ABSTRACT
On 14 July 1791, a fairly large group of men dined at the Royal Hotel in Birmingham in commemoration of the destruction of the Bastille that had occurred two years earlier. A mob gathered and attacked the men, obviously targeting dissenters, and in the course of the riots, the house of the theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley was burnt down. On this evening, the hotel, also called Dadley’s Hotel after its proprietor Thomas Dadley, functioned as a meeting-place for supporters of and sympathizers with the French Revolution. That the men met there for dinner shows that the necessary function rooms were available and that hotels were not only used by tourists but also possessed an important function within the public sphere of the city. Moreover, the occurrence also documents that not all early ‘hotels’ were necessarily catering for the gentry or the upper class.
