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‘A lasting and salutary warning’: Incendiarism, Rural Order and England's Last Scene of Crime Execution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2008

STEVE POOLE
STEVE POOLE*
Affiliation:
University of the West of England, Coldharbour Lane, Bristol BS16 1QY, UK
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Abstract

Agricultural incendiarism was a perennial factor in social relations in some areas of nineteenth-century rural England and is often understood by historians as an expression of ‘covert’ social protest. However, such categorisation risks oversimplifying what may be diverse and locally specific factors. In 1830, the high sheriff of Somerset presided over England's last ever scene of crime execution at the Somerset village of Kenn following the conviction of three labourers for incendiarism. This requires explanation. Crime scene executions were not only anachronistic and rare, but unfashionably brutal and expensive by this time, and were not undertaken lightly; moreover arson was soon to be removed from the list of capital statutes. Yet, oddly, the case was not obviously connected to the agenda of ‘social protest’ characterised by Swing as it emerged just months afterwards; indeed understanding the behaviour of the county authorities here requires an appreciation of a considerably more specific and parochial set of concerns and conditions. The Kenn incendiaries, it is argued here, were put to death at the scene of their crime to protect and uphold the principle of informing in a rural community whose dysfunctional social relations made the practice a judicial necessity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 19 , Issue 2 , October 2008 , pp. 163 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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References

Notes

1. Jones, David, ‘Thomas Campbell Foster and the Rural Labourer: Incendiarism in East Anglia in the 1840s’, Social History, 1 (1976), 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Hobsbawm, E. J. and Rudé, George, Captain Swing (London, 1969)Google Scholar, examined rural protest across the whole of southern England but was necessarily limited to the labourers' revolt of 1830 and did not interest itself in incendiarism as cultural practice in the wider rural social relations of rural communities, but as a signifier of ‘popular protest’. For later, more specific work on rural incendiarism the key text is Archer, John E., ‘By a Flash and a Scare’: Incendiarism, Animal Maiming and Poaching in East Anglia, 1815–1870 (Oxford, 1990)Google Scholar, which established little or no correlation between parishes disturbed by Swing in 1830 and those disturbed by arson over a longer period (see p. 131). For subsequent studies see Ambler, R. W., ‘Ranters and Rick Burners: Primitive Methodism and Rural Discontent in South Lincolnshire’, in Tyszka, Dinah, Miller, Keith, and Bryant, G. F. (eds.), Land, People and Landscapes: Essays on the History of the Lincolnshire Region (Lincoln, 1991)Google Scholar; Gyford, Janet, Men of Bad Character: The Witham Fires of the 1820s (Studies in Essex history, 1, Chelmsford, 1991)Google Scholar; Hussey, Stephen and Swash, Laura, ‘Horrid Lights’: 19th-century Incendiarism in Essex (Studies in Essex history, 5, Chelmsford 1994)Google Scholar; Randall, Adrian and Newman, Edwina, ‘Protest, Proletarians and Paternalists: Social Conflict in Rural Wiltshire, 1830–1850’, Rural History, 6, 2, (1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For Charlesworth see ‘An Agenda for Historical Studies of Rural Protest in Britain, 1750–1850’, Rural History, 2, 2 (1991).

3. The relationship between arson, ‘social crime’ and a perceived switch from covert to overt forms of social protest in the rural South forms the backbone to debates in Reed, M. and Wells, R. (eds.), Class Conflict and Protest in the English Countryside, 1700–1880 (London, 1990)Google Scholar, which, as its title suggests, is preoccupied with the development of an ‘English rural proletariat’ and in which the earlier sallies of the ‘Wells-Charlesworth debate’ are collated and further explored. For a useful critique, see John Archer's contribution, ‘The Wells-Charlesworth Debate: A Personal Comment on Arson in Norfolk and Suffolk’; Charlesworth, ‘Agenda’, 234. For a related and more recent contribution to the debate over incendiarism and ‘social crime’, see Shakesheff, Timothy, Rural Conflict, Crime, and Protest: Herefordshire, 1800 to 1860 (Woodbridge, 2003)Google Scholar. For an overview from an earlier period that does not confine itself to reading arson as protest, see Capp, Bernard, ‘Arson, Threats of Arson and Incivility in Early Modern England’, in Burke, Peter, Harrison, Brian and Slack, Paul (eds), Civil Histories: Essays presented to Sir Keith Thomas (Oxford, 2000)Google Scholar.

4. Archer, Flash and a Scare, pp. 157–8; Charlesworth, ‘Agenda’, 235. An honourable exception to the rule is Carl Griffin, whose ‘Policy on the Hoof: Sir Robert Peel, Sir Edward Knatchbull and the Trial of the Elham Machine Breakers, 1830’, Rural History, 15, 2 (2004) has made an important contribution to the historiography of judicial responses to Swing. Griffin's most recent work problematizes the relationship between patterns of newspaper reporting and the known geography of incendiarism, but is not an exploration of language as such: Griffin, C. J., ‘Knowable Geographies? The Reporting of Incendiarism in the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Century Provincial Press’, Journal of Historical Geography, 32, 1 (2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. In October 1830, the Elham defendants received sentences of just four days in gaol rather than the maximum sentence of seven years transportation. See Griffin, ‘Policy on the Hoof’, 127–9.

6. Bristol Mirror, 4th September 1830.

7. Authentick Memoirs of the Wicked Life and Transactions of Elizabeth Jeffryes, Spinster, who was Executed on Saturday, March 28, 1752, for being Concerned in the Murder of her Late Uncle, Mr. Joseph Jeffryes, (London, 1752).

8. Bath Journal, 31st August and 7th September 1772.

9. The Times, 29th April, 19th May 1841.

10. Reverend J. Leifchild, D. D., Remarkable Facts Illustrative and Confirmatory of Different Portions of Holy Scripture (London, 1867), p. 222.

11. Bath Journal, 4th April 1748, 20th August 1764.

12. Bath Journal, 19th September 1748.

13. The Times, 10th August 1813, 8th August 1818.

14. The Times, 3rd August 1818. Other early nineteenth century crime-scene hangings occurred at Warminster (Wilts) and Woodford (Essex) in 1813, and at Purton (Wilts) in 1819. See The Times, 18th March, 10th August 1813, 3rd August 1819.

15. McGowen, Randall, ‘Civilizing Punishment: The End of the Public Execution in Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (July 1994), 259–261CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The seminal work on the dynamic relationship between majesty, justice and mercy in the mediation of Hanoverian capital crime and punishment is Hay, Douglas, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’, in Hay, D., Linebaugh, P., Rule, J., Thompson, E. P. and Winslow, C. (eds.), Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England (London, 1975), pp. 17–63Google Scholar.

16. Leifchild, Remarkable Facts, p. 221.

17. Bath and Cheltenham Gazette, 27th April 1830. For the politics of law reform see especially Gatrell, V.A.C., The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 263–72, 567, 602–4Google Scholar. Gatrell's work on the process by which public ‘squeamishness’ caused a rethink of execution procedures remains unsurpassed. The revising statutes were 7 & 8 George IV, c.30, secs 2 & 17. The 1828 Act was itself amended shortly afterwards to relieve prosecutors of the burden of proving malice, and the 1837 Act of repeal for arson only revoked the clause relating to stacks; it did not interfere with clauses protecting buildings in which human life was, by inference, put at risk.

18. The Times, 23rd March 1830, 21st December 1830, 12th January 1831, 24th July 1835.

19. The Times, 21st September 1830.

20. The National Archive (TNA), Home Office (HO) 40/27, Colonel J. M. Muir to Lord Melbourne, 23rd December 1830 and 24th December 1830. See also the very similar advice offered by a commander in Wiltshire; Colonel Brotherton to Lord Melbourne, 3rd December 1830.

21. The Times, 29th December 1794. See also J. Rutter, Delineation of the North Western Division of the County of Somerset (1829).

22. Somerset County Record Office (SCRO), Q/RDe/135, Kenn Enclosure Award and Plans, 1810–1815; Report from the Select Committee on Labouring Poor (Allotments of Land) with the Minutes of Evidence (London, 1843), p. 16. For the development of allotment schemes in Somerset see Appendix to the First Report From the Commissioners on the Poor Laws, South Western District (London, 1834), pp. 442–3.

23. The 1841 census, the first to note individual professions, recorded eighteen farmers and forty-two agricultural labourers at Kenn. Male and female ‘servants’ accounted for another thirty-five people and the only other professions recorded were carpenter (four), blacksmith (one), publican (two), shoemaker (one), butcher (one), basket-maker (one) and tallow chandler (one).

24. Mr Austin's Report on the State of Agriculture in the Counties of Wiltshire, Dorset, Devon and Somerset (London, 1843), p. 8.

25. The Times, 1st April 1831.

26. Bath Journal, 17th January 1831; Taunton Courier, 19th January 1831; The Times, 1st April 1831. Petitions praying for the abolition of tithes were launched from North Wootton, Yatton and Kenn in January 1831; SCRO, D/P/Yat/3/2/10, Rectorial tithes payable at Kenn, 1834; Leifchild, Remarkable Facts, p. 220.

27. TNA, HO 52/9, Vincent Stuckey to Lord Melbourne, 2nd December 1830; Mr Austin's Report on the State of Agriculture in the Counties of Wiltshire, Dorset, Devon and Somerset (London, 1843), pp. 8–9, 15

28. Bath Journal, 20th July 1829.

29. For these payments see SCRO, S/800 D/P/Kenn 9/1/1, Kenn vestry minutebook, 1814–1849.

30. see SCRO, S/800 D/P/Kenn 9/1/1, Kenn vestry minutebook, 1814–1849.

31. For the Banwell disturbance see informations in SCRO, QS/R Quarter Session Rolls, Epiphany 1831.

32. For an analysis of the effects of this legislation, see Wells, Roger, ‘Poor Law Reform in the Rural South East: The Influence of the Sturges Bourne Acts during the Agricultural Depression, 1815–1835’, Southern History, 23 (2001)Google Scholar. The ‘pseudo-gentry’ is Barry Reay's term, for which see The Last Rising of the Agricultural Labourers: Rural Life and Protest in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford, 1990), p. 23.

33. Acreages calculated from Poulett's survey of 1811: SCRO, DD/SAS/C/212.

34. The World, quoted in Bath and Cheltenham Gazette, 7th April 1829.

35. Bath and Cheltenham Gazette, 24th April 1830. The Lord Lieutenant between 1819 and 1837 was the Marquis of Bath.

36. Appendix to the First Report From the Commissioners on the Poor Laws, South Western District (Parliamentary Papers, London, 1834), p. 448.

37. For Thomas Hedges's prosecution, see SCRO QS/R, Quarter Session Rolls (microfilm), information of Abraham Davis, constable of Kenn, and John Cox, yeoman, 29th April 1829.

38. Bath Journal, 21st December 1829; Bath and Cheltenham Gazette 27th April 1830; Times, 26th May 1830.

39. McGarvie, M. (ed.), Crime and Punishment in Regency Frome: The Journals of Isaac Gregory, Constable of Frome, 1813–14 and 1817–18 (Frome, 1984), p. 22Google Scholar. For the Shepton Mallet case see SCRO, Q/SR, Quarter session rolls, Epiphany 1829, information of David Caddy and Isaac Norton, 24th October 1828; for Middlezoy see Bath Chronicle, 28th November 1820.

40. Appendix to the First Report From the Commissioners on the Poor Laws, South Western District (Parliamentary Papers, London, 1834), p. 448; Bristol Mirror, 11th September 1830; TNA, HO 52/9, Robert Gunsley Ayerst to Lord Melbourne, 6th December 1830; Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords appointed to inquire into the State of Agriculture in England and Wales with the Minutes of Evidence (London, 1837), p. 302.

41. For Somerset cider license prosecutions, see Bath and Cheltenham Gazette, 12th February 1828, 17th March 1829; Bath Chronicle, 21st August 1828; Bath Journal, 15th August 1829; Felix Farley's Bristol Journal, 1st July and 15th August, 1829; SCRO, QS/R Quarter Session rolls, Easter 1829, information of Joseph Humphries.

42. Bristol Mirror, 28th August 1830.

43. Bristol Mirror, 28th August 1830.

44. Bristol Mirror, 28th August 1830, TNA, HO 17/128, petition of Sarah Coliford, October 1831; petition of William Wall (n.d.), August 1830.

45. TNA, HO 17/128, memorandum of John Vaughan, 4th September 1830. For the expectation that the sentences would be carried out at Ilchester, see also Bristol Mirror, 4th September 1830. Mary Wall was still at Ilchester a year later when her mother petitioned the crown for a pardon without success. See TNA HO 17/128, petition of Sarah Coliford, October 1831.

46. Bristol Mercury, 7th September 1830; Bristol Mirror, 28th August 1830; 11th September 1830.

47. The Times, 22nd April 1801; Taunton Courier 29th July 1829; Humphreys, A. L., Materials for the History of the Town of Wellington (London and Wellington, 1889), p. 201Google Scholar.

48. Bristol Mirror, 11th September 1830.

49. Bath Chronicle, 10th April 1828.

50. They appear in the 1841 Yatton census as James and Isaac Ould.

51. SCRO, Q/AGi/14/4, Ilchester Felons Register, 1828–33, prisoners for Michaelmas Sessions, October 1832; QS/R, Quarter Session Rolls (microfilm), information of Samuel Coleman, John Parsons, Samuel Rawlings and others, 8th October 1832; Q/Sca 1–30, Somerset assize calendar, March 1831; Bristol Gazette, 16 November 1830; Leifchild, Remarkable Facts, p. 224.

52. Clevedon Mercury, 24th February 1923, 13th December 1941; Bristol Evening World, 9th August 1952; Weston Mercury, 13th August 1954. I am indebted to two local historians, Ken Crowhurst of the Gordano Society and Ann Bessell of Bristol for their help with these more recent news cuttings.

53. Archer, ‘The Wells-Charlesworth Debate’, p. 86.