Douglas Hay – författare

The period from 1688-1820 was marked throughout with riots and rebellions, seditions and strikes. Yet it began with the welcoming of Prince William of Orange, whose coronation was widely celebrated as a move towards a more democratic state. Parliament and the courts were set to become a central feature of political life. But in 1819, fifteen men, women, and children were killed and over 400 injured when the yeomanry, directed by the magistracy, attacked the mass meeting for parliamentary reform at St Peter's Field, Manchester.The long eighteenth century was characterized by the gradual erosion of consensual politics: the transfer from a cross-class consensus based on the Whig/Tory divide to divisions based instead on the notion that the state privileged the interests of certain social groups over others. This book draws together the implications of recent work on demography, labour, and law to assess their importance for defining those moments and places where class interests met and conflicted. By focusing on the experiences of the eighty percent of the population who made up England's `lower orders', Douglas Hay and Nicholas Rogers accord new significance to food shortages, changes in poor relief, use of the criminal law, and the shifts in social power caused by industrialization which would bring about the birth of working-class radicalism.

In the popular imagination, informed as it is by Hogarth, Swift, Defoe and Fielding, the eighteenth-century underworld is a place of bawdy knockabout, rife with colourful eccentrics. But the artistic portrayals we have only hint at the dark reality. In this new edition of a classic collection of essays, renowned social historians from Britain and America examine the gangs of criminals who tore apart English society, while a criminal law of unexampled savagery struggled to maintain stability.Douglas Hay deals with the legal system that maintained the propertied classes, and in another essay shows it in brutal action against poachers; John G. Rule and Cal Winslow tell of smugglers and wreckers, showing how these activities formed a natural part of the life of traditional communities. Together with Peter Linebaugh's piece on the riots against the surgeons at Tyburn, and E. P. Thompson's illuminating work on anonymous threatening letters, these essays form a powerful contribution to the study of social tensions at a transformative and vibrant stage in English history.This new edition includes a new introduction by Winslow, Hay and Linebaugh, reflecting on the turning point in the social history of crime that the book represents.