ABSTRACT
A large body of coal heavers assembled in a riotous manner in Wapping, went on board the colliers and obliged the men who were at work to leave off; so that the business of delivering ships, in the river, is wholly at a stand. The comfortable “public” of the mid-eighteenth century was not altogether unaware of the existence of a Labour problem or even of the tendency for strong workmen’s “confederacies” to appear whenever trade disputes developed in a large industry. One witness and one Justice of the Peace sufficed to send a workman, charged under this clause, to Hard Labour for a month. This right to arrest and summarily imprison working-men for alleged “breach of contract of employment” was not removed from the Statute Book until after a considerable struggle by the “Labour” movement of the second half of the nineteenth century.
