Thomas Campbell Foster and the rural labourer; Incendiarism in East Anglia in the 1840s∗

Abstract

They know of but one method. They can fire hay-stacks and wheat-ricks. They can create around them an atmosphere of terror; and out of the midst of flame and smoke, perchance, the history of their sufferings may at length tell upon the ear of the world. The Nonconformist, ig June 1844 I met an old man on the road yesterday. I had asked him where the fire was, and how I could get to it; ultimately what he thought was the cause of such fires; and he replied 'oppression, master, nothing but oppression'. 'You mean low wages, I suppose?' 'I mean oppression; low wages is not the only oppression.' The Morning Chronicle, 28 July 1844 In this article an attempt will be made to show that the early nineteenth-century debate over the rural labourer and the extent of his violent protests were much greater than has generally been realized. This study will reveal that incendiarism in parts of rural East Anglia reached epidemic proportions. Contrary to the views of some contemporaries the burning of farm property was not a new phenomenon. Most middle-aged East Anglians of the I840s could remember several major outbreaks of incendiarism in I8I 5-17, I822, i 825, I 829-33 and I 835-7 and the history of this crime reached back to the early years of the Napoleonic Wars and beyond. In fact, some of the fires of the mid-nineteenth century were almost exact replicas of incidents which had occurred sixty and seventy years previously. Incendiarism, therefore, was a traditional form of rural protest, together with poaching, maiming, the stealing of farm animals, machine-breaking, the sending of threatening letters, and organized opposition to low wages, high prices and unpopular aspects of the Poor Law.' The criminal statistics, which are of limited value, suggest that the chronology and