Yorkshire Almanac A revolutionary bread riot is averted at Sheffield

3 December 1816: A revolutionary bread riot is averted at Sheffield

Sheffield Mercury. 1816/12/10. The Sheffield Disturbances. Times. London. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

THE SHEFFIELD DISTURBANCES.
(From the Sheffield Mercury, Dec. 7.)
On Tuesday last the inhabitants of this town and neighbourhood were thrown into considerable alarm, in consequence of a number of people having assembled together in a field near the Wicker. There has been a meeting of this kind in agitation for some time among the mechanics, and it is conjectured that they used no other means of collecting the people together than what arose from a by-meeting the day before, which probably consisted of not less than 100 persons, who effectually circulated among the workshops and public-houses their intention of meeting in the open air as above-mentioned.
Two or three persons addressed those assembled in the field, with a recommendation that they should depart in peace, and meet again on the following Thursday forenoon, when would be known the result of the London proceedings in Spafields.
Disregarding the wholesome advice of going to their respective homes, a few hundreds of men and boys paraded the principal streets. At the head of the crowd a man carried a pole, on which was placed a loaf that had previously been steeped in blood, and attached to which was the following inscription:-“Bread or Blood!” They directed their course to the new buying-ground, whence, after having resolved to meet there again on Thursday, they returned in larger numbers towards the market-place.
The Magistrates, having had early information of the meeting, were assembled at the Tontine inn, and had called in the assistance of the civil and military powers. With these wise precautions the populace, on their second appearance, were received by the Magistrates in the Haymarket. Here a dialogue ensued between one of the Magistrates and a man from the crowd, which ended in the Magistrate ordering the latter, one John Blackwell, alias Blacker, a well-known character, to be seized; and he was immediately examined, and dispatched to York-castle. After the most friendly advice from the Magistrates, the populace departed, having committed no act of outrage but the breaking of a few panes of glass.
SECOND MEETING.
On Thursday another meeting took place, about 10 in the forenoon, on the new burying-ground, but was broken up by the appearance of the dragoons from the barracks, who, passing up Broad-lane about half past 10, were followed up Crook’s-moor-way by nearly the whole of the populous assembly. The leaders remained behind, waiting the return of their comrades, till about 11 o’clock, when the expectants increasing in number, formed a pretty large concourse of men, women, and children. About this time a ring was formed, and one of the leaders said something, which we believe was an invitation for someone to address them; but no one coming forward, he put it to the vote that they should go and invite Mr. Rawson to preside over them, which was carried by a show of hands. They instantly proceeded towards the town, with an intention of executing this proposition; but it seems, by the time they arrived in High-street, they had learned that Mr. Rawson was in London. Their course was afterwards directed to the field, between the Wicker and Attercliffe, where they first met on the former occasion. Here, when a few hundreds arrived, they came to a determination of meeting in that place at five o’clock on the same evening.
Notwithstanding a heavy fall of rain, a populous meeting took place, about five o’clock, in the field near the Wicker. They returned to the town about six o’clock, and though considerable noise and alarm were created, we bure heard of no serious acts of violence. The magistrates had used every precaution to preserve the peace of the inhabitants. The Sheffield aud Rotherham troops of cavalry were on duty, and the town speedily assumed a tranquil appearance. To the time (early this morning) of our paper going to press, the town has remained perfectly, peaceable.
We hope to hear no more of these meetings, by which the lives of thoughtless persons are placed in danger, and the peace of the inhabitants is destroyed.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

My title paraphrases Earl Fitzwilliam, who investigated:

“As far as I can collect, the proceedings at Sheffield are intended as Counterparts of those in London”.5 Political events in London during that week were of prime importance to both reformers and revolutionaries. On 2 December a great rally was held at Spa-Fields, where an enormous crowd was addressed by the radical orator Henry Hunt. A small group of Spencean revolutionaries attempted to transform the meeting into an insurrection which included an effort to enter the Tower of London. Rumours had spread to the provinces that something sensational was going to happen at Spa-Fields, and this was the cause of the excitement in Sheffield. Fitzwilliam, who was not an alarmist, reported to the Home Office that the Sheffield disturbance “was not the consequence of distress – not the want of employment – not the scarcity or dearness of provisions, but that it has been the offspring of a Revolutionary spirit” (Donnelly 1975/12).

John Thomas of Sheffield claims Blackwell was the man with the pole:

[April] 14 [1839]. Died, in the Sheffield Poorhouse, where he had been nearly eight years, aged 53, John Blackwell, tailor, alias Jackey Blacker, well-known in the early part of his life as “King of the Gallery” of the Sheffield Theatre. On Tuesday, the 3rd of December, 1816, Jackey distinguished himself in a cheap bread riot, by carrying on a pole a loaf smeared with blood. Being observed by Mr. Wortley, (now Lord Wharncliffe,) that gentleman dashed into the crowd, and himself apprehended him. He was committed to York Castle, and tried on the 19th March, 1817, found guilty, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. Blackwell was also charged, at the York Summer Assizes of 1820, for behaving in a riotous manner at Sheffield, and encouraging other disorderly persons to riot, and having in his possession a loaded pistol, a pike, and other unlawful weapons. For this offence, he was imprisoned two years and a half (Thomas 1830).

The Doncaster Gazette says that Wortley arrested Blackwell in person.

I’m not sure I believe either.

Navickas’ Edgelands is good.

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Comment

My title paraphrases Earl Fitzwilliam, who investigated:

“As far as I can collect, the proceedings at Sheffield are intended as Counterparts of those in London”.5 Political events in London during that week were of prime importance to both reformers and revolutionaries. On 2 December a great rally was held at Spa-Fields, where an enormous crowd was addressed by the radical orator Henry Hunt. A small group of Spencean revolutionaries attempted to transform the meeting into an insurrection which included an effort to enter the Tower of London. Rumours had spread to the provinces that something sensational was going to happen at Spa-Fields, and this was the cause of the excitement in Sheffield. Fitzwilliam, who was not an alarmist, reported to the Home Office that the Sheffield disturbance “was not the consequence of distress – not the want of employment – not the scarcity or dearness of provisions, but that it has been the offspring of a Revolutionary spirit” (Donnelly 1975/12).

John Thomas of Sheffield claims Blackwell was the man with the pole:

[April] 14 [1839]. Died, in the Sheffield Poorhouse, where he had been nearly eight years, aged 53, John Blackwell, tailor, alias Jackey Blacker, well-known in the early part of his life as “King of the Gallery” of the Sheffield Theatre. On Tuesday, the 3rd of December, 1816, Jackey distinguished himself in a cheap bread riot, by carrying on a pole a loaf smeared with blood. Being observed by Mr. Wortley, (now Lord Wharncliffe,) that gentleman dashed into the crowd, and himself apprehended him. He was committed to York Castle, and tried on the 19th March, 1817, found guilty, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. Blackwell was also charged, at the York Summer Assizes of 1820, for behaving in a riotous manner at Sheffield, and encouraging other disorderly persons to riot, and having in his possession a loaded pistol, a pike, and other unlawful weapons. For this offence, he was imprisoned two years and a half (Thomas 1830).

The Doncaster Gazette says that Wortley arrested Blackwell in person.

I’m not sure I believe either.

Navickas’ Edgelands is good.

Something to say? Get in touch

18 August 1812: Lady Ludd leads bread rioters through the streets of Leeds

6 March 1684: The highwayman and racketeer John Nevison is captured at an alehouse near Sandal Castle, Wakefield

11 September 1666: Nine days after the start of the Great Fire, Margaret Hodgson of Richmond tells a York court that a beggar told her yesterday of a plot to burn London

14 April 1792: The ballad of Spence Broughton, hung this day at the York Tyburn for robbing the Sheffield and Rotherham mail

20 September 1819: Flags and fasces at a procession from Briggate to Hunslet Moor to protest the Peterloo Massacre

6 May 1800: A bread riot at Leeds market, during Napoleon’s blockade of Britain, and following a harvest failure in 1799

3 July 1761: John Wesley visits an unjustly bankrupted Yarm liquor smuggler in York Castle

16 February 1789: Thomas Paine writes to Thomas Jefferson telling of the “revolutionary” iron bridge being built to his design by the Walkers of Masbrough (Rotherham)

7 January 1813: In a novelisation of the Luddite murder of Marsden textile manufacturer William Horsfall, a local Baptist minister, Abraham Webster, reports on his execution-eve visit to George Mellor in York Castle

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Comment

Some background to the novel:

D. F. E. Sykes, a Huddersfield solicitor married to the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, focused in Ben o’ Bills, The Luddite, which the author claimed to be based on oral testimony and ‘mostly true’, on a fictional family, the Bamforths, connected with the Particular Baptists at Powle Moor, near Slaithwaite, where the minister, Abraham Webster, was so decidedly against the new machines that old Mrs Bamforth ‘died in the belief that the curse of Scripture was upon them’. George Mellor, a cousin of the Bamforths in the novel, enters the story on Christmas Eve, 1811, intoning the first verse of ‘Christians Awake’. He goes along with the rest of the family to Christmas morning service at Slaithwaite Church, where ‘near all Slaithwaite’ had gathered ‘Methodies and Baptists and all; and even folk that went nowhere, Owenites they called them’, who ‘made a point of going to church that one morning of the year’. Mellor, who occasionally speaks in moderate tones, but elsewhere gives vent to Painite anti-clerical and republican sentiments, is portrayed presiding at a Luddite oath-taking ceremony with a Bible to hand. He refers to Benjamin Walker, the accomplice who betrayed him, whose family Sykes also links with the Baptists at Powle Moor, as a ‘Judas’, He is visited twice in his York prison cell by Abraham Webster, who prays with him on the eve of his execution. According to Sykes, this final pastoral visit inspired Mellor to offer words of forgiveness for his enemies from the scaffold, though Sykes was clearly using dramatic licence in allowing Webster to lead the singing of a Methodist hymn at Mellor’s execution, since all the contemporary accounts record this as a feature of the execution of another group of Luddites. At the end of the novel, Soldier Jack, a former militia-man-turned-Luddite, reflecting on Mellor’s fate, philosophizes: ‘”Yo’re dissenters at th’ Powle … an’ … if there’d been no dissenters there’d been no Luds, ‘an George Mellor ‘d noan ha’ danced out 0′ th’ world on nowt”‘.

Much of the background to Sykes’s novel is authentic, as are several of the key characters, including Abraham Webster, the Baptist minister at Powle Moor, the Reverend Charles Chew, the curate at Slaithwaite and the Luddites George Mellor and Benjamin Walker. A succession of popular evangelical Calvinistic Anglican curates in the Venn tradition at Slaithwaite and the reluctance of the earls of Dartmouth to release land on their estates for the building of Nonconformist places of worship had delayed the local development of both Wesleyanism and Dissent, a factor of which Sykes was clearly aware in his reconstruction of popular religion in the Colne Valley. In fact, no Wesleyan chapel was built at Slaithwaite until 1839, though a chapel had been opened in 1810 at Linthwaite, the first to be built in the Colne Valley, and cottage meetings were begun at Marsden in the same year. The Baptist secession had occurred as recently as 1787 and the Powle Moor Chapel was built· three years later on moorland waste in the neighbouring township of Scammonden, having been denied building land on the Dartmouth estates in the Colne Valley. The most recent historians of the chapel have, however, found no evidence in the chapel records to corroborate the links between Sykes’s characters and the chapel and dismissed Sykes’s account as purely fictional.
(Hargreaves 1990)

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