Another book signing for Regency Cheshire!

I am very pleased to announce that I will be signing copies of Regency Cheshire at the Waterstone's store in Knutsford on Saturday 22 May from 11am until 1pm. Knutsford is a lovely historic town and I can't wait to visit it once more.  Look forward to seeing you all on the day!

Book signing for Regency Cheshire!

I'm very pleased to say I will be doing another book signing for Regency Cheshire at Waterstone's on Eastgate Row in Chester on Saturday 29 May, from 2pm until 4pm. I look forward to meeting you all there and having a chat on the day!
Photo of the author © Nigel Wilkes

Holiday Highlights

We enjoyed a trip to Somerset over the Easter weekend. On our way down we stopped at Ludlow, a beautiful historic town with an interesting castle. It also has many lovely Georgian buildings, including Dinham House, where Lucien Bonaparte stayed during the Napoleonic Wars. In Somerset, we enjoyed a breezy walk to Brean Down Fort, which was built in the 1860s following a French invasion scare.

Another highlight of our visit to the West Country was the Secret World wildlife centre open day, where we saw baby badgers (very noisy!) and some tiny baby squirrels enjoying a bottle feed.

It was nice to get away from the computer for a few days, as I am currently doing lots of work on Stolen Childhoods. Oh, and a reminder for family historians tracing their Liverpool forebears – my feature on Liverpool ancestors has just been published in Discover My Past England.

Images: Dinham House, Ludlow. A ruined searchlight post at Brean Down fort, Somerset. A baby squirrel at Secret World. Photos © Nigel and Sue Wilkes.

Chester Races

It’s almost time for Chester Races, one of the highlights of the city’s social scene. Sports-mad Regency gentlemen pursued the pleasures of the ‘fancy’ - cock-fighting, boxing, the turf, the chase and so on - with great relish. Horse-racing was immensely popular. The Prince Regent bred horses, and one of his successes was ‘The Smoker,’ a famous Cheshire racehorse run by Sir John Fleming Leicester of Tabley.

Races have been held at the Roodee since about 1539, except during the Civil War and Interregnum. The Stranger’s Companion described the scene at the Roodee in the 1820s: ‘The annual races…commence the first Monday in May, and continue five days, during which all is bustle and gaiety. The ground…is extremely well adapted for the diversion and convenience of the spectators …The races are kept up with true sportsmanlike respectability…when the sport is once begun, nothing can equal the interesting effect which it gives. The people …range themselves one above another on the bank, and give an appearance very like an immense theatre, whilst the wall is surmounted by a large assemblage of fashion and beauty, collected from all parts of the city and neighbourhood.'
One larger-than-life character often seen at Chester Races was 'Mad Jack' Mytton (1796-1834), who lived on seven bottles of port wine a day. Mytton also ran horses at Tarporley Hunt Races, over a new course near Cotebrook in the Delamere Forest. (Tarporley Hunt races, founded c.1776, were held at Crabtree Green until 1815, when Delamere Forest was enclosed). Horse races also took place at Macclesfield, Nantwich, Northwich, and Sandbach; Farndon held flat races until 1803. In Regency times, Knutsford races were ‘remarkable for being honoured with a more brilliant assemblage of nobility and gentry than any other in the county; not excepting even Chester.’ (Cowdroy’s Directory, 1796). You can find out more about the county’s racing scene and ‘Mad Jack’ and his amazing career in Regency Cheshire.
Image: Chester Grandstand (designed by Thomas Harrison) at the Roodee. Stranger’s Companion in Chester, 4th edition, c. 1828.

Election Fever!

The date of the general election has been fixed at last, and no doubt for the next few weeks we will be inundated with political analysis and comment on every TV and radio channel.

Election campaigns in Regency times were positively bloodthirsty affairs. Vote-rigging, bribery, and fistfights between rival supporters were the order of the day. The electoral system was rotten to the core and ripe for reform. Very few people had the vote, only ‘forty shilling freeholders,’ that is, those with property worth forty shillings or more. Parliamentary seats were bought and sold; they were even advertised for sale in the newspapers. There was no secret ballot, so a would-be MP could check whether his money used for ‘treating’ electors was well spent.

Cheshire had four parliamentary seats: two for the county as a whole, and two for the city of Chester. The Cheshire parliamentary seats were carved up between eminent county families. Between 1785 and 1829 Sir Robert Salusbury Cotton, John Crewe of Crewe, Davies Davenport of Capesthorne, Thomas Cholmondeley of Vale Royal and the Egertons of Tatton shared the honours pretty equally. Cotton and Crewe were Whigs; Davenport an Independent; Cholmondeley and Egerton were Tories. The all-powerful Grosvenor family of Eaton Hall held at least one but more typically both Chester city seats between 1780 and 1830. The Grosvenors spent over £20,000 on drinks alone for voters during the contentious 1784 city election to grease the wheels for their candidates Wilbraham Bootle and Thomas Grosvenor. 

Chester was notorious for its political in-fighting, and there were frequent riots on its streets during election time. You can read more about election fever in the county during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and some of the colourful characters involved, in Regency Cheshire.
Image: Section of map of planned Parliamentary Divisions for Chester in 1832 by Lt. Robert K. Dawson

Real Life in Regency England

We’ve all coveted the fashion prints, or explored the stately homes and gardens, or perhaps pictured ourselves whirling around a ballroom with Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett. But are we in danger of losing sight of the ‘real’ Regency?
It’s easy to get seduced by the affluent lifestyles of the upper classes. Yet the Regency was an age of contrasts. Far away from the glitzy world of clubs like Almack’s and White’s, social unrest in counties such as Cheshire embodied the real spirit of the age. 

The Napoleonic Wars placed a huge financial burden on Britain. The working classes groaned under the weight of taxes on tea, soap, salt, sugar and other household items. War and a succession of bad harvests led to great hardship. When bread prices hit famine levels in 1812, workers rioted. The Luddites attacked mill owners’ factories and homes. The Corn Laws, introduced in 1815 to protect the profits of the landed and farming interests, kept the price of corn at grossly inflated levels. Two years later, celebrity chef Carême created a famous feast at Brighton Pavilion for the Prince Regent and guests with over 100 different dishes on the menu.

The working classes bitterly resented the Corn Laws, but they had no vote. Booming industrial towns such as Manchester and Stockport, with spiralling populations, had no representation in parliament. Political tension simmered between the upper and lower classes. It’s a measure of workers’ desperation that they risked their lives for change. The Radical reform movement was brutally repressed by a paranoid administration terrified that Revolution would cross the Channel from France. Lancashire and Cheshire workers protesting peacefully in the ‘march of the Blanketeers’ and on the field of Peterloo were met by the gleaming sabres of the yeomanry cavalry.

The penal code was savage; land and property were sacrosanct. Men faced transportation for stealing a pheasant to feed their families. Medieval punishments such as the stocks and scold’s bridle were still used in Cheshire towns. Even children could face a death sentence for stealing property worth seven shillings or more, although in practice the sentence was often commuted to transportation. Eleven year old Samuel Jones spent six months in Knutsford’s House of Correction in 1828 for stealing linen.
It’s fair to say that many members of the privileged classes took their social responsibilities very seriously. Jane Austen was well acquainted with the nature of poverty. In Emma (1816), she describes the cottage of a ‘poor sick family’ living near Highbury, with its ‘outward wretchedness’ and ‘still greater within.’ It’s one of Emma Woodhouse’s nicer traits that she is ‘very compassionate’, and Georgian charity flowed freely. In Cheshire, charity balls were held and soup kitchens set up to help relieve silk workers’ families suffering during a trade depression, which was exacerbated by the banking crash of 1825-6.
Many silk and cotton workers were children and young people. Those elegant muslins and silks depicted in La Belle Assemblée and the Lady's Monthly Museum were made by cheap child labour.
The new factories springing up during the industrial revolution needed workers. Some were ‘free’ labour children sent to the mill by their parents. Farmer’s boy Adam Rushton hated the long hours he worked in the Macclesfield silk mills, but his impoverished parents needed his wages. In one Stockport cotton mill in 1816, 145 of its 418 workers were under eighteen. Tiny children were small enough to crawl under and clean the ‘mules’ which spun cotton; their fingers could nimbly fasten together broken threads. Children as young as five years old worked for fourteen hours a day or more for a few pennies each day.
Other child workers were parish apprentices. Some London parishes sent cartloads of workhouse children to northern counties. These children were apprenticed to factory owners from age nine or ten until they were twenty-one. The parish apprentices were legally owned by their masters, who didn’t pay the children a wage – just fed and clothed them.
By contrast, ‘The First Gentleman of Europe’ squandered £30,000 p.a. on his racing establishment alone. The Prince Regent alienated his subjects with his spendthrift ways, gambling, love affairs and bitter feud with Prince Caroline. William Cobbett commented that when George IV was buried in July 1830, the people of London, far from showing grief, treated the event as a public holiday.
So spare a thought for those who really paid for the dreaming spires of Brighton Pavilion: the impoverished millions who also inhabited Jane Austen’s ‘Regency World.’

This article first appeared in Jane Austen's Regency World. © Sue Wilkes.
Images: Men’s fashions, winter wear, French engraving by Camus, c.1830. French modes were in vogue, even though England was at war with France.

Map of Cheshire, 1819 by John Cary. West is at the top of the map.

Scold’s Bridle or Brank. Chambers’ Book of Days, Vol. II, 1864.

The Big Cheese

At last we have some daffodils blooming in our garden – I cannot remember them being this late for many years. Spring was a busy time for farmers in Regency Cheshire. Ploughing for barley began in April, and in May farmers started work on their potato crop. The end of the Napoleonic wars was a very bad time for Cheshire farmers; they found it very difficult to sell their produce, because there was a trade depression.

Cheshire, of course, was famous for its cheese. The best dairies were in the Nantwich area. The Weaver valley was said to produce some of the finest cheese in the county. During the early nineteenth century, 92,000 cows were kept for dairy production; about 11,500 tons of cheese were produced each year. Whey left over from the cheese-making process was used to feed pigs; the pigs favoured by Cheshire farmers were a mixture of long-eared and short-eared breeds.

In 1825, huge cheeses were presented as gifts to the Duke of York and the Bishop of Chester by some ‘No Popery’ Cheshire folk as a mark of approbation for the peers’ stance against Catholic Emancipation. The Duke of York’s cheese weighed 132 lb.

Image: ‘The Cow and the Mischievous Boy,' and ‘The Bull, the Pig and the Robbers’. Engravings by Harrison Weir and J.Greenaway, Children’s Picture Book of the Sagacity of Animals, George Routledge & Sons, 1872).