T]the events are Chatterton are not officially named as one of the massacres in this country. The indiscriminate killings at Chatterton 196 years ago are then, in effect, Britain’s’ hidden massacre. This must change. (David Gordon Scott, 2022)
Three years ago, when I wrote these words, I argued that the indiscriminate killings at Chatterton, 26th April1826 should be described as “Britain’s hidden massacre”. My claim was not that the deaths had been entirely forgotten, but rather, that what happened that day had become concealed and subject to widespread misunderstandings. Whilst there was knowledge people were killed during the ‘Lancashire Rising’, at the same time the events at Chatterton were mired in a kind of ideological fog which obscured truth. I referred to this “mystification” as form of “knowledge injustice” and argued that the efforts to re-frame the events at Chatterton as a massacre were a matter of reclaiming truth and justice from below.
Three years later, with the 200th Anniversary of the Lancashire Rising now only several months away, it seems a good time to reflect on the progress made in re-framing Chatterton. There undoubtedly has been a significant shift in understandings. This can be evidenced via a ‘google search’ of the Chatterton Massacre. Since March 2022 several local newspapers, The Open University, The Weavers Uprising Bicentennial Committee and the BBC, among others, have consistently referred to what happened as a massacre. At all three annual commemorations held at Chatterton since 2022, these indiscriminate killings have been referred to in the same way. This framing also underscores the shared narrative of the Heritage Fund grant for the bicentennial commemorations of the Lancashire Rising and several heritage sites and museums also deploy this language. A global panel of experts on state crime has recently been convened to facilitate international recognition of this framing as a massacre, whereas local residents of Chatterton today also object to the “riot” label and wish for it to be changed.
Although Chatterton is still sometimes referred to as a “riot” or a “fight”, momentum is shifting. Over the last three years the language of “riot” has certainly been dislodged from its previous dominance and there now seems little appetite to use “riot” to describe either the events at Chatterton or the Lancashire Rising. The previously less well used term “fight” has though proved more resilient. “Fight” is an alternative word to describe the legal term “affray”, which historically referred to breaches of the peace when the Riot Act had not been read. Whilst several references do exist to affray/fight in historical accounts, it remains a woefully inadequate descriptor of the killings at Chatterton. First, fight/affray is the language of the powerful, imbued with certain legal connotations and meanings. Second, as legal alternative to “riot” it implies similar assumptions about the moral culpability of the crowd in generating the disturbance. Third, today the word “fight” is used differently to the 1820s and now describes incidents where small numbers of people are involved in the mutual exchange of blows. At no point does “fight” imply today the inequality of arms at Chatterton, where trained sharp shooters fired hundreds of bullets into a crowd comprised of 3,000 starving working-class people with no ammunition but the stones on the floor around them. Fourth, the use of the word “fight” does not reveal the historical truth that some of these people were indiscriminately killed. Their deaths remain mystified. To paraphrase another commentator, at best using the language of “riot” or “fight” legitimates the claims of the governing authorities at the time; at worst, they obscure the historical truth of the massacre and perpetuate knowledge injustice.
But there is a further obvious reason why Chatterton should be referred to as a massacre – what happened on 26th April 1826 is remarkably like several other massacres. A cursory glance at The Boston Massacre, 5th March 1770, where five American protestors were shot dead by British soldiers, immediately indicates strong parallels with the indiscriminate killings at Chatterton. Chatterton also closely mirrors the Massacre of St George’s Field, London, 10th May 1768. Similarities include the reading of the Riot Act to an assembled crowd of thousands; the throwing of stones by the crowd and then soldiers indiscriminately firing into “the mob” when one of these stones hits a senior state authority; the indiscriminate killing of several protestors when the shooting starts followed sometime later with the death of a bystander with a stray bullet; to uncertainty about actual number of deaths and a failure to establish all their names.
Chatterton may not yet be officially defined as a British massacre. But evidence is overwhelming that it should be.
