Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [570]
In the year 1830 a terrible event took place at Sarum.
The people of the city were appalled, but it did not surprise Ralph Shockley in the least.
For in November 1830, the countryside rose.
There was nothing new in a riot. Luddites had often rioted and broken machinery in the north. There had been small riots in Sarum from time to time, when the cloth workers tried to increase their wages or fight new machines.
“They break a few heads, but they make their views known,” Mason used to remark to Ralph.
But this was something different.
There had been two terrible harvests. At the same time, farmers too, like the clothiers, had been introducing new machines. The riot was not a single rising: there were dozens of small mobs, Ralph heard, burning ricks and attacking machinery all over Hampshire and Wiltshire.
“It’s the start of a revolution,” Canon Porteus prophesied grimly.
“It’s the start of agricultural reform, more like,” Ralph corrected.
It was neither.
The riot at Salisbury was one of the most serious.
On November 23, 1830, a large mob moved across the ridge on the north-east side of the city known as Bishopsdown. They found a threshing machine and broke it up.
“There are thousands of them, and they’re armed,” a young clergyman assured him as he hurried down the High Street towards the cathedral close. “The Yeomanry is out already. They’ve come to kill us.”
Ralph did not believe him and, telling his son to take Agnes to the Porteuses’ house, he set out across the town. Soon he crossed the market place, turned east past the Black Horse and Swayne’s chequers, and came out on the patch of open ground on the eastern edge of the town known as Green Croft. Then he could see them, on the slopes above.
They were an impressive group – not thousands but several hundred and they carried bludgeons, iron bars and odds and ends of the machinery they had broken up. They were angry and desperate. He watched calmly as they swept down towards the town.
Standing by the corner he found a young weaver with whom he had shared Cobbett’s Register many times.
“The people in the close think they’ve come to kill them.”
The weaver shook his head.
“It’s Fige’s Iron Foundry they’re after,” he said. “Machines, not people.”
“It’s what I thought.”
Now there was a cheer as that notable Salisbury gentleman, Mr Wadham Wyndham, rode boldly out towards them at the head of a small force of special constables. The constables looked apprehensive. Wyndham did not.
Then he noticed something else. Waiting a little behind them was a large detachment of Yeomanry.
The procedure was simple, and Wyndham followed it correctly. First he addressed them and urged them to disperse. They came on. Then he ordered the Riot Act to be read. Still they did not move. They were almost all at Green Croft now.
There was no alternative. Wyndham ordered the Yeomanry to charge.
The battle did not last long. The Yeomanry were trained and armed; the labourers were not. In minutes they had been driven back to St Edmund’s churchyard and beyond. Some got away; some did not. Ralph watched the débâcle sadly.
“They captured twenty-two of them,” he told his family that evening. “Canon Porteus can sleep safe in his bed.”
It was a similar story in other places.
On December 27, 1830, a special Assize was opened before Lord Vaughan and Justices Alderson and Parke. Three hundred and thirty-two prisoners involved in the riots were tried. Ralph Shockley attended. It was a terrible business that left him profoundly depressed. Some of the prisoners were little more than children. Most, he guessed, had been swept into the riots for little more reason than that the rioters were passing and they had nothing better to hope for. The sentences were much as he expected.
For during Ralph Shockley’s lifetime, one of the most convenient discoveries ever to aid the administration of British justice was made: the continent of Australia was found.
“By placing men down there,” Canon Porteus reminded him, “they are as safely isolated from humanity as Napoleon on the island of