A radical, an acquittal, and the year the British state tried to hang men for asking for a reform bill
The Tooke Arms holds a 4.4 from a hundred and seventy reviews, and if the man in the name is John Horne Tooke, he was tried for his life for wanting parliamentary reform.
1794
Which was a bad year to be a radical in England.
Because the French Revolution had happened, and it had turned to the Terror, and the British government was frightened – genuinely, and not unreasonably – that the same thing was coming here.
And it responded by attacking the reform movement.
What they actually wanted
Which is the part that stops you.
Because the reformers were not, in the main, revolutionaries.
They wanted the vote extended. They wanted annual parliaments. They wanted the rotten boroughs abolished – which were seats with almost no electors, controlled by a single landowner, who simply appointed the member.
Every single one of those things is now either law or unremarkable.
And in 1794 it was capital treason.
The trials
Thomas Hardy – a shoemaker, and the secretary of the London Corresponding Society. John Horne Tooke. John Thelwall.
And they were charged with compassing the death of the King, which was the treason statute, and which carried hanging, drawing and quartering.
The argument was that a reform of Parliament would necessarily lead to a republic, and a republic to regicide.
Which is a chain of inference so long that even the jury could not follow it.
And they were acquitted
All of them.
Which is genuinely one of the better moments in English legal history – because the juries simply would not do it.
They were presented with a shoemaker who had written some pamphlets, and asked to hang him, and they said no.
The Prat’s editorial desk regards the 1794 acquittals as the strongest available argument for the jury, and notes that the government’s response was not to reconsider.
It was to change the law
Because within a year the Treasonable Practices Act and the Seditious Meetings Act had been passed – broadening treason, and restricting public meetings to fewer than fifty people without a magistrate’s permission.
If you cannot convict them, redefine the crime.
Which is the finding
Eight postcodes and a thousand and one hundred and ninety-five articles.
Every community that has had nowhere to go has met in a room where drink is served – because the Corresponding Societies met in pubs, and it was illegal to combine, and nobody could prove why twelve men were in one.
And Tooke was a linguist
Which is the strangest thing about him.
Because he wrote a book on etymology – a long, eccentric, enormously influential work arguing that all the abstract parts of speech were worn-down remains of concrete words.
That a preposition was once a verb. That an abstraction is always a fossil of something physical.
Much of his specific linguistics is now regarded as wrong.
And the instinct – that words carry buried in them the objects they came from – is exactly what this survey has spent twelve hundred articles demonstrating.
Verdict
Good pub, honest number.
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