The development of the English rural proletariat and social protest, 1700–1850

This paper suggests that covert social protest, including theft, the sending of anonymous threatening letters, and arson, was the most enduring mode of protest in the English countryside after the 1790s. Developments in this exceptional decade were responsible for increasing the scale of covert protest. Inflation, under and unemployment, with standards of living falling beneath subsistence levels, necessitated a massive increase in poor relief. Its administration required an unprecedented extension of authority over the lives of working people. This generated class conflict, but the establishment successfully suppressed overt protest, demonstrations, ‘food riots’ and strikes. Protest was driven underground, and in spite of two important semi‐covert movements in 1816 and 1830–1, protest remained essentially covert until after 1850.