1839 - A TALE OF MIGRANT WORKERS
This is a tale about how the poor could make their voices heard in the 1830s...
You can’t study the history of those times for long without seeing how strong was the English class system. Until the 20th century, when votes for all came onto the agenda, the class system, or social order, was an accepted fact. Accepted more, I suspect, by the rich than by the poor. But the poor had relatively few resources to do anything about it. So the accepted fact was that some people were rich and others poor, that the rich had a duty to govern and to take responsibility for those poorer than themselves, while the poor owed deference to their “betters” or rather, richer neighbours. The social order was a pyramid, with many poor people at the base. Above them the middle-classes – people in trade or small farmers who worked their own farms. And above them the propertied – the county gentry, who owned land but used the labourers to work it for them, and servants to do their work; the rich professionals; the aristocracy. And poised above them all, the monarch.
We English tamed our monarchy early on, and the monarch could not do what he or she liked. Power passed into the hands of Parliament – the House of Lords and the Commons. Not that the Commons were very common – they were rich people, largely drawn from the propertied classes, younger sons of aristocrats, county men. And predictably they served their own interests.
So if you were poor, what power did you have? Not a lot, it’s true, so that most things in your life were beyond your control. But still the poor had more power than you might think. And that is because what the rich hated was social disorder. What is the use in being rich if you are not safe to enjoy it? If you can’t walk safely down the road, if your animals and crops are destroyed, if you feel permanently ill at ease? Whenever things got too bad for the poor, whenever their desperation became too great, there would be riots, you could guarantee it. Or if not riots, then something more subterranean like arson or damaging crops (see The Shelford Arsonist ). Any society which is not a police state has to take notice and do something to allay the situation.
Now England never really went for the police state model. It would have been too expensive. We had no proper police force until the mid-19th century. Nor did we ever have much of an army. Being an island, the navy was what we needed to defend us. So for centuries our army was very small. Those in power appreciated that having a lot of soldiers was more trouble than it was worth. Soldiers back then were considered the scum of the earth, men brutalized and difficult to control. All right if you were pointing them at the enemy, but back home they caused nothing but trouble. Besides which, an army is politically dangerous – think military coups. We never had a big enough standing army to make a coup work. So the resources that the ruling class had for keeping order were very limited. As a result, the riot has always been taken very seriously.
So society worked by a sort of consensus. I don’t mean that everyone thought things were great. Far from it. The poor, for centuries, had a pretty miserable life. But as long as life was just tolerable, then they tolerated it. If ever things got too bad, and particularly when the labourers’ sense of fair play was outraged, then riots were liable to erupt.
One such riot happened in Shelford in 1839. Farmer John Maris tried to employ Irish labourers when there were unemployed labourers in Shelford. The village simply wasn’t having it, and there was a riot. The ringleaders were arrested and tried, but a point was made. I would be very surprised if any local farmer tried to use Irish labour again for a few years thereafter, as you will see....
On the 12 August 1839 farmer John Maris employed 14 Irish labourers to reap some wheat. More came along, begging to be employed, if just for a meal, because they were starving. He paid them all 7s an acre plus beer. The Shelford labourers had refused to work at that price because they were starvation wages.
Harvest was the one time of the year when there was plenty of farm work in the village. Agricultural labourers would normally expect to get good wages then. Instead here they were, unemployed - there were 20 of them unemployed in the village - while the Irishmen did their work.
About 6.30 in the evening a mob formed and pursued the Irish down the street, carrying sticks and throwing stones, threatening to kill the “paddies”. They certainly meant business – one Irishman suffered a severe head injury. The Irishmen hid at farmer Maris’s house. The mob briefly retired, but soon returned with threats of violence. Again, at dark, they gathered and roared threats against them. Mr Blinkhorn, the baker, sheltered another injured Irishman and was subjected to threats from the mob. More Irishmen fled to Mr Hurrell’s yard and were again assailed with missiles, altogether a very nasty riot. The leader, it was said, was William Bowtell. Other major players were his sons, John, Jesse and Thomas, Pearce Melbourne, William Rose and James Robinson.
In the 1841 census William Bowtell was a labourer in his early fifties, living in High Green. He had sons James (20), Thomas (15), Jesse (14) and Charles (10). James Robinson was in his forties and lived in High Street with wife and 2 children in the Town House (opposite St Mary's church). Pearce Melbourne was a teenager. William Rose was 14, James 15. As with most riots, the young males played a significant part, but they were not alone – there were plenty of mature married men involved too.
A couple of days later the village constable, David Robinson, went with a warrant to arrest William Bowtell. Bowtell was not going to give in without a struggle. Robinson asked two other labourers – John Cole and William Coville - to help him with the arrest and they refused. Another mob assembled. In the ensuing fracas, a second constable, James Willis, was bitten in the thigh by Mark Rose, whom he was trying to arrest. Willis whacked Rose with his staff, which caused Rose to have a fit. One James Powter also refused to help the constable – his defence: “I refuse to assist, because my wife said if thee do I’ll cut thee old head off; and she’s master”! There was a good deal of argument as to whether the constable was acting legally – these labourers clearly had a good sense of their rights. The mob tried to rescue the men, and Robert Jordan, John Kefford, Susan Butler and Amelia Dun were charged with rescuing rioters. The women were ordered to pay a fine of £16. Now where were they going to get that much money – a labourer’s wages being about 10s a week? Jordan, Kefford, Powter, Coville and Cole were all charged with assaulting a constable in discharge of his duty, and were given 3 months imprisonment. This rescue mob were mostly in their forties. It is noticeable that the women were as active as the men. As E P Thompson said: “These women appear... to have been unaware that they should have waited for some two hundred years for their Liberation”.
One can only feel sorry for the Irish labourers who were poor men, even worse off than the Shelford labourers. Ireland was already suffering from the potato blight which would cause the Great Famine in 1845-6, and the Irish were forced by poverty and land shortage to become itinerant workers in England, where they were roundly despised being both “foreign” and Catholic. While most of the English labouring classes were hardly churchgoers, they belonged to that English culture which defined itself by Protestantism and violently anti-Catholic prejudice. Although called to give evidence at the Petty Sessions trial, the Irishmen pretended not to recognize the prisoners – they had been threatened. Like all migrant workers, they suffered the aggression of those they displaced when they were as much victims of an unjust social order as those who resented them. The aggression of the labourers, as is invariably the case, was deflected from the true target – the farmers of Great Shelford in general and Maris in particular – to someone less powerful.
Everything in the newspaper accounts suggests that the villagers – or at least the labouring families of the village – stood together on this issue. The trial report says that the farmer’s use of Irish labour “gave such offence to the villagers as to lead to this occurrence”. Both men and women stood as one on this issue and no-one was going to let the arrests take place if they could help it. I suspect even the magistrate was sympathetic. The rioters were sentenced to 2 months’ hard labour. In contrast, a man who stole 8 turkeys had been transported for 7 years!
David Robinson was a carpenter in his early 30s living where Robinson’s Dairy was later to stand, in Woollards Lane. James Willis was a tailor in his thirties living in High Green. The role of parish constable was a voluntary one, which rotated round the village. It would fall, not to the rich farmers, who would not demean themselves, but to people like Robinson and Willis, tradesmen in a small way, but higher on the social ladder than the labourers. Farmer John Maris owned a house and homestall on High Green – probably Maris Farm. His enclosures amounted to about 18 acres. Unless he rented more elsewhere, he was not, therefore, a large farmer.
If you are interested in the subject of riots, then try reading E P Thompson’s “Customs in Common”. This is a book about the 18th century, but Thompson has a lot to say about proletarian culture and the riot as a means of asserting their rights.
v1 © Helen Harwood, uploaded February 2025