The Gloucestershire Yoemanry Cavalry
Prologue
Men of means with the wherewithal
To pay for horse, uniform and accoutrements;
Not professional soldiers but volunteers,
Ready to confront Napoleon
In the event of a French invasion;
And, also, ready to confront the lower orders,
In the event of protests and strikes over enclosure,
Food prices, low wages, unemployment
(‘Civil unrest’).
Also, ready to confront demands for democracy
(‘Civil unrest’),
In the nineteenth century,
As in the Bristol Riots of 1831
(Though not, thank God, replicating
The actions of the Manchester Yoemanry
Twelve years before at Peterloo),
And, also, ready for action during the 1830s
(Captain Swing),
And the Chartist decade of ‘the hungry forties.’
Inventory
The Cheltenham or 1st Gloucestershire Troop (1795)
The Bristol Light Horse Volunteers
The Bristol Troop
The City of Gloucester Troop
The Cotswold Volunteers
The Doddington Volunteer Cavalry
The Dursley Volunteer Cavalry
The Loyal Gloucestershire Yoemanry
The Henbury Troop of Gentlemen
The Longtree Bisley and Whitstone Troop
The Minchinhampton Troop
The Wotton-under-Edge Volunteer Troop of Cavalry
Snapshots of Action
1795: Threatening letters in Uley,
‘No King but a constitution down down down o fatall dow high caps and proud hats for ever dow down we all.’
Sir George Paul thought Tom Paine’s The Rights of Man
Was republican hand in glove with the food riots:
‘This is but the beginning of an evil that will turn to desperate consequences’,
He helped foster the burning of a guyed Tom Paine,
But that didn’t stop mass-meetings
Up on Minchinhampton Common,
‘The cry of want of bread … forms a body of insurgents, amongst them are mixed a number of seditious persons’,
His associate, the Earl of Berkeley agreed:
‘A vein of bad materials runs through the lower order in the clothing part of the county which still continues to study Tom Paine’ –
But back to Sir George Paul again,
When the invasion-scare of 1798,
Led to some master clothiers calling
for workmen to join the volunteer militia:
‘If too many of them should get under arms … and no enemy appear, they might take an opportunity of holding strong language to their masters on the sore point of increasing machinery.’
1825:
‘We laid our shuttles and looms to rest and joined the Stroud Valleys Weavers Union. I straightway joined 50 others at a congregation at Ham Mill. There was 700 of us the next day. We threw the one of the clothier Marling’s men in the brook. We all joined the next assembly a few days later. 200 of us congregated at Vatch Mills. There were 3,000 of us by the following evening. We baptised more strike breakers and master clothiers’ men in Mr. Holbrow’s fish pond. I won’t name names but the same happened at Woodchester, Minchinhampton, Frogmarsh, Chalford and Bisley. It was all over Stroudwater.
The stone masons then joined in. They were angry about the Combination Acts. The carpenters and millwrights joined them too. So the gentry swore in special constables. Then the Hussars rode in a couple of days later. When we re-congregated they read the Riot Act. So we threw stones at them. They dispersed us with horse and swish of sabre. A friend was arrested for selling ‘The True British Weaver’, so more congregations followed: Break Heart Hill near Dursley, then 3,000 on Stinchcombe and then 6,000 on Selsley. If anyone broke the strike then we stuck them backwards on a horse and paraded them through the lanes while we all beat pots and pans in a cacophony of rejection. I think they stuck them on beams from looms in Chalford and then pushed them in the canal and brook. They read the Riot Act there too. We kept it going though.
The next big congregation was in Stroud at the end of August. We called for the release of our friends in prison. But that was nothing compared to what was going on in Wotton-under-Edge. The leader of the weavers there mocked the Hussars by calling himself ‘General Wolfe’. He led several congregations in the open air and in the Swann. Then they set cloth and loom beams ablaze. Stones were thrown and windows smashed. The clothiers replied with muskets.’
We move in five years:
Back in the winter of 1830,
Cotswold lanes were thronged with anxious farm hands:
Families were hungry with bread prices high -
And so, with wages low, with winter indigence;
And the threat of new threshing machines;
The Captain Swing riots had made their way
From Wiltshire to Gloucestershire –
Smashing threshing machines, burning hay ricks,
Penning threatening letters to farmers, signed by
The half-mythologised gentleman on a white horse,
The impossibly ubiquitous Captain Swing:
“this is to inform you what you have to undergo gentelemen if providing you Don’t pull down your meshenes and rise the poor mens wages the married men give tow and sixpence a day the single tow shillings or we will burn down your barns and you in them this is the last notis
From Swing”
He came to Horsley at the end of November:
Threshing machines were dutifully broken,
Lord Sherborne rallied the J.P.s of the shire,
And appealed to the agricultural labourers:
‘Return to your labours and we will listen to your complaints’,
But the promise of a ‘just’ response
Was the jailing of nearly a hundred labourers
In the prison at Gloucester …
Out towards Tetbury, the cavalry
were dispatched to the Trouble House,
Surrounding the inn, with their swords drawn
(‘I’ll give them “Bread or Blood”, be damned’),
The farm hands pausing for some bread and cheese,
Escaping out the back door, into the rain,
Pursued by the cavalry through the plashy fields,
Near two dozen captured in the mud and mire,
Drenched to their skin and bone in their threadbare coats …
The nearby lanes and farmyards were frantic too,
Tetbury, Chavenage, Cherington and Beverstone,
All so surface upper crust these days,
But over a hundred gathered then on the Beverstone Road,
‘Be damned if we don’t go to Beverstone and break the machine!’
Sledge hammers, picks, staves all carried
Under the tutelage of Elizabeth Parker,
To the farm of Jacob Hayward,
To smash that damned threshing machine,
A signal moment for Gloucestershire
In ‘The Last Labourer’s Revolt’ …
Now we jump on a few months to the Bristol Riots of 1831:
Three days of protests and confrontation -
The most telling since the Gordon Riots of 1780 –
Resulted in the eventual despatch
Of the Doddington Volunteer Cavalry…
Listen to the words of Professor Steve Poole:
‘The only Gloucs yeomanry to turn out at Bristol in 1831 was the Doddington and Marshfield, led by their Captain, William Codrington of Dodington Park. They were sent for by the mayor on the evening of Sunday 30th so they saddled up and rode into the city but in the chaos and confusion that greeted their arrival, they failed to find a magistrate to issue them with orders and read the Riot Act so that they could engage the crowd. After several hours of cantering around between the Council House, the Guildhall and the military headquarters on College Green, Codrington gave up and took his men home. He wasn’t very happy …’
Steve’s piece in reply to my plea for help in research prompted this reply on the Bristol Radical History Facebook page:
‘That’s a fascinating bit about Codrington’s forces not being able to find a magistrate to read out the 1714 Riot Act … and therefore not being able to go on and kill protesters … so they went home. Who’d have guessed they’d be so observant in following the law in such a situation!’
Steve replied:
‘Well, they could find themselves in serious trouble afterwards if they didn’t. The Riot Act offered legal protection if their intervention left anyone seriously injured or dead. My guess is they were terrified. Yoemanry are only part time soldiers and the Doddington troop had only been in existence for a year. They were formed to combat Swing crowds in south Gloucestershire the previous winter but I’m not sure they were ever used. Not exactly battle-hardened troops!’
I then came across this letter from CB Codrington to Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary, in justification of his son and troops:
‘Living in a neighbourhood where Reform and Rebellion are nearly synonymous, it is not to be wondered at, if every attempt is made to stigmatize such men as these of whom my son’s Troop is composed – It is respectability as opposed to Rebellion in the guise of Reform’.
But in the year of 1834,
Amalgamation took place:
That dozen or so in the prologue
Fused together into the brand spanking new
Gloucestershire Yoemanry Cavalry
(I wonder if abolition of enslavement
‘Compensation’ helped to pay for new uniforms?);
And then: in the Chartist decade
Of what became known as ‘the Hungry Forties’:
The Royal Gloucestershire Hussars.
We put on our best blouses, aprons and hats
“I’ll never forget last Tuesday, even if I live to seventy.
We all woke up so excited, never eaten porridge so fast.
We put on our best blouses, aprons and hats,
The men shaved their chins, put on their caps,
Moleskin trousers and fustian waistcoats,
And out we strode into the lane.
Such a sight you never did see!
The men and women and children,
All marching in an orderly line past our cottage;
Then when we got to Stroud, we couldn’t believe our eyes:
Serpentine lines climbing up every valley side,
There must have been thousands!
All laughing and cheering, but sore determined,
To get our rights and right our wrongs;
Bread has never been so dear and wages are down,
With long hours for those who do have work;
Then there was the Tolpuddle Martyrs,
Then there was the New Poor Law and the Workhouse.
The Bible tells us to nurture each other in sickness and in health,
But the Workhouse rents us all asunder!
So it was such a joy to see them all,
See them all streaming from
Sheepscombe, Steanbridge and Slad,
Stroud, Stonehouse, Woodchester, Uley, Wotton,
The Stanleys, Selsley, Cainscross, Minchinhampton, Painswick,
Rodborough, Stonehouse, Randwick, Ruscombe, Bisley,
Nailsworth, Avening and Horsley,
Bussage, Brimscombe and Thrupp;
Bands playing, music flowing, banners billowing:
‘ Liberty’; ‘Equal Rights and Equal Laws’;
‘For a Nation to be Free it is Sufficient that She wills it’.
Then the banners from the Working Men’s Associations,
And the Radical Women’s Associations,
Then the handbills and placards listing our six points:
Universal Suffrage; Secret Ballot; Payment of MPs;
Abolition of the property qualification for MPs;
Equal constituencies; Annual Parliaments;
Then the speeches up there on top of the common:
‘We must have the 6 points’;
‘Peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must’;
‘Those damnable Poor Law Bastilles are worse than prisons’;
‘May the Almighty inspire the people with vigour and energy’;
Then cheers for our Chartist leaders’ names,
And then the groans for Russell’s;
It was such a day and life will never be the same again:
Russell says we do not understand the laws of capital and wages,
But we do, my Lord.
We do.”
And that’s what they call ‘civil unrest’.
The first person voices of the poor.
But who is ‘they’?
I end with the beginning:
Men of means with the wherewithal
To pay for horse, uniform and accoutrements;
Not professional soldiers but volunteers …
And I end with the end:
“May the Almighty inspire the people with vigour and energy”;
‘Then cheers for our Chartist leaders’ names,
And then the groans for Russell’s;
It was such a day and life will never be the same again:
Russell says we do not understand the laws of capital and wages,
But we do, my Lord.
We do.’
(Lord John Russell: Home Secretary in 1839, the year of the Chartist mass meeting on Selsley Hill, and also Stroud’s M.P.)