Now! Then! Tag: Napoleonic Wars (1803-15)

Entries for the tag ‘Napoleonic Wars (1803-15)’

A series of conflicts fought between the First French Empire under Napoleon (1804-15) and a fluctuating array of European coalitions, which originated in political forces arising from the French Revolution (1789-99) and from the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802), and produced a period of French domination over Continental Europe.

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)
23 May 1793: The 14th Foot, predecessor of the West Yorkshire Regiment, chant a French Revolutionary song as they storm enemy trenches at Famars (Valenciennes)
15 August 1805: The Sheffield volunteer infantry depart to fight Napoleon on the beaches, which one man thinks might be in the Peak District
4 May 1807: Lord Milton welcomes 10,000 to his 21st birthday barbecue at Wentworth Woodhouse, Rotherham, during his campaign to be elected MP for the Whigs
25 June 1808: Dr Campbell, lodging above a chandler’s on Leeds Kirkgate, advertises the results of his treatment of anorexia, Napoleonic wounds, and all other known illnesses
28 July 1809: The Napoleonic career of Richard Beckett of the Coldstream Guards, Meanwood (Leeds), and the MCC, who fell today at Talavera (Toledo)
26 September 1810: Anthony Brown of Bowling (Bradford) is detained for swindling the Otley parents of Wellington’s men
17 February 1812: Leeds businessmen meeting at the magistrates court act against the authors of the first successful Luddite attack in Yorkshire, at the Oates, Wood, and Smithson works at Oatlands, Woodhouse Carr
7 April 1812: Sheffield cemetery builders and metal-workers riot on market day against potato price inflation
28 April 1812: Methodist Luddites fatally wound the textile manufacturer William Horsfall on his way home from Huddersfield market
19 May 1812: An Anglican Whit walk encounters a Nonconformist one at “Briarfield” (Birstall), amid Luddites and wars with France and the US, in the imagination of Charlotte Brontë
18 August 1812: Lady Ludd leads bread rioters through the streets of Leeds
4 January 1813: Alexander Thomson, Baron of the Exchequer, fires the Georgian state’s opening salvo in the great trial at York of Luddites from the West Riding
1 August 1813: The 51st Foot wear bay leaves, not white roses, on Minden (now Yorkshire) Day, as they drive the French back over the Pyrenees
3 October 1815: In the Hull Packet, a London reader defends a preference for the exact sciences over the humanities in the exam for mastership of the Trinity House School
3 December 1816: A revolutionary bread riot is averted at Sheffield
10 November 1817: Though organised Luddism is in decline, a gig-mill burns on Hunslet Lane, Leeds
17 May 1823: “Doncaster fertiliser manufacturers imported more than a million bushels of skeletons from Waterloo and other Napoleonic battlefields in 1822”
19 August 1849: The last bull-baiting at Lydgate Wakes, Saddleworth
15 September 1872: Death of “York’s last Waterloo hero”

Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.