Neither historians nor heritage professionals have found it easy to come to terms with the extraordinary popular uprising of October 1831. There is, to this day, no commemorative monument to the several hundred unarmed men and women killed by direct and merciless military intervention on 31 October. We do not even know the number. As at Peterloo twelve years earlier, where the death toll was much smaller and the outcry greater, there was no public enquiry and only a few inquests, none of which asked particularly searching questions and city coroners were in no mood to be critical. The Whig mayor, Charles Pinney, was put on trial and acquitted; not for murder but for failing to bring the crowd to book more quickly. Military commanders boasted with impunity of the slaughter they had overseen while a Special Commission tried 114 rioters, convicted 81, transported 26 and executed 4. The earliest attempts at historical analysis, and much popular writing on the subject since, tended to coalesce around themes of public alienation, whether it be from the structures of central or local government, or simply from the principles of civilised social order. As one popular account put it, ‘Whenever such convulsions take place in a community, they will almost always be traceable to one cause, namely an unnatural state of society, arising from misgovernment.’ Specifically, it is argued, the people and their rulers were out of touch.

Government was out of touch because the Recorder, Sir Charles Wetherell, had been foolish enough to claim to his parliamentary colleagues that there was little interest in reform at Bristol. The corporation was out of touch because it was remote, corrupt and unaccountable.