Radical Bristol: 1790s

The Watchman: Coleridge, Beddoes and the radical 1790s in Bristol – Mike Jay

During 1795-6, Bristol’s popular protests against Pitt’s ‘Reign of Terror’ were led by two remarkable figures, both recent arrivals in the city: the radical doctor Thomas Beddoes and the young lecturer and poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Together they campaigned against the government’s crackdown on free speech and public assembly, and collaborated on The Watchman, a journal which risked prosecutions for sedition by holding a secretive and paranoid government up to scrutiny. The Watchman captures Beddoes and Coleridge in their moment of radical solidarity, but their paths, and their political convictions, were already beginning to diverge.

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Popular politics in Bristol in the 1790’s – Steve Poole

This paper traces and evaluates popular crowd activity and political initiatives at Bristol during the revolutionary 1790s, from the first formation of radical democratic societies in 1792, and the unprecedented wave of industrial action that accompanied it, to the various efforts of the Corporation to control and suppress ‘seditious speech’. En route, we consider the politics of the so-called Bridge Riot of 1793, the wrecking of several brothels in 1792, a couple of food riots and a two day siege of radical club rooms by a loyalist mob in 1797.

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The Kingswood Colliers & the Cock Rd. Gang -Steve Mills

The Kingswood forest, forest life, free miners, one night house, common land usage and the coal industry. The toll gate riots, Bristol bridge, election riots, rent a mob, ‘reputation’, the Cock Road gang, the 1817 militia and enclosure.

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