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A People's History of Sheffield from the French Revolution to Chartism with Matthew Roberts - Ep 43
916 Plays3 years ago
Archaeology & Ale is a monthly series of talks presented by Archaeology in the City, part of the University of Sheffield Archaeology Department’s outreach programme. This month we are proud to host Matthew Roberts from Sheffield Hallam University speaking on "A People's History of Sheffield from the French Revolution to Chartism". This talk took place on Tuesday, November 23rd, 2021, online via Google Meets.
Sheffield has a rich tradition of ‘history from below’, in the sense of a long established assertive and proud group of working people who created a rich occupational, social and political culture. From the time of the French Revolution in the 1790s through to the 1850s and beyond, working people increasingly fought for recognition, dignity, protection in the workplace and their rights of citizens. At the centre of these struggles were Sheffield’s metal workers, the cutlers and ‘little mesters’, as well as women and not just as wives but in their own right. What was life like for the working classes of Sheffield during this period? What changes and continuities marked their lives? Why did Sheffield become a centre of radical politics? These are some of the questions we’ll explore in this talk.
Matthew Roberts from Sheffield Hallam University
Matthew Roberts is Associate Professor in Modern British History at Sheffield Hallam University in the UK. He is an historian of nineteenth-century Britain and the Anglophone Atlantic World, and works mainly on the history of popular politics and protest, the visual and material culture of politics, and more recently the history of emotions. His book Chartism, Commemoration and the Cult of the Radical Hero was published by Routledge in 2020, and is now available in paperback.
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Transcript
Introduction and Context
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
Sheffield's Historical Narrative
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello everyone, and welcome to episode 43 of Archaeology Now, a free monthly public archaeology talk brought to you by Archaeology in the City, the community outreach program for the University of Sheffield's Department of Archaeology. This time, our guest speaker is Matthew Roberts, speaking about a people's history of Sheffield from the French Revolution to charge them. Through the ongoing COVID pandemic, this talk is taking place online via Google Meets, so maybe some background noise or audio feedback in our recording. Enjoy!
00:01:04
Speaker
I guess I wasn't quite too sure what people wanted to hear, really, in me addressing the group. I think, and I'll try and do a bit of both, but I thought I'd tell you something a little bit about the history of Sheffield in the late 18th, early 19th centuries. So there's certainly a local story to it. But I guess the other thing that I wanted to do and that is at the centre of the research that I've been doing for
00:01:30
Speaker
at least the past couple of decades, really is thinking about how we might write political history differently and how we might write that from the perspective of ordinary people. Now that in itself is nothing new. It's part of history from below. You heard a definition of that there. That's a long recognized way of doing history.
History from Below
00:01:51
Speaker
became prominent in the 1960s and 70s under the influence of Marxism, adult education, first generation of university students from grammar schools, etc. And Sheffield and the history of Sheffield, I think, has been part that tradition of writing history from below. But in the last 20 years or so, I think historiography,
00:02:11
Speaker
and what's been written about things like popular movement, social movement, working class protest and politics, those sorts of things. It's taken, I think, quite an interesting turn and very slowly, I have to say, it's very slow. I think historians are starting to learn things from groups like archaeologists. It's been a big emphasis on material and visual culture.
00:02:32
Speaker
in the last two decades and that's something that I've worked on quite closely and also I think trying to get more at the experiential dimension as existential as that sounds I think more straightforwardly what I've been trying to do in my research and others who are also working in this area is be able to get at what it felt like
00:02:57
Speaker
what it looked like, what it sounded like, what it smelled like almost. I haven't seen an olfactory history of politics just yet. But the most recent research I've been doing, you heard about in the introduction now, the history of emotion has very much been about thinking about the role that feeling plays in politics.
00:03:14
Speaker
And it's one of those things that once someone says, oh, yeah, feelings are important in politics, you kind of think, well, that's rather obvious. But funnily enough, it's only really been in the last five, 10 years that historians have started to take the history of emotions quite seriously. And I think there's always a danger of over-rationalizing our approach to the past.
00:03:35
Speaker
you know, in thinking stuff was always about reason, it was always about political ideas, it was always about organisation.
Civic Protests and Public Spaces
00:03:42
Speaker
I think often it's about things that are much more prosaic than that, but no less significant, like feeling, anger, disillusionment. So there's certainly going to be some of that today.
00:03:52
Speaker
So that's sort of what's bubbling along in the background to my talk about how we might write the history of popular politics slightly differently. So a bit of local context, I said in my opening remarks there that Sheffield I think has been at the centre of
00:04:09
Speaker
a long tradition of an assertive and proud group working people created a rich occupational, social and political culture. And that really begins at the time of the French Revolution in the 1790s through to the 1840s and beyond. But I'm just sort of going to do that first big chapter today and finishing with the Big Bang of 1848.
00:04:31
Speaker
from the time of the French Revolution in the 1790s through to the 1840s and beyond. Working people increasingly fought for recognition, dignity, protection in the workplace, and their rights as citizens. Things like the vote, greater protection for labor, repeal of the corn laws, things that put taxation on the people's bread, and also by challenging the exclusion of working people from public spaces. And I think that's the first thing.
00:04:59
Speaker
I would want to say that might be of interest to a group of archaeologists that a lot of what working class protest is about in this period is challenging the exclusions that working people face as far as the streets and buildings of a town like Sheffield present. So one of the ways elites try to clamp down on
Sheffield's Industrial Landscape
00:05:23
Speaker
working-class movements is by preventing them from gaining access to public buildings. So groups like Chartists and Jacobins at the time of the French Revolution, as the British variants of radicals are called, they're always trying to get access to civic buildings to hold their meetings, places like the Cutlass Hall. But the doors are always closed to them. So they tend to meet at more outdoor locations, like Paradise Square, now full of lawyers, sadly. But even in places like that,
00:05:53
Speaker
It's not unusual for the authorities to send in the military to disperse peaceful meetings. So you can see a lot of what's going on here is a long running contest. Working people try to challenge those exclusions in the built environment of a place like Sheffield. And for movements that are more better resourced, and that's always going to be a problem for working class movements, they do actually manage to pull their pennies and build purpose built.
00:06:21
Speaker
places where they can meet, but that's very much the exception rather than norm for obvious reasons, money being premium. So often they are forced to hold meetings on more outdoor kind of locations and far from the civil boundaries. So beyond the urban environment, places like Sky Edge, which I think is behind where Park Hill flats currently are, further afield on places like Atticliffe Common,
00:06:50
Speaker
and certainly throughout Yorkshire, often in sort of rural locations that are the midway point between places like Bradford Leeds, Sheffield and so on. So it's kind of difficult, I guess, to be a working class protester because of these restrictions that exist. So I thought before I got into talking to, say a little bit more about these protest moments, I'd just say a little bit of something about what
00:07:16
Speaker
Sheffield Society was like and what working class culture was like during this period that I'm talking about. So I'll begin with a bit of background about Sheffield and I think the point I'm about to make is aptly captured I think on this image here from I think the late 18th century and
00:07:35
Speaker
Sheffield was not a product of the so-called industrial revolution in the way that, say, places like Bradford or Manchester were at the beginning of our period, the late 18th century. Sheffield was already a sizeable town. In 1776, it had a population of some 30,000 that doubled by 1801, and then you do start to see a bit of an explosion, more characteristic of places that are beginning to boom, 112,000 by 3161,000 by 1815.
00:08:05
Speaker
But the point here is that Sheffield was a much older and longer established centre of small scale manufacturer, principally metalworking. Cutlery, of course, we always talk about cutlery, but not just cutlery, also edge tools and silver plate.
00:08:21
Speaker
Again, unlike Bradford and Manchester, this is a crucial point. There was no widespread mechanization and transition to large-scale factory production in Sheffield until way beyond the period I'm talking about today. It's not really until the late 19th century that you start to see the rise of heavy industrial Sheffield, Atlas, Brightside, Atticliffe, those sorts of places.
00:08:43
Speaker
So in other words, there was no dark satanic mills to speak of in Sheffield during the first half of the 19th century. And I think that has important consequences for the nature of working class life and crucially the relationship between the different classes which made up Sheffield. And I'll return to that later.
00:09:01
Speaker
So the typical scale of manufacture was small, taking place in workshops nestled in and around courtyard at the rear of back-to-back housing. As maps and recent archaeological excavations have confirmed, there was a close proximity between industry and domestic life in Sheffield, a pattern that only really began to decline, as I say, in any significant way in the late 19th century. So your typical
00:09:30
Speaker
Working environment really is what you can see depicted here from wonderful set of illustrations published in 1814 by George Walker called the Costumes of Yorkshire and one of the illustrations is of a cutler's workshop and the map that I showed you there was of an area in between West Street and Kellam Island.
00:09:48
Speaker
Now, it's important to note that not everybody in Sheffield worked in the metal trade, even though that's what the town was famous for. At the time of the 1851 census, some 23,000 men and 1,000 women were working in steel, iron, founding, and engineering. So there's a total of something like 30,000 people working in the metal trades. But out of a total population of 135,000, that still leaves a significant number of people engaged in other occupations.
00:10:18
Speaker
such as retailing service enterprises. And there were many other artisans as well. The town has over a thousand shoemakers, for example, nearly 4,000 female domestic servants at this time. And one of my favorite things I found off the census
00:10:37
Speaker
was the town had no less than 1,700 milliners, most of whom were women making hats, which means that nearly half the men and five, six of the women in employment made their living from occupations other than metalworking. So the basic point here is we shouldn't assume that every adult working class male was a cutler or metalworker.
00:10:59
Speaker
Having said that, small metalwork constituted the single largest category of male employment. Around a third worked in this highly specialised and subdivided sector.
00:11:10
Speaker
More importantly, the majority of workers in the city and its hinterland were artisan, that is skilled labourers, many of them highly skilled indeed. And we shouldn't exclude here Sheffield's hinterland. And I'm talking there about the 10 or 12 miles around the city, which of course becomes the site for scatterings of cutlery, forges and related artisan metalworking because of the close proximity of coal, ironstone mining, quarrying,
00:11:36
Speaker
iron furnishing and foundries, along with significantly capitalized agriculture as well.
Artisans and Market Pressures
00:11:42
Speaker
So this was a geography that was determined largely by the availability of running water, no less than three significant rivers of course in the town, the sheath, the dawn and the riverland provided motive power for grinding and other processes.
00:11:55
Speaker
The hinterland was also the location of rich coal and iron seams for turning into steel. The cutlery industry actually was heavily dependent on the import of high grade Swedish iron bar. I think the other crucial point to note here, it was not just that the metal workers, sorry, the metal workers were fiercely independent and a proud group. So that brings me really to the question of what did it mean to be an artisan?
00:12:18
Speaker
at this time and in particular a skilled metal work. Traditionally this entailed being an artisan that is serving an apprenticeship with an approved master in a trade that was highly regulated often by royal statutes like worship companies such as the company of cutlers in Hallamshire
00:12:34
Speaker
a trade guild in fact was incorporated in 1624. These companies did things like set terms of apprenticeships, they monitored the missions to their membership, they issued regulations pertaining to quality, workmanship, agreed price lists and even working conditions.
00:12:51
Speaker
Now, artisans tended to be peace rate workers, i.e. they were not paid wages, they were paid for the items that they made, an agreed price that was paid upon completion of their work. Now, over the course of the 18th century, as with other such companies, the Cutlass Company,
00:13:08
Speaker
had become increasingly oligarchic and ineffective at protecting the status of the artisans from the rise of capitalism and market forces, as larger merchant manufacturer capitalists began to exert dominance.
00:13:23
Speaker
squeezed the small masters, famously known of course as Little Mesters, and their artisan workers. Despite a rear guard action by the artisans in the 1780s and 90s through their trade societies, basically early forms of trade unions, to make the company more democratic and accountable,
00:13:40
Speaker
The metal working trade was increasingly proletarianized, rising instances of employing unapprenticed labor, i.e. workers who had not served an apprenticeship because they were cheaper and could therefore undercut skilled workers. We've seen things like growing numbers of apprentices remaining journeymen, i.e. not becoming masters, as would have been ordinarily the case in a long life devoted to this. There's also a growing dependence on tools and equipment provided by the employer.
00:14:08
Speaker
You know, in a Marxist sense, workers are increasingly no longer owning the means of production. And we're also seeing, of course, the rise of industrial capitalists with greater concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of larger employers who were able to dictate terms. Now, what all this adds up to is, well, an interesting sort of social scene in Sheffield.
00:14:30
Speaker
On the one hand, there is certainly evidence of growing social tension by the early 19th century, certainly from the perspectives of smaller masters and artisans, to say nothing of less privileged groups of workers.
00:14:46
Speaker
But on the other hand, one of the sort of things about Sheffield is that it's quite complicated. There are lots of people who will tell you that Sheffield was not a place of class conflict. You can see one here, John Parker, future MP of Sheffield, saying in 830, there is not the mark line of difference between the rich man and the poor man.
00:15:05
Speaker
which is becoming annually more observable in other places. The middle ranks are nearer both to the upper and lower. And I think relatively, there probably is some truth in that Sheffield, similar to Birmingham, are places that have got more of a variegated social structure. There is less of an obvious divide between the Venanos, the rich and the poor. The problem, of course, with statements like that is that it's all relative. And it's not a surprise, I think, that that's coming from someone who
00:15:33
Speaker
It's pretty high up the social scale in Sheffield terms and we don't have to look very far. Joseph Maver here, a famous songster from Sheffield, writing the late 18th, early 19th century, who is seen as the voice of the working man. You can see here from an extract from one of his songs that I put on the board that he's certainly not signing up to this notion that Sheffield's all rosy and cosy and he's likening the condition of the working man in Sheffield to slaves.
00:16:01
Speaker
to the enslaved in America, which I think is really interesting. It shows that there is an awareness of things beyond Sheffield amongst workers, that they're likening their conditions to enslaved labor overseas and they're not the first and certainly not the last of a group of white workers to make quite a, it's often seen as a clumsy comparison to say the least between the position of being a worker and that of
00:16:28
Speaker
someone enslaved in the colonies or the former colonies in this case as well. So visions of Sheffield are complex but certainly I think from the perspectives of cutlers and metalworkers they're looking back on
00:16:44
Speaker
They're increasingly looking back, I think, with a sense of disillusionment of a lost golden age of the fact that things were once better, but no longer are as good. And you can see that with evidence such as this, which is presented to Parliament for ever having select committees, Royal Commissions investigating the state of manufacture. Sheffield Cutlers are
00:17:05
Speaker
being interviewed here on a select committee on the state of
Revolutionary Inspirations
00:17:08
Speaker
manufacturers commerce and shipping in 1833. And the story that they tell essentially is that things are going from bad to worse. What would you reckon the average wages of labor in the hardware trade at Sheffield from two and six to five shillings a day? They're working 12 hours a day, okay, two hours for meal time.
00:17:27
Speaker
11 to 12 hours. The pace of work is also beginning to increase, even in the absence of large factory-based type production. Destructive of health in temperance is the greatest enemy, i.e. people having too much to drink. Of course, the metalworkers, many of them the cutlers, are also famous for playing hard as well as working hard.
00:17:49
Speaker
And I'll say a little bit more about that in a moment, but I think a lot of the things, the privileges that they once been able to count on, they're all being systematically stripped away and taken away and undermined. So that really is the context, I think, for radical politics and it doesn't take sort of
00:18:08
Speaker
you know it's not a difficult thing to understand why a group of increasingly disillusioned workers would start to turn towards politics as a potential route for bettering their lives but it does take some explaining and the event that sort of kicks all of this off really.
00:18:25
Speaker
is the French Revolution.
Chartism and Democratic Reforms
00:18:27
Speaker
What I've summarized here are sort of key dates in the history of protest and radical politics, as it's called at the time, people who are pursuing essentially a political solution to their grievance as it kicks off with the French Revolution. For obvious reasons, a seemingly autocratic, immovable regime has been brought to its knees on the continent, the French monarchy,
00:18:50
Speaker
It's been replaced. It sort of opens the floodgates. There's big questions about who should politics before? How should we rearrange politics? How should we make societies work fairer? And groups in Sheffield and indeed elsewhere in the UK start to respond very favourably to the French Revolution, hence the name given to them by the authorities and the upper classes as Jacobins after the French radicals who are powering the French Revolution.
00:19:14
Speaker
So real key data in Sheffield is the formation of the Sheffield Society for Constitutional Information, which sounds one of the dullest societies you could imagine. But I think that the name is carefully selected, because beneath that, they're doing pretty radical stuff. They're reading things that the government wants banned, that they want off the streets. In particular, Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, the idea that everybody has rights, every man at least,
00:19:44
Speaker
Sheffield becomes a centre then for debating these radical ideas and it really sort of is born then and it continues to be a prominent kind of movement radicalism that is until the mid 19th century and then it sort of dies down a bit before it sort of powers off once again in the late 19th century.
00:20:04
Speaker
So I'm not going to talk about all of these things here, but what you start to see, of course, is sort of a division amongst the radicals about how best to pursue their goals, what those goals might be, democracy, OK, for some, possibly even the Republic. They start to divide about how best to pursue those goals.
00:20:22
Speaker
Should we pursue peaceful means? She's probably the majority and then there's also a smaller minority, an influential minority actually, who are willing to use more direct action methods, take up arms, and you can see that in the revolutionary underground.
00:20:39
Speaker
Once the state starts to clamp down on radical politics in the 1790s in Britain, it drives it underground. And in the process, it radicalizes it. And it rears its head, sometimes in food riots, which are still happening in Sheffield in the early 19th century, usually where a group of women will go to a bakery and they'll basically say, we're only paying so much money for this bread. They'll pay for the bread and then they'll leave it, which, of course, technically is a form of theft because you're not paying the asking price.
00:21:09
Speaker
This is a traditional way actually that plebeians have used to try and make the system fairer but there is that sort of direct action that's sort of often called pre-industrial type protest is declining and there's a shift towards more sort of democratic movements of pursuing democratic means by constitutional objectives, peaceful means.
00:21:32
Speaker
and this is what you start to see here as the 19th century progresses and it all culminates really in the movement that I'm going to spend the remainder of my time talking about this evening and that's Chartism which is the mass movement for democratic rights.
00:21:49
Speaker
in the 1830s and 40s, which sweeps across Britain. At its height, it's got something like 3.3 million members. It's the world's first largest working class movement in history, not just in Britain, in the world. And of course, places like Sheffield are an epicentre of Chartism, and it mobilises millions of workers. It draws on things like a notion of class, family and community, all of which
00:22:16
Speaker
with the aim to create a more democratic society. And you see that sort of division once again that I hinted at earlier, there's a divide amongst the chartists about how best are they going to pursue their objectives? Is it going to be through peaceful protest? Is it going to be through holding meetings in
00:22:33
Speaker
Paradise Square, or is it going to involve taking up arms against the state? And some of you will know where, or you may do, you'll know where I'm going with this, when I mentioned the name Samuel Holbury, who I'm going to talk about in a moment. So the basis of Chartism is a document called the People's Charter, which consisted of six points, universal man of suffrage, secret ballot. Funnily enough, voting at this time is something that's done in
00:22:59
Speaker
not in private. It's done in quite an intimidating way. You've got to make your way up onto the hostings. The closest parallel, I guess, these days would be something like a music festival, drunken revelry and people deliberately bribing people and hiring thugs to make sure people vote the right kind of way.
00:23:19
Speaker
Unsurprisingly, this movement for democracy wants the secret ballot to be able to vote in the polling booth as we do to this day. It wants the abolition of property qualification for MPs. In other words, only people who are rich can stand for parliament at the time.
00:23:36
Speaker
It wants the qualification that limits MPs to the property and rich classes abolishing. It wants payment for MPs. It wants equal sized constituencies. There's huge variety in the size of constituencies at this time. Of course, until 1832, places like Sheffield did not elect their own MPs. So there's still a lot of disparity even after the so-called Great Reform Act 32.
00:24:02
Speaker
And the only point of the people's charter not to be conceded to this day, those of you who are keeping tally will note the sixth one annual parliaments or in other words, general elections every year. It doesn't take sort of much thought to think about why that's not being conceded. That's the last thing any sort of.
00:24:22
Speaker
professional politician wants. But the thinking there for the Chartists at least is that, in a sense, all of these other points are designed to make politics more representative of ordinary people. But the second thing, often forgotten about the Chartists, is they also want to make political leaders more accountable, hence general elections every year. Well, that brings me to Samuel Holbury, probably the most famous Sheffield Chartist.
00:24:50
Speaker
And I'm going to start after, I mean, the history of this bust in itself is quite interesting. This was commissioned by, well, I'm not going to give the story away for those of you who don't know the story of Holbury because it's, yeah, it's quite a gripping one, but I'll hold the thought about the history of this bust for the moment. But if I forget to come back to it, feel free to ask questions about it afterwards.
00:25:11
Speaker
I'm going to begin with plaque dedicated to the young Samuel Holbury. This is the burial site of Holbury in the Sheffield General Cemetery and I'm going to zoom in so you can see what's actually on his tombstone.
00:25:28
Speaker
It says, sacred to the memory of Samuel Holbury, who, at the early age of 27, died in York Castle after suffering an imprisonment of two years and three months, June 21st, 1842, for advocating what to him appeared to be true interest of the people of England. And I think the second part there, which you probably can't read, is quite interesting as well. It says,
00:25:53
Speaker
Is the feverish dream of life, The rich and poor find no distinction here, The great and lowly end their care and strife. The well-beloved may have affection's tear, But at the last the oppressor and the slave Shall equal stand before the bar of God of him, Who life and hope and freedom gave To all that through this veil of tears of trod. Let non-them murmur against the wise decree, Opened the door and set the captive free.
Martyrs and Struggles for Change
00:26:21
Speaker
also of Samuel John, his son who died in his infancy. This tablet was erected by his bereft widow. So Holbury dies at the tragic age of 27 in York Castle where he's been imprisoned for the part he's played in a Chartist uprising in Sheffield and I'll tell you about why he dies there later on.
00:26:43
Speaker
Let me just say a little bit more about Holbury himself. He was originally a farm laborer from Nottinghamshire. He then listed in the army at the age of 17, relocated to Northampton, where he became deeply influenced by local radicals imbibing their democratic ideas and ideals. On buying his freedom from the army in April 1835, he moved to Sheffield, where he first worked as a Cooper, barrel maker, then as a distiller.
00:27:09
Speaker
After he lost his job in 1837, as many working people did at this time due to an economic downturn, he then lived for a brief period of time in London. But having failed to turn his look around there, he returns to Sheffield in October 1838. A little over a year later, Holbury was once again unemployed. But by this time, he had a young pregnant wife. Given Holbury's radical education in Northampton, coupled with the periods of unemployment he experienced,
00:27:37
Speaker
It's not surprising that he joined the Sheffield Working Men's Association once he returned to Sheffield. This was the organisation that spearheaded the emerging Chartist movement in the town. Like the Working Men's Associations elsewhere established in Britain in the 1830s, the Sheffield One had been set up in 1837 to campaign for the extension of democratic and social rights.
00:28:04
Speaker
It was not long until Holbury emerged as a leading Chartist speaker in the town. He played a leading part in fact in the church sit-in organised by Sheffield Chartists in 1839. Now we might ask ourselves why are Chartists organising demonstrations in churches and not just in Sheffield we might add.
00:28:22
Speaker
A bit of context here. The growing tension between Sheffield Chartists and the local authorities in the late 1830s was really about the various ways in which the elite tried to exclude the Chartists from public spaces, the point I mentioned at the very beginning of my lecture.
00:28:38
Speaker
It was becoming increasingly difficult for them to even hold large outdoor meetings in places like paradise square there was no access to public buildings to hold meetings which were available to middle class reform so this explains why charges began to held silent protest meetings in paradise square.
00:28:56
Speaker
and also why they took the decision to process to the parish church and stage a protest inside them by occupying the pews, the seats, the benches of the local well-to-do. This represented a symbolic challenge to the power of the established order, propped up as it was of course by the Anglican Church, the Church of England. Chartists would meet up
00:29:18
Speaker
And March en masse to the church, this happened over a series of Sundays, the summer and autumn of 1839. They'd enter the church, they'd sit in the private pews, i.e. the seats that had been paid for by, supposedly paid for, by the local middle classes who got their name on the back of them, much like sort of opera and Hollywood stars do on, you know, pavements and backs of seats in theatres, those sorts of things.
00:29:42
Speaker
So these were rented by the wealthy and symbolized, of course, the hierarchy of the state church, which was supposed to be the church for all and not just the wealthy. The occupation of the pews, therefore, by the chartists prevented many of the middle class from gaining admission to the church and was a manifestation of the growing conflict between rich and poor at this time. And not surprisingly, it led to a number of commotions as instances of pew renters tried to evict chartists leading to fisticuffs.
00:30:11
Speaker
To further underline their point, Chartists often attended wearing their work clothes, thus going against the established practice of wearing Sunday best. The point being that a lot of working people had sold their Sunday bests, even if they were rich enough to have a pair of good clothes for Sunday, they pawned them to be able to make ends meet.
00:30:30
Speaker
Finally, and perhaps most significantly of all, Chartists requested sermons that emphasized the liberality and fraternal basis of Christianity. In the hands of many Chartists, Chartism was merely applied Christianity. The Bible is my Chartist manual, claimed the lead Chartist T.B. Smith. So Holbury was very much at the forefront of organizing these sittings.
00:30:53
Speaker
Now, had that been the extent of Holbury's contribution to Chartres, he would have remained a relatively minor figure, a local and regional figure to be sure, but that was about it. But it was in the events of the night of 11th, 12th January 1839, which would transform Holbury into a Chartist hero and a national name. And I'll come to the weapon that you can see on the screen here in a minute. For that was the night that Holbury and other local Chartists were alleged to have
00:31:21
Speaker
planned an uprising in Sheffield, which was to be part of a series of link risings across the region. Holbury, the reputed ringleader, was supposed to have made a careful military plan. At his trial for seditious conspiracy, the court heard how he and his supporters amassed a sizable arsenal, which included daggers, pikes, and the item you can see here, a caltrope. It's a metal sort of spike which you throw on the floor with a view to disabling cavalry.
00:31:49
Speaker
of course is one of the ways that the armed forces break up popular disturbances. But there was also shells, bullets and hand grenades all found in Holbury's home and other places. So the rising was to begin with a diversion on the outskirts of the town by firing at the homes of the magistrates, the purpose being to draw the forces of law and order away from the town centre.
00:32:11
Speaker
Once the military was so drawn, the Chartists would then seize the old Town Hall and Paradise Square, which at that time was the administrative commercial centre of Sheffield. Unfortunately, it turned out that one of the co-conspirators, a Rotherham landlord by the name of James Allen, whose pub had been the meeting place of the conspirators where they'd hatched this plant,
00:32:31
Speaker
It turns out he was a spy and was being used by the plea to provoke the chartists into rising as a way then, of course, of being prepared for it, being able to round up the ringleaders and make an example of them. That sort of Ashant Provocateur role is a common one among spies and informers at this time.
00:32:48
Speaker
So this enabled the police and soldiers to foil the plan, just as it was about to unfold. And Halbury was arrested at his home where the police found a dagger and grenades. What followed was really a skirmish rather than an uprising. When Halbury failed to appear and give the order to begin, those who had amassed estimates suggest there were about 50 insurgents, the rest had gone, suspecting that their plans had been foiled. And after some brief fighting with the police, they disappeared, some of whom were pursued and arrested.
00:33:17
Speaker
Now most historians have accepted that arising was planned by some Sheffield Chartists, though the most recent account by Catherine Lewis suggests that Holbury had not in fact planned an uprising and that the police magistrates and prosecution at Holbury's trial abused the grossly one-sided legal system to secure the conviction of an innocent Holbury.
00:33:37
Speaker
Now, whether one agrees with her conclusions, the article is very interesting for its detailed account of the way in which the criminal justice system was loaded against the Chartists and ordinary people at this time. In March 1840, Holbury and his associates were tried at York for seditious conspiracy and found guilty. Holbury was sentenced to four years imprisonment.
00:33:57
Speaker
at North Allerton, a choice that was dictated by considerations of geography, get him away from Sheffield, away from the epicenter of Chartism, and also harshness of conditions. Holbury was so badly treated in prison, he was made to work the treadmill, which you can see here, and to endure the silent system, so much so that his health deteriorated with the result that he died just over two years later, and he was only 27 years old.
00:34:24
Speaker
The authorities concluded that Holbury had died of TB. The Chartist took a different view to add to the tragedy Holbury's son, who his wife had been pregnant with when he was arrested, had died the even tender age of 18 weeks old, hence the appendage to the tombstone that we saw.
00:34:40
Speaker
But something like 20 to 50,000 people lined the streets of Sheffield for Holbury's funeral, and soon he was being hailed as a martyr to the people's charter.
Decline of Chartism and Legacy
00:34:51
Speaker
And of course the Cascades, which some of you may have seen, these gardens in Sheffield were dedicated to his memory, a somewhat belated tribute to the sacrifices that he and others made for the liberties that we so often take for granted.
00:35:04
Speaker
So I think that is certainly not the end of Chartism in Sheffield, by no means. Thereafter, however, for reasons that are probably not difficult to fathom, the majority of them agreed to pursue their objectives more peacefully rather than organising uprisings. And there's no doubt that Holbury's, the physical force kind of side of it, is undoubtedly one of the more dramatic episodes in the history of Chartism.
00:35:27
Speaker
But nonetheless, I think it's testament to the sacrifice that those like Holbury made to try and bring about a better society and secure rights that too many of us, I think, take for granted these days. So to conclude, I think if we have to fully make sense of movements like Chartism and radicalism,
00:35:44
Speaker
we need to focus on the sites, spaces, sounds, and feelings associated with the everyday lives of radical activists and their working class supporters. Radicalism was nurtured in the Cutler's workshop, not just in the sense of the grown proletarianization of the workforce, but also in the sense that the workshop was a space in which radical-minded cutlers could discuss and debate the ills of the working class in a way that was just not open to factory workers elsewhere.
00:36:14
Speaker
The Cutlers and other artisans felt increasingly alienated, not just in the workshop, but also in public life, as the authorities tried to limit their access to the public sphere, forcing groups like the Chartists to meet outside and beyond the inner town. Protests like Holbury, Holbury's were as much about pushing back on these restrictions as they were about the people's charter and overthrowing constituted authority. More prosaically, though no less significant,
00:36:42
Speaker
Men and women like Holbury were angry and disillusioned, always with the authorities and elites, but also sometimes with their fellow workers who did not always respond positively to movements like Chartism, whether through fear of reprisals or even opposition to the goals, strategies and tactics of the movement.
00:37:00
Speaker
The fate of Holbury and the demise of Chartism in the short term reminds us that being a political activist can be a depressing experience as well as a dangerous one which necessitates great sacrifice and sometimes the ultimate sacrifice.
Conclusion and Contact Information
00:37:15
Speaker
Thank you very much.
00:37:21
Speaker
Thank you for listening to Archeology Now. For more information about our podcast and guest speaker, please visit our page on the Archeology Podcast Network. You can get in touch with us at Archeology in the City on Facebook, WordPress, Instagram, or Twitter. If you have any questions or comments, we'd love to hear from you. See you next time!
00:37:47
Speaker
This episode was produced by Chris Webster from his RV traveling the United States, Tristan Boyle in Scotland, DigTech LLC, Cultural Media, and the Archaeology Podcast Network. This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archapodnet.com. Contact us at chris at archaeologypodcastnetwork.com.