4 - Wreckers from Without: Weavers, Colliers, Arsonists and Sodomites, 1729–34

Summary

At the end of September 1729, the corporation filed into the Mayor's Chapel on College Green to hear the customary sermon from the Bishop's chaplain, Carew Reynell, at the swearing in of the new mayor. Reynell's themes were equally customary. In January, he had reminded them that ‘little jealousies bred discontents, that discontents occasioned murmurings, and murmurings ripened into faction’, and in November he would remind them of ‘the just sense (they) must have, as a Rich and Trading City, of the Benefits of Government’. Yet as the corporation listened to Carew's sage advice that day, events were unfolding in another part of the city and in its hinterland to the east to ensure the poignancy of his message for several weeks to come. At seven o'clock that morning the weaving community beyond Lawford's Gate had mobilised en masse and set off in a crowd to the house of a Bristol drugget maker, Stephen Fechem in Castle Ditch. Within a day or two, eight would be dead and Fechem in hiding. This chapter considers the often complex relationship between corporate governance, economic hubris and a series of threats to Bristol's stability emanating, or so it was presumed, from ‘without the Gate’ – not only from marauding weavers and colliers but from criminal extortionists and ‘gangs’ of sodomites. The self-confident reputation of the merchant elite would be severely tested by challenges of this kind over the next five years, culminating in the unexpected defeat of one of the oligarchy's sitting MPs, the Walpolean minister and the city's Recorder, Sir John Scrope.

Bristol's continued pre-eminence as the nation's second city, it was frequently said, required constant vigilance against factional discord and weak local government. Nourished by two decades of peace, Bristol's economy thrived in the 1730s, as the city finally outgrew Norwich as Britain's second-largest urban centre, and came to dominate the tobacco, sugar and slaving trades.3 Suggestions from detractors that its culture was materialistic and unrefined were countered by a self-confident corporation, who fondly ordered the publication of sermons like Carew's that elevated merchants to the status of local and national heroes. By 1744, Bristol had become the modern Tyre, counselled A. S. Catcott, rector of St Stephens, ‘the crowning city whose merchants are princes and whose traffickers are the honourable of the Earth’.