Society
The violent English?
Quentin Crewe
101 was the wheelwright in the village when I Was a boy. Young Tom he was called then to distinguish him from his father, Now, of Course, he is getting on and it would be a pretty old, or a rather disrespectful person who called Ilirn anything but Mr Phillips. He has a wry, somewhat detached way of looking at life and is tickled by other people's agitations. "They are very worried about this violence", he said. "Of course, it is bad if you're blown up, I suppose". Nevertheless, he was quite shocked by it all. To provoke, I asked whether all had been Peaceful when he was young, in the 'twenties. Torn always warms to a reminiscence. "You ',,know those two bridges on the road to Newcastle. When I was a lad no farmer, coming ,fr°111 market, liked to go past there alone. ineY'd jump out on them, and take all their money. No one walked there alone if he could help". "But you'd walk there now, wouldn't you, Tor*" "Oh aye, I would, but we're a violent people". And so we are and always have been. Indeed, it is arguable that, despite all, we are living in the safest, most peaceable times this country has ever known. z AnYone who has a picture of bucolic peace al early times might care to ponder that, in the 8, venth century, under King Ethelbert's Ic.entish laws, it was found necessary to lay cd°WrI specific sums of compensation to be paid
any
!or damage one man might do to another, Including six shillings for piercing his penis. . The Middle Ages were a time of almost Intolerable lawlessness and insecurity. In 1348 !here were eighty-eight known cases of murder in Yorkshire alone, which at that time had a 1310P-dation approximately the same as Sheffield ,sas now. A corresponding rate per head of the PoPulation today, spread over the whole ecluntrY, would mean some 10,000 murders annually, as opposed to fewer than 200 which We actually have. Ill his excellent book, The Roots of Evil, ristopher Hibbert describes how, through " fourteenth u! the foueenth and fifteenth centuries, .arroed bands often led by knights would seize _whole towns. Before the Black Death, Bristol occupied and ruled for years by a brigand woO took possession of the port. e'llYone might join in this sort of lark and, eqs,UallY, anyone might suffer. The Abbots of „,.."erborne and Middleton were members of a rg who pinched all the Countess of Kingtimber. The Prior of Bristol joined in a d On a manor in Wiltshire during which all "ie inhabitants were murdered, the lady of the ,n,rianor raped and her chaplain frightened to th. One band even broke into Edward l's treasury and stole £100,000. The arm of the law was weak and its ;111f:1-cement often impossible. People were a_napPed and threatened with being falsely unless they paid ransoms. In 1451 at yivnalsingham four hundred armed bandits rode I 0 town and forced the justices to acquit all their friends. Turb.., jogs did not improve much even under the u°rs. One Venetian envoy reported, "There is no country in the world where there are so many thieves and robbers as in England, so that few venture to go alone in the country excepting in the middle of the day and fewer still in the towns at night and least of all in London". Stow maintains that 72,000 criminals were hanged during Henry VIII's reign, that is to say five or six a day. This is probably an exaggeration, but it gives some idea of the prevalence of violence. Already in Elizabethan times the country roads were full of highwaymen. If travellers stuck to the four great Roman roads, they might be all right, otherwise there was a good chance of being robbed or even killed. In London there were no-go areas, relics in some cases of the pre-Reformation areas of sanctuary. In these there was virtual immunity from arrest, based partly on the reluctance of any officials to venture into such strongholds of criminality. The eighteenth century far from bringing relief from violence brought, as it did in other fields, refinement and sophistication, in this case horror and brutality. Crime, under Jonathan Wild, became organised for the first time. Captain Alexander Smith, who published his History of the Lives of the most noted Highwaymen, Footpads, Housebreakers, Shoplifts and Cheats of both sexes in 1714, described the training of small children in these arts. He also wrote of the forerunners of false readers of gas meters. Women would knock at the door of a grand house with a message. While waiting for an answer they would pocket every small object on the ground floor. In coastal regions there were wreckers who lured ships onto the rocks. Any ship without survivors was legally a wreck and, therefore, free for anyone to plunder. The kindly natives of fishing villages from Kent to Cornwall saw to it that survivors were a rarity. That delightful beauty spot the Cheddar Gorge was avoided by everybody because its
inhabitants, who lived pretty much in a wild state in caves, were inclined to murder any visitors who came near the place.
London was, of course, worse than anywhere. Horace Walpole was shot in the face by a highwayman in Hyde Park, the Duchess of Montrose was robbed in broad daylight in Piccadilly, pickpockets battered people with clubs in Fleet Street, a Portuguese visitor was nailed to a wall by his ear and later knifed and drowned in a puddle. The French Mail was robbed by highwaymen in Pall Mall. Sadler's Wells offered armed protection to any theatregoers in the hope of attracting custom. Ladies on their way to Court carried blunderbusses in their laps. The most unpleasant aspect of eighteenth century violence was that it came to be surrounded with a spurious glamour. Even during the sixteenth century a large proportion of those convicted of highway robbery at the Middlesex Sessions described themselves as gentlemen like Gamaliel Ratsey, who was given to Robin Hood gestures, and Ned Bonnet, who waylaid a Cambridge undergraduate out with a prostitute. Having robbed them, he made the youth and the girl strip and dragged them • into town, naked, as an object lesson. By the eighteenth century crime had become fashionable. Mobs of upper-class young men calling themselves Mohocks roamed the streets indulging in senseless violence, turning women upside down in tar barrels and pricking their legs ■.vith swords. They blinded people, slashed them, beat them up. The Bold Bucks, another society, raped children.The Scowerers broke up inns, the Nickers broke windows.
Lady Macclesfield's son was tried for murder
after skewering a fellow card-player, but was pardoned. A gentleman called Plunket slit his wigmaker's throat when he wouldn't reduce his prices. In some ways it was fairly surprising that society held together at all. Nevertheless, a ry centu of more settled government did lead on to the desire for greater public order. In 1829 Sir Robert Peel established his police system and, by 1856, every county and borough had to employ a police force. The enclosures, which meant the ploughing up of heaths and thickets suitable for ambush, and the macadamised roads both helped to eliminate the highwayman. England became a safer place, but the Victorian age could hardly be described as peaceful. Much of the violence was, of course, legalised. There was not one day of the Queen's reign when we were not conducting a war or campaign, against fuzzy-wuzzies, Afghans,
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