Blanketeers

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.

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.

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".

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.

[1] 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",[2] and expressed his relief that no Middleton people went as marchers.

[1] Each marcher had a blanket or rolled overcoat on his back, to sleep under at night and to serve as a sign that the man was a textile worker, giving the march its eventual nickname.

[4] Each group of ten carried a petition bearing twenty names, appealing directly to the Prince Regent to take urgent steps to improve the Lancashire cotton trade.

The cavalry pursued and attacked them, in Ardwick on the outskirts of Manchester and elsewhere, including an incident at Stockport that left several marchers with sabre wounds and one local resident shot dead.

On 12 May Sidmouth circulated instructions to the Lords Lieutenant that magistrates could use their own judgement on what constituted "seditious or blasphemous libel" and could arrest and bail anyone caught selling it.