17 September 2021
The Peterloo Massacre of 16 August 1819. The Manchester and Salford Yeomanry cavalry regiment violently disperses a crowd of peaceful demonstrators and attempts to arrest its leaders at St. Peter’s Field, Manchester, England. Eighteen people were killed and hundreds injured. The Riot Act of 1715 was not read on this occasion, although it had been for previous demonstrations at that location where the crowd had dispersed peacefully. Saber-wielding cavalrymen charge into a crowd of demonstrators, while six men and one woman, bearing banners with Phrygian caps atop them, look on in horror from the speakers’ platform.
To read the riot act is to issue a reprimand and warning—cease what you’re doing or else—but it once meant to issue an official, and much more serious, legal notice. The British Riot Act of 1715, or giving its official title An Act for Preventing Tumults and Riotous Assemblies, and for the More Speedy and Effectual Punishing the Rioters (Anno primo Georgii I. Stat. 2. C. 5.), was passed in the first year of the reign of George I. At its heart, the act said that when a government official told a crowd of twelve or more to disperse, they must do so within an hour or face the death penalty. The key portion of the act reads:
That if any persons to the number of twelve or more, being unlawfully, riotously, and tumultuously assembled together, to the disturbance of the publick peace, at any time after the last day of July in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and fifteen, and being required or commanded by any one or more justice or justices of the peace, or by the sheriff of the county, or his under-sheriff, or by the mayor, bailiff or bailiffs, or other head-officer, or justice of the peace of any city or town corporate, where such assembly shall be, by proclamation to be made in the King's name, in the form herin after directed, to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, shall, to the number of twelve or more (notwithstanding such proclamation made) unlawfully, riotously, and tumultuously remain or continue together by the space of one hour after such command or request made by proclamation, that then such continuing together to the number of twelve or more, after such command or request made by proclamation, shall be adjudged felony without benefit of clergy, and the offenders therein shall be adjudged felons, and shall suffer death as in a case of felony without benefit of clergy.
And be it further enacted by the authority aforesaid, That the order and form of the proclamation that shall be made by the authority of this act, shall be as hereafter followeth (that is to say) the justice of the peace, or other person authorized by this act to make the said proclamation shall, among the said rioters, or as near to them as he can safely come, with a loud voice command, or cause to be commanded silence to be, while proclamation is making, and after that, shall openly and with loud voice make or cause to be made proclamation in these words, or like in effect:
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.
The law went into force in 1715, but the phrase read the riot act did not appear for some decades. The first recorded instance that I’m aware of is in a pamphlet, An Appeal to the Public in Behalf of the Manager, published in 1763. The pamphlet was produced in response to riots that occurred in January of that year at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden and the Drury Lane Theatre. Such public disruptions at theatrical appearances were hardly unusual, occurring around once every couple of years during this period. But this pair of riots was occasioned by the raising of ticket prices. It had been customary to charge late arrivals to a performance half price for their tickets. But in January 1763, the managements of the Covent Garden and Drury Lane Theatres, the only fully licensed theaters in London, altered the practice and began charging full price regardless of when the person entered the theater. David Garrick ran the Drury Lane Theatre, and John Beard was manager of the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden:
The passages here meant, are those which suppose Mr. Garrick would not appear the first night of the disturbance, to speak to the audience, though he was in the house.—That a message was sent to Mr. B—d, to persuade him to join with the manager of Drury-lane, in opposing force to force, and compel the audience to a submission;—which suppose a Justice of peace was proposed being sent for to read the Riot-act;—which make some of the performers insult and threaten the audience in the Green-room;——And which suppose Mr. G——k never intended to keep his word with the public, though he promised them an acquiescence with their terms.
This instance, of course, is a literal use of the phrase, calling upon a magistrate to read the proclamation and order the rioters to disperse.
The sense of a severe reprimand or warning, not the official legal proclamation, appears a couple of decades later. From M.P. Andrews’s 1784 play The Reparation, a scene in which two men are getting up the gumption to fight a duel before a third man tells them to cut it out:
Sir Gregory. I could not break through forms for the universe.—Single combat, to be sure, may be maintained, but always with proper decorum. You state your grievances—I reply—preliminaries are broken—and then war is declared in due course.
Swagger. Devil burn me, but we’ll do as the French do—declare war without saying a syllable of the matter. So come on, Sir Gregory—by St. Patrick, I’ll bother bother both sides of your ears with nothing but war! war! (bellowing).
Enter COLONEL QUORUM.
Col. Quorum. Peace, I say, or I’ll read the riot act—Gentlemen, your most obedient.—and now, what is the matter.
A jocular, but literal use, of the phrase can be found in satirist John Wolcot’s 1795 poem The Convention Bill, an Ode. Wolcot wrote under the pseudonym of Peter Pindar:
And, when our KING to Weymouth shall repair,
Forget not thou an order to the MAY’R,
When in the tub the ROYAL LIFE embarks,
To read the Riot-Act to shrimps and sharks!
A distinctly figurative sense of read the riot act appears in a letter from Martha Wilmot Bradford to her sister Alicia from Vienna on 17 December 1819, in which her husband the Rev. William Bradford added the following paragraph after Martha described the dress she had been wearing:
Matty with that delicate reserve so natural and so becoming would have omitted to say what was most to the point on this subject, and as she has just run out to read the riot act in the Nursery, I beg to add the essential paragraph to the above, viz that at a little family supper at the Ambassador’s after the first reception, there was as is usual a good deal of discussion of the Ladies dresses, and would you believe it Ma’am that it was unanimously voted that the Chaplain’s Lady was the best dressed in the room.
The modern equivalent would be a husband picking up his wife’s smartphone as she left the room to send a text complimenting her to a friend. In any case, reading the riot act to naughty children in a nursery is a far cry from the legal sense.
The Riot Act remained on the books until 1967, when its primary provisions were repealed, and the remainder of act was repealed in 1973. But the phrase lives on.
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Sources:
Andrews, Miles Peter. The Reparation, a Comedy. London: T. and W. Lowndes, 1784, 48–49. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
An Appeal to the Public in Behalf of the Manager. London: Wilson and Fell, 1763, 22–23. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).
Bradford, William. Letter, 19 December 1819. In Martha Wilmot. More Letters from Martha Wilmot: Impressions of Vienna, 1819–1829. Edith Vane-Tempest-Stewart and Harford Montgomery Hyde, eds. London: Macmillan, 1935, 39.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2021, s.v. read, v.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2010, modified December 2019, s.v. Riot Act, n.
Pickering, Danby, ed. The Statutes at Large, vol. 13. Cambridge: Joseph Bentham, 1764, 142–43. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Pindar, Peter (pseudonym of John Wolcot). “The Convention Bill, an Ode.” Works of Peter Pindar. London: J. Cundee for J. Walker, 1802, 500. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Today in London’s Theatrical History: Riot at Covent Garden Theatre Against Ticket Price Rises, 1763.” Pasttenseblog, 24 February 2017.
Image credit: Richard Carlisle, 1819. Manchester Libraries. Public domain image