‘To be Shot Like a Crow…’

by Philip Morgan

In 1792, if you were an agricultural labourer in Oxfordshire with no skilled trade, life was hard. The only thing you had to sell was your labour, and that was needed only now and again: harvest time, haymaking, perhaps a bit of hedging and ditching in between. When there was work, the pay was dreadful.

You might have known that France was the enemy but you wouldn’t have felt that had much to do with you.

But every county had to supply a certain number of men to the ‘Militia List,’ a kind of compulsory Territorial Army. In Oxfordshire it was about 560. The names of all eligible men in the county were put in a box and the first 560 drawn out had to join. They had to serve three years. The service in peace time consisted of one four-week training camp a year. Your name hadn’t come up yet. You thought it might be quite a laugh if it did: get away from the village and learn how to fire a musket. So, when you were offered twenty pounds to take the place of the butcher’s son, whose name had turned up, you didn’t hesitate. Twenty pounds was more than you could earn in a year and all you had to do was go on some sort of camp. Money for nothing. What could possibly go wrong?

The French Revolution was what went wrong. In 1792 France abolished the monarchy. The British government started to get very worried. They were terrified that the revolution would spread into England, so in December 1792 they ‘embodied’ the militia which meant that now it and you were part of the full-time army and were marched off to the south of England to join the thousands of soldiers preparing for a possible invasion.

You received eight pence a day, but six pence were deducted for food and ‘necessities’: gaiter and shoe repairs, soap, combs, pipeclay to whiten your belts, and the flour needed to powder your pigtail. That left you with twopence for extra food, tobacco, beer and anything else: hardly a life of luxury.

You were billeted in various places in the south until in January 1795, you arrived at the barracks in East Blatchington near Seaford, twelve miles to the east of Brighton.

Your day began at sunrise with roll call and inspection. You had to be fully dressed and your equipment spotless, if not you could be flogged. Then came hours on the parade ground, practising the complicated manoeuvres needed to fire and move as a unit. The problem was that the parade ground was in Brighton.

So, every day you marched there and back: twenty-four miles.

And on top of that, you were always hungry.

The harvest of 1794 had failed. Prices rocketed. Wheat, bread, and meat more than doubled in price, but the army allowance per man stayed the same.

And you starved.

You saw the well-fed officers on their thorough-bred horses. You saw full flour wagons escorted by soldiers leaving the mill at Tide Mills, destined for others. You brooded on the unfairness of it all: especially the fact that you had to pay for the flour to whiten your pigtail.

On the evening of Thursday 16 April, 1795, the hunger and resentment became too much. A group of you marched into Seaford and demanded that the local butcher reduce his prices. When he refused, you threw some money on the counter and dragged the meat into the street where it was shared chaotically between soldiers and local folk. It didn’t feel like theft. It felt like feeding starving people.

That night, excitement swept through the barracks. Why stop at one shop? The next morning, a larger group, bayonets fixed, marched into Seaford and seized whatever food they could find. Again, the distribution was chaotic and indiscriminate. But only food was taken: no money, no valuables, no pointless destruction.

This was not looting. It was hunger.

Another group marched to the flour mill at Tide Mills and occupied it.They seized 300 bags of flour and unloaded a ship carrying flour bound for Falmouth. They began selling food at fair prices, and a group of sixty men stayed on site to hold the mill. The officers panicked. This was revolution. Where might it end? Troops were called in: the Lancashire Fencibles from Shoreham and the Horse Artillery from Lewes. They arrived early on Saturday morning complete with cannon.

The rebels quickly surrendered, and by lunchtime the protest had been crushed. Arrests followed. Courts martial were convened. The regiment was placed under martial law. Six men were sentenced to flogging and one to transportation to Australia. And Edward Cooke and Henry Parish — though both seem to have been little more than accidental spokesmen — were sentenced to death.

Prince Frederick, Duke of York & Albany, younger brother of George IV, had been made a Field Marshal earlier that year and, only days before the protest, effectively became commander-in-chief of the army under his father, King George III.

So, determined to demonstrate his authority and terrify anyone else thinking of challenging the status quo, he devised an elaborate public punishment.

You were lucky.

You had not been named, not charged. You knew perfectly well it could just as easily have been you sentenced to death.

In the heavy early morning rain of 13 June 1795 your regiment, surrounded by cavalry and infantry to stop any further protests, was marched to the execution site at Goldstone Bottom, a natural amphitheatre that would later become Hove Park.

Thirteen regiments assembled there and crowds of civilians: about eight thousand people in total.

First came the floggings.

The men sentenced to whipping were tied to posts and lashed. Then Cooke and Parish were led out to die.

They were made to kneel on their coffins facing a firing squad of twelve of their comrades. Forced to watch, you said a heartfelt prayer of thanks that you hadn’t been made to join the firing squad.

The shots rang out. The men fell dead.

Your regiment led the troops in a march past the bodies. As the coffins were born away, blood ran down the backs of the dead men’s comrades carrying them.

The whole show lasted about three and a half hours.

It is said that a local shepherd cut the outline of the coffins in the turf and that these were visible for fifty years.

The authorities felt the show was a success. Public military cruelty of this sort became standard practice in the British armed forces. They believed that only the ‘horrific spectacle’ of comrades killing comrades could prevent French revolutionary ideas spreading through the ranks.

There was widespread public revulsion at the cruelty of the punishment, particularly the deliberate use of fellow soldiers as executioners. Poems attacking the cruelty of prime minister William Pitt the Younger and King George III were pasted up around the county:

“Soldiers to arms and revenge your Cause On those bloody numbskulls, Pitt and George. For since they no longer can send you to France To be murdered like Swine, or pierc’d by the Lance You are sent for by Express to make a speedy Return To be shot like a Crow, or hang’d in your Turn.”

The authorities didn’t care. Public flogging wasn’t banned in the British Army until 1881.

You survived the protest but you were still in the army. With a lot of luck, you might have got to the Peace of Amiens in 1802 and been ‘disembodied’, released from service and gone home.

If your bad luck held, you would have been called up again in 1803 and finally discharged in 1816, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars: twenty-four years of active service. A bit harsh when you thought you were just signing up for an annual training camp.