ELY, FROM THE OUSE.
This first outbreak was no sooner suppressed than another and much more serious one took place at Littleport. Gathering at the Globe Inn one morning to the number of a hundred and fifty, armed with cleavers, pitchforks, and clubs, the desperate labourers set out to plunder the village. At their head marched a man bearing a pole with a printed statement of their grievances flying from it. The first object to feel their rage was a shop kept by one Martin, shopkeeper and farmer. Martin attempted to buy them off with the offer of a five-pound note, but they took that and burst into the shop as well, smashing everything and carrying off tea and sugar. An amusing side to these incidents is seen in an account telling how one plunderer staggered away with a whole sugarloaf, and how a dozen of Martin's shirts, "worth a guinea apiece," as he dolefully said afterwards, disappeared in the twinkling of an eye.
Then they visited a retired farmer and demolished his furniture. He had a snug hoard of a hundred guineas tucked away in an old bureau. Alas! when these men of wrath had gone, the guineas were found to have gone with them. And so forth, throughout the long day.
XLII
Night at last shuts down on Littleport. The village is in deshabille: furniture lying broken in the streets, the household gods defiled, the beer-barrels of all the public-houses run dry. Every oppressor of the poor has been handsomely served out, and, incidentally, a good many unoffending people too: for a mob maddened with the sense of wrongs long endured is not discriminating. One there is, however, not yet punished. This is the vicar, conspicuous earlier in the day, alternately threatening and cajoling, but, many hours since, prudently retired to his vicarage. With a savage growl, they invest the house and batter at the door, demanding money. The vicar offers two one-pound notes; scornfully rejected, and ten pounds at the very least is demanded. He refuses, and to his refusal he adds the folly of presenting a pistol at the heads of these furious men; a pistol instantly snatched from his hands and like to be used against him. From this very patent danger and the sudden dread of murder he runs; runs upstairs to his wife and daughters, and presently they are out somewhere at the back door, all flying together,—the women, as I gather, in their nightgowns,—making for Ely, where they arrive at midnight.
Meanwhile, all this night, Littleport is trembling: the shopkeepers, the farmers, anyone who has anything to lose, with fear: those who have nothing to lose, something even to gain, with certain wild hopes and exaltations. Not without fear, they, either; for it is a brutal Government with which, in the end, they must reckon. So far, these wild despairing folk have had no leader, but now they turn to one well-known to sympathise with them: one John Dennis, an innkeeper and small farmer, and by consequence of the hated class of oppressors. By conviction, however, he sides with them: a very Saul among the prophets. To him, late at night, they come. He is abed and asleep, but they rouse him. Will he lead them to Ely on the morrow, to urge their needs and their desperate case upon the authorities?
He will not: it is useless, he says. Nay, but you must, you shall, say they, else we will shoot you, as one forsworn.
So poor Dennis, whose fate is sealed from this hour, leaves his bed and dresses himself, while the excited peasantry loot all Littleport of its gunpowder, bullets, and small shot, used in wild-fowling. Some sixty muskets and fowling-pieces they have found, and eight of those curious engines of destruction called "punt-guns" or "duck-guns." A gun of this kind is still used in duck-shooting. It has a barrel eight feet long, with two inches bore, and is loaded with three-quarters of a pound of shot and about an ounce of gunpowder. It is mounted on a swivel, generally at the end of a punt.
Guns of this calibre they have mounted in a farm-waggon, drawn by two horses, and at the back of the waggon they have placed a number of women and children: with some idea of moving hearts, if not by fear of their quaint artillery, at least in pity for their starving families. It is daybreak when at last they set out on the five miles to Ely, a band of two hundred, armed with muskets, fowling-pieces, scythes, pitchforks, clubs, and reaping-hooks. Ely has heard something of this projected advance, and sends forth three clerical magistrates and the chief constable to parley and ask the meaning of this unlawful assembly. The meaning, it seems, is to demand wages to be fixed at not less than two shillings a day, and that flour shall be sold at not more than two shillings and sixpence a stone. Meanwhile, the duck-guns look these envoys in the eyes perhaps a little more sternly than we are disposed nowadays to credit. At anyrate, the magistrates temporise and promise to inquire into these things. They retire to the Cathedral precincts to consult, and—ah! yes, will these demonstrators please go home?