Yeomanry Cavalry
The Yeomanry Cavalry was the mounted component of the British Volunteer Corps. It was established in the late 18th century amid fears of invasion and insurrection during the French Revolutionary Wars. A yeoman was a person of respectable standing, one social rank below a gentleman, and the yeomanry was initially a rural, county-based force.
About Yeomanry Cavalry in brief
The Yeomanry Cavalry was the mounted component of the British Volunteer Corps. It was established in the late 18th century amid fears of invasion and insurrection during the French Revolutionary Wars. A yeoman was a person of respectable standing, one social rank below a gentleman, and the yeomanry was initially a rural, county-based force. Members were required to provide their own horses and were recruited mainly from landholders and tenant farmers, though the middle class also featured prominently in the rank and file. Officers were largely recruited from among the nobility and landed gentry, and although social status was an important qualification, the primary factor was personal wealth. Most famously, it was largely responsible for the Peterloo Massacre, in which some 17 people were killed and up to 650 were injured, while policing a rally for parliamentary reform in Manchester in 1819. It ceased to exist as a separate institution in 1908, when theYeomanry became the mounted part of the Territorial Force. Yeomanries fought mounted and dismounted in both the First World War and the Second World War, and are now maintained in the 21st century largely by four yeomanRY regiments of the Army Reserve. The yeomanries are represented as squadrons in many 19th century regiments, including the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers and the Queen’s Royal Hussars, which are represented in squadrons as well as in the Royal Artillery and the Royal Engineers. The Yeomanrys were formed to defend the country against foreign invasion, adding to fears that the French Revolution would provide a model that might be emulated in Great Britain.
In 1793, the French government declared war on Great Britain, adding the fear of foreign invasion to that of domestic insurrection and leading to panic in London. The regular army was not sufficient to defend against the French, so the British Army had already deployed six brigades alongside the Austrian army in the Netherlands, which was not the main military reserve, and was not enough to defend Britain from the French revolution. TheYeomanries were formed in response to this, and were deployed in support of local authorities to suppress civil unrest, most notably during the food riots of 1795. Its only use in national defence was in 1797, when it helped defeat a small French invasion in the Battle of Fishguard. It declined in strength, surviving largely due to its members political influence and willingness to subsidise the force financially. Around the same time, the Industrial Revolution brought increasing urbanisation, which led to ever greater demands for food away from farms. Poverty and disenfranchisement led to social discontent in urban towns such as Birmingham and Manchester. The last, in 1892, found a place for the yeomonry in the country’s mobilisation scheme, but it was not until a succession of failures by the regular army during the Second Boer War that the yeomenry found a new relevance as mounted infantry. It provided the nucleus for the separate Imperial YeomanRY, and after the war, the yeormanry was re-branded en bloc as the Imperial Yeomenry.
You want to know more about Yeomanry Cavalry?
This page is based on the article Yeomanry Cavalry published in Wikipedia (as of Oct. 31, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
