An Expanding Watch, 1748-76 31skilful at using large crowds to support his causes.^9 Additionally, disputes
over wages and other employment issues in several London trades led to
widespread strikes and demonstrations that occasionally degenerated into
riots and street battles. The worst years were 1768-69, when several indus-
trial disputes coincided with the political riots surrounding Wilkes's election
to the House of Commons for Middlesex.^10 The coal heavers had a pro-
tracted dispute over wages and hiring practices that turned violent. Seven
men were hanged in Stepney in front of a crowd of 50 000. The strikes and
wage disputes went on in the 1770s - hat dyers in Southwark in 1770, sailors
and tailors in 1772, a combination of coal heavers, watermen, porters and
silk weavers in 1773, hatters in 1775. These workers petitioned the govern-
ment, appealed to magistrates, and bargained with their masters over wages.
They paraded to the Houses of Parliament or the palace, held rallies, and
occasionally rioted in the streets.U
According to George Rude, these political and industrial activities are
best understood in the context of a tradition of crowd action as protest.^12
Riots were not new to London in the 1760s and these riots shared character-
istics with earlier and later crowds.^13 These were very mobile rioters, often
gathering in additional support as they moved. And, Rude notes, 'It is also
perhaps a surprising fact that the most riotous parts of London ... were not
the crowded quarters of St Giles-in-the-Fields or the shadier alleys of Hoi-
born but the more solid and respectable popular districts of the City, the
Strand, Southwark, Shoreditch, and Spitalfields.'^14
These events have been seen as evidence for the extent to which the
working poor in London were prone to crime and to which London was
'unpoliced' in the eighteenth century.^15 Contemporaries, however, did not
always attach that meaning to riots and crowds. They made a distinction
between the responsibility for public order that lay with magistrates and the
military and the responsibility for more ordinary property crime prevention
and detection that lay with parish authorities. Riots very rarely occurred at
night and because of the mobility of rioters, containment by a night watch
was impossible. Only the authority of magistrates was extensive enough
geographically and legally to police crowds. The Riot Act had to be read
by a justice of the peace and only a magistrate could call out the military to
assist civil officials.^16 Riot control, therefore, lay outside both the responsib-
ility and capacity of parish authorities, although constables could be, and
were, called upon to assist magistratesP
Crowds were not necessarily seen as criminal.^18 It was commonplace for
politicians to use hired gangs during elections to sway voters. The Duke of
Newcastle said that he loved mobs and had headed up one himself once.^19
The wage earners, small shopkeepers, and artisans who took to the streets
were the very people on whom local law enforcement relied. It was these
same kind of people who served on watch committees, acted as constables,