What is “protest”? Who is a protester and who is not? This is a problem that has bothered me ever since I began, about ten years ago, to try to sort out the social and political protesters from the rest of the convicts transported to Australia from the late 18th century to the 1860s. To some this is no particular problem at all. Criminologists and writers on crime and punishment - such as Leon Radzinowicz, J. J. Tobias and Nigel Walker (to cite the most recent) - have tended to place protest, when they have dealth with it at all, under such omnibus labels as crimes against property and crimes against persons. Others have eluded such refinements altogether and have argued that if protest is a social phenomenon, so is crime, and how can one sensibly draw a distinction between the rebel against society and the man whom society drives, or appears to drive, to crime? So it has been claimed that all convicts, whether they were transported or hot, were the victims of a society that left them out in the cold; and there is some justice in the claim (was it made by the Hammonds?) that in a society like Britain's in the early nineteenth century there was a large measure of culpability in common between the cattle-maimer or urban thief and the magistrate or High Court judge who sent them to a penitentiary at home or to the convict-jails of Van Diemen's Land or Sydney Cove.

Revolts against English monarchs, varying in scope and intensity, marked every reign from 1100 to 1272. After that, if we consider what happened to Edward II and Richard II, and the Wars of the Roses and the troubles of the first Tudor, we see pattern emerging in the shape of constitutional change induced through revolt. Even in the context of that centuries-long pattern, there was something special in the revolt of 1173-4, when three sons of Henry II united with an array of anti Plantagenet barons and continental neighbors to try to unseat the powerful king of England, who also held Normandy, Maine, Anjou, and the feudal conglomeration that comprised Aquitaine.

For reasons that I shall attempt to develop, the complex events of those two years constituted a watershed for mediaeval England, separating an age of feudal institutions from an age of royal bureaucracy that bore hints and suggestions of the modern era. The generational gap between sons and father added drama to the conflict, and psychological forces were inextricably bound to political forces as the revolt developed.

“I love a mob,” the aging Duke of Newcastle said in 1768, “I headed a mob once myself. We owe the Hanoverian succession to a mob.” As I read those words I wondered if the good Duke, who was 73 when he said them, had slipped into senility or into an aged-ripened concept of the past, for the textbooks tell of the Jacobite rioting at George I's accession and during and after the Rebellion of 1715, but not of mob action in support of the Hanovers. The more specific histories of the period such as George Rude's Hanoverian London show that some of the events which we interpret as riots were actually pitched battles between mobs of Jacobite sympathizers and friends of the new government. This shows the existence of rival forces but where was Newcastle's mob? This paper attempts to define that mob, to explain the reasons for its formation, to show its organization around the young Pelham-Hollis, Duke of Newcastle, and to illustrate its activities.

The hunger riots which spread across most of southern England in the summer and autumn of 1766 were the most extensive rural disorders in a century when food riots became chronic. More serious in their threat to the social order than the violent protests against the high cost of “necessaries” and the new Militia Act in 1756-57, the disturbances of 1766 placed a heavy strain upon the forces of order. They foreshadowed the more serious agrarian riots of the next century.

While the War Office in September, 1766 moved its detachments across the countryside in a vain effort to parry the rapidly-shifting threats from militant labourers, colliers, tinners, weavers, and others of the provincial dispossessed, the rioters becamer bolder and seized control of large tracts of the countryside almost in the manner of an occupying army. As the crisis developed, demands for military protection from market towns and isolated country estates poured into the War Office. By late September the pattern of events had unfolded to the point where Lord Barrington, the Secretary-at-War, apprehended a threat of general insurrection. Striving to mobilise his limited resources, he ordered the commanders of both active troops and “invalides” to assist the civil magistrates “upon requisition,” while at the same time he urged the leaders of rural society, the aristocracy and the gentry to abandon their lethargy and use initiative in arming their servants to suppress less serious disturbances.

In recent years, historians have departed from narrative histories to seek new approaches to the Chartist movement. Professor Asa Briggs has opened up an important avenue in emphasizing local studies of the movement. He has been concerned to place the Chartists in the perspective of local politics and class relations. Chartist Studies was the first result of his approach, and several other short essays have appeared subsequently. In the next few years, we can look for some substantial analyses of the movement from a local perspective. David Goodway is working on Chartism in London and Professor William Maehl is working on the Newcastle area in the Northeast. I have done a study of class relations and Chartism in Brighton, and James Epstein is working on Feargus O'Connor's relations with three Chartist communities. Epstein's work involves comparative area studies and points the way toward broadening local studies with the possibility of some very illuminating results. However, we must be careful that we do not get so caught up in local studies that they totally dominate our thinking.