fields and parks of London at the end of the eighteenth century.’7 Many were influenced by a range of radical ideas, from Tom Paine’s astonishing bestseller The Rights of Man, to the theories of the Enlightenment and the ideas of the French and American revolutions. At the same time, forms of working-class and collective organization were still embryonic.
The city was the scene of great extremes of affluence and poverty. Its fabric was held together by wealth made from slavery and empire. The rich spread out in this century from the traditional confines of the old City and Westminster to fill in many of the spaces in between, building fine houses in the Georgian squares of Bloomsbury and Marylebone. The upper and middle classes employed bevies of servants: one estimate puts the number at 200,000 in 1796, around a fifth of the city’s population at the time.8 The poor and the working people, on the other hand, lived in the growing suburbs which surrounded the city walls – Clerkenwell, Islington, Tower Hamlets, and Southwark, as well as in parts of the City and Westminster themselves. They were artisans, apprentices, small masters, servants, river workers, sailors, street vendors, criminals and prostitutes. The trades which Londoners carried out included carpentry, butchery and shoemaking, as well as silk weaving which was the specialty of French, Irish and other immigrants in Spitalfields.
THE SPITALFIELDS RIOTS
The silk weavers were among the most pugnacious sections of London society, strongly organized to protect their trade and repeatedly forced to defend themselves. In 1675 and 1697 they rioted against the introduction of new machines and production techniques. When in 1719 the weavers assembled again in Spitalfields and at the Mint (near the Tower of London) to protest against the import of calico which threatened the silk industry, they had the recently passed Riot Act read out to them.9 As one of the key sections of the embryonic London working class, they helped to define class consciousness in the city. Spitalfields was the centre of their home and work, wedged between the City and the East End, providing a densely packed area in which radical ideas could ferment. Many of the silk weavers were themselves refugees or descendants of refugees, Huguenots from France who fled Louis XIV’s anti-Protestant pogroms in the 1680s. They were notorious for militancy in pursuit of their trade: any dispute with the masters would involve them not only stopping work but ripping the silk which had been already woven, rendering it worthless. They also smashed machinery and did as much damage to their masters’ enterprises as they could, in this presaging some of the movements against industrialization and new machinery which took place outside of London. They were a formidable force that also played a major part in all the political and social upheavals of the time.
France began forced conversions to Catholicism in 1681, and in 1685 the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes outlawed Protestantism in France. Some 50,000 to 80,000 of these Protestants settled in England, about half of them in the London area, where they gravitated towards the two established French churches: in Threadneedle Street in the City, and at the Savoy in the West End. The Huguenot communities thus became based in Spitalfields and Soho. By 1700 there were nine French Protestant churches in the East End and twelve in the West End.
Protestant immigrants received a better welcome in London than others, partly as a result of virulent anti-Catholicism, partly because of propaganda that dwelt on the atrocities committed against Protestants in France. Despite the threat of anti-Huguenot riots in the East End in 1675, 1681 and 1683, there appears to have been little physical violence directed against the French refugees. After the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the accession of William and Mary, Huguenots received a remarkable level of charitable support.
The Spitalfields silk workshops occupying the majority of the Huguenots made their owners extremely wealthy. One, Francis Goodchild, became lord mayor of London. Weaving only declined in the late 1700s, as silk was driven out of the market by new Indian and Chinese fabrics. The Spitalfields Acts passed between 1765 and 1801 aimed at controlling wages and working conditions, and to protect the domestic market from overseas competition. But the business continued to shrink. Weavers fought their masters to protect their livelihoods in violent clashes, particularly in 1768–69.
The Spitalfields Riots of those years were the result of heightened class conflict in the industry. This took place against a background of hardship and poverty among the working people of London and growing industrial unrest in a number of areas. The silk weavers wanted to control the prices in the industry. The conflict started as one between different groups of journeyman weavers, the single-hand or narrow weavers and those with engine looms. The masters had reduced the prices they paid for piece work, adding to the grievances. Angry weavers resorted to direct action, cutting the silk in the looms of those weavers who had ‘broken the book’ of fixed prices. In the summer of 1768, there were repeated ‘cuttings’ in Spitalfields. The weavers went armed, and in one raid shot a young man dead.
A new agreement in the wake of these events rapidly broke down. By now, the journeyman weavers had formed committees which collected a levy from any who owned looms to pay for organization and strike action. They called themselves the Bold Defiance. And they demanded money from the masters. One who refused to pay the levy was sent a threatening letter: ‘Mr Obey, we give you an Egg Shell of Honey, but if you refuse to comply with the demands of yesterday, we’ll give you a Gallon of Thorns to your final Life’s End.’10 The weavers met in various pubs in the area to collect money and to organize. In 1769 they set their own prices in the food markets.11 Amid shortages of food and fuel, the weavers repeatedly resorted to destroying looms and cutting silk.
The looms of one journeyman weaver, Thomas Poor, were cut by a group led by John Doyle and John Valline. Valline also headed a crowd of 1,500 who attacked seventy-six looms belonging to master weaver Lewis Chauvet, because he wouldn’t contribute to the committee funds. The authorities decided to intervene, and a meeting of silk weavers in the Dolphin pub in Bishopsgate was broken up by soldiers, with deaths on both sides. The big masters, led by Chauvet, now underwrote the costs of soldiers billeted in Spitalfields and effectively occupying the area; Doyle and Valline were tried and sentenced to death. In an attempt to cow the unruly and militant weavers, the authorities decided not to hang them at Tyburn as was usual, but in Bethnal Green at the heart of the weaving district.
Crowds lined the lengthy route from Newgate to the gallows, erected outside the Salmon and Ball pub which is still standing by Bethnal Green tube. The men expected to be rescued by the angry multitude which pelted the guards with rocks, but the execution went ahead. In anger and frustration, the gallows were torn down and reassembled outside Chauvet’s house as thousands attacked the building, burning furniture and breaking windows.12 The authorities never again dared to hang a weaver in Bethnal Green, and years later the weavers still bore a grudge against those who betrayed them. Eighteen months later, one of those who informed on them was cornered by an angry crowd and lynched.13
One lasting reminder of the Huguenot presence stands out. Just on the corner where Fournier Street, with its rows of Huguenot houses, meets Brick Lane in the East End of London stands the Jamme Masjid mosque. It started life in 1744 as a Huguenot church; fifty years later it became a Wesleyan chapel. From 1898 the building housed the Spitalfields Great Synagogue, serving the Eastern European Jewish community, until it was sold to the Bengali community in 1975. The building has been used for over two and a half centuries as a place of worship for the peoples of Spitalfields, yet the communities assembling within its walls have changed with successive waves of immigration to London. It stands today not only as the heart of the Bengali community but as a symbol of that movement and fluidity which is so characteristic of London’s history.14
LOVE, MARRIAGE AND MOTHER’S RUIN
Marriages of the poor had often been common law agreements, but this changed with the Hardwicke Act of 1753, which tried to prevent clandestine marriages by decreeing that from 1754 all marriages had to be conducted in the Church of England (only Quakers and Jews were exempted). This was an attempt to staunch the tide of ‘irregular marriages’ in the early eighteenth century. In London there were dozens of ‘Lawless churches’, most famously the ‘Fleet Prison Rules’. A business grew up around
