74 ENGLISHSAGA

colliers arrested by the police were rescued by their fellow
miners who subsequently stormed the Burslem Town Hall, burnt
its records and rate books, and sacked the George Inn and the
principal shops. Afterwards the town looked as though an
invading army had passed through it.

The scene of the insurrection would not have been England
had its grim and starving landscape not been lightened by flashes
of humour. At one place where a band of marauding Amazons
from the cotton mills threatened to burn down a farm, the
farmer turned the tables by loosing his bull. In another—it was
at Wigan—the local miners insisted oh keeping guard round
Lord Crawford's park against their fellow strikers so that, as
one of them put it, the old Lord could drink his port in peace.1

Work throughout the industrial north was now at a complete
standstill. In Manchester all the shops were shuttered and the
streets thronged with thousands o"f workmen who besieged the
sidewalks demanding money and food from passers by. Similar
scenes were enacted in almost every industrial town from
Leicester to Tyneside, and in western Scotland. At Stoke-on-
Trent the mob gutted the Court of Requests, the Police Station
and the larger houses; at Leeds the Chief of Police was seriously
wounded, and fatal casualties occurred at Salford, Blackburn
and Halifax. The wildest rumours circulated: thart in Manchester
the police had been cut to pieces with volleys of brickbats; that
the redcoats, welcomed by the hungry populace as brothers, had
risen against their officers; that the Queen who had "set her face
against gals working in mills" was ready to grant the Charter
and open the ports to cheap corn.

The alarm of the well-to-do classes in the adjacent rural
areas was by now intense. In the factory towns of Lancashire
6ooo.millowners and shopkeepers enrolled as special constables
to defend their menaced interests. The Government decided to
act with vigour. In every northern and midland county the
yeomanry were called out, and farmers' sons sharpened sabres
on the grindstone at the village smithy before riding off to patrol
the grimy streets of a world they did not understand. Tall-
hatted magistrates rode beside them ready to mumble through
the Riot Act and loose the forces that had triumphed at Peterloo
over the urban savagery their own neglect had created. .

On Saturday, August i3th, there was fierce rioting in
Communicated by the present Earl of Crawford and Balcarres,