History of Norwich

e was a people still in England, the event might turn out to be so." Hayes says that "the outbreak of war, in bringing the worsted manufacture almost to a standstill and so plunging the mass of the Norwich weavers into sudden distress made it almost inevitable that a crude appeal to working-class resentment should take the place of a temperate process of education which the earliest reformers had intended".

However by 1795 it was not just the Norwich rabble which was causing the government concern. In April that year the Norwich Patriotic Society was established, its manifesto declaring "that the great end of civil society was general happiness; that every individual...had a right to share in the government..." In December the price of bread reached its highest yet, and in May 1796, when William Windham was forced to seek re-election following his appointment as war secretary, he only just held his seat. Amid the same disorder and violence as was often the case with Norwich elections, it was only by the narrowest of margins that the radical Bartlett Gurney, campaigning on the platform of "Peace and Gurney – No More War – No more Barley Bread" failed to unseat him.

Though informed by issues of recent national importance, the vibrant two-sided political culture of Norwich in the 1790s cannot be totally disconnected from local tradition. Two features stand out from a political continuum of three centuries. The first is the dichotomous power balance. From at least the time of the Reformation, there is a record of Norwich as a "two-party city". In the mid-16th century the weaving parishes actually fell under the control of opposition forces, as Kett's rebels held the north of the river, in support of poor cloth workers.

Secondly there does seem to be some case for saying that with this tradition of two-sided disputation, the city had over a long period of time developed an infrastructure, evident in her many