A cost of living crisis, low wages, high unemployment, militant Trades’ Unions, strikes, a county-wide boycott, protests in Penzance, and a riot in Redruth…
Category Archives: Riots and Social Unrest
Effigy Burning in 1800s Cornwall
What happens when the working classes take the law into their own hands? Nobody was safe from the phenomenon of effigy burning: philanderers, politicians, mine owners, perverts…
Trouble in Clay Country: The Food Riots of 1847, Part Five
The rioters finally meet their match in St Austell. Bayonets at the ready…
The Fugitive: James Jewell: A Prologue to Part Five of the Food Riots of 1847
A rioter on the run…who did he see? Who did he speak to? Did he escape?
Hellfire Corner: Redruth: The Cornish Food Riots, Part Four
Violence, looting, and arrests in Redruth as the miners and militia face off…continuing The Cornish Food Riots of 1847…
Commotion Time: Pool, June 4, 1847: The Cornish Food Riots, Part Three
No relief in Helston. Little in Penzance. Matters get ugly when 3,000 starving people arrive in Pool. Part three of The Cornish Food Riots of 1847…
Rise of the Miners: The Food Riots of 1847, Part Two
Things are getting worse. The miners get organised. The miners march for food – and the authorities react…
The Cornish Food Riots of 1847: Background and Context
The people are hungry! The miners are rising! A series of five posts on the food riots that erupted in Cornwall throughout the spring and summer of 1847. No town was safe from the starving thousands, and violence regularly broke out…
In Search of An Gof, Conclusion: An Gof Today?
What of extreme Cornish Nationalist groups and their activities today?
In Search of An Gof, part three: The Two An Gofs
The historic An Gof and the group known as ‘An Gof’: does the use of his name by the 1980s extremists corrupt An Gof’s memory, or are the two ‘An Gofs’ more alike than mainstream pro-Cornish activists would like to admit?
Francis Edwards ~ The Cornish Historian 