inns,
Flint and red brick and whitewash,
Just as in Cobbett’s and the Orator’s day;

A left hand turn on a footpath followed,
And so to the crossing of the main (turnpike) road,
Where we turned left along the verge to a stile on the right,
Where a footpath sign on a gate showed us our way up the hill;
We walked where Hunt no doubt took his horse,
A parliament of rooks democratically nesting
Below us on our left hand side,

Lichen splashing the track-way hawthorn,
The big sky landscape bare branched etched,
A solitary signpost standing to show our path
Across the lonely windswept downs,
Now resounding with ordnance,
Beyond the red flags down to Salisbury Plain:
An echo of the musket fire from the days of Swing,

Skylarks ascending to sing the spring,
While finches arced their way across the ploughed fields,

Barns with the ghosts of their threshing machines,
Boot-prints once down there in the oozing mud,
Cries of ‘Bread or Blood’ still there in the air,
The ashes of burnt hayricks and letters,
Once scattered across the nearby valley farms and fields,

The sun now gleaming on the puddled track-ways,
And on the white horse hillside to the south;
While, beyond, lay Hampshire and misty Dorset,
Where Captain Swing once rode on his white horse.

We wandered on to skirt a high Iron Age enclosure,
And so descend along a curving lane,
Past the birthplace of Henry Hunt on our right,
Widdington Farm:
‘I was born on the 6th November 1773, in Wiltshire, at Widdington Farm, not within a mile of any other habitation, near Upavon. Widdington Farm lies about a mile from the turnpike road … a lone farm, in a valley upon the downs.’
But no mention of the Orator today,
Instead:
‘WIDDINGTON SHOOT
WILTSHIRE
CLAY SHOOTING GROUND
OUR NEXT COMPETTION IS …’;

And this is how Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt,
And Wiltshire’s radical history is memorialized,
Mute and invisible in the Vale of the Avon,
Unless you use your imagination –
But, wait, in St Timothy’s Church in Upavon,
There is a brief but welcome reference to Captain Swing
On the information board:
‘In the beginning of the nineteenth century agricultural workers in general, and those of Wiltshire in particular, had been reduced to abject misery, and The Vale was a focal point of the agricultural unrest known as the Swing Riots of 1830.’
‘Abject misery’ is daring and arresting …
But the next sentence and paragraph
Guides the reader’s understanding thus:
‘By far the most important development was the Vale’s emergence as a transportation corridor … the Kennet & Avon Canal …’

‘By far the most important development …’
The subliminal suggestion …
Old fashioned Swing …
The modernity/progress transportation trope …
The modernity of ‘corridor’ …
The world of ‘abject misery’ has been left behind …
Mute and invisible,
Like Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt.

We hope to address this mute invisibility
On the 16th of August 2019,
The bi-centenary of Peterloo,
With a Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt performative walk:
Meet at the church in Enford at 10.45:
The walk will end at Upavon after about three hours,
A bit up and down and one bit by the main road;
Park at Enford and get the bus back from Upavon,
Or get the bus from Swindon to Enford and back from Upavon.

Post-script:

Wild flowers seen on July 11th on this walk:
Agrimony

Bird’s Foot Trefoil Black Medick
Bladder Campion Bramble
Broomrape
Buttercup
Burdock
Bush Vetch

Chicory
Clematis
Cleavers
Common Centaury Common Knapweed Common Toadflax Creeping Thistle
Cut Leafed Cranesbill Daisy
Dandelion
Dock
Dog Rose
Dogwood
Dove’s-Foot Cranesbill Elder Flower
Evening Primrose

Fairy Flax
Field Bindweed
Field Scabious

Goats Beard
Great Mullein
Great Willowherb Greater Knapweed Ground Ivy

Hedge Bedstraw Hedge Woundwort Hemp Agrimony
Herb Robert
Hoary Plantain Hogweed
Hop Trefoil

Ivy Leafed Speedwell

Lady’s Bedstraw

Marjoram
Meadow Cranesbill Meadowsweet Meadow Vetchling

Melilot
Milkwort
Mousear
Mousear Hawkweed Mugwort

Musk Mallow

Nipplewort

Oxeye Daisy

Pignut Pineapple Weed Poppy

Purple Toadflax Pyramidal Orchid

Quaking Grass

Ragwort

Red Bartsia
Red Clover
Rest Harrow
Red Valerian Ribwort Plantain Rock Rose
Rosebay Willowherb Rough Hawkbit

St. Johns Wort Salad Burnet Sanfoin
Selfheal Shepherds Purse Silverweed Small Scabious Sorrel Sow Thistle
Spear Thistle Speedwell
Spindle Tree

Teasel
Tufted Vetch

Vipers Bugloss

Watercress
Water Forget-Me-Not Weld

White Bryony White Campion Wild Carrot White Clover White Deadnettle Wild Basil
Wild Mignonette Wild Parsnip Wild Thyme Wood Avens

Yarrow
Yellow Rattle Yellow Vetchling

Re memorialization, readers might also want to look at the link below:
https://radicalstroud.co.uk/a-wiltshire-town-and-peterloo/

Peterloo and Revolution

REVOLUTION 1819-2019

This was the time when the age of Marx replaced that of Burke,
The time when the ‘swinish multitude’ and ‘the mob’ became a working class,
When there was not just the economic revolution of school textbooks,
But also a presence of a possible political one,
A time when Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man (sic),
Viewed as seditious and libellous
By the nation’s rulers,
Could sell 200,000 copies in a year,
When the population was only around ten million,
And so many could not read – but they listened,
And learned and remembered,
Despite the patriotic cavalcades
And violent contrived disruption of ‘Jacobin’ meetings,
Despite the show trials and government spies,
The arrest of booksellers, the banning of political meetings,
The censorship and illegalisation of criticism of government or monarchy.
This was our land in the 1790s:
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women,
Pitt’s repression at home and war abroad,
Food riots all around our five valleys
(‘We might as well be hanged as starved’),

https://radicalstroud.co.uk/the-1766-food-riots-and-the-hangmans-noose/

The Naval Mutinies of 1797
(“An attempt was made to give to the ships
in mutiny the name of ‘The Floating Republic’.”)
‘Secret Jacobin springs’ were rumoured:
‘Jacobin emissaries and the Corresponding Society …
Jacobin management and influence is at the bottom of this evil’;
The Red Flag was hoisted;
Richard Parker was elected President by the mutinous delegates:
‘… We are not rebels to our country, our country are rebels to us.’
‘I and my brother delegates are all united, and acting in the cause of humanity;
and while life animates the heart of Dick Parker, he will be true to the cause.’
Anything else to rock the ship of state?
Riots against the Militia Act in Scotland,
Wolfe Tone and rebellion in Ireland –
When more people were killed by the army
Than in the ‘Reign of Terror’ in Paris …
Pamphlets such as King Killing;
The Happy Reign of King George the Last;
100, 000 people meeting at Copenhagen Fields, Islington;
The King’s carriage attacked:
‘No War! No King! No Pitt!’
This sung to the tune of ‘God Save the King’ at Drury Lane Theatre:
‘And when George’s Poll
Shall in the basket roll,
Let mercy then control
The Guillotine.’

REVOLUTION 1819-2019

This was the time when the age of Marx replaced that of Burke,
The time when the ‘swinish multitude’ and ‘the mob’ became a working class,
When there was not just the economic revolution of school textbooks,
But also a presence of a possible political one,
A time when Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man (sic),
Viewed as seditious and libellous
By the nation’s rulers,
Could sell 200,000 copies in a year,
When the population was only around ten million,
And so many could not read – but they listened,
And learned and remembered,
Despite the patriotic cavalcades
And violent contrived disruption of ‘Jacobin’ meetings,
Despite the show trials and government spies,
The arrest of booksellers, the banning of political meetings,
The censorship and illegalisation of criticism of government or monarchy.
This was our land in the 1790s:
Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women,
Pitt’s repression at home and war abroad,
Food riots all around our five valleys
(‘We might as well be hanged as starved’),

https://radicalstroud.co.uk/the-1766-food-riots-and-the-hangmans-noose/

The Naval Mutinies of 1797
(“An attempt was made to give to the ships
in mutiny the name of ‘The Floating Republic’.”)
‘Secret Jacobin springs’ were rumoured:
‘Jacobin emissaries and the Corresponding Society …
Jacobin management and influence is at the bottom of this evil’;
The Red Flag was hoisted;
Richard Parker was elected President by the mutinous delegates:
‘… We are not rebels to our country, our country are rebels to us.’
‘I and my brother delegates are all united, and acting in the cause of humanity;
and while life animates the heart of Dick Parker, he will be true to the cause.’
Anything else to rock the ship of state?
Riots against the Militia Act in Scotland,
Wolfe Tone and rebellion in Ireland –
When more people were killed by the army
Than in the ‘Reign of Terror’ in Paris …
Pamphlets such as King Killing;
The Happy Reign of King George the Last;
100, 000 people meeting at Copenhagen Fields, Islington;
The King’s carriage attacked:
‘No War! No King! No Pitt!’
This sung to the tune of ‘God Save the King’ at Drury Lane Theatre:
‘And when George’s Poll
Shall in the basket roll,
Let mercy then control
The Guillotine.’

Anything else?
The Combination Acts of 1799-1800,
Illegalising trade unions,
Colonel Despard and the United Englishmen:
‘Aristocrats to the lamp posts… we’ll hang them … we’ll break them …
We shall have no more nobles and priests.’
The colonel, married to a woman of colour,
Meeting at Furnival’s Inn, Holborn, and in Soho Square,
With the idea of a coup d’etat:
With the provinces to follow the following action:
Attacks on the Tower of London, Woolwich Arsenal,
The Royal Mint, the Bank of England …
But here come the Bow Street Runners,
Arresting the conspirators in the Oakley Arms, Lambeth:
‘You have been separately indicted for conspiracy against his Majesty’s person,
his crown and government, for the purposes of subverting the same
and changing the government of this realm’;
‘Each of you … are to be drawn on hurdles to the place of execution,
where you are to be hanged, but not until you are dead;
for while you are still living, your bodies are to be taken down,
your bowels torn out and burned before your faces,
your heads cut off and your bodies to be divided into quarters
and your heads and quarters to be then at the King’s disposal
and may Almighty God have mercy on your souls.’
(The disembowelling and burning were later rescinded.)
John McNamara whispered to Despard on the scaffold:
‘I am afraid, Colonel, we have got ourselves into a bad situation.’
Despard: ‘There are many better and some worse.’
He then addressed the crowds with a democratic greeting:
‘Fellow citizens’ –
And then coolly informed them that he was about to be executed
Because:
‘He has been a friend to the truth, to liberty and to justice,
because he has been a friend to the poor and oppressed.’
Let’s jump on a few years …
And we have the Luddite action in the north
(More troops stationed there than used against Napoleon),
Report of the Secret Committee of the House of Lords
on the Disturbed State of Certain Counties, 1812:
‘All the societies in the country are directed … by a Secret Committee … these societies are governed by their respective secret committees … delegates are continually dispatched from one place to another, for the purpose of concerting their plans’,

On top of that,
There were bread riots in Leeds, Sheffield, Barnsley, Carlisle and Bristol;
The Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, was assassinated;
In Stoke, it was reported that,
‘A man came running down the street, waving his hat round his head
And shouting with frantic joy:
“Perceval is shot, hurrah!”
There were parties in the street,
Drum beats and flags unfurled in Nottingham,
While, locally, we could look at Uley and all around the five valleys:

https://radicalstroud.co.uk/class-conflict-in-uley-1795/

https://radicalstroud.co.uk/before-the-luddites/

While back in William Cobbett’s ‘Great Wen’?
Thomas Spence with his plans for agrarian communism,
To end, as he put it:
‘the poor man’s poverty and the rich man’s gout’;
He and his followers, such as William Davison, a man ‘of colour’,
Chalked their egalitarian plans and messages
All over London walls and pavements;
Spence issued medallions with circumferential revolutionary slogans;
Their anthem ended with these lines:
‘From landlords, once set free,
The bells shall ring, we’ll dance and sing
On Spence’s Jubilee’,
Thomas, selling his journal from a baker’s cart:
Pig’s Meat: or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude,
‘a few Contingent parishes have only to declare the land to be theirs and …
other adjacent parishes would immediately follow the example …
thus would a beautiful and powerful New Republic
instantly arise in full vigour’;
His other publications included:
Restorer of Society to its Natural State,
The Real Rights of Man,
The Restorer;
Theirs was a dream of a revolutionary Utopia:
Spensonia!

But the end of war in 1815 and peace at last!
And …

Soldiers and sailors on the streets,
Unemployed weavers,
Corn Laws to protect landlord profits by keeping out cheaper corn imports
(Lord Sidmouth, Home Secretary:
‘Man cannot create abundance where Providence has inflicted scarcity’;
‘The alleviation of the difficulties is not to be looked for
from the intervention of Government and Parliament’),
‘Bread or Blood’ riots in East Anglia in 1816,
Hampden Clubs formed for political reform, and
Extension of the suffrage, secret ballot, and annual parliaments,
Republican newspapers such as The Black Dwarf,
And The Gorgon, and William Cobbett’s Political Register
(Derided as ‘Twopenny Trash’ by the patrician ruling class,
Yet it would sell 60,000 a week,
Ten times that of the Times and Observer):
‘If the skulkers will not join you,
If the decent fireside gentry still keep aloof,
Proceed by yourselves’ …
And so we proceed to Spa Fields in 1816,
Thousands present with the tricolour, the Cap of Liberty,
When followers of Thomas Spence attempted something of a coup d’etat,
Trying to scale the walls at the Tower of London,
Devising an ‘Anti-Cavalry Machine’, ‘The Night Cat’,
Designed to suffocate soldiers in their barracks.
The leaders were charged with High Treason,
But the involvement of a government spy
Led to their acquittal;
One year later and we have a sort of hunger march,
The March of the Blanketeers,
The same year, the Pentridge Rising of 1817 –
Another armed uprising of sorts,
With agent-provocateur fabulations (Oliver the Spy) …
But, this time, executions and transportation followed:
‘The jurors of our Lord the King upon their oath present that …
Jeremiah Brandreth … otherwise called the Nottingham Captain …
together with a great multitude of false traitors …
to the number of five hundred and more,
arrayed and armed in a war-like manner,
that is to say with swords, pistols, clubs, bludgeons, and other weapons …
did then with great violence parade and march in a hostile manner
in and through divers villages, places, and public highways …
and did then and there maliciously and traitorously
attempt and endeavour by force of arms
to subvert and destroy the Government and Constitution of the Realm’;
The Black Dwarf remembered Jeremiah Brandreth differently:
FORMED BY NATURE FOR DEEDS OF DARING
HIS SOUL POSSESSED A DEGREE OF PERSONAL COURAGE
AND AN EXTENT OF SELF-COMMAND
WHICH
UNDER THE SMILE OF FORTUNE MIGHT HAVE ENABLED HIM
TO ECLIPSE THE FAME OF MARLBOROUGH
AND RIVAL THE GLORY OF NAPOLEON’;
William Turner cried out on the gallows:
‘This is all Oliver and the Government’,
But a parliamentary secret committee talked of:
‘some general plan of simultaneous or connected insurrection;
the object … after consolidating a sufficient force,
to march upon London,
and there to overthrow the existing Government
and to establish a republic’;
And from Manchester:
‘the lower orders
are everywhere meeting in large bodies
and are very clamorous’ about
‘a general union of the lower orders throughout the kingdom’;

The suspension of Habeas Corpus followed in 1817,
And the Seditious Meetings Act,
The use of government spies and agents-provocateurs
(In passing, btw,
even if the government did use spies
and agents-provocateurs,
to furnish the justificatory evidence
necessary for policies of repression,
we have to say that the plots still happened),
The spread of barracks: 26, 000 troops stationed in barracks,
Rather than in inns where they might become disaffected:

The Black Dwarf 1817:

‘The army and the people are … separated from each other … no intercourse must be allowed … lest the soldier should begin to remember that he is a man’;

William Hone, 1817:

‘Our Lord who art in the Treasury,
whatsoever be thy name,
thy power be prolonged,
thy will be done throughout the Empire …
Turn us not out of our places,
But keep us in the House of Commons,
The land of Pensions and Plenty;
And deliver us from the People.
Amen.’
Joseph Swann, a newspaper seller,
Imprisoned for four and a half years in 1819,
For selling ‘treasonable material’:
‘Off with your fetters; spurn the slavish yoke,
None, now, or never, can your chain be broke;
Swift then, rise and give the fatal stroke.’

In 1819, the ban on political meetings ended,
There were calls for female suffrage in the North,
40,000 Glasgow weavers met to petition the Prince Regent
for assistance so as to emigrate to Canada –
But for radicals, the answer would have to be universal suffrage,
And the secret ballot and annual parliaments;
The summer would be the time for a signal meeting,
Manchester to be the venue
(Hunt at Smithfield, 21st July 1819:
‘After the first day of 1820 we cannot, conscientiously,
consider ourselves … as bound by any persons styling themselves
our representatives, other than those who shall be
fully, freely and fairly chosen by the voices and votes
of the largest proportion of the members of the state’),
With Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt to address 60,000 people
(‘Libellous, seditious, factious, levelling, revolutionary,
Republican, democratical, atheistical villain’)
All in orderly procession, dressed in their Sunday best,
All following Hunt’s request that they should bring
‘No other weapon that that of an approving conscience’,
Banners were profuse:
UNITY & STRENGTH;
PARLIAMENTS ANNUAL – SUFFRAGE UNIVERSAL;
Red caps of liberty at this perfectly legal meeting,
With nigh on 20% of Lancashire’s population present,
But in rode the Yoemanry,
And then the Hussars, flashing their swords
(Nearly three foot long and weighing two ibs two ounces)
Within minutes eleven dead and over four hundred wounded,
Sprawled everywhere on the ground were
‘Hats, bonnets, shawls, shoes, musical instruments …
In the midst stood the hustings with its broken flag-staffs
and tattered banners’;
Samuel Bamford described it thus:
‘the hustings remained,
with a few broken and hewed flag staves erect
and a torn and gashed banner or two drooping,
whilst over the whole field were strewed the caps,
bonnets, hats, shawls and shoes …
trampled, torn and bloody.
The Yoemanry had dismounted –
Some were easing their horses’ girths,
Others adjusting their accoutrements;
And some were wiping their sabres.
Several mounds of human bodies still remained as they had fallen,
Crushed down and smothered.
Some of these still groaning – some with staring eyes,
Were gasping for breath and others would never breath again …’
Eleven dead and over four hundred wounded;
The Prince Regent offered his congratulations for
‘prompt, decisive and efficient measures
for the preservation of the public tranquillity’;
Lord Sidmouth, Home Secretary, in private:
‘an essential principle of government … the confidence of the magistracy …
a readiness to support them in all honest, reasonable, and well-intended acts,
without inquiring too minutely whether they might
have performed their duty a little better or a little worse.’
The local authorities thanked the Yoemanry:
‘Their extreme forbearance exercised
when insulted and defied by the rioters’;
And so that was the meeting at St Peter’s Fields,
Peterloo, 1819,
Witnessed thus, by Lieutenant Joliffe, 15th Hussars:
‘although nine tenths of the sabre wounds were caused by the Hussars,
it redounds to the human forbearance
of the men of the 15th that more wounds were not received,’;
Peterloo, followed by the dictatorial Six Acts,
And Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy –
‘I met Murder on the way
It had a face like Castlereagh …
Ye are Many, They are few’ …
Peterloo, followed by the spy-riddled 1820 Cato Street Conspiracy:
Arthur Thistlewood, Watson and co. organised
The Committee of Two Hundred,
They met surreptitiously at the White Lion in Wych Street,
Planning a coup d’etat with the formation of a Provisional Government
(Thistlewood’s planned speech:
‘Your tyrants are destroyed.
The friends of liberty are called upon to come forward.
The provisional government is now sitting.’),
The spark – the assassination of the cabinet in revenge for Peterloo,
Whilst they were dining at Lord Harrowby’s,
The idea being to decapitate the cabinet
(Henry Bathurst’s would have been included, btw),
And parade the heads on spikes through London’s chartered streets:
James Ings:
‘ I will enter the room first, I will go in with a brace of pistols,
a cutlass and a knife in my pocket
and after two swordsmen have despatched them,
I will cut off every head that is in that room
And Lord Castlereagh’s and Lord Sidmouth’s
I will bring away in a bag …
As soon as I get into the room I shall say:
“Well my Lords, I have as good men here as your Manchester Yoemanry.
Enter Citizens, and do your duty.”’
But the Bow Street Runners broke into the stable loft in Cato Street,
The conspirators were taken prisoner after a skirmish;
Whilst they were held at the Horse and Groom,
A search of the loft revealed
‘a great quantity of pistols, blunderbusses, swords and pikes’;
Charges of high treason followed,
For the conspirators ‘ did compass, imagine, invent, devise
And intend to deprive and depose our said Lord the King of …
The style, honour and kingly name
Of the imperial crown of this realm’;
Secondly, they intended
‘To move and excite insurrection, rebellion and war against the King …
and to subvert and alter the legislature, rule and government
and to bring and put the King to death’;
Ings emphasised the role of Edward the Spy:
‘The Attorney-General knew …
when I was before Lord Sidmouth,
a gentleman said,
Lord Sidmouth knew all about this for about two month’;
Bruit said,
‘Should I die, by this case,
I have been seduced by a villain,
who, I have no doubt,
has been employed by Government’;
Thistlewood: ‘Liberty and Justice
Have been driven from confines by a set of villains,
Whose thirst for blood is only to be equalled …
By their plunder’;
Apart from castigating Edwards, he spoke also of Peterloo:
‘when infants were sabred in their mothers’ arms
and the breast from which they drew the tide of life,
was severed from the parent’s body’;
‘High treason was committed against the people of Manchester,
I resolved that the lives of the instigators of the massacre
should atone for the souls of the murdered innocents’,

But Black Cap Chief Justice was unmoved:
‘You and each of you; be taken here to the gaol from whence you came
and from thence that you be drawn upon a hurdle to a place of execution
and there be hanged by the neck until you be dead; and that
afterwards your heads shall be severed from your bodies
and your bodied be divided into four quarters
to be disposed of as his majesty shall think fit.
And may God in his infinite goodness have mercy on your souls’;
Thistlewood disdainfully took snuff as he listened to the verdict;
The date chosen: a hurried May 1st 1820 –
Thistlewood:
‘The sooner we go, sir, the better’;
And on the scaffold, Tidd and Thistlewood shook hands:
‘Well, Mr Thistlewood. How do you do?’
‘I was never better.’
After they had hung for half an hour,
Their bodies were taken down, de-hooded,
And their heads were placed on the block:
‘This is the head of Arthur Thistlewood, the traitor.’
One by one, the heads were shown,
But the crowd shouted:
‘Bring out Edwards!
Shoot that bloody murderer!’
Windows were smashed afterwards …
The Home Office had received a plenitude of anonymous letters
Before May 1st, threatening violence:
‘To Ministers, Privy Councillors, Bloody-minded wretches –
Ye are now brooding with hellish delight
On the sacrifice ye intend to make on those poor creatures
Ye took out of Cato Street on pretence
Of punishing them for what your own horrid spies
And agents instigated … But know this,
Ye demons, on an approaching day
And in an hour when you least expect it
Ye yourselves shall fall a sacrifice to
The just vengeance of an oppressed
And suffering people who shall behold
Your bloody corpses dragged in Triumph through their streets.’

The 1820s saw the rise of trade union action again
(The consequence being the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834),
And then in 1830, the Captain Swing agricultural riots,
When southern England was ablaze,
Followed by the crisis of 1830-32 over parliamentary reform,
When the Whig government divided the middle from the working class
(‘Seducing the bourgeoisie’),
By giving the vote to householders on a stiff property qualification,
Thereby ensuring continued aristocratic dominance,
And preventing any possibility of revolution.
In the words of Macaulay:
“Reform that ye may preserve”
(Remember! The word ‘democracy’
was a pejorative then to our rulers),
But when it seemed that the House of Lords was determined
To prevent any semblance of reform
and even limited extension of the franchise,
Riots followed at Derby, Nottingham and Bristol,
There was a run on gold at the Bank of England,
There were rumours of armed marches from the provinces on London,
Of refusals to pay taxes,
Of mutinies in the army and refusals to obey orders,
Windows were smashed in the houses of infamous reactionaries,
Such as the Duke of Wellington,
There were strikes in the industrial north, midlands and Wales …

An Interlude not The Prelude:

Wordsworth might have grown up ‘fostered alike by beauty and by fear’,
But it was fear alone that stalked him in 1817,
Seeing treason and sedition, ‘even among these mountains’,
Informing the prime minister of the necessity
Of an armed presence in the capital,
Otherwise, ‘four and twenty hours would not elapse
before the tricoloured flag would be planted …’

An Epilogue of Sorts

When next in London, let’s walk the sites of these radical pubs,
Where treason and sedition were discussed as standard:
The Two Bells, the Flying Horse, the Ham and Windmill,
The Bleeding Heart; the Coach and Horses;
The Brown Bear and the Black Horse.

The Country 1830-32,
Through they eyes of those who lived then:

Mrs Arbuthnot’s Journal Nov 4 1830

‘The Duke of Wellington was ‘hooted and hissed’ at ‘wherever they could see him’ at the opening of Parliament by ‘the people who were … very disorderly’ and called out ‘No police! … and in various parts of the town attacked the police most furiously … we have taken great precautions against the mobs. Troops and artillery have been brought to London, the guards doubled, the police all on the alert … wherever the mobs have assimilated they have been routed & severely beat by the police … Hunt and Cobbett have opened a meeting house they call the Rotunda near Blackfriars Bridge, and there they assemble & harangue crowds of the lowest order in the most seditious manner, and from that place they issue in large bodies & come & alarm the … West End … I hope the mob will soon be tired of getting nothing but blows from the police.’

29th November

‘The country is in a terrible state, thanks to all the people who have been lauding the French Revolution up to the skies and dinning in the ears of the people that, if they choose to rise, nothing can resist them. The consequence has been that all over the country the peasantry, who in many parts really do suffer under great privations, have been worked upon by incendiaries & agitators & have burnt rickyards & broke machines; in many parts there have been violent conflicts between the mob & the constables.’

Mary Frampton

‘The unpopularity of the Duke of Wellington was extreme, so as to render his life in danger from the pressures of the crowd, stones being thrown at him &c.’

The Times 9 December 1830

‘if enemies to universal suffrage .. it is because such a principle would be, in effect, a narrowing of the representative system, by the virtual exclusion of all influence derived from property, and an absolute surrender … to a single class – a class moved to frequent warfare … by the extremes of destitution and desperation acting upon incurable ignorance, prejudice and distrust.’

Mrs Arbuthnot’s Journal 16 May 1831

‘The Duke has lost heart entirely. He thinks the revolution is begun and that nothing can save us … he foresees nothing but civil war & convulsion.’

Mrs Mundy to Lady H. Frampton, Markeaton, 15 October 1831

‘MY DEAR MOTHER … Conceive how horrid it was on Sunday morning, just as we had finished our doleful breakfast, having been up all night, and having the yells of the multitude and the crash of windows, and doors still ringing in our ears to have a gentleman (My Meynell) ride up, saying that he was just come from Derby (where he had expected to be annihilated by the mob …), that they had forced the town gaol and liberated twenty-three prisoners, were proceeding to the county gaol … and were coming on to us … Fortunately the gaoler made a gallant defence, which delayed the rioters until the dragoons arrived from Nottingham, which was only just in time, as they were preparing to scale the walls … We are very thankful for our preservation … for the Nottingham rioters plundered much more; and at Colwick, near Nottingham – Mr Muster’s place – they entered, seized the furniture and pictures, which they made into a bonfire before the door; and utterly ruined it.’

Mrs Arbuthnot’s Journal 23rd October 1831

‘…the mob broke the windows of several houses. They broke all the Duke of Wellington’s windows in broad daylight … there was not a single policeman came till the mob had been throwing stones for 55 minutes & then not one man was taken up.’

The Reverend J.L. Jackson to C.B. Wollaston, Clifton 31st October 1831

‘…the knots of men standing about the streets were of the most awful character. Three individuals were killed by the soldiers and more wounded. In the afternoon we heard that the multitude was assembled in much greater masses, and about four o’clock we saw the new City and County Gaol in flames; afterwards the Bridewell and another prison in the Gloucester Road … In the course of the evening Queen’s Square was fired and the Bishop’s palace … the … Mansion House … the Custom House … Other property to an immense amount is also destroyed. This morning an actual slaughter has taken place; it is supposed … that above seventy persons have been killed, besides a large number who have been wounded. The military charged through some of the principal streets.’

Charles Greville’s Journal 11 November 1831

‘The country was beginning to sleep after the fatigues of Reform, when it was rattled up by the business of Bristol, which for brutal ferocity and wanton unprovoked violence may vie with some of the worst scenes of the French Revolution … nothing could exceed the ferocity of the populace, the imbecility of the magistracy or the good conduct of the troops. More punishment was inflicted by them than has been generally been known, and some hundreds were killed or severely wounded by the sabre. One body of dragoons pursued a rabble of colliers into the country and covered the fields and roads with the bodies of wounded wretches, making a severe example of them …’

Lord Fitzroy Somerset to the Duke of Wellington, Horse Guards, 2 Nov 1831

‘MY DEAR LORD
… The force we shall have in and about London on Monday next …
The 1st Life Guards, from Windsor to Hyde Park Riding House.
The 2nd Life Guards, Regent’s Park Barracks.
The Blues, Hyde Park Barracks.
The 9th Lancers, King’s Stables, Pimlico.
The 7th Dragoon guards … to assemble either at the Obelisk
or Vauxhall Bridge.
One squadron of the Greys … to move up from Croydon to Vauxhall Bridge or some other convenient spot.
Four guns, Riding Establishment, St. John’s Wood.
Four guns or more, Carlton House stables.
One Battalion of Foot Guards and detachment of Artillery, Tower.
Four battalions of Foot Guards, Portman Street Barracks, Knightsbridge Barracks, Mews Barracks, Westminster quarters daily duties.
500 marines, from Woolwich, at Deptford Dockyard or the Obelisk.
To these four guns might be added.
This is all the force we can at present muster, and the garrisons at Portsmouth and Chatham are not as strong as they ought to be.
Your most faithful and affectionate,
Fitzroy Somerset.

The Poor Man’s Guardian, No. 22, Saturday 19 November 1831

‘BURNING A BISHOP IN EFFIGY!
Remember, remember,
The Fifth of November
Between fifteen and twenty thousand persons paraded the streets … For, lo! And behold! Here is a fat, bloated, blundering bishop … we hereby commit his infernal body to the flames … in the certain belief that eternal damnation will be his portion, and that he will never inherit a glorious resurrection.
Good Lord! Put down aristocrats;
Let boroughmongers be abhorred;
And from all tithes and shovel hats
Forthwith deliver us Good Lord!’

Lord Lyttelton to Lady Lyttelton

‘London 9 May
My Yoemanry Commission I shall probably … resign … God grant that I may not be obliged again to turn out again … for the suppression of a local riot.’

The Times on the demand for gold at the bank, 15 May
‘MONEY-MARKET and CITY INTELLIGENCE

Monday evening

The demand for gold at the Bank is increasing … According to the best estimate that can be found, about 1,000,000l in gold may have been drawn out.

16 May

A steady demand for gold is kept up at the Bank … Every man of common understanding is convinced that the gold in the Bank will be exhausted in a week if a Tory ministry is appointed in the face of the obstinate determination against it on the part of the people.’

Alexander Somerville’s Autobiography of a Working Man

‘At Birmingham, two hundred thousand persons … resolved to pay no King’s taxes, until the bill passed, and, if need be, to remove bodily the whole two hundred thousand of them, and encamp, with other political unions, on Hampstead … Heath, to be near parliament … It was rumoured that the Birmingham political union was to march for London that night; and that we were to stop it on the road. We had been daily and nightly booted and saddled, with ball cartridge in each man’s possession, for three days ready to turn out at a moment’s notice. But until this day we had rough sharpened no swords … to make them inflict a ragged wound … we implored the people … not to allow rioting, window breaking, or any outrage on property; else, if refusing to draw swords on them, in the event of our being brought before a court martial for such disobedience, we would have no justification.’

Hobhouse’s Recollections

19May

‘I went to Place. He told me that there would, positively, have been a rising if Wellington had received power yesterday. Everything was arranged for it, he himself would not have slept at home …’

22 May

‘Charles Fox [MP] … said to King, “By recalling Lord Grey, you have saved the country from civil war.”
“Yes,” said the King, “for the present.”

The Peterloo Massacre, Robert Reid, Windmill Books 2018
Artisans and Sans-Culottes Gwyn A. Williams Libris 1989
Democracy and Reform D.G. Wright Longmans Seminar Series 1981
The Floating Republic Manwaring & Dobree Pen and Sword Books 2004
The Cato Street Conspiracy John Stanhope Jonathan Cape 1962
Reform or Revolution E.A. Smith Alan Sutton 1992
Waterloo to Peterloo R.J. White Heinemann 1957 (It was Bernard Crick’s copy!)
The Lives of … The Leaders of the Cato Street Conspiracy … Primary Source Edition Nabu Public Domain Reprints
Enemies of the State M. J. Trow Pen & Sword 2010

A new poem about Peterloo

06
Dec

A new poem about Peterloo

Lynette Cawthra

People use our collections for all sorts of reasons. A poet called Oliver Lomax came in recently to read some of our eye-witness accounts of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. He is now generously sharing his resulting poem:

Peterloo

I beg you will endeavour to preserve the most
perfect silence. Put your hand to the ground and
take its pulse.

The time of the martyr is at your feet. A climate
of angels lying low in a buried world, fragment
seeds of liberty,

sixpences of bone spent for us. This is the archaeology
of the heart, be meticulous with it and know that
their ballad is in your blood.

Their cries still rent the air outside the room
where The Sex Pistols played, outside the rooms
chasing Michelin stars,

where borough mongers and their abettors from
an umbilical distance away severed the contract
of the heart.

As hussars’ sabres cut the seams of heaven
and bled down on to the field a holy alliance,
not to be petitioned by prayer.

A flock that had drawn from the four corners of the
North West, a forest of men, women, children and liberty
cut down, made to buckle in its bloom.

The ball in their right breast a Tory sphere
that still orbits the poor today as they rust in a
half-life harbour.

Eclipses the truth on bedroom tax suicides and
blots out the sun on the homeless wards. All evidence
must be received, we are all the body of John Lees.

Look up two hundred years and see time like
a mirage, the ghosts of us, hold their dreams aloft
like something new born.

And let us sit beside poverty, have a word in its ear.

Say, listen ‘We are here’.

Happy Birthday Thomas Spence

Coming events cast shadows before,
Fings are wot they used to be,
Not so much a la recherce des temps perdu
As deja flippin’ vu:
London on Thomas Spence’s birthday,
(June 21st 1750)
Today June 21st 2019:
No need to try and slip through wormholes of time,
The present has caught up with the past:
Central London still owned by the aristocracy,
Not so much the old Paris Situationists’ cry,
‘Underneath the pavements the beach!’
As ‘Pavements owned by the dukes!’
Record numbers sleeping rough,
Nicked for ‘Loitering’ and ‘begging’
Under the 1824 Vagrancy Act,
‘Royal Ascot’ (Queen Anne 1711);
An antique selection method of an antique prime minister …
But the longest day dawned well,
With a message from Keith Anderson
At the Thomas Spence Society,
Wishing him a happy birthday,
With poems and songs and well wishes for our walk;

Coming events cast shadows before,
Fings are wot they used to be,
Not so much a la recherce des temps perdu
As deja flippin’ vu:
London on Thomas Spence’s birthday,
(June 21st 1750)
Today June 21st 2019:
No need to try and slip through wormholes of time,
The present has caught up with the past:
Central London still owned by the aristocracy,
Not so much the old Paris Situationists’ cry,
‘Underneath the pavements the beach!’
As ‘Pavements owned by the dukes!’
Record numbers sleeping rough,
Nicked for ‘Loitering’ and ‘begging’
Under the 1824 Vagrancy Act,
‘Royal Ascot’ (Queen Anne 1711);
An antique selection method of an antique prime minister …
But the longest day dawned well,
With a message from Keith Anderson
At the Thomas Spence Society,
Wishing him a happy birthday,
With poems and songs and well wishes for our walk;
I read the email and boarded the train for London,
Warmed and cheered by this instant letter,
A textual and oral culture for today,
An echo of Thomas Spence’s ‘free and easies’;

We met near what was once Robert Wedderburn’s radical chapel,
Near what was once a hayloft in Brewer Street, Soho,
Watched the world go by while chalking ‘Spence’s Plan’,
Just as they did back in the days of William Pitt:
‘No Landlords You Fools!’
‘The People’s Farm’;
Saw the ghosts of spies in the Ham and Windmill,
Wandered a ‘free and easy’ passage
Past the radical inns of the Spenceans
And the London Corresponding Society
(A maze, of course, un-memorialized),
On a pilgrimage from Soho to Long Acre,
Along the Strand to Chancery Lane,
Where William Hone once saw Thomas Spence
Assaulted by two Bow Street Runners,
To what once was The Hive of Liberty book shop
In Little Turnstile, High Holborn;
We exchanged facsimiles of Spence’s radical tokens,
Met David Rosenberg (‘Rebel Footprints’)
For a tour of radical Clerkenwell,
Bade farewell at Spa Fields’ information board –
The 1816 monster meeting of course unmentioned,
Despite the wealth of words on the board –
Pondering on how Mr. Thomas Spence
And all that associated history might be memorialized,
He is remembered in Newcastle
https://keithyboyarmstrong.blogspot.com/2019/06/thomas-spence-birthday-21st-june-1750.html
And that ‘Jacobin fox’, John Thelwall,
Is remembered in London
http://www.johnthelwall.org/2018/04/john-thelwall-blue-plaque-event-in-london-may-24/
Perhaps we could fashion our own unofficial blue plaque?
Perhaps I could visit the Little Venice café in Little Turnstile,
And see if we might place it there,
As an act of homage,
So all who pass by will see the name
Of Thomas Spence, The Hive of Liberty;
And some might then google those names,
Then talk and read and discuss further,
In a recreation of an oral and textual culture,
And who knows where those ‘free and easies’ might lead?
A Hive of Liberty meets Extinction Rebellion:
‘No Landlords You Fools!’
‘The People’s Farm!’
‘Spence’s Plan!’

Worker’s Memorial Day Walk Remembering Allen Davenport

Remembering Allen Davenport

‘I was born May 1st, 1775, in the small and obscure village of Ewen … somewhat more than a mile from the source of the Thames, on the banks of which stream stands the cottage where I was born … I was never in any school … I had to get the very alphabet by catching a letter at a time as best I could from other children, who had learnt them at school … The next grand object I had in view was to acquire the art of penmanship …’

‘If there were no parks or pleasure grounds, the whole face of the country would present to the eye cornfields, meadows, gardens, plantations of all kinds of fruit trees etc., all to the highest state of cultivation.’

A government spy’s report of Allen’s words after Peterloo: ‘The Yoemanry had murdered our fellow Countrymen but had we in our own Defence shot even one or two of them it would have been called Murder and Rebellion, but [we] will put up with it no longer … we may loose a few lives in the onset yet what is the army compared to the Mass of the Country who are laboring under the yoke of Despotism … these Yoemanry are but few compared with us and it only wants the People to make up their minds as one Man for it is better to Die fighting in the cause of Liberty and freedom than be starved by our Oppressors.’

Thanks to Deborah Roberts for the above photograph.

Remembering Allen Davenport

‘I was born May 1st, 1775, in the small and obscure village of Ewen … somewhat more than a mile from the source of the Thames, on the banks of which stream stands the cottage where I was born … I was never in any school … I had to get the very alphabet by catching a letter at a time as best I could from other children, who had learnt them at school … The next grand object I had in view was to acquire the art of penmanship …’

‘If there were no parks or pleasure grounds, the whole face of the country would present to the eye cornfields, meadows, gardens, plantations of all kinds of fruit trees etc., all to the highest state of cultivation.’

A government spy’s report of Allen’s words after Peterloo: ‘The Yoemanry had murdered our fellow Countrymen but had we in our own Defence shot even one or two of them it would have been called Murder and Rebellion, but [we] will put up with it no longer … we may loose a few lives in the onset yet what is the army compared to the Mass of the Country who are laboring under the yoke of Despotism … these Yoemanry are but few compared with us and it only wants the People to make up their minds as one Man for it is better to Die fighting in the cause of Liberty and freedom than be starved by our Oppressors.’

Concluding Remarks on Allen Davenport
The King, or Legitimacy Unmasked, A Satirical Poem
Printed by the celebrated exponent of the Spencean burlesque,
Samuel Waddington in Oxford Street in 1819;
This poem written by the son of a weaver in Ewen,
Was bought by a government spy from Robert Wedderburn;
This boy who taught himself to read and write,
Would become a noted writer for Sherwin’s Political Register,
But when he made his last recorded visit to Wedderburn’s chapel,
So he ceased to contribute to the radical press –
The Theological Comet asked:
‘What is become of A.D.?’
Followed by Davenport’s poem,
‘Saint Ethelstone’s Day’,
Which commented upon Peterloo’s
‘Yoemanry Butchers’ who
‘hacked off the breasts of women
and then cut off the ears and noses of men’,
Then his lines about consequent Christian hypocrisy;
So let us remember Allen Davenport with his own concluding words:

‘Every man should study Politics, for my part I study them all Day. I write on them, I dream of them at Night, I stand here twice a week preaching Blasphemy and Sedition (as they call it and will continue to do so unless they rob me of my liberty.’
And, finally, his speech from October 27th 1819: “Let us prepare to knock down this system of tyranny to rush upon the Cannon’s Mouth and if we should not succeed Die gloriously in the Struggle.”

 

Uley Walk: the Uley Skimmington April 26th

Friday 26 April 2019, meet at Uley Church Hall bus stop 9:30

(Bus 65 towards Dursley, leaves Merrywalks at 09:00, alight at Uley Church Hall 9:20)

It’s the First of June 1792, and there are fifty weavers gathered outside John Teakle’s cottage in Uley. He’s been working for cheap rates in the workshops of Nathaniel Lloyd at ‘The Courts’. The weavers insist that Teakle removes his work from the loom, threatening him that his house will be pulled down, and he will be ducked in the pond.

Friday 26 April 2019, meet at Uley Church Hall bus stop 9:30

(Bus 65 towards Dursley, leaves Merrywalks at 09:00, alight at Uley Church Hall 9:20)

It’s the First of June 1792, and there are fifty weavers gathered outside John Teakle’s cottage in Uley. He’s been working for cheap rates in the workshops of Nathaniel Lloyd at ‘The Courts’. The weavers insist that Teakle removes his work from the loom, threatening him that his house will be pulled down, and he will be ducked in the pond.

To make an example of him, Teakle formed the centre of attention in a Skimmington procession from Uley to Horsley and Nailsworth. In addition to his ducking he was fixed to a pole and carried round the villages. On the return of the procession to Uley, Theakle escaped and barricaded himself in his cottage. The stand-off lasted three hours, and windows and the roof were damaged.

All welcome to join our Uley Skimmington recreation, to Horsley and back. There will some Rough Music along the route, so bring your own pans. Eight miles round trip, allow five hours.

Andrew Budd at sootallures@yahoo.co.uk for more information.