The Culture of Combination: Solidarities and Collective Action Before Tolpuddle

Abstract

A B S T R A C T . Beyond the repression of the national waves of food rioting during the subsistence crises of the s, workers in the English countryside lost the will and ability to mobilize. Or so the historical orthodoxy goes. Such a conceptualization necessarily positions the 'Bread or Blood' riots of , the Swing rising of , and, in particular, the agrarian trade unionism practised at Tolpuddle in  as exceptional events. This article offers a departure by placing Tolpuddle into its wider regional context. The unionists at Tolpuddle, it is shown, were not making it up as they went along but instead acted in ways consistent with shared understandings and experiences of collective action and unionism practised throughout the English west. In so doing, it pays particular attention to the forms of collective action -and judicial responses -that extended between different locales and communities and which joined farmworkers, artisans, and industrial workers together. So conceived, Tolpuddle was not an exception. Rather, it can be more usefully understood as a manifestation of deeply entrenched cultures, an episode that assumes its historical potency because of its subsequent politicized representations.Beyond the machine breaking of the Luddites in -, arguably no act of protest in modern Britain, whatever the context, is so well known and notorious as the arrest, trial, and subsequent transportation in early  of six agricultural labourers from the Dorset parish of Tolpuddle on the charge of having issued illegal oaths.  'For many years', as John Archer put it, 'it was believed that, with the exception of Swing and Tolpuddle, there were few rural events worth investigating'.

Historicising geographies of solidarity

“…In some instances, however, working‐class mobility is bound up with more exclusionary practices. The pan‐occupational relationships that C. J. Griffin () describes, for instance, existed alongside attacks on migrant Irish labour (p. 454). The complexities of the relationship between solidarities rooted in particular workplaces, occupational or wider class identities, and divisions across other social cleavages, such as gender, sexuality, and race, are crucial in elaborating a more nuanced understanding of solidarity (Payling, ).…”

“…Yet even with groups of workers that may be viewed as comparatively static, the history is often more complex. Carl Griffin (), for example, shows how the mobility of early nineteenth century rural workers was crucial in developing “pan‐occupational solidarity” (p. 452). This connection between mobility, boundary crossing, and solidarity has been central to geographical work in a number of areas, as is discussed in relation to transnationalism below.…”

Occupy! Historical geographies of property, protest and the commons, 1500–1850

“…For instance, in the context of the insurrectionary spirit in south Somerset in the early 1830s where local radical politicking combined with revolutionary sentiment, frequent reform and election rioting, and a huge upturn in trade unionism, there were at least two recorded attempts to systematically settle commons that attracted the attention of the local and national authorities. 82 At Stoke under Hamdon near Yeovil in March 1832, 'many of the lower classes' had 'taken possession of and enclosed within these last three Days a very large portion of the valuable waste'.…”