Third Year Module
Module Leader: Dr Harvey Osborne
Rationale and Content:
This module will examine the characteristics and periodicity of 'social' crime and protest in rural Suffolk during the period 1815-1870, while drawing on a wider regional and national context. During the early to mid-nineteenth century rural Suffolk developed a particular reputation for social unrest based primarily on endemic levels of incendiarism directed against employers, poor law and magisterial officials. The county also experienced outbreaks of machine breaking, wage and tithe riots in the 1820s and 1830s as well as determined and significant resistance to the New Poor Law and workhouse system in the 1830s and 1840s, and was characterised by such persistent contravention of the Game Laws that offenders accounted for almost a quarter of the county's gaol population in the 1840s. This module will examine the underlying causes of these problems, the characteristics of offenders and the responses of the authorities. It will investigate interconnections between 'overt' and 'covert' lawlessness and the emergence of what historians have regarded as more rational and organised methods of protest in the 1860s and 1870s.
A conceptual and socio-cultural context for these activities will be provided at the outset before students move on to examine specific phenomenon, episodes and debates centred on incendiarism, poaching, anti-poor law activity, animal maiming, rural Chartism, socially-motivated vandalism, smuggling, machine breaking, tithe and wage riots and agricultural trade union activity. Students will explore the chronology, characteristics and causes of these activities as well as connections between them. A number of research questions will be addressed during the module. Why did rural incendiarism become so particularly prevalent in Suffolk? What were the characteristics of the 'Captain Swing' movement in the county and why was it relatively limited in impact given the wider context of protest? Was Swing a social, economic or cultural movement? Has the significance of rural Chartism been underestimated? What stimulated poaching crime? What was the role of women in rural crime and protest? What was the linkage, if any, between incendiarism and later 'progressive' and 'rational' forms of collective protest and organisation? Students will be invited to re-examine existing conceptual understandings of social crime by drawing upon new perspectives from the spheres of cultural and gender history to throw light on the dynamics and periodicity of social crime and protest.
Learning and Teaching Strategies:
This module will be delivered through a combined weekly lecture and seminar plus tutorial support. Where appropriate supporting resources will also be made available online. Seminar sessions will be designed to encourage student participation and will support students in strengthening their skills of presentation, discussion,argument and debate,and in evaluating, interpreting and using secondary and primary sources.
Assessment:
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Module
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Mode
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Weighting %
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Length
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Submission date
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Unquiet Countryside
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Assessed seminar discussion
Book review
Essay
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10
45
45
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2,500 words
2,500 words
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N/A
Week 7
Week 12
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Recommended introductory reading:
J.E.Archer, Social unrest and popular protest in England, 1780-1840, (Cambridge, 2000).
J.E.Archer, "By a flash and a scare": incendiarism, animal maiming and poaching in East Anglia, 1815-1870, (Oxford, 1990).
G.E. Mingay (ed.), The Victorian Countryside, Vol. II, (London, 1981).
A.Randall & A.Charlesworth, (ed.), Moral economy and popular protest: crowds, conflict and authority, (Basingstoke, 2000).
Further reading:
M.Freeman, (ed.), The English rural poor, 1850-1914, (London, 2005).
E.Hobsbawm & G.Rude, Captain Swing, (New Edition, London, 2001).
A.Howkins, Reshaping Rural England: A Social History 1850-1925, (London, 1981).
A.Howkins, Poor Labouring Men: Rural Radicalism in Norfolk 1870-1923, (London, 1985).
D.W.Howell & K.O.Morgan, (ed.), Crime, protest and police in modern British society: essays in memory of David J.V. Jones, (Cardiff, 1999).
D.J.V.Jones, Rebecca's children: a study of rural society, crime, and protest, (Oxford, 1989).
D.J.V.Jones, Crime, protest, community and police in nineteenth-century Britain, (London, 1982).
M.Matthews, Captain Swing in Sussex and Kent: Rural Rebellion in 1830, (Hastings, 2006).
G.E.Mingay, Rural Life in Victorian England, (London, 1998).
J.Rule & R.Wells, Crime Protest & Popular Politics in Southern England, 1740-1850, (London, 1997).
M.Reed and R.Wells, (ed.). Class, conflict and protest in the English countryside, 1700-1880, (London, 1990).
K.D.M.Snell, Annals of the labouring poor: social change and agrarian England, 1660-1900 (Cambridge, 1985).