Peterloo Massacre
The Peterloo Massacre took place at St Peter’s Field, Manchester, Lancashire, England on Monday 16 August 1819. On this day, cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. Between nine and fifteen people were killed and four to seven hundred injured in the ensuing confusion.
About Peterloo Massacre in brief
The Peterloo Massacre took place at St Peter’s Field, Manchester, Lancashire, England on Monday 16 August 1819. On this day, cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation. Between nine and fifteen people were killed and four to seven hundred injured in the ensuing confusion. Peterloo’s immediate effect was to cause the government to pass the Six Acts, which were aimed at suppressing any meetings for the purpose of radical reform. It also led indirectly to the foundation of the Manchester Guardian newspaper. In 2019, on the 200th anniversary of the massacre, Manchester City Council inaugurated a new Peterloo Memorial by the artist Jeremy Deller, featuring eleven concentric circles of local stone engraved with the names of the dead and the places from which the victims came. For some time, Peterloo was commemorated only by a blue plaque, criticised as being inadequate and referring only to the \”dispersal by the military\” of an assembly. In 2007, the City Council replaced the blue plaque with a red plaque with less euphemistic wording, explicitly referring to \”a peaceful rally\” being ‘attacked by armed cavalry’ and mentioning ’15 deaths and over 600 injuries’ The event was first labelled the ‘Peterloo massacre’ by the radical Manchester Observer newspaper in a bitterly ironic reference to the bloody Battle of Waterloo which had taken place four years earlier. In 1816, Thomas Oldfield’s History of the House of Commons and the Counties of Great Britain and Ireland; being a History of Commons, Counties and Boroughs of the United Kingdom and Ireland, was published.
It claimed that the earliest MPs for England and Wales were returned by the patronage of 177 individuals and 16 by the direct patronage of the Scottish government: all 45 Scottish MPs. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, a brief boom in textile manufacture was followed by chronic economic depression, particularly among the textile manufacturers. These inequalities in political representation led to calls for reform in political reform in 1819, particularly in the industrial north. The major urban centres of Manchester, Salford, Bolton, Blackburn, Rochdale, Ashton-under-Lyne, Oldham and Stockport had no MPs of their own, and only a few hundred county voters. Nationally the so-called rotten boroughs had a hugely disproportionate influence on the membership of the Parliament of the UK compared to the size of their populations. By the early 19th century, half of all MPs returned by a total of just 154 or closed boroughs were owned by the owners of rotten Boroughs or Boroughs, and a further 16 of the Boroughs and Counties. All 45 MPs owed their seats to their patronage of Scottish government; all 45 of the MPs for Scotland and Wales owed their patronage to the Scottish Parliament; and all 45 from the Welsh Parliament owed their seat to their Scottish government. In 1819 there were only 17,000 voters in the towns of Clitheroe, Newton, Wigan, Lancaster, Liverpool, and Preston.
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This page is based on the article Peterloo Massacre published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 04, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
