We tend to think of Manchester as the shock city of the Industrial Revolution, but its roots are much older. It was founded in A.D. 79, the same year that another Roman city, Pompeii, was buried beneath the lava of Vesuvius. A Roman fort was built on an area of higher land near the junction of the Rivers Irwell and Medlock and, from it, the soldiers of the Roman Empire tried to maintain law and order among the warring tribes of the region.
Law and order has been an issue for Manchester for much of its history. Republican views led to Manchester supporting Parliament in the Civil War, leading the Royalists to try to besiege the town. Although the townspeople were successful militarily, the disruption to trade caused by the war plunged the city into poverty. In both 1715 and 1745, the town was associated (more or less willingly) with the two Stuart pretenders to the throne (the younger being the famous Bonnie Prince Charlie). They used Manchester as a base as they made their way south, to overthrow the established order (and then back north, fleeing the wrath of their opponents).
In the eighteenth century, urban growth outstripped the town’s ability to feed itself. It led to a series of food riots which, on occasions, required the intervention of the armed forces to restore order. In 1819 it was the authorities that were responsible for the breakdown in order. A peaceful demonstration of thousands of working people at St Peters Fields (roughly on the site of the old Free Trade Hall) was turned into carnage as an ill-disciplined militia, fuelled by exaggerated rumours of unrest, rode into the crowd with swords drawn. The result was the infamous Peterloo massacre. It was still bitterly remembered a decade later, when Prime Minister the Duke of Wellington came to the city in 1830 to open the railway from Liverpool, and had to leave again, rather more quickly than he expected.
The nineteenth century saw industrial unrest on a huge scale, when the Plug Plot Riots of 1842 attempted to close down the region’s textile industries. Irish Republican Fenians fought a gun battle with police in the streets of the city in 1867 to free convicted compatriots; this was the start of over a century of sporadic Republican outrages in the city, which culminated in the giant car bomb of 1996 that destroyed large swathes of the city centre.
We have not even got on yet to Marxism, the most influential revolutionary movement of the twentieth century, or the violently militant Suffragettes, both of which movements can claim to have their origins in Manchester.
Law and order – just one strand from Manchester’s long and fascinating history.
Stuart Hylton is the author of the newly published The Little Book of Manchester
Further Reading:
* The Little Book of Manchester by Stuart Hylton
* Manchester: From the Robert Banks Collection by James Stanhope-Brown
* Manchester Then & Now by Chris Makepeace
* South Manchester Remembered by Graham Pythian
* Irish Manchester Revisited by Alan Keegan & Danny Claffey
* The Manchester Book of Days by Ben McGarr
* Not A Guide To: Manchester by Ben McGarr