Mayhem: Post-War Crime and Violence in Britain, 1748-53

by Nicholas Rogers

After the end of the War of Austrian Succession in 1748, thousands of unemployed and sometimes unemployable soldiers and seamen found themselves on the streets of London ready to roister the town and steal when necessary. In this fascinating book Nicholas Rogers explores the moral panic associated with this rapid demobilization.

Through interlocking stories of duels, highway robberies, smuggling, riots, binge drinking, and even two earthquakes, Rogers captures the anxieties of a half-decade and assesses the social reforms contemporaries framed and imagined to deal with the crisis. He argues that in addressing these events, contemporaries not only endorsed the traditional sanction of public executions, but wrestled with the problem of expanding the parameters of government to include practices and institutions we now regard as commonplace: censuses, the regularization of marriage through uniform methods of registration, penitentiaries and police forces.

Genres: History

320 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

For the archivist and medieval historian, see Nicholas J. Rogers

Nicholas Rogers is Professor of History at York University, Toronto, Canada. He is the co-author of Eighteenth-Century English Society: Shuttles and Swords (OUP) and the author of Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (OUP), for which he received the 1999 Wallace K. Ferguson Prize of the Canadian Historical Association for the best book on non-Canadian history.

Reviews

[Ed · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Mayhem” is closely grained social history of the demobilization crisis in eighteenth century England in the years following the War of Austrian Succession. The author looks at the anxieties of the period and the tensions caused by the sudden dismissal of thousands of soldiers and sailors who had served in Europe, North America and the Caribbean and additional thousands of men who had worked in the dockyards outfitting and repairing the navy’s ships. Vessels were paid off and the crews put ashore, often with empty pockets but being owed months or even years of wages plus prize money for capturing enemy shipping. It was a volatile time with the newly unemployed servicemen showing a truculence that didn’t match the patrician concepts of a deferential manners and paternalistic order.

Men had been impressed—essentially kidnapped—into service aboard a British naval ship often with little warning and no training. They were subject to the rule of the lash ordered sometimes capriciously officers and carried out with a vengeance by petty officers. They had faced shot and shell from the enemy, were afflicted with diseases endemic to the fleet, were often injured and never comfortable. They served in unfamiliar tropical lands or in the Channel Fleet that didn’t put into port from one year to the next, with food and water brought from the shore.

England was unprepared for the return of its jolly tars and mighty oaks. The navy men were eager to get ashore and begin spending the wages they were owed only to find out that delay upon delay made them paupers, no longer heroes who kept the enemy from the sceptered isle. Those who were paid became easy targets of confidence men, footpads and robbers . And the majority—those who weren’t paid (or not paid in full or on time) found that theft and robbery with violence were acceptable substitutes. Newspapers of the day played up the class aspects inherent in the conflict, seeing it as an attack on the rich—by no means a completely incorrect assumption.

There were moral panics over the “gin craze” which preoccupied many commentators both before and after the war. Rot-gut gin was newly popular among the urban poor; the great and the good feared that British labor power (and the willingness to put it forward) might falter at crucial moments of imperial expansion. There were grave concerns over the leisure time of the poor and whether these pursuits could be channeled into more productive or at least less fearsome paths. The debate over the evils of gin was part of a national assessment over the capacity and willingness of the dispossessed to fight another war since few thought that the treaty that ended the War of Austrian Succession was more than a temporary truce while Britain and the Bourbon powers gathered their strength and lined up allies for another go at it.

Social regulation such as the Poor Law and related laws on vagrancy, the prohibition against “sturdy beggars” and the inability of society to curb violence despite an increase in hangings, increased use of informers and the intervention of the clergy who denounced Sabbath-breaking, blasphemy or other moral lapses showed how the Whig ruling class felt that things were slipping out of control. There were turnpike riots in the southeast of England where toll gates were demolished, pitched battles with smugglers on the southern coast that showed the state was unable enforce laws or even monopolize armed violence with its borders. Even though the last of the Stuart led and French supported Jacobite rebellion was defeated in the Midlands, local juries refused to convict the rebels and revelers do that even armed struggle against the central government often went unpunished.

“Mayhem” seems to be an excellent example of E.P. Thompson’s most famous formulation of social history, that it demanded that historians undertake projects of rescue, i.e. that they write histories about people who do not get to write their own. Called “history from below” by some, Rogers uses the term micro-history and settles on “incident history” which is what happens to everyone else while the history of kings and generals, wars and treaties, continent conquering and nation building is being reported—what used to be called simply “history” and now is seen as history of (or at least from the point of view of) the elites of society. Highly recommended, just a bit slow going when Rogers quotes unknown (to me) historians.

[Christina Marta · Rating 4 out of 5]

The big lesson to be learned is: the labourer is worthy of his hire. When you demobilize soldiers and sailors, you have to pay them wages owed. In an era before any kind of social safety net, many men turned to crime. I never cared for Fielding, and after reading this, I want to drown him in a bucket. He was a magistrate who was oblivious to the proximate causes of the crimes before him.

And gory public executions don't work as deterrents. Capital punishment doesn't work as a deterrent.