Chapter 4 - Riots

Chapter 4 – Silk Weavers Riot

Spitalfields had been a centre of the silk-weaving industry since the early seventeenth century. Towards the end of the century, at the time when the Huguenots arrived from France, large numbers of Huguenot silk-weavers settled in the district thanks in large part to the decision of William and Mary to invite Huguenots being hard-pressed by the French crown to relocate their talents across the channel. This now-domestic industry quickly began supplanting formerly dominant French imports.

But as the 18th century unfolded, even the most industrious Spitalfields weavers came under increasing competitive pressure especially from Chinese and Indian imports. Weavers attacked in the open street wearers of cotton stuffs - the "Calico Madams" - even tearing the clothes off their backs. In petitions to Parliament the calicoes were denounced "as a worthless, scandalous, unprofitable sort of goods embraced by a luxuriant humour among the women, prompted by the art and fraud of the drapers and the East India Company to whom alone they are profitable."

During the 1760s, there were still many weavers in Spitalfields whose French surnames showed their Huguenot descent. The unrest began in 1763

Although Parliament attempted to ban textile imports to preserve the domestic industries, Spitalfields workers were known to enforce their prerogatives directly by attacking people in the street thought to be wearing foreign prints. This simmering tension came to a rapid boil after settlement of the Seven Years’ War enabled England and France to resume trading — and a glut of French textiles to undermine weavers’ price controls.

Riots among the Spitalfields weavers were common. Any decline of prices, or opposition in trade, would lead to violence. In 1765, when the king attended parliament to give assent to the Regency Act, the weavers formed a procession of red flags and black banners to protest the importation of French silks. The House of Lords were terrified into an adjournment, and in the evening, Bedford Estate was attacked, the mob claiming that the Duke of Bedford had been bribed into making the Treaty of Fontainebleau allowing importation from France.

An Act was passed in 1765, making it a felony punishable by death to break into any house, or shop, with the intent to maliciously destroy, or damage, any silk in the process of manufacture. The "cutters" continued rioting in 1767, 1768 and again in 1769; attacking workshops and wounding any who stood in their way.

The conflict of 1769 saw the Huguenots involved in a struggle to keep the rates that the master weavers paid for their work from falling below a subsistence level. They organised in unofficial, and highly illegal, trade unions. "Silk-cutting", slashing up a weaver's work, was used as a punishment for weavers who accepted a lower rate of pay, or master weavers who refused to pay money into the funds that were collected to support union activities

In September 1769, an attempt was made to arrest an entire meeting of weavers. An officer with a party of soldiers invested a pub, the "Dolphin", in Spitalfields, "where a number of riotous weavers, commonly called cutters, were assembled to collect contributions from their brethren towards supporting themselves in order to distress their masters and oblige them to advance their wages". Meeting with resistance, the soldiers fired on the weavers and killed two, and captured four. The remainder fled and lay concealed in cellars of houses and in the vaults of the churches throughout the night of terror not only for them but also for their womenfolk.

On 6 December 1769, two rioters were executed. The King ordered the execution to occur not at the Tyburn gallows, but right in the weavers’ backyard, adjacent Spitalfields at Bethnal Green.

“They were therefore this morning taken in a cart from Newgate through the City to Whitechapel, and thence up the road to Bethnal Green, attended by the Sheriffs &c, with the gallows, made for the purpose, in another cart; it was fixed in the cross road, near the Salmon and Ball Pub”

“There was an inconceivable number of people assembled, and many bricks, tiles, stones &c thrown while the gallows was fixing, and a great apprehension of a general tumult, notwithstanding the persuasion and endeavours of several gentlemen to appease the same. The unhappy sufferers were therefore obliged to be turned off before the usual time allowed on such occasions, which was about 11 o’clock; when, after hanging about fifty minutes they were cut down and delivered to their friends.”

A few other rioters were put to death at Tyburn later in December 1769.

Years of violent labour conflict were finally quelled with the 1773 Spitalfields Weavers Act, a political compromise which protected the domestic industry from foreign competition and enabled magistrates to set wages.

Though this act stabilized a tense domestic situation, its effect over several decades was seriously problematic: a protected monopoly with wage-controlled workers maintained an increasingly obsolete system of labour-intensive manufacture that fell behind power looms coming online elsewhere.