In November 1800 an early winter snowstorm hit Exmoor, followed two days later by a violent rainstorm, which caused unprecedented flooding in St Thomas, a low-lying suburb of Exeter:
The inundation became violent on Sunday about noon, at which time the water began to flow over the streets of St. Thomas, and continued to increase with great rapidity until about five o’clock in the afternoon, when it had arisen in every street of that parish, and in the Exe Island, to the height of about six feet. At this period the appearance was dreadful, all the inhabitants were obliged to betake themselves to their upper rooms, whilst some, whose houses were built with mud (cobb) walls, were under the most serious alarm that they should be buried in the ruins. The current of the river [Exe] was then astonishingly strong, hurrying…large pieces of wood, hayricks, and other matters which had been swept by its force from the neighbouring grounds, insomuch that serious apprehensions were entertained for the safety even of the New Exe Bridge.72
That same day two post-chaises set off from Okehampton to make their return journey to London, and on coming down the hill into St Thomas they suddenly encountered the floodwater:
here the water was so high, that it flowed over the backs of the horses, and reached nearly to the windows of the [first] carriage. One horse having dropped dead, it was necessary immediately to cut the traces, so as to extricate the others from the carriage, and prevent, if possible, the whole from being carried off by the violence of the current. As the waves continued rising it was judged impossible to preserve the lives of the persons in the carriage, unless a boat could be procured from the quay.73
In a dangerous operation, a boat was brought up close, ‘just in time, for the persons were still sitting in the carriage, immersed above their middles, and so rapid did the water rise, that they had scarcely been extricated…and the carriage lashed to prevent its being washed away, when the stream flowed over the roof’.74 The travellers were the architect Henry Holland, his family and servants, who were all saved, along with the remaining horses.
Attempts at scientific weather forecasting were not published in newspapers until later in the nineteenth century, although most newspapers and magazines gave some weather details for preceding weeks or months. Many country gentlemen used barometers and thermometers to compile records, but forecasting relied heavily on observation and experience. Woodforde keenly observed the weather and had great faith in folklore. On 30 January 1794, after an intensely cold period, he wrote:
A frost again but not so sharp as yesterday. It did not freeze within doors last night…It froze…in the afternoon, and the barometer still rising, but in the evening it thawed and some rain fell. I was saying before dinner that there would be alteration of weather soon as I a long time observed one of our cats wash over both her ears – an old observation and now I must believe it to be a pretty true one.75
Faced with poor weather and poor roads, it was cheaper and easier in coastal areas for freight and even passengers to be conveyed by sea. Small ships did not need proper ports, but could be loaded and unloaded by boat while anchored offshore. Alternatively, ships were beached, as on the north Norfolk coast at Cromer where in 1798 Samuel Pratt witnessed coal being offloaded from ships into carts: ‘There is now no harbour at Cromer, yet corn is exported, and coals, deals, &c. received in return…at high water they [the ships] are laid upon the beach, and, as soon as the water is sufficiently ebbed, carts are drawn to the side of the ship, and the coals shot into them, as they are into lighters in other places.’76 The carts, he said, only carried a small load because of the steep road up the cliff: ‘In this manner the carts continue working, till the water flows so high as to wash the sides of the horses, and just to float the carts…When the vessel is empty it floats on a high tide, and continues at a little distance from the shore, and is then loaded with corn by boats.’77
With canals making substantial improvements in the carriage of goods by water to inland areas, the condition of roads consequently benefited, because heavy waggons were no longer using them. William Hutton who lived in Birmingham said that before the canal was constructed from there to the Wednesbury coalfields, ‘It was common to see a train of carriages for miles, to the great destruction of the road, and the annoyance of travellers.’78 Canals were also used for passenger transport, and as early as 1774 a letter to the Annual Register reported:
The Duke of Bridgewater has just built two packet-boats, which are every day towed [by horses] from Manchester to Warrington; one carries six score passengers, the other eighty: each boat has a coffee-room at the head, from whence wines, &c. are sold out by the captain’s wife. Next to this is the first cabin, which is 2s. 6d., the second cabin is 1s. 6d. and the third cabin 1s. for the passage or voyage upon the canal.79
A few years later Nelly Weeton travelled from Wigan to Liverpool in a similar packet-boat, on a branch of the same canal network, and because of the canal’s winding route and the stops to pick up passengers, the journey took most of the day:
I arrived again at my lodgings after a very pleasant sail down the canal, perfectly safe and sound both in body and mind, with a little less fat perhaps in the evening than I had set out with in the morning; for, whether inside or outside, I was almost half baked. The cook generally begins her operations by ten o’clock in the morning, frying bacon, eggs, beef steaks, potatoes, and mutton chops; roasting meat, warming meat pies, &c., and seldom finishes before 3 or 4 o’clock in the afternoon; for most people who go in the tail end of the packet seem to think that eating and drinking is the most delightful amusement of travelling.80
It was also convenient to transport troops by canal boats, as The Times showed in 1806:
The first division of the troops that are to proceed by the Paddington canal [London end of the Grand Junction Canal] for Liverpool, and thence by transports for Dublin, will leave Paddington today, and will be followed by others tomorrow and Sunday. By this mode of conveyance the men will be only seven days in reaching Liverpool, and with comparatively little fatigue, as it would take them above fourteen days to march that distance. Relays of fresh horses for the canal boats have been ordered to be in readiness at all stages.81
Canal boats did not yet have engines, but were pulled by horses, and Hutton was appalled by the cruelty he witnessed on the Birmingham to Wednesbury canal: ‘The boats are nearly alike, constructed to fit the locks…and are each drawn by something like the skeleton of a horse, covered with skin; whether he subsists upon the scent of the water, is a doubt; but whether his life is a scene of affliction is not; for the unfeeling driver has no employment but to whip him from one end of the canal to the other.’82
Steam engines, already transforming manufacturing industries, would soon do the same for transport. The Cornish engineer Richard Trevithick began working on models and prototypes of a portable steam engine, and in London in 1808 he demonstrated a self-propelled engine running on a rail track. Other engineers were making similar experiments, and although steam engines began to be used for the haulage of coal on rail tracks from mines, it would not be until 1825 that the Stockton and Darlington railway provided the first steam train for passengers.
Steamboats were also making an appearance, and a passenger service between Yarmouth and Norwich was started in 1813, but it was balloons that caught people’s imagination. Balloon flights had already taken place on the Continent, and the first man to ascend in a balloon in England was an Italian, Vincenzo Lunardi. After some problems with the hydrogen balloon, Lunardi successfully took off from the grounds of the Honourable Artillery Company in City Road, London, on 15 September 1784. Once the mooring ropes were cast off, ‘For a moment, the globe hung suspended, as if inclined to fall, but Mr. Lunardi instantly kicking out a considerable portion of his…ballast, ascended triumphantly, standing erect in the gallery, and waving his flag as a return to the incessant acclamations that were paid him at his departure.’83
The crowd watching the balloon flight numbered over a hundred thousand and
included the Prince of Wales. They had never seen anything like it, as the newspapers reported: ‘The fine spectacle presented to the public, produced curious effects upon John Bull – while Lunardi ascended, some held up their hands in admiration, while others burst into tears, very expressive of sensibility and pleasure…Old persons…declared they had lived till now to see the greatest Wonder of their Age.’84 It was reported that ‘Mr Sheldon, who followed Mr. Lunardi from London, on a fine hunter, changed his horse three times, and kept so well up with him, as to be enabled to dine in his company at Ware [in Hertfordshire]’.85 For now the horse could still keep pace, but its days as the fastest form of travel were drawing to an end.
TEN
DARK DEEDS
Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery.
Mansfield Park, by Jane Austen
The novels and surviving letters of Jane Austen give an impression of a world barely touched by crime or warfare. Yet for much of her life Britain was at war and threatened by invasion, there was widespread fear of crime, and criminals were treated harshly. By the early Victorian era, the laws of England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were being referred to as the ‘Bloody Code’, because of the number of offences that carried the death penalty. Indeed, the phrase ‘You might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb’1 arose when stealing a sheep was added to that list. There was more meat on a sheep, but stealing either a lamb or a sheep could mean execution.
A major part of the Bloody Code was the Black Act, an Act of Parliament that came into law in 1723 in response to two gangs of poachers in Hampshire and Berkshire who were known as ‘blacks’ because they blackened their faces. This Act made many offences punishable by death, including activities not previously treated as crimes, such as entering a forest in disguise or with a blackened face. The modern equivalent might be a mandatory death sentence for wearing a mask or hooded jacket. This draconian law was deliberately designed to protect the interests of the elite, particularly those with large estates, and it remained the backbone of the Bloody Code for a century.
It was the lower ranks who felt the brunt of the Bloody Code. The rich and powerful could, and did, bribe their way out of almost anything. Most laws were designed to protect people’s possessions, and as the gap between rich and poor widened, more and more property-related offences were made punishable by hanging. In reality, though, the death penalty was only routinely carried out for murder, violent crimes or those involving valuable property. Before the 1770s nearly 150 crimes were capital offences, increasing to over 220 during Jane Austen’s lifetime. Many capital crimes were by modern standards no more than misdemeanours.2 John Byng expressed his dismay at the justice system: ‘Go on my poor deluded country…Transport felons by thousands: fill the globe with your convicts. Hang by hundreds: and when reason is almost lost, and laws multiplied beyond comprehension, may some surviving few of the nation who do not thrive by politics and stratagem, endeavour at a reform.’3
Depending on the nature of the crime, including the type of goods stolen and where the offence took place, such as inside a shop or in the street, criminals could be executed for stealing goods valued at more than a shilling. This was a period when the lowliest labourers earned less than £25 a year and often as little as £12, while the upper classes enjoyed incomes of £10,000 or more, sometimes as much as £50,000,4 and the annual Civil List payment – from taxes – to support the royal family exceeded £1,000,000.’5 With such great disparities of wealth and living conditions, when one person’s pocket watch cost as much as another’s yearly wage, the temptation to steal was strong. The number of crimes against property rose and fell in line with bad and good harvests, and famine could drive normally law-abiding but desperate people to steal rather than starve.
Such vicious penalties were intended as a deterrent, but proved woefully ineffective. A better deterrent would have been effective policing, but this was resisted because of fears of a repressive police state as witnessed in France before the Revolution and under Napoleon. Even county police forces would not be introduced for decades to come because of the dread of introducing networks of informers and secret police. While London had its Bow Street Runners, outside the capital reliance was placed on parish constables. There were rarely more than one or two constables in any parish, but these officers could swear in temporary constables to help when needed, as William Darter explained for his home town of Reading: ‘We had no police, but a head constable was chosen from the ratepayers on the election of Mayor, and he selected a number of others to serve under him, the names being submitted to the Chief Magistrate before being sworn.’6
Towns also paid night watchmen, literally to watch out for wrongdoers, but the provision of watchmen could be poor, and John Blackner outlined how Nottingham’s citizens made their system work:
about 35,000 inhabitants are scattered through upwards of 400 streets, lanes &c. and…nine or ten men, four of whom watch the marketplace, are employed to walk almost twenty streets. In 1815, in consequence of the numerous depredations committed in several streets, where no watch was kept, the housekeepers therein obtained permission to be sworn in the capacity of special constables, and by taking their turns as watchmen of the night, have preserved the neighbourhood in security.7
If a public disturbance could not be contained by the constables, magistrates could call for troops, but they might take some time to arrive. Magistrates, also known as Justices of the Peace, were the mainstay of the law. Appointed from among the large landowners of an area, they were unpaid and performed relatively mundane duties such as the regulation of markets, fairs and alehouses, as well as judging and punishing minor offenders, without a jury, in petty sessions (later known as ‘magistrates’ courts’). Those accused of more serious offences were tried at the Quarter Sessions, held in towns and cities four times a year, where the Justices of the Peace presided in courts with a jury. The main criminal courts were the Assizes (literally, ‘sittings’), and judges moved from town to town within their circuit to hear serious cases like murder and counterfeiting. The Assizes were usually held two or three times a year, so that prisoners could wait months for their trial. In London serious crimes were tried at the Old Bailey.
The Assizes were also an excuse for social gatherings, and in March 1811 Louis Simond saw the ceremonial first day at York: ‘On Sunday the judges, just arrived for the assizes, came to church en grand costume, with their huge powdered wigs, and black robes…The mayor and corporation swelled the train, and in the rear footmen and white liveries, and large nosegays at the button-hole; the whole town was in motion. The assizes in a country town are an event.’8 The following day provided an even better spectacle:
we met the judges going to open the sessions, with the same wigs and the same train as yesterday. The whole town was in motion,—the streets full of misses in white muslin,—citizens in dark-blue coats, carefully brushed, glossy hats, and shining boots,— and military people in red. It seemed a day of rejoicing; and, in fact, the whole of the sessions is a period of amusement; yet we learn that the prisons here are unusually full. There are eight cases of murder, and among them a young couple for beating their own child, an infant, to death.9
The Assizes covered their surrounding area and on this occasion at York cases were about to be heard from as far away as Halifax and Hunslet near Leeds.10
Crime rates were lower outside the main towns and cities, as Byng observed: ‘When I was at Knutsford [Cheshire], I remark’d the purity of the country, at seeing young women riding alone: why, within 50 miles of the devilish metropolis, they would have been all robb’d, and r—.’11 Crime was indeed an urban plague, and London as the capital city was also the capital of crime. To try to reduce its high levels of crime, the Bow Street Runners had been established by the novelist and magistrate Henry Fielding in 1749.12 In 1792 seven more ‘police stations’, besides the magistrates’ office in Bow Street, were set up, and the runners were even called on to tackle crimes outside
the capital.13 William Darter spotted them at the horse races at Ascot in Berkshire in 1814: ‘I arrived at Ascot some time before the races were to commence…where I saw [John] Townsend, at the time a well-known Bow Street officer, giving instructions to his men, who were usually called Bow Street Runners.’14
Large gatherings, as at racecourses, were the haunt of pickpockets, the cream of criminals according to Carl Moritz: ‘The highest order of thieves are the pick-pockets or cutpurses, whom you find every where; and sometimes even in the best companies. They are generally well and handsomely dressed, so that you take them to be persons of condition.’15 Benjamin Silliman gave useful tips on how to elude pickpockets:
If you are going, by night, into crowds, or any where on foot, leave your money at home, except what you want for immediate use; either leave your watch, or drop the chain into the fob [small pocket]; if you have valuable papers or a pocket book, carry it in a pocket in the breast of your coat; button your coat; if in a crowd and danger be apprehended, fold your arms, and let one hand rest on the pocket book. The pocket handkerchief may be in danger, but the loss of this is not serious, and even this may be prevented by wearing it in a pocket opening within the skirt of the coat…By observing these precautions, I have never lost any thing in London.16
In the streets, pickpocketing was often committed by young boys in gangs, and if one was caught, he might be beaten and released, rather than handed to the law, as happened on one occasion in London during the summer of 1784:
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