The trouble had been building for years. Nottinghamshire was framework-knitting country, and the knitters had been crushed by mechanisation and falling piece-rates for a generation. When the People's Charter of 1838 began circulating — its six points demanded the vote for every man, secret ballots, paid MPs, an end to the property qualification — it found a ready audience in the cottages where men sat at the frame from dawn until they could no longer see the yarn. On Thursday 18 August, more than two thousand met in the Nottingham Market Place and resolved to cease work until the Charter became the law of the land. The magistrates, watching the crowd swell, decided that no further meetings would be allowed.

What followed was almost a week of running encounters across the town and the villages around it. The Riot Act was read on Friday. On Saturday, five hundred Chartists trying to bring out the Radford colliers met the Dragoons in open fields and scattered; about one hundred and forty were rounded up and marched to the Cavalry Barracks. On Monday, several hundred more walked north along Mansfield Road and met two thousand framework-knitters coming in from the villages at Sherwood. The military arrived. There was, as one witness put it, a general flight over hedge and ditch. Only two men were caught. By Tuesday morning the Chartists thought they had learned the lesson: stay out of the town. Meet somewhere quieter, somewhere open. Mapperley Hills Common, fifty-four acres of grazing land above the Coppice, looked perfect.

It was not. Colonel Rolleston rode up with the Bays, ordered the assembly to disperse, and when it did not, directed the arrest of about four hundred. A man watching from the high ground above the Park Tunnel, looking north-east across Derby Road, said he could see the horse soldiers busy in dispersing the people, and their swords, flashing in the sun, shone like dazzling stars from this point of vantage in the Park. The prisoners were marched four abreast down Woodborough Road, then along Red Lane toward the town. At the top of York Street, just before the House of Correction, a crowd attacked the escort with stones, and the Dragoons cleared the streets by galloping about and brandishing their swords. By four in the afternoon, every prisoner was inside the town jail.

Of the four hundred detained, about two hundred and fifty were released that same afternoon on five-pound recognizances to keep the peace. Roughly fifty went to trial in front of the same Colonel Rolleston at the Quarter Sessions. All were found guilty. Some drew six or four or two months with hard labour; the rest were bound over. A month later, on 23 September, the Nottingham Review published a long satirical poem called The Battle of Mapperley Hills, scornful of the magistracy and the militia, and pointedly dedicated — straight-faced — to the magistrates themselves. The label stuck. A rally that had been broken up over the dinner hour became, in the local memory, a battle.

It was, in a way, the last great moment of Nottinghamshire Chartism. The energy that had built through that hot August leaked away into a different campaign: the fight against the Corn Laws and the high price of bread, a movement that would carry the working class through the rest of the decade. The framework-knitters never got their vote in 1842, but the demands the magistrates rode down on Mapperley Hills — the secret ballot, the male franchise, the abolition of the property qualification — would one by one become British law over the next eighty-six years. The Common itself is mostly built over now. The crossroads where Ransom Road meets Woodborough Road sits on what was once open grazing, and nothing on the modern street suggests that a cavalry charge once passed this way.