Notes

1 This piece benefited from the comments of Madge Dresser, Ryan Smith, Rivka Swenson, Nicholas Woolf, and the other members of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Eighteenth-Century Studies Reading Group.

2 There has been very little work done on Winscom. She has an entry in the DNB (Grundy). The entry in Janet Todd’s A Dictionary of British and American Women Writers, 1660-1800 laments her “limited poetic powers.” Her work has been anthologized in Roger Lonsdale’s Eighteenth-Century Women Poets: An Oxford Anthology and Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia’s British Women Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century. Winscom suffered debilitating headaches which she discussed in her poetry and that has been the object of some scholarly attention including Elizabeth McKim’s article, “Making Poetry of Pain: The Headache Poems of Jane Cave Winscom.” Another piece on her Welsh identity has been published, Catherine Messem’s “Irreconcilable Tensions; Gender, Class and the Welsh Question in the Poetry of Jane Cave (c1754-1813).”

3 In her poem, “Lines Sent to an Examiner in the Excise” (1794), Winscom complains about the expense and inconvenience of repeated moves: “And should you stand, soon comes your rout, / For each fourth year you’re moved about” (23).

4 Nicholas Rogers continues: “In Bristol and Liverpool, two of the principal provincial ports in the eighteenth century, the adult male population threatened by impressment was probably a quarter or more, which helps to explain why the subject inflamed the passions of those cities” (8).

5 Rogers also details how those involved in anything related to naval activities (who were of course highly desirable to a press gang) collaborated to further elude and deter press gangs.

6 As Clarkson’s report went on to detail, the mortality rate for seamen on slave ships was particularly high. For example, Clarkson notes that Bristol slave ships “have had no accommodations or places of shelter for the seamen, either in sickness or in health” (67). That line of argument—that part of the damage of the slave trade was the effects on the nation’s seamen, the ships being “not a nursery but a graveyard”—was consistently used by the anti-slavery movement.

7 Shiercliff goes on to describe the considerable number of sugar refineries that existed in Bristol and the high quality of their product. “By which means loaf sugar is made here, and sold on better terms than can be done elsewhere, and in general the single refined sugars of Bristol, are held in higher estimation, and will fetch a better price abroad, than that which they receive from other places” (18) He also details the advantages of international trade for Bristol’s economy: “merchants have not only the greatest trade, but they trade also with a more intire (sic) independence upon London, than any other town in Britain; whatever exportations they make to any part of the world, they are able to bring back the returns to their own port, and can dispose of them there” (14).

8 Harrison suggests, in a departure from the argument of Jones, that associations of this episode with anxiety about the French Revolution “is founded upon the false premise that a riot in 1793 must, somehow, have close links with the impact of the French revolution” (558).

9 Jones goes on to note how this belief provides the “legitimizing notion” E.P. Thompson describes as present in most eighteenth-century riots in his well-known essay, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century.”

10 The so-called Riot Act (1 Geo. I. §2, c. 5) was introduced in 1715. The Act made it a felony for an assembly of more than twelve people to refuse to disperse within one hour of being ordered to do so and having been read a specified portion of the Act by lawful authority, and provided that after this hour the assembly could be dispersed by force. To read the Riot Act, one would recite the following: “Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God Save the King!”

11 Except where otherwise indicated, this account of the events at the Bristol Bridge is taken primarily from the previously cited, John Rose, An Impartial History of the Late Disturbances in Bristol (1793).

12 Or “A Poem, Occasioned by Hearing Prophane Cursing and Swearing” finds the use of profanity cause for divine vengeance:

And can we wonder, if the sword

Is plung’d in Brothers blood?

If threat’ning vengeance flies around

From a tremendous God. (1-4)

13 In the 1794 edition of Poems on Various Subjects, the poem’s title added the phrase “Written During the American War.”

14 Jane Cave’s first volume of poetry, Poems on Various Subjects, Entertaining, Elegiac, and Religious, was published by subscription in Winchester in 1783. In 1786, Poems on Various Subjects, Entertaining, Elegiac, and Religious. With a Few Select Poems from Other Authors. By Miss Cave. Now Mrs. W---- was published in Bristol “for the author” with additional subscribers. A second edition was published in 1789 in Shrewsbury. The 1794 edition was described on the title page as “The Fourth Edition, Corrected and Improved, with Many Additional Poems, Never before Published.” It was published in Bristol by N. Biggs. It asserts that the “great Number of Nobility and other respectable Persons who subscribed to the former Editions of this Work, it is presumed, will be a sufficient Recommendation to every future Purchaser” (A3). It then provides a select list of the “more than Fifteen Hundred” previous subscribers. Throughout her writing, Winscom also presents local “calamities” as a kind of divine retribution. “Do not a nation’s sad offences call / For national calamities to fall?” (17-18) she asks in “On the First General Fast after the Commencement of the late War.”

15 Winscom specifically places these scenes of torture on the streets, suggesting again that she is alluding both to public beatings of slave or also the public display of governmental control with the shootings at the Bristol Bridge.

16 “To make matters even more complicated, and cause potential confusion in the chain of command,” details Michael Manson, “the militia were under the order not of their own officers, but of the local magistrates.” (49).

17 There are numerous examples of the military exacting punishment in this way. For example, The History of the Rebellion in 1745 and 1746 details how Maiben, a journeyman apprentice to a wigmaker, was “stripped, tied to halberts in the market place, and whipped” for making disparaging comments about a military officer. Francis Douglas, The History of the Rebellion in 1745 and 1746, Extracted from the Scots Magazine: With an Appendix (261). A 1794 collection, Politics for the People: Or, a Salmagundi for Swine, details how, for stealing two eggs “The poor volunteer to the halberts is tied,” and flogged until “the blood gushes down from his nape to his heels” (173).