From the tragic tale of Mary Clifford, whose death at the hands of her employer scandalised Georgian London, to an account of the violent activities of Victorian Manchester’s scuttling gangs, via a character portrait of the duel-obsessed Cavalier Sir John Reresby, A Fiery & Furious People explores the brutal underside of our national life in all its variety. And as it considers the litany of assaults, murders and riots that pepper our history it also traces the subtle shifts that have taken place both in the nature of violence and in people’s attitudes to it. Why was it, for example, that wife-beating could once be simultaneously legal and so frowned upon that persistent offenders might well end up being ducked in the village pond? When did the serial killer first make an appearance in the annals of English crime? How could football be regarded at one moment as a raucous pastime that should be banned and the next as a respectable sport that should be encouraged? What gave rise to particular types of violent criminal – medieval outlaws, Georgian highwaymen, Victorian garrotters – and what made them dwindle and then vanish?
Throughout, Professor James Sharpe draws on an astonishingly wide range of material – court records and murder pamphlets, popular ballads and novels, sermons and films – to paint vivid pictures of the nation’s criminals and criminal system from medieval times to the present day. He gives a strong sense of what it was like to be caught up in, say, a street brawl in medieval Oxford or a battle during the English Civil War. And he also seeks to answer perhaps the most fascinating and fundamental question of all: is a country that has experienced not only constant aggression on an individual scale but also the Peasant’s Revolt, the Gordon Riots, the Poll Tax protests and the the urban unrest of summer 2011 naturally prone to violence or are we, in fact, gradually becoming a gentler nation?
James Sharpe was Professor of History at the University of York from 1997 until his retirement in 2016, and is now Professor Emeritus. He is a leading social historian, with a particular interest in the history of crime. He has published widely on the subject and is a committee member of the International Association for the History of Crime and Criminal Justice. His books include Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750 (1996) and Dick Turpin: the Myth of the English Highwayman (2004).
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First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Random House Books
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ISBN 9781847945136
Most of my research and publication since I began work on my Oxford DPhil thesis in 1968 has been on the history of crime in early modern England, and as that research developed I became increasingly interested in violence as a historical phenomenon. At the same time, teaching the social history of the early modern period led me to take an interest in peasant revolt and other forms of popular disturbance, while the burgeoning of gender history from the early 1980s onwards encouraged me to deepen my understanding of domestic violence and rape as historical phenomena. I had also, via working on pamphlets dealing with murder (and latterly witchcraft) trials, begun to ponder on some of the broader, longer-term implications of media representations of violence. These various interests were brought together when I was successful in obtaining funding, under the aegis of the Economic and Social Research Council’s Violence Research Programme, for a research project on violence in Lancashire and Cheshire between 1600 and 1800. While I was working on the project between 1998 and 2000, I found myself in productive scholarly debate with historians working on more recent periods, and with sociologists and criminologists. These experiences helped me decide to try to put together a book on the long-term history of violence in England between the late middle ages and the present day. I am also acutely aware that violence remains a major preoccupation of modern society, in the United Kingdom as elsewhere, and I was intrigued by what resonances the study of violent behaviour in the past, and representations of it, might have for our current situation.
I have engaged with a number of historians and their publications while formulating my ideas on the history of violence, notably Robert Muchembled, Randolph Roth, Pieter Spierenburg and John Carter Wood, while I have also received unfailing support from my wife, Krista Cowman, my literary agent, Jane Turnbull, and Nigel Wilcockson at Random House. I have further benefitted from discussing this book as it progressed with my York colleagues Mark Roodhouse and Craig Taylor, and from giving papers as my research on violence developed to conferences at Bern, Brussels, Jyväskylä, Leicester, Leiden, Liverpool, Lyon, Montpellier, Oxford and Rotterdam. Most of the research for this book has been carried out in the J. B. Morrell and Raymond Burton Libraries of the University of York, or on electronic resources made available by them. I have also made use of the holdings of the Borthwick Institute for Archives, York; Cheshire Archives and Local Studies; and The National Archives (TNA) Kew, London. I acknowledge Crown copyright in TNA documents and modern government publications cited.
The title of the book is derived from one of the possible translations of the chronicler Jean Froissart’s description ‘gens foursenés et esragiés’ which he applied to the rebels in London in June 1381, during that mass-uprising we know as the Peasants’ Revolt. In a sense, this book describes how, over the long term, the English people became less fiery and furious. One has to hope that they will not become so again.
James Sharpe
University of York
July 2016
Everyone agreed on the way that Roger Crockett received the injuries that caused his death on that December morning, but very few of the 116 witnesses who subsequently gave evidence were willing to identify the person (or persons) who had actually inflicted them. Not even Margaret Parker, into whose lap Crockett almost fell when he was struck on the head from behind with a staff, was prepared to give an opinion. As so often in the aftermath of a brutal attack, some people may have had more than an inkling who was responsible, but were either too afraid to name the perpetrator or else had a vested interest in keeping his identity a secret.
At the time of his death in 1572, Crockett was the owner of the Crown Inn at Nantwich in Cheshire, a bustling market town of about 1,800 inhabitants that prospered on the profits from salt production as well as passing trade attracted from travellers on the London–Chester road. Crockett was a shrewd, up-and-coming businessman, who was gradually acquiring land in the area and had become interested in securing the lease to a potentially very profitable piece of pasture – known as Ridley Field – from its owner, a Leicestershire gentleman named Edward Leigh. But while this may have been a shrewd financial decision, it was also a move guaranteed to bring him into direct conflict with the Halsalls. They were a prominent local family already on bad terms with Crockett: on one occasion he and Richard Halsall had been overheard hurling that most colourful of sixteenth-century insults, ‘tird [turd] in thy teeth’, at each other. Now the Halsalls were furious that Crockett should seek the lease to a field that Richard Halsall currently held and that had previously been in the possession of Halsall’s father.
Widespread local gossip suggested that if there were to be trouble, it would occur on Wednesday 19 December, the day Crockett was due to take possession of his new land. At the subsequent inquest Ralph Ince told how he ‘heard a little girl of his own coming in from play out of the street from other children say that there would be mischief and if Crockett came to Ridley Lane he would be beaten’. Ince’s wife Ellen confirmed the story, saying that the twelve-year-old girl ‘as she played with Halsall’s children and others heard them say, that if Crockett purchased Ridley Field, he should be killed for it’.
Sure enough, on 19 December tension spilled over into violence. First Thomas Wilson, one of a group of men the Halsalls had gathered together, assaulted Thomas Wettenhall, who, along with his brother Roger, was an associate of Crockett. Then, a little later, Roger Wettenhall and Richard Halsall encountered each other, and a fight ensued. Young Alice Inpley described its early stages:
Being sent on an errand by her father into the town, & coming back again being about 8 of the clock in the morning she saw Richard Halsall come out of the gate of his own house, and going down as far as Woodstreet Lane end saw Roger Wettenhall meet the said Halsall, and cross over the channel [presumably a drainage channel] and strike at him, and so they struck there 20 blows before anybody came to him.
The two men fought with staves, Wettenhall receiving a head injury and collapsing into a hedge. Halsall, his brother William and Thomas Wilson, who had joined him, were contemplating inflicting further injuries on him, but were dissuaded by Halsall’s father, who told them Wettenhall had suffered enough, and that they should stop.
By now a large crowd had gathered, witness after witness later testifying how they had heard a commotion in the street, and left their houses or workshops to find out what was going on. And it was at this moment that Crockett appeared, carrying a staff, but signalling his unwillingness to fight by not having it raised ready for use (there was evidently a code of conduct in such matters). He made his way through the crowd, trying to get to his friend Roger Wettenhall. Halsall’s men, however, attacked him and knocked him to the ground with a blow to the head. (Crockett’s widow and his associates were later to claim that more than a single blow to the head had been involved, and that Crockett had been savagely assaulted.)
At this point Richard Wilbraham, probably the most important man in Nantwich and certainly a member of one of Cheshire’s most prominent families, intervened. He had been in bed when the fighting started, and his haste to get to the scene was reflected in his appearance: he arrived half dressed, holding up his hose with one hand and clutching a staff in the other; his points (the laces which held the various parts of Elizabethan clothing together) were undone and he was shoeless. He was no friend of the Wettenhalls or of Crockett: indeed Crockett’s wife Bridget was later to allege that he had been involved in a conspiracy in the town against her dead husband whose business success, as already suggested, had ruffled the feathers of some of Nantwich’s leading residents. On the other hand, Wilbraham clearly felt that his social status required him to act as peacemaker. Accordingly, with the encouragement of several members of the crowd, he quietened things down. Halsall and his men went back to Halsall’s house, presumably to celebrate. Crockett was helped up, taken to the nearby house of Roger Gorse, cleaned up and then led home, where he was put to bed. His injuries, according to some of the witnesses who saw him at that stage, were horrific. He had a bad head wound, one of his eyes had been almost knocked out, and he had also suffered injuries to his legs, arms and torso. From time to time he coughed up blood and brains. He died between eight and nine o’clock that night.
The two warring parties swiftly circulated their own – very different – versions of what had happened. Although the evidence from witness statements and the subsequent coroner’s inquest suggested that Crockett had received multiple wounds, the Halsall faction argued that he had been hit only once, and that this had merely left a ‘dalke’ or depression on his head. Their hope, presumably, was that if this account became the accepted one and the case ever came to trial, a verdict of manslaughter rather than murder would be brought in. To counter this, the Wettenhalls and Crockett’s widow Bridget took the extraordinary course of displaying the dead man’s body, naked except for a cloth over his private parts, on the streets of Nantwich, and on the Saturday after the killing took it to Nantwich Market. They also enlisted the services of a painter named John Sinter, who, as he explained later, was sent for by Thomas Wettenhall and asked to
Draw out on paper the picture of the body & the signs & marks thereupon and upon his oath deposeth that as near as he could in every respect he did the same according as appeareth in the same paper now being shewed before him, saving only at that time there was no blood about his nose or ears, until it was the day he was carried to church.
Sinter claimed that a number of men in the town, including Richard Wilbraham, expressed their displeasure with the painter for making this record.
On the afternoon of the day Crockett’s corpse was carried to the market, a coroner’s inquest was held in a packed Nantwich church (so packed, in fact, that the two coroners had to clear many spectators out of the building). The body was inspected by both coroners and by the sixteen-man inquest jury. One coroner, John Maisterson, expressed the view that the injuries sustained had been minimal. Since Maisterson happened to be Richard Wilbraham’s brother-in-law, Bridget Crockett not surprisingly alleged that he was far from being a disinterested official.
And then the key witness, Roger Wettenhall, made an intervention that introduces us to a curious contemporary belief. It was widely held in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England that the corpse of a murdered person would bleed if it were touched by the murderer (there are scattered examples of this practice being used as a means of establishing proof in murder cases during the period). Wettenhall demanded, in the Queen’s name, that this test should be applied to those he held to be Crockett’s murderers (these men are not named in the records that survive), quoting Aristotle in support of his argument (and thereby providing an interesting example of how classical education had spread to the English provincial gentry by the late sixteenth century). The coroners were not impressed. According to John Gryffin, a gentleman who was present at the inquest, one of them
. . . said to Wettenhall if you can show me a book case [i.e. legal precedent], that they ought to be sent for I will send for them or else, not, and then Wettenhall answered that he thought Mr Coroner was both wise & learned according to his office, and he in humble manner required it for the prince [i.e. the Queen].
Having failed in his bid to have the corpse touched, Wettenhall was asked to state the names of those he considered to be Crockett’s killers. He equivocated. The coroners initially refused to release the corpse for burial, possibly because they did not wish it to be examined further, but after some argument agreed to do so. Crockett’s body was taken away, and presumably buried in Nantwich churchyard.
The events of 19 December 1572 offer a tantalising glimpse of a society where violence, if not exactly taken for granted, was very much part of the normal order of things. It was a world in which a dispute over a relatively trivial property matter could end in a man’s death. It was also a world in which those involved in such a brawl, far from being the lower-class element who, since Victorian times, have rightly or wrongly been regarded as most prone to violence, were actually ‘respectable’ citizens of the town.
It’s also very apparent from the witness statements just how many Nantwich citizens carried weapons around with them as a matter of course – or, at least, how many had easy recourse to them. The fight itself, according to one of the witnesses, William Jackson, involved ‘the great clash of staves’. Practically all of the men who came along to see what was going on bore a staff or some other weapon that they were fully prepared to use. A townsman named Richard Bally was one such. On that morning he was in Richard Wilkes’s house, and
. . . hearing a woman make an outcry that there was a fray in the street sent out the wife of the house to see who it was; and she came and said she could see nobody, and then Peers Crewe said it may be some friend of ours, let us not sit here for shame and so stepped up and took the examinant’s staff standing in the entry and this examinant took a bill [a type of halberd] out of Wilkes’s chamber and Wilkes took a skull [a metal helmet of a pretty basic design] and put it upon his head and a staff in his hand and so came all three together until Peers Crewe was stayed by his own wife and maid and carried into his own house.
Another witness, Thomas Palen, gave a detailed description of the weaponry carried by the company the Halsalls had gathered together to fight for Ridley Field. Most of them were armed with some type of staff, Thomas Wilson having one twelve feet long and with a metal pike head. One had a dagger and a staff, one had a pickerel (a short pike), another had a bill. Palen claimed that he saw ‘all the company in battle array’.
Yet there are also clear indications that many of those drawn into the melee, or witnesses to it, were opposed to violence. Peers Crewe’s wife dissuaded him from going to see what was happening – an interesting glimpse of the inner workings of an Elizabethan marriage. The three men he knew who did go along, did so to see if any of their friends needed help. Others who ventured out with their staves were clearly motivated by a desire to defuse the situation rather than become involved in it. One such was John Lovett who, on hearing ‘a clattering like the felling of wood’ and then women crying out ‘help, help’, went into the street carrying only a ‘cloth yard’ (a form of measuring rod) for protection. He later described how he saw a number of women and children watching two men fighting. Noticing that Thomas Wilson and William Halsall were armed and approaching the combatants, he tried to stop them, and seized hold of Halsall. He broke free but Lovett ran after him, caught, disarmed and then restrained him.
Women were also involved – as so often throughout history – as potential peacemakers. Ellen Turner intervened to save Roger Wettenhall, and claimed to have held back one of the men attacking him. Another woman, identified variously as ‘Joan of Love Lane’ or ‘Joan of the Lane’, also tried to protect Wettenhall, putting herself between him and his would-be assailants. Richard Halsall’s father intervened to save Roger Wettenhall from worse punishment at the hands of Richard, his brother William and Thomas Wilson. And, of course, Richard Wilbraham, as one of the town grandees, clearly felt that it was incumbent on him to bring the violence to an end. On the one hand, then, there were those who were prepared to attack and kill a man over a property dispute. On the other, there were many who instinctively felt this to be wrong.
We will never know who really was responsible for the death of Roger Crockett. Early rumours, encouraged by the pro-Crockett faction, suggested that it had been Richard Wilbraham, an unlikely claim given the evidence of his role as peacemaker, but one clearly put forward to cause trouble for a man perceived to be an enemy. Suspicion then fell on Edmund Crewe, a local shoemaker, who, according to the Halsall faction, admitted striking the fatal blow. However, they also seem to have been able to spirit him away – or, at least, he conveniently fled the area and was never put on trial.
Bridget Crockett and the Wettenhalls were clearly and understandably dissatisfied with the coroner’s inquest and later proceedings at Cheshire Court of Great Sessions. They therefore took matters further, invoking an antique procedure rarely used by the late sixteenth century: an appeal of felony. This was, in effect, a civil suit that could be brought if the appellant felt the normal course of justice had been perverted. It was a hazardous process to undertake – it was very easy to lose on a technicality and, if you lost, you could be sued for damages – so the fact that Bridget Crockett should have resorted to it shows just how passionately she felt about the justice of her cause – or, alternatively, how much she hated the Halsalls. At any rate, at the Court of Great Sessions at Chester in July 1573 Edmund Crewe was indicted in his absence, along with twenty-one other people. Six (among them Richard Wilbraham and Richard, Anne and William Halsall) were bound over until the next convening of the court in February 1574, at which point they were discharged. Bridget Crockett’s attempt to prove that there had been a conspiracy to murder her husband had come to nothing.
So we are left uncertain as to the identity of the man who struck the blow that killed Roger Crockett. But we do have a very clear impression of how a violent incident was played out nearly four and a half centuries ago, and a sense of the ways in which actions and attitudes differed from those of today, as well as of the many parallels.1 The Nantwich incident thus forms a useful piece in the complex jigsaw puzzle of half a millennium or so of violence in England.
Violence is currently a major source of concern in England as it is in most other countries of the world.2 We are constantly being told by our press and politicians that we live in a ‘violent society’; many people in inner-city areas live in fear of violence; we hear tales of widespread aggression within the home; and its alleged prevalence is seen as an important indicator of a wider social malaise. Yet at the same time we are fascinated by violence; we watch movies and television programmes and play video games that all depend very heavily on depictions of it. Besides that there is still the widespread belief that a willingness to fight is a badge of masculinity: some might argue that this is restricted to certain classes and age groups, but nevertheless fighting is something most men have experienced at some point in their lives. Violence is therefore an established social problem, even if there is no consensus on the point at which it shades into aggression or aggression into mere assertiveness.
It certainly seems to be part of the human condition.3 The Judeo-Christian tradition dates it back to the second generation of mankind. Genesis, 4:1–14 tells us the first murder story, involving two brothers, Cain and Abel, the sons of Adam and Eve. Abel was a pastoralist, ‘a keeper of sheep’, and Cain, the elder brother, an agriculturalist, ‘a tiller of the ground’. Both made appropriate offerings to the Almighty, in Cain’s case an offering ‘of the fruit of the ground’; in Abel’s ‘the firstlings of his flock and the fat thereof’. God accepted Abel’s offering, but rejected Cain’s (‘But unto Cain and his offering He had not respect’). Cain was angry. He ‘talked with Abel his brother, and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel, and slew him’. When the Lord returned, found Abel missing and enquired as to his whereabouts, Cain replied: ‘I know not. Am I my brother’s keeper?’ ‘What hast thou done?’ came the response. ‘The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground. And now art thou cursed from the earth, which hath opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand’. And so the first agriculturalist was turned into ‘a fugitive and vagabond’, cursed to wander the world (in fact Cain made off to ‘the land of Nod, on the east of Eden’). But Cain pointed out that his vagabond status would mean he could be killed by anybody whom he encountered, so God put his mark on him, promising seven-fold vengeance upon anyone who harmed him.
Some might object that this account of the first murder is scarcely a historical one. It is, however, a very ancient one and there is plenty of evidence of a more scientific nature that humans have always had a propensity to violence. We know, for example, that the first inventors of pebble tools, the African Australopithecines, used this technical innovation not only to hunt, but also to kill their fellows.4
Violence, of course, encompasses a wide range of human behaviour, from killing, through non-fatal forms of interpersonal violence, to threats and intimidation. Some social scientists take the broadest possible view of it. The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, for example, has argued that all social and political systems based on inequality and exploitation are inherently violent, and he ends his book on violence by commenting that sometimes doing nothing is the most violent act possible.5 My own working definition is rather narrower. I would argue that at its core, violence is the use of physical force to injure or damage people and property, or involves language or behaviour that threatens to do so. I’m aware, though, that even this definition leaves us with a very fluid concept. Violence can be prompted by a wide range of drives and emotions: self-defence, frustration, a desire for revenge, a desire to retaliate, a desire to dominate, a desire to maintain honour. It is subject to different cultural interpretations, and views of it change over time. Even a single culture at one particular moment in its development may have an ambivalent attitude to aspects of violence, unsure whether certain acts are legitimate or not. Thus wife-beating was widely regarded as acceptable in the past, but it was also of questionable legality and drew the opprobrium of some social commentators. Likewise, between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the duel was regarded as being of central importance to the honour code of at least some members of the aristocracy and gentry; yet it was also illegal and, almost from the moment of its arrival in England from the continent, attracted hostile comment.
Then there are areas of licensed violence to be considered. Formerly, masters and mistresses of apprentices and servants (and people a fair way down the social scale might keep a live-in servant or two) were entitled to use physical chastisement, as, of course, were parents and schoolteachers. Even then (to reiterate the role of culture) there were widely held beliefs regarding appropriate levels of ‘correction’, and local opinion might intervene if it judged that the line had been crossed between acceptable practice and the outright abuse of an individual.
An added complication is that acts of violence normally involve three people or sets of people: the perpetrator and the victim, of course, but also, in many cases, an audience. And as the events surrounding Roger Crockett’s death show, the audience can play much more than an observational role: its attitudes and behaviour can be crucial in defining whether or not an act of violence is deemed legitimate, and hence at what stage it should be brought to an end.6 To make matters even more complicated, while violence may sometimes be spur of the moment, it can just as easily be carefully orchestrated and regulated. In the past, fights between men were subject to rules of engagement; both the men involved, and certainly those watching them, had a clear idea of how much physical force would be appropriate to the occasion (not, of course, that this necessarily stopped things getting out of hand). Indeed, as the presence of an audience suggests, and as anyone who has seen two men squaring up to each other and trading insults as a prelude to fighting will understand, violence can be performative. So while the popular view of violence is of unrestrained and unthinking force, it can just as easily be carefully choreographed and bound by unwritten rules.
This can be seen among those unlikeliest of theatrical performers, football hooligans. Here, for example, is a description of the actions of Sheffield United supporters – or ‘Blades’:
Blades play to various audiences and, like thespians worldwide, they and their fellow performers need to adhere to the boundaries of the plot and understand the script. That said, some fluff their lines, while others ham; still others fail to respond on cue, and some have to improvise constantly. The outcome is hooligan dramas that are contextual, negotiated and improvised . . .
Continuing his metaphor, the commentator also draws attention to ‘the theatre critics – journalists and police – who report on what they see as the appalling performance’.7
Football hooliganism shows that violence can be a performance. It also demonstrates that it can involve ritual. On one famous occasion fighting broke out between opposing football fans during a match, and the police had to be called in to restore order. During the fighting it appeared that some of the fans were directing kung-fu kicks at their opponents – clear evidence to those who saw the match televised that what was unfolding before their eyes was one of the worst cases of football hooliganism yet. Closer inspection of the relevant footage, however, showed that the kicks were directed into the air about three feet away from rival fans. The football hooligans may have been intent on shows of bravado, but they were also generally keeping to well-established rules. That doesn’t mean of course that ritual violence can’t get out of hand and boundaries be transgressed.8 But it does suggest that, even in the case of apparently aggressive kung-fu football hooligans, what initially appeared to be extreme acts of violent and random provocation were actually carefully considered and did not involve physical contact. Newspapers often talk of ‘meaningless’ or ‘mindless’ violence. In fact, most violence takes place for a reason: it normally has a meaning, even if that meaning is obscure, or distasteful to many outside observers. So we need to recognise that violence can be ‘instrumental’ – a calculated act to bring about a calculated end.
One common feature of violent behaviour, which can be traced back as far as records go (and, indeed, to Cain and Abel), is that it tends to be performed by men. The driving force here is a sense of male honour. As the anthropologist Julian Pitt-Rivers put it, ‘The ultimate vindication of honour lies in physical violence, and when other means fail the obligation exists . . . to resort to it.’9 The willingness to fight and changes in attitudes to fighting are therefore very much related to changing notions of masculinity. To us, the reasons why eighteenth-century labourers got into pub brawls or their social superiors fought duels may seem trivial, but both groups were working within an honour code that stipulated that violence was an acceptable – perhaps the only – way of vindicating reputation and regaining status. For certain – especially young – men, then, a willingness to demonstrate hardness and a taste for fighting was an important way of demonstrating masculinity.
Shifting views of masculinity gradually led to the widespread rejection of interpersonal violence between men, except among those elements of society deemed ‘rough’. Attitudes to other forms of violence also changed over the years. Wife-beating, which I have already touched on, is a case in point. At one time it was pretty widely accepted, and although there were always voices raised against it, both in local communities and in print, it was rare for this kind of abuse to result in a formal charge and conviction. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, domestic violence came increasingly to be recognised as a major social evil and, as such, a matter for the police and for the courts. Condemnation of sexual assaults on women has also grown in force over time, resulting in an increased willingness on the part of victims to see their assailants brought to trial (between 1897 and 1901 an average of 759 cases each year were reported to the police in England and Wales; between 1965 and 1969 that figure had risen to 11,293, and in the year from September 2013 to September 2014 to 24,043).10 It’s a similar picture with bullying. Two generations ago it was certainly known about and disliked, but in general those suffering from it (especially at school) would be advised either to fight back on the basis that bullies are cowards (a rather questionable premise) or to accept it as part of the normal course of things. Today, however, bullying, both at school and in the workplace, has, like domestic violence, been identified as a serious social issue.
So far I have touched on violence among individuals and small groups. Collective violence is also an important strand of English history. In the summer of 2011 a number of cities were afflicted by a brief but serious outbreak of rioting and looting, which destroyed property and led to confrontations with the police. In the summer of 1780 central London suffered the infinitely more destructive Gordon Riots, during which the mob went almost unchecked for several days. In the summer of 1381 London was the target of peasant rebel armies, which looted the property of unpopular political figures, massacred foreigners, and executed the medieval equivalents of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
There is a tradition of popular unrest and popular protest in England, which encompasses not only these large-scale outbreaks, but also numerous smaller outbreaks during which Englishmen and women demonstrated, sometimes violently, over the price of grain, over landlords enclosing their common land, over pay and conditions at the workplace, and over trades union rights. Things sometimes got out of hand and there were certainly instances of spontaneous aggression, but – as with many other forms of violence – there was often a structure to the apparent mayhem: rioters were frequently motivated by legitimate grievances, and they could demonstrate a surprising degree of ‘order within disorder’. In so far as riots were violent, they were clearly demonstrating a form of violence other than that manifested in purely interpersonal violence.11
The violence of war is beyond the scope of this book, but it is interesting to speculate what effect everyday violence has had on the way in which the wars that have intermittently punctuated English history have been fought. Some historians have suggested, for example, that the grim living conditions of the pre-1914 working class made their experience of the First World War less daunting than it would otherwise have been. Set against this is the view of the historian Dan Todman, who commented that ‘The inhabitants of urban Glasgow might regularly have set about each other on sectarian lines, but they did not employ trench mortars, machine guns and flamethrowers.’12 It is also interesting to speculate as to whether wars have tended to worsen everyday violence – whether, in other words, people who are given the task of killing become intrinsically more violent as a result. We are certainly now aware of the post-traumatic stress that wars can cause – we know that war can take a terrible mental toll – but it has to be admitted that when it comes to earlier periods the evidence is very patchy. John Keegan’s brilliant reconstructions of the experience of fighting at Agincourt and Waterloo have given us some sense of what it was like to be in combat before the twentieth century, but that doesn’t mean we can be sure of the impact of that experience on those doing the fighting.13 And linking the experience of war to greater levels of violence among returning soldiers is very problematic.
At the end of the First World War it was anticipated that there would be a wave of violent crime among ex-servicemen, who had been brutalised at the Front by their experiences. The fear proved to be misplaced. Some British battalions in the Normandy campaign of 1944 were noted to be suffering from worryingly high levels of combat fatigue, possibly a sign of what today we would call post-traumatic stress – a psychological condition that can leave ex-combatants ill-fitted for a return to civilian life.14 Yet post-war crime statistics do not decisively demonstrate a rise in violence after these soldiers returned home.15
War occupies an unusual place in the annals of violence because it is legitimate: it is fought at the behest of the state. This can lead to some surreal judgements. President Johnson, for example, could deplore rising levels of violence in the United States at the same time as his B52s were raining down bombs on North Vietnam. But it’s also a reminder that, as Max Weber pointed out many years ago, one of the defining characteristics of the modern state is its claim to maintain a monopoly on legitimate violence in the society it governs.16 A state can declare war, kill tens of thousands of people, and argue that it is acting legally. Similarly, in times of peace, it can mutilate or take the lives of those who have transgressed its laws. In England up until 1868 criminals could still be executed in public. Up until well into the nineteenth century petty offenders, men and women alike, could be stripped to the waist and publicly whipped. In the case of public corporal punishment, the practice slowly declined in the course of that century, just as the taste for public execution dwindled in Victorian times. Both trends could be said to illustrate something, not just about the workings of the state but about changing attitudes among the public to pain and suffering, and hence, perhaps, violence, though it is always dangerous to assume an inexorable trend: just as flogging subsided, for example, one of England’s periodic moral panics led to its almost immediate revival for men convicted of robbery.
The fact of state-sponsored violence has inevitably led some to question its legitimacy. One influential theorist was Frantz Fanon, whose book The Wretched of the Earth, first published in France in 1961, was a key text for rebels against colonialism and, a little later, for some leftist groups. It was written while the Algerian War of Independence was still being fought. (Fanon did not live to see either a free Algeria or to enjoy the book’s success. In the year of publication he was diagnosed as having leukaemia, and died in Washington in December.)
For Fanon, violence is an essential part of the anti-colonial struggle:
But it so happens that for the colonised people this violence, because it constitutes their only work, invests their characters with positive and creative qualities. The practice of violence binds them together as a whole, since each individual forms a violent link in the great chain, a part of the great organism of violence which has surged upwards in reaction to the settler’s violence in the beginning . . . At the level of individuals, violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex and his despair and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect.17
Fanon, then, raises an important point about the legitimacy, and morality, of violence in pursuit of a struggle against oppression. His writings had comparatively little impact in England, although they were espoused by elements within the New Left. The 1960s engendered another classic work lodged firmly in contemporary politics, Hannah Arendt’s On Violence, which inter alia reminded its readers that, by the time of the Cold War, state violence could obliterate humankind.18
And yet if the state is the arbiter of violence, most would argue that it is also the guarantor against it. After all, the law – an expression of state authority – helps restrain those violent passions to which, it seems, humankind is prone. This was certainly the viewpoint of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, in his Leviathan of 1651. Writing in the wake of the Civil War, Hobbes understandably felt that a strong, and unchallengeable, central authority – a sovereign power – was essential to the existence of civil society. Like many political theorists of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, he imagined humans before the installation of government living in a state of nature, which, for him, was a grim place, ‘a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man . . . and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.’ This is ‘what manner of life there would be, where there were no common power to fear’. And for Hobbes it was the emergence of that common, sovereign power which prevented the war of all against all, and made civil society possible.19 Hobbes took an unusually pessimistic view of human nature but, as post-apocalyptic movie after post-apocalyptic movie has demonstrated, there is a strong conviction among many that the existence of the state and its law-and-order apparatus is our main guarantor against the descent into violent anarchy.
A second major restraint is – or certainly has been – religion. Throughout the period covered in this book England was, in formal terms at least, a Christian country, and for most Christian thinkers violence is a bad thing. That doesn’t necessarily make Christianity a peaceful religion, as various Middle Eastern peoples confronted by Crusaders in the high middle ages found to their cost, and as is suggested by the doctrine of the just war, developed as early as the fifth century by St Augustine. But the fact nevertheless remains that the Christian message is essentially one opposed to interpersonal violence.
Family ties, too, play a part in steering people away from violence. At the height of the Roger Crockett affair, Peers Crewe, keen to go and find where the fighting was in case any of his friends needed assistance, was pulled into his house by his prudent wife aided by their maidservant. The theme of responsibility to family is often to be found in writings on violence, notably tracts written against the practice of duelling. John Bennett, preaching a sermon against duelling in Manchester in 1783, reminded would-be duellists of their responsibilities to ‘parents, perhaps tottering with age, who have nursed thee in infancy, guided thee through youth, and watched thee to manhood’. He pointed out that the duellist might also have ‘a tender partner of thy cares’: ‘wilt thou plunge her into such inexpressible distress?’ And then there might be children to be considered:
Thou hast children, who cry for help, and cling round thee for support. Wilt thou not hear their cries? Wilt thou not pity their helpless sorrows? Wilt thou not wipe their trickling tears, and wilt thou turn them into the world – comfortless and uninstructed – not only without a parent – but (what is infinitely worse) with the remembrance of one who might have lived the counsellor of their infancy, and the ‘guide of their youth’ – but who fell – hear it in conscience – hear it sensibility [sic] – who fell, untimely, by his own determination.20
Being married did not automatically stop a man from getting into fights. But for many it must have inculcated a sense of responsibility sufficient to lead them away from violence and other forms of criminality.
So if violence is a constant in human behaviour, its nature and extent – as well as attitudes towards it – have clearly changed over time. Until the nineteenth century, for example, men had licence to chastise their wives, their children and their servants. But as the Victorian era drew towards its close, such behaviour had become increasingly frowned upon. Even at a single given moment in time different people might hold very disparate, sometimes very muddled, views about violence. An eighteenth-century gentleman would be horrified to read about a labourer beating his wife to death, but probably would not think twice about involving himself in a potentially fatal duel. And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that even at the level of the individual, attitudes to violence can change over the course of the years: young, aggressive unmarried men could – and still can – turn very easily into more docile middle-aged husbands.
When it comes to theories about violence, there is certainly no shortage of ideas. There are biological explanations, which concentrate on such fundamental issues as the genetic make-up of human beings, especially men, and on how aspects of the functioning of the human brain might inhibit or encourage violence among individuals. There are psychological theories, which concentrate on the impact of (to take the most obvious example) neglectful, abusive, or violent parenting, or the loss of parents or other important adults early in life. And there are sociological theories, which look at the social conditions likely to fuel violent behaviour, and at how violent individuals react to the world around them and to their fellow human beings. For the moment let me focus on two theoretical positions that are currently exercising historians who write on violence. The first of these is evolutionary psychology; the second is the concept of the ‘civilising process’ put forward by the German sociologist Norbert Elias.
The historian who has made the most sustained attempt to derive insights from evolutionary psychology is John Carter Wood. His ideas were set out in developed form in an article of 2007 in which he argued for a fundamental unity of human psychology: just as all human beings have a basically similar physical make-up, he suggests, so their mental processes are fairly uniform. Accordingly, Carter Wood cites Leda Cosmides and John Tooby to the effect that ‘rather than a “blank slate” or all-purpose thinking machine, the brain is theorised as a collection of modular “regulatory circuits” that organise the way we interpret our experiences, inject certain recurrent concepts and motivations into our mental life, and provide universal frames of meaning that allow us to understand the actions and meanings of others’. Among the ‘regulatory circuits’ are those governing the human propensity to violence. And since it is present in all societies, even if at varying levels and inspiring different reactions, it’s fair to assume that a tendency to violence is part of human evolution – a factor in the survival of the human race.21
Violence, then, comes down to the basic concept of the survival of the fittest, the term being applied not, as it so often is currently, to individuals, but rather to species, and corresponding closely to the Darwinian concept of natural selection. All males, it is argued, are programmed to compete for resources, of which perhaps the most important are sexual partners for reproductive purposes. Males will therefore fight to gain access to females. Only the strongest will manage to mate, and because the strongest prevail the species is thereby strengthened. Male competitiveness and consequently violence are thus a core part of the male psyche for evolutionary purposes. All successful species are adaptive, and this is one of the key ways in which the human race has adapted to survive.
There are problems with this theory – not least that evolutionary change occurs too slowly to explain the changes in patterns of