Frictions between the Army and Locals in Britain

The Society for Army Historical Research was founded in Britain in 1921 to foster “interest in the history and traditions of British and Commonwealth armies, and to encourage research in these fields.”

The organization publishes a quarterly journal, and to encourage memberships it’s just shared a selection of past articles on its website, including J. E. O. Screen’s “The Eighteenth Century Army at Home as Reflected in Local Records” (P.D.F.).

Screen discussed a variety of incidents in Great Britain across the eighteenth century that left a paper trail. The way these things work, that mostly meant events that produced friction or caused change. The issues included quartering and supplies, recruiting, and interpersonal disputes—some of the same problems that army commanders and local officials dealt with in the colonies.

Quartering seems to have played out differently, though. In the American colonies, regiments were usually stationed at the big ports or on frontiers, not in rural towns. But in Britain, army units moved through smaller towns, particularly when companies were traveling to recruit more soldiers. Those places didn’t have so many barracks or large buildings that could be converted to barracks, as in New York and Boston. Screen wrote:

The Nottingham records include a list of the Royal Horse Guards quartered there in July 1779. Although incomplete, this list shows strikingly the degree of dispersal imposed on a unit or sub-unit even in a relatively large centre. Ninety-seven men were distributed among thirty public houses, the largest number in any one being six and the median three.

In 1766 three recruiting parties were in Nottingham at the same time. Fortunately for the local authorities, that meant plenty of soldiers were available to suppress a riot at the local fair.

There are other examples in this article showing how locals disliked the disruption of army units coming through—except when they liked the money those soldiers brought or the protection they provided. In 1768 the Scottish town of Banff council linked the question of who should house the soldiers with who profited from their presence:

all publick brewers, keepers of publick houses or retaillers of ale, beer, wine or spirituous liquors, and all victuallers and bakers, butchers, gardners and barbers, who are presumed to be more immediatly benefited by the soldiers, shall have stated and constant billets upon them before any of the other inhabitants, and house keepers shall be quartered upon, and that none of the above shall have under two and others more according to the extent of their trade.

In 1781 Banff even asked the Crown to station at least two companies of soldiers there over the summer “for the protection of the town and harbour, as both are so very exposed to the depredations of the enemy.”

Screen described violent altercations between locals and soldiers, such as a brawl at Cork in 1755. But that same Irish town’s council complained in 1758 that the commanding officer of the local fort had refused to provide “a detachment of soldiers to aid the civil officer in arresting some persons in the town of Cove charged with felony.” In fact, that captain allegedly “in a very contumelious manner declared he would wipe his britch with twenty such orders.”