Mr. Justice Park[460] was equally stern and uncompromising in defending the property of the followers of the carpenter of Nazareth against the unreasoning misery of the hour. Summing up in a case at Aylesbury, in which one of the charges was that of attempting to procure a reduction of tithes, he remarked with warmth: ‘It was highly insolent in such men to require of gentlemen, who had by an expensive education qualified themselves to discharge the sacred duties of a Minister of the Gospel, to descend from that station and reduce themselves to the situation of common labourers.’[461]
Few judges could resist the temptation to introduce into their charges a homily on the economic benefits of machinery. Mr. Justice Park was an exception, for he observed at Aylesbury that the question of the advantages of machinery was outside the province of the judges, ‘and much mischief often resulted from persons stepping out of their line of duty.’[462] Mr. Justice Alderson took a different view, and the very next day he was expounding the truths of political economy at Dorchester, starting with what he termed the ‘beautiful and simple illustration’ of the printing press.[463] The illustration must have seemed singularly intimate and convincing to the labourers in the dock who had never been taught their letters.
Such was the temper of the judges. Who and what were the prisoners before them? After the suppression of the riots, the magistrates could pick out culprits at their leisure, and when a riot had involved the whole of the village the temptation to get rid by this method of persons who for one reason or another were obnoxious to the authorities was irresistible. Hunt, speaking in the House of Commons,[464] quoted the case of Hindon; seven men had been apprehended for rioting and they were all poachers. Many of the prisoners had already spent a month in an overcrowded prison; almost all of them were poor men; the majority could not read or write.[465] Few could afford counsel, and it must be remembered that counsel could not address the court on behalf of prisoners who were being tried for breaking machines, or for belonging to a mob that asked for money or destroyed property. By the rules of the gaol, the prisoners at Salisbury were not allowed to see their attorney except in the presence of the gaoler or his servant. The labourers’ ignorance of the law was complete and inevitable. Many of them thought that the King or the Government or the magistrates had given orders that machines were to be broken. Most of them supposed that if a person from whom they demanded money threw it down or gave it without the application of physical force, there was no question of robbery. We have an illustration of this illusion in a trial at Winchester when Isaac Hill, junior, who was charged with breaking a threshing machine near Micheldever, for which the maximum penalty was seven years, pleaded in his defence that he had not broken the machine and that all that he did ‘was to ask the prosecutor civilly for the money, which the mob took from him, and the prosecutor gave it to him, and that he thanked him very kindly for it,’[466] an admission which made him liable to a death penalty. A prisoner at Salisbury, when he was asked what he had to say in his defence to the jury, replied: ‘Now, my Lord, I ‘se got nothing to say to ’em, I doant knaow any on ’em.’[467] The prisoners were at this further disadvantage that all the witnesses whom they could call as to their share in the conduct of a mob had themselves been in the mob, and were thus liable to prosecution. Thus when James Lush (who was afterwards selected for execution) and James Toomer appealed to a man named Lane, who had just been acquitted on a previous charge, to give evidence that they had not struck Mr. Pinniger in a scuffle, Mr. Justice Alderson cautioned Lane that if he acknowledged that he had been in the mob he would be committed. Lane chose the safer part of silence.[468] In another case a witness had the courage to incriminate himself. When the brothers Simms were being tried for extorting money from Parson Easton’s wife, a case which we have already described, Henry Bunce, called as a witness for the defence, voluntarily declared, in spite of a caution from the judge (Alderson), that he had been present himself and that William Simms did not use the expression ‘blood or money.’ He was at once ordered into custody. ‘The prisoner immediately sprung over the bar into the dock with his former comrades, seemingly unaffected by the decision of the learned judge.’[469]
Perhaps the darkest side of the business was the temptation held out to prisoners awaiting trial to betray their comrades. Immunity or a lighter sentence was freely offered to those who would give evidence. Stokes, who was found guilty at Dorchester of breaking a threshing machine, was sentenced by Mr. Justice Alderson to a year’s imprisonment, with the explanation that he was not transported because ‘after you were taken into custody, you gave very valuable information which tended greatly to further the ends of justice.’[470] These transactions were not often dragged into the daylight, but some negotiations of this character were made public in the trial of Mr. Deacle next year. Mr. Deacle, a well-to-do gentleman farmer, was tried at the Lent Assizes at Winchester for being concerned in the riots. One of the witnesses against him, named Collins, admitted in cross-examination that he believed he should have been prosecuted himself, if he had not promised to give evidence against Mr. Deacle; another witness, named Barnes, a carpenter, stated in cross-examination that during the trials at the Special Commission, ‘he being in the dock, and about to be put on his trial, the gaoler Beckett called him out, and took him into a room where there were Walter Long, a magistrate, and another person, whom he believed to be Bingham Baring, who told him that he should not be put upon his trial if he would come and swear against Deacle.’ When the next witness was about to be cross-examined, the counsel for the prosecution abruptly abandoned the case.[471]
The first Special Commission was opened at Winchester with suitable pomp on 18th December. Not only the prison but the whole town was crowded, and the inhabitants of Winchester determined to make the best of the windfall. The jurymen and the Times special correspondent complained bitterly of the abnormal cost of living, the latter mentioning that in addition to extraordinary charges for beds, 5s. a day was exacted for firing and tallow candles, bedroom fire not included. The three judges sent down as commissioners were Baron Vaughan, Mr. Justice Parke, and Mr. Justice Alderson. With them were associated two other commissioners, Mr. Sturges Bourne, of assistant overseer fame, and Mr. Richard Pollen. The Duke of Wellington, as Lord-Lieutenant, sat on the Bench. The Attorney-General, Mr. Sergeant Wilde, and others appeared to prosecute for the Crown. The County took up every charge, the Government only the more serious ones.
There were three hundred prisoners, most of them charged with extorting money by threats or with breaking machinery. What chance had they of a fair trial? They started with the disabilities already described. They were thrown by batches into the dock; the pitiless law was explained to the jury; extenuating circumstances were ruled out as irrelevant. ‘We do not come here,’ said Mr. Justice Alderson, ‘to inquire into grievances. We come here to decide law.’ But though evidence about wages or distress was not admitted, the judges did not scruple to give their own views of the social conditions which had produced these disturbances. Perhaps the most flagrant example was provided by a trial which happily was for a misdemeanour only. Seven men were indicted for conspiring together and riotously assembling for the purpose of raising wages and for compelling others to join them. The labourers of the parish of Fawley had combined together for two objects, the first to raise their wages, which stood at 9s. a week, the second to get rid of the assistant overseer, who had introduced a parish cart, to which he had harnessed women and boys, amongst others an idiot woman, named Jane Stevens. The labourers determined to break up the cart, but they desisted on the promise of a farmer that a horse should be bought for it. Lord Cavan was the large landowner of the parish. He paid his men as a rule 9s. a week, but two of them received 10s. The mob came up to his house to demand an increase of wages: Lord Cavan was out, quelling rioters elsewhere. Lady Cavan came down to see them. ‘Seeing you are my neighbours and armed,’ said she, ‘yet, as I am an unprotected woman, I am sure you will do no harm.’ The labourers protested that they meant no harm, and they did no harm. ‘I asked them,’ said Lady Cavan afterwards, in evidence, ‘why they rose then, there was no apparent distress round Eaglehurst, and the wages were the same as they had been for several years. I have been in several of their cottages and never saw any appearance of distress. They said they had been oppressed long and would bear it no longer.’ One man told her that he had 9s. a week wages and 3s. from the parish, he had heard that the 3s. was to be discontinued. With the common-sense characteristic of her class Lady Cavan assured him that he was not improving his position by idling. The labourers impressed the Cavan men, and went on their peaceful way round the parish. The farmers who gave evidence for the prosecution were allowed to assert that there was no distress, but when it came to evidence for the defence a stricter standard of relevancy was exacted. One witness for the prisoners said of the labourers: ‘The men were in very great distress; many of the men had only a few potatoes in their bag when they came to work.’ ‘The learned judges objected to this course of examination being continued: it might happen that through drinking a man might suffer distress.’ The Attorney-General, in his closing speech, asserted again that the prisoners did not seem to have been in distress. Baron Vaughan, in summing up, said that men were not to assemble and conspire together for the purpose of determining what their wages should be. ‘That which at first might be in itself a lawful act, might in the event become illegal.... A respectful statement or representation of their grievances was legal, and to which no one would object, but the evidence, if they believed it, showed that the conduct of this assembly was far from being respectful. No one could feel more for the distresses of the people than he did, but he would never endure that persons should by physical strength compel wages to be raised. There was no country where charity fell in a purer stream than in this. Let the man make his appeal in a proper and respectful manner, and he might be assured that appeal would never be heard in vain.... His Lordship spoke very highly of the conduct of Lady Cavan. She had visited the cottages of all those who lived in the neighbourhood, she knew they were not distressed, and she also felt confident from her kindness to them that they would not offer her any violence.’ All seven were found guilty; four were sentenced to six months hard labour, and three to three months.
Very few, however, of the cases at Winchester were simple misdemeanours, for in most instances, in addition to asking for higher wages, the labourers had made themselves liable to a prosecution for felony, either by breaking a threshing machine or by asking for money. Those prisoners who had taken part in the Fordingbridge riots, or in the destruction of machinery near Andover, or in the demolition of the Headley Workhouse, were sentenced to death or to transportation for life. Case after case was tried in which prisoners from different villages were indicted for assault and robbery. The features varied little, and the spectators began to find the proceedings monotonous. Most of the agricultural population of Hampshire had made itself liable to the death penalty, if the authorities cared to draw the noose. The three hundred who actually appeared in Court were like the men on whom the tower of Siloam fell.
A case to which the prosecution attached special importance arose out of an affair at the house of Mr. Eyre Coote. A mob of forty persons, some of whom had iron bars, presented themselves before Mr. Coote’s door at two o’clock in the morning. Two bands of men had already visited Mr. Coote that evening, and he had given them beer: this third band was a party of stragglers. Mr. Coote stationed his ten servants in the portico, and when the mob arrived he asked them, ‘What do you want, my lads?’ ‘Money,’ was the answer. ‘Money,’ said Mr. Coote, ‘you shan’t have.’ One of the band seemed to Mr. Coote about to strike him. Mr. Coote seized him, nine of the mob were knocked down and taken, and the rest fled. Six of the men were prosecuted for feloniously demanding money. Baron Vaughan remarked that outrages like this made one wonder whether one was in a civilised country, and he proceeded to raise its moral tone by sentencing all the prisoners to transportation for life, except one, Henry Eldridge, who was reserved for execution. He had been already capitally convicted of complicity in the Fordingbridge riots, and this attempt to ‘enter the sanctuary of Mr. Eyre Coote’s home’ following upon that crime, rendered him a suitable ‘sacrifice to be made on the altar of the offended justice’ of his country.
In many of the so-called robberies punished by the Special Commissions the sums taken were trifling. George Steel, aged eighteen, was sentenced to transportation for life for obtaining a shilling, when he was in liquor, from Jane Neale: William Sutton, another boy of eighteen, was found guilty of taking 4d. in a drunken frolic: Sutton, who was a carter boy receiving 1s. 6d. a week and his food, was given an excellent character by his master, who declared that he had never had a better servant. The jury recommended him to mercy, and the judges responded by sentencing him to death and banishing him for life. George Clerk, aged twenty, and E. C. Nutbean, aged eighteen, paid the same price for 3d. down and the promise of beer at the Greyhound. Such cases were not exceptional, as any one who turns to the reports of the trials will see.