Stephen Poole Steve.Poole@uwe.ac.uk
Professor in History and Heritage
"Some examples should be made": Prosecuting reform bill rioters in 1831-32
Poole, Steve
Authors
Contributors
Michael T. Davis
Editor
Emma Macleod
Editor
Gordon Pentland
Editor
Abstract
Following the House of Lords’ rejection of the parliamentary Reform Bill in the autumn of 1831, severe rioting broke out in a number of English towns. In the judicial retribution that followed, some 259 people were prosecuted, seven of them hanged and 43 transported. This essay takes a detailed look at the local circumstances and the choice of courts in which suspected rioters were brought to trial and the variable outcomes achieved as a consequence. Reform was a divisive and regionally nuanced issue and shaping a measured response was neither straightforward nor uniform. While prisoners at Nottingham and Bristol were tried with rigour by Special Commission, magistrates at Loughborough, Mansfield and Worcester were keen to confine cases to local courts, eschewing judicial terror in the interests of healing social wounds.
Citation
Poole, S. (2018). "Some examples should be made": Prosecuting reform bill rioters in 1831-32. In M. T. Davis, E. Macleod, & G. Pentland (Eds.), Political Trials in an Age of Revolutions: Britain and the North Atlantic, 1793—1848 (237-263). Palgrave Macmillan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98959-4_10
Online Publication Date | Dec 31, 2018 |
---|---|
Publication Date | Dec 31, 2018 |
Deposit Date | Sep 24, 2019 |
Publisher | Palgrave Macmillan |
Pages | 237-263 |
Series Title | Palgrave Histories of Policing, Punishment and Justice |
Book Title | Political Trials in an Age of Revolutions: Britain and the North Atlantic, 1793—1848 |
Chapter Number | 10 |
ISBN | 9783319989587 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98959-4_10 |
Keywords | House of Lords, Reform Bill 1831, riot, court, trial, Nottingham, Bristol, Loughborough, Mansfield, Worcester |
Public URL | https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/3241120 |
Publisher URL | https://www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9783319989587 |
You might also like
The defeat of the Second Reform Bill in October 1831 – An overview of public responses PART 1
(2023)
Digital Artefact
The Worcester riots of November 1831
(2023)
Digital Artefact
The Sherborne Riots of 1831
(2023)
Digital Artefact
The Yeovil Riots of October 1831
(2023)
Digital Artefact
Downloadable Citations
About UWE Bristol Research Repository
Administrator e-mail: repository@uwe.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2024
Advanced Search