Crime and Protest in Eighteenth Century England

The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a period of transition - between the old traditional rural society stretching back to the Middle Ages and the modern urban society of industrial capitalism. Changes - the growth of trade and manufacture, commercial farming, the expanding power of the trading and manufacturing classes - had of course been underway during previous centuries but it is during the this period that the changes, particularly in relation to crime and criminal justice, become noticeable. The transitions which we can observe during this period are important for us today. If we can understand the social changes - urbanisation, the market economy, the formation of the modern working class, the changing position of women as part of that process - then we can better understand how changes in the present period may be affecting crime and the criminal justice system.

We can see two sets of related changes at work: firstly changes in the nature and definitions of crime and secondly, changes in the ways in which crime is controlled. In this lecture we shall deal with the first of these: changes in criminality. We need also to distinguish between long run and short run change. When rapid change is taking place there is often an intensification of social conflicts and problems before a new period of stability sets in. Thus, as we shall see, the nineteenth century was a period of falling crime as urban capitalist society become more stable and the modern criminal justice system was put in place. However the immediate effects of the changes which formed the transition to modern society, during the period we are going to discuss now, was rising crime and an intensification of conflicts and social problems.

Some of the long run changes in the nature of crime have been summed up by Michel Foucault as a shift from mass to marginal criminality

"A general movement shifted criminality from a 'mass criminality' to a 'marginal criminality' partly the preserve of professionals... In fact, the shift …forms part of a whole complex mechanism, embracing the development of production, the increase of wealth, a higher juridical and moral value placed on property relations, stricter methods of surveillance, a tighter partitioning of the population, more efficient techniques of locating and obtaining information: the shift in illegal practices is correlative with an extension and a refinement of punitive practices." (pp 75-7)

That is to say, criminality was becoming the preserve of a particular group of people who could be identified as criminals, rather than simply something anyone might do. This, he is saying, was associated with the development of modern society-the importance of private property, better methods of surveillance of the population and obtaining information about crime and at the same time the development of more sophisticated penal practices.

But that is a long run change. During the eighteenth century crime rates were rising under the impact of the decay of traditional rural forms of economy and society. A great social change was taking place in England: the transition to a capitalist market society. The countryside was the place where these changes were taking place: industrial manufacturing and urbanisation had yet to develop. This transition had two aspects. Firstly it involved considerable social dislocation and secondly it led to social struggle over rights as the traditional relations between the landowners and the masses moved towards the modern social relations of employer and employee. Crime became tied up with the social conflicts and antagonisms associated with these changes.

It is of course difficult to get an accurate estimate of the amount of crime in England at this time due to the absence of centralised records and the fact that many lesser crimes were dealt with summarily and not recorded. During the 1720s and 30s there was, according to commentators like the novelist and London magistrate Henry Fielding and merchant and magistrate Patrick Colquhouon, a rising tide of crime. And this view was generally shared. As regards the causes of rising crime it is important to distinguish between two issues. Firstly, rising crime as a result of the social and economic dislocations produced by change and, secondly, the extent to which some forms of crime were a form of protest or resistance on the part of the poor to the changes taking place in their livelihoods. 

Crime as a reflection of social dislocation

In 1812 the magazine Quarterly Review, commenting on the previous century, observed that 

"Commerce itself is the mother of the crime of theft in all its varieties; not more from the habits it bestows than the opportunity it affords to that offence. It pours in wealth in a shape most convenient for plunder"

The most important form of wealth of the traditional rural English society had of course been land, a fixed form of property. But with the growth of trade and manufacture and commercial farming, money circulated rapidly and goods were increasingly on the move from countryside to towns, to ports for export, along the newly constructed roads and canals. Hardly surprising, then that the eighteenth century was the age of the Highwayman. Goods, money and people in transit between towns were relatively defenceless against armed robbers. The slow speed of transport, the absence of a regular police force underlined the inability of the state to exercise effective control over the national terrain. There were large areas of the rural periphery beyond the control of the state, or with only periodic visits by state officials such as revenue officers and soldiery to coastal smuggling communities. The expansion of trade both between towns and between continents exposed the weakness of the state in the face of the professional Highwayman and Pirate who existed, much as in the Middle Ages, based on the sanctuary of unguarded and uncharted territory. At the same time as towns rapidly expanded a similar weakness of the state was highlighted by the rookeries, areas, usually a maze of narrow streets and alleyways navigable only by their inhabitants and safe from all except the episodic incursion of the authorities. In these areas underworlds, networks and a thriving criminal economy had been expanding, in London at least, since the middle of the sixteenth century. 

Apart from this expansion of criminal opportunity, the social effects of the transition to capitalism tended towards increasing crime by increasing poverty and insecurity. The landed gentry saw their property increasingly as a source of profitable agriculture. The labourers who had worked their estates for centuries increasingly came to be seen as wage labour: to be hired and fired as required, rather than families who had lived and worked the land for centuries. Workers who were not profitable were turned off the land. There was a great deal of poverty and at the same time bread prices were rising as a free market in grain was established.

Historian John Beattie writing about the eighteenth century (especially after 1750) says:

"Crimes against property in the eighteenth century arose primarily from problems of employment, wages and prices… they increased when men found themselves squeezed by rising prices or lower wages or lack of work." (Beattie 1974)

His research on the court records in the counties of Surrey and Sussex during the 1760s showed how crime rates closely followed the movements of prices

Crime as resistance to the development of capitalism

But there is an important additional dimension to crime during the eighteenth century. In talking about traditional society we noted what Michel Foucault called the  'popular illegalities'. We noted the lack of a clear conception of criminal law violation and strict boundaries between legal and illegal. The nature of monarchical sovereignty was such that it did not require absolute observance of the law. But with the rising importance of trade and commerce, property was money. Merchants and manufacturers saw their property as investments and sources of profit, not simply of social status. An absolute sanctity of property, the right of the property owner to complete control over his property and the profits it generated needed to be defended. The extension and consolidation of bourgeois property involved not only the increasing refusal to tolerate traditional illegalities but the criminalisation of activities many of which had been customary practices since time immemorial. These included such activities as the gathering of wood or hunting of game on common land, together with a whole host of traditional 'perks' like the entitlement of agricultural workers to a portion of the remains of the harvest, of coal miners to pick the waste coal from the pit heaps, and of dockers to a portion of the cargo. The latter practice in particular outraged Patrick Colquhoun, the wealthy eighteenth century London merchant and magistrate and led him to found his own private police force to stop pilferage in his dock warehouses at Wapping on the Thames.

The criminalisation of custom produced 'crime' functioning as opposition by working people to the advance of capitalist social relations. In eighteenth century England the state, with its expanding 'Bloody Code' of capital offences, followed in the footsteps of capitalist property relations.

The mass of working people meanwhile attempted to defend their traditional ways of doing things - their traditional rights and customs, acquired over the centuries, to the regulation of prices of flour and bread, to hunt game on 'common land', to take a portion of the harvest, or of the cargos of ships unloaded. All these were being taken away. From the standpoint of the commercial farmers, manufacturers and merchants these customary rights came to be seen as ambiguities, obstacles to the absolute ownership of property and the right of the owner to use his property in the pursuit of profit as he saw fit. All other claims to use the property by the masses had to be seen as theft. In resisting these changes the masses thus found themselves increasingly being regarded as criminals. Certain types of crime thus became forms of resistance, of the defence of traditional rights and customs.

During the 1970s radical British historians such as Edward Thompson and Douglas Hay wrote much on the relationship between crime and social protest. They generally used the term 'social crime' to refer to criminality functioning as a form of resistence or protest. The term social crime was first coined by the historial Eric Hobsbawn in his writings on `primitive rebels' and `social bandits'. (Hobsbawm 1959, 1969, 1972). There are a number of elements associated with the concept of social crime

Firstly there is the violation of law as a more or less explicit form of protest. In Hobsbawm's usage, social crime describes

This is more than simply a statement of the obvious fact that many criminal offenders might be driven by a rage to `hit back at the system'. The reference is rather to organised social resistance with the criminal acting in some sense as a representative or articulator of social grievances. Thus in Hobsbawm's studies of social banditry the focus is on

A second important element of social crime is the existence of broad community support for the activities of the 'criminal'. This may range from regarding the criminal as a romantic hero - as with some of the Highwaymen mentioned earlier or simply turning a 'blind eye' to certain activities -- like not asking too closely where the cheap goods being offered to you actually came from. In the middle were forms of activity in which a large number of people participated although they might not have had any clear notion that they were engaging in acts of resistence to change.

Let us take some examples.

bread riots

Bread riots, occurred throughout the eighteenth century in response to deregulation and rising prices. They are recorded in 1709, 1740, 1756-7, 1773, 1782 and in particular 1795 and 1801. These are just the ones of which historical records remain. These events were an important indication of the way that changes associated with the development of the market economy impacted on the poor. These riots were studied in a very famous article by Edward Thompson, written in 1967 called 'The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century',

What was happening was fairly simple. Traditionally, since time immemorial, farmers had harvested grain and brought it to the local town market, where it had been sold at a price regulated by tradition. Bakers bought the grain and baked bread and sold it, again at a traditional price regulated by custom and law going way back into the Middle Ages. Bread was a particularly important part of the diet of working people at that time. It was not just one item among many as it is today. No bread meant no food.

But the development of the market economy and the rise of commercial farming for a profit meant that landowners were starting to behave differently. They now grew grain to make money not just to serve the needs of the locality. They started to do things like:

• Hoard grain at harvest time when the price would be low, and sell it later when there was more of a shortage and prices were rising.

• If they discovered that prices were higher in another region they might export their grain there rather than sell it to the local bakers at the traditional price.

Thompson quotes a petition of labourers from Leeds in 1795 to the local magistrates. They complained of

"corn factors and the millers and a set of people which we call hucksters and mealmen who have got the corn into their hands that they may hold it up and sell it at their own price or they will not sell it."

Both these would raise the price of bread, to the profit of farmers but to the detriment of working people. The riots, so called, were not orgies of lawlessness, argues Thompson, but deliberate action by the masses to prevent this sort of behaviour and to try and retain the traditional methods. They were, argues Thompson a form of 'politics' by poor people who had absolutely no other way of making their voices heard. There was no representation in parliament, and there were no trade unions or any form of representation of the interests of the poor. Meanwhile the representatives of the new rising class of commercial farmers and, later, industrialists, were singing the praises of the market. Remember this is the period when Adam Smith wrote the 'Wealth of Nations' - which to this very day is used by defenders of free market capitalism as their 'bible'. He demanded the "unlimited, unrestrained freedom of the corn trade." That is, of the free market.

One point that Thompson makes is that Magistrates and the local authorities who had to deal with the disturbances were often looking backwards to the old traditions rather than forwards to the new world of capitalism. They often referred back to old Mediaeval laws by enforcing the regulation of prices and thereby prohibited the very things that commercial capitalism now wanted to do - hoarding until prices rose (forestalling) The alternative response to the rioters was subsidy. The Speenhamland system of Poor Relief inaugurated in 1795 was a welfare system linked to the price of bread.

poaching

The second example, was poaching - the illegal hunting of game (rabbits, pheasants, deer etc.) on private land. This involved trespass and theft. Poaching was also much studied by Edward Thompson, (in his own book Whigs and Hunters and in a book he edited with Douglas Hay and other historians callled Albion's Fatal Tree)

The poacher in many areas was something of a popular hero. The Welsh historian, David Jones, wrote that the poacher was "such an ordinary figure, an accepted and normal part of rural life.". Down to the early 1840's one in four criminal convictions were for poaching offences. Jones goes on: "In the second quarter of the (nineteenth) century poaching was widely regarded as one of the fastest growing crimes in Britain, and, unlike arson, highway robbery, cattle-, horse- and sheep-stealing, it continued to be a prominent and permanent part of the rural scene even in the 1880's and 1890's. 

Poachers were "overwhelmingly working people" though the authorities tended to target casual and migrant agricultural workers. Here was a classic case of the Magistrates and the landowners being determined to stamp out a crime that ordinary people for the most part just did not think was a crime at all.

Thus Douglas Hay's study of poaching (in the book Albion's Fatal Tree) showed how local communities

"…united solidly in defence of poaching. The keepers met with a wall of silence when they tried to make inquiries, but found that word spread like lighthening when they obtained a search warrant, and that the suspects had escaped with 'the apparatus' just before they arrived. Witnesses lost their memories… Poachers not only gave alibis for one another; they also took measures against informers" (1975: 198)

However such popular support can range from positive enthusiasm for bandit as popular hero-as in the Robin Hood legend or the poacher as popular hero-to simply turning a blind eye to activities which the state authorities regard as crime but which peasant or working class communities do not perceive as particularly harmful. Whereas any notion of crime as popular protest necessarily involves communal support for the criminal, it is not clear that the latter necessarily implies the former.

Poaching was seen by the majority of the poor simply as a defence of tradition. Since time immemorial local people had, by tradition, hunted rabbits and other game on 'Common' land. (this old notion of 'Common' land as belonging to everyone still exists. So we still have Clapham Common, Wandsworth Common etc where anyone can go.) But gradually, landowners were claiming these areas as private property and putting fences (enclosures) around them to keep the local people off. The aim was now to use the land for profitable farming and the last thing wanted was the local labourers hunting the rabbits. Crime here expressed a class of class interests. Of course the situation was not quite as simple as this. There were for example, gangs of professional poachers who hunted game and then sold it on the black market to Innkeepers. By no means all poaching was poor people defending their traditional way of life. 

pilferage

Crime as resistance was even clearer in the docks. Men who unloaded ships had, again, by tradition, taken or 'pilfered' a small portion of the cargo. If a ship full of tea was being unloaded then the dock workers would take a few packets each. This had been part of the 'popular illegalities' since time immemorial but by the eighteenth century merchants, who were running profitable trading businesses, wanted this stamped out and a new respect for 'absolute private property' drummed into the masses. They had to be taught that taking what was not theirs was a criminal offence. Theft of cargo interfered with profits.

Thus Patrick Colquhoun, a wealthy London merchant, magistrate and friend of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, complained that dock workers "consider it as a kind of right which attaches to their situation to plunder whatever opportunity offers" (quoted in Emsley page 113). Peter Linebaugh, a historian who worked with Edward Thompson, wrote a book called The London Hanged in which he described, among other things, the struggle of dock workers in London to retain their old traditions. He quotes Colquhoun's plan for a professionally paid police force - a novel idea in those days to stop pilferage. Colquhoun's Thames Police founded in 1800 were the first paid police force in London and predated the foundation of the Metropolitan Police by 29 years. Other merchants in Liverpool and Bristol followed rapidly with their own 'docks police.' By modern standards these police forces were more like Securicor or Group Four. They were concerned to search workers as they left the docks, and Colquhoun even put his police in charge of paying the wages. He certainly saw their main job as keeping the workers in order.

Linebaugh quotes Colquhoun in his plan for the new Thames Police, as seeing

"the working class as an epidemic... a military enemy whose 'various detachments and subdivisions... [form] the general army of Delinquents'... The London working class has spun a 'system', a 'monstrous System of Depredation', a 'General System of Pillage'. It is 'disciplined in acts of Criminal Warfare'... The working class is also uncivilised, possessing 'unruly passions', 'rapacious desires', 'evil propensities', 'noxious qualities', 'vicious and bad habits', and its moral turpitude needs the 'human improvement' by police" (1991 p 428)

Towards the end of the eighteenth century and in the early decades of the nineteenth direct violent criminal resistence to the development of manufacture gathered pace. The new 'manufactories' (factories) particularly in the Midlands and the North of England employed a growing army of urbanised workers (men, women and children) at starvation wages and crowded them into the unsanitory condititions of the rapidly expanding industrial town. We shall consider the impact of these developments in a later lecture. But, especially in the textile industry, these new factories were, by using the latest steam technology, undermining the living standards of the traditional rural hand-loom weavers who simply could not compete with factory made textiles in terms of price.

Riots against the introduction of the machine were frequent during the eighteenth century. The motive was not simply the economic impoverishment of those still producing by traditional methods but the disruption to community and social life involved in the transition from work organised around the family and carried on in the place where the family lived. Traditional textile production would be organised much the same way as farming with different members of the family having a different role in the production process. Employment in the new factories, meant, in addition to terrible labour conditions, the breakup of the family. The new 'Masters' (the factory owners) had little regard for the custom of all family members working together and saw no obligation to even employ all members of the family. The most articulate and militant of the machine smashers were the 'luddites' at the beginning of the nineteenth century

The continuity of social crime

The forms of social crime we have considered were the more overt, militant type, which can be construed as a type of protest or defence of the status quo against change. Certainly machine-smashing fits such a description. Alongside these more overt forms of crime as protest were similar sorts of activity, part crime, part simply traditional activities of the poor. Some of it was pretty harmless like coal miners' families picking over waste coal from the slag-heaps and taking it home. But during the eighteenth century other activities like smuggling often involved whole communities, in the coastal areas, who on occasion were prepared to fight armed battles with the authorities to defend what was a lucrative traditional form of income.

Social crime of the pilferage type continues well into the modern period. Another historian, John Benson, talking about working class crime in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries says:

"There seems little doubt that certain forms of popular crime declined in importance between 1850 and 1939. Poaching became less common towards the end of the nineteenth century while prostitution diminished dramatically in the years following the First World War. On the other hand there seems little doubt that other, probably more common forms of popular crime persisted virtually unabated, with scavenging, pilfering and similar activities continuing to provide work and income for a large - though unknown number of working class families." (Benson 1989: 28-9)

As late as the 1950s the sociologist, John Mays, was amazed at the degree of pilferage taking place in the Liverpool docks and the effect it was having in teaching docker's children 'bad ways'

"The amount of theft from the Liverpool docks is considerable, £15,000 work of goods being stolen in the year 1951 and 467 persons prosecuted. While the offenders in this respect are not all dock labourers very many are, and the effect on children who see their fathers and elder brothers bringing home goods stolen at work must be considerable" (Mays 1954: 117-118)

The general point is this. Gradually, as we shall see, there develops something of a consensus in society about the definition of crime and what is not and the criminal comes to stand out as someone clearly marked by his crime. The old blurred boundaries of the 'popular illegalities' become firmer. But of course social crime never entirely disappears. In poor communities widely tolerated forms of pilferage and theft remain important supplements to, or even for, low levels of wages or social security benefits. Indeed, with the growth today of the 'informal economy' of smuggled, counterfeit or stolen goods (see the article by Trevor Bark listed below) there are plenty of examples of forms of crime, particularly theft or shoplifting for example which are tolerated by the poor and yet regarded as theft like any other by people who have secure incomes and therefore are not tempted into such activities.

references

Beattie, John (1986) Crime and the Courts in England 1600-1800. Princeton University Press.
Benson, John (1989) The Working Class in Britain 1850-1939. London: Longmans.
Jones, David (1982) Crime, Protest, Community and Police in Nineteenth Century Britain. London: Routledge.
Hay, D., Thompson, E., Linebaugh, P. eds. (1975) Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England. London: Allen Lane.
Hobsbawm, Eric (1959) Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Hobsbawm, Eric (1969) Bandits. Harmonsworth: Penguin books.
Hobsbawm, Eric (1972) 'Social Criminality: distinctions between socio-political and other forms of crime', Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History (25):5-6.
Mays, John (1954) Growing Up in the City. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 
Reay, Barry. (1998) Popular Cultures in England, 1550-1750. London: Longmans
Thompson, Edward (1967) 'The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century', Past and Present 50. pp 76-136.
Thompson, Edward (1977) Whigs and Hunters: The Origins of the Black Act. Harmondsworth: Penguin books
Wood, Andy. (2002)  Riot, Rebellion and Popular Politics in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave