Spitalfield riots

Spitalfields had been a centre of the silk-weaving industry since the early seventeenth century. Towards the end of the century, at the time when the Huguenots arrived from France, large numbers of Huguenot silk-weavers settled in the district. During the 1760s, there were still many weavers in Spitalfields whose French surnames showed their Huguenot descent. Irish weavers came slightly later, but by the middle of the 1730s there were many people from Ireland, or of Irish origins, working in the Spitalfields silk industry.

Relations between the groups were not always good. There were times when the Irish weavers were blamed for working for too little money and bringing down the rates of pay. The conflict of 1769 cut right through the middle of both communities, the Huguenots and the Irish. Journeymen were involved in a struggle to keep the rates that the master weavers paid for their work from falling below a subsistence level. They organised in unofficial, and highly illegal, trade unions. "Silk-cutting", slashing up a weaver's work, was used as a punishment for weavers who accepted a lower rate of pay, or master weavers who refused to pay money into the funds that were collected to support union activities.

Riots among the Spitalfields weavers were common. Any decline of prices, or opposition in trade, would lead to violence. In 1765, when the king attended parliament to give assent to the Regency Act, the weavers formed a procession of red flags and black banners to protest the importation of French silks. The House of Lords were terrified into an adjournment, and in the evening, Bedford Estate was attacked, the mob claiming that the Duke of Bedford had been bribed into making the Treaty of Fontainebleau allowing importation from France.[1]

An Act was passed in 1765, making it a felony punishable by death to break into any house, or shop, with the intent to maliciously destroy, or damage, any silk in the process of manufacture. The "cutters" continued rioting in 1767, 1768 and again in 1769; attacking workshops and wounding any who stood in their way.[2]

In September 1769, an attempt was made to arrest an entire meeting of weavers. An officer with a party of soldiers invested a pub, the "Dolphin", in Spitalfields, "where a number of riotous weavers, commonly called cutters, were assembled to collect contributions from their brethren towards supporting themselves in order to distress their masters and oblige them to advance their wages".[3] Meeting with resistance, the soldiers fired on the weavers and killed two, and captured four. The remainder fled and lay concealed in cellars of houses and in the vaults of the churches throughout the night of terror not only for them but also for their womenfolk.