page_title: Blanketeers
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Blanketeers / Background
caption_attribution_description: A portrait of Samuel Bamford, a British radical writer and reformer from Lancashire, England.
context_page_description: The Blanketeers or Blanket March was a demonstration organised in Manchester in March 1817. The intention was for the participants, who were mainly Lancashire weavers, to march to London and petition the Prince Regent over the desperate state of the textile industry in Lancashire, and to protest over the recent suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. The march was broken up violently and its leaders imprisoned. The Blanketeers formed part of a series of protests and calls for reform that culminated in the Peterloo massacre and the Six Acts.
context_section_description: England suffered economic hardship in the years immediately following the Napoleonic Wars, and Lord Liverpool's government faced growing demands for social, political and economic reform. In the textile towns of the industrial north, wages fell sharply as the factory system developed, and traditional handloom weavers were among the worst affected. The Corn Laws of 1815 onward were intended to protect British agricultural landowners from cheap foreign imports, but their effect was to increase grain prices and decrease supplies, causing hardship among the poor.  In 1816 (the "Year without a summer") severe weather resulted in poor harvests, leading to further food shortages during the winter of 1816–1817.  Discontent led to riots, first in some country districts and then in towns and cities, notably the London Spa Fields riots of November–December 1816.  A Reform Bill for universal suffrage was drafted, with considerable input from the Northern radicals, and presented to Parliament at the end of January by Thomas Cochrane, but it was rejected on procedural grounds by the House of Commons.  After the Prince Regent's coach was attacked on the way back from Parliament on 28 January 1817, the government embarked on the so-called "Gag Acts", a number of measures to repress the radicals, including the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act.  The rejection of the draft bill, and the increasingly repressive measure, led to a series of events that included the Blanketeers' march, as the radicals attempted, as Poole puts it: "to appeal in the last resort to the crown over the head of parliament, and to exercise in person the right of petitioning which had been denied them by proxy".
  In January and February 1817, various workers' and deputies' meetings in Manchester were addressed by the radical orators Samuel Drummond and John Bagguley.  A recurring theme of these meetings was the supposed legal right of individuals to address petitions directly to the Crown.  Drummond and Bagguley helped plan a march to London to present such a petition, holding meetings along the way and encouraging others to join the demonstration, and these plans were announced by William Benbow at a public meeting in Manchester on 3 March, at which the hope was expressed that the marchers would be 20,000 strong.
  Some Lancashire reformers opposed the march and advised their supporters not to take part.  Samuel Bamford, a weaver, writer and radical leader from Middleton, had been part of the delegation to London to discuss and forward the abortive Reform Bill. He thought the march ill-planned and unwise, predicting that they would be "denounced as robbers and rebels and the military would be brought to cut them down or take them prisoners", and expressed his relief that no Middleton people went as marchers.  Bamford would later claim that one of the organisers disappeared with the money raised to feed the Blanketeers, leaving them without a means of support on the march.
caption: Samuel Bamford opposed the march, but was arrested in the aftermath
exif: {}