Qualla: Battle of Mapperley Hills

Battle of Mapperley Hills: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

They had come to eat. By three o'clock on Tuesday 23 August 1842, several thousand framework-knitters, colliers, and labourers had gathered on Mapperley Hills Common, drawn in from Hucknall and Bulwell and Arnold and Basford. They were quietly sitting down on the grass preparing to eat their dinner, the contemporary account says — as if a picnic might be enough to make them invisible. Then the 2nd Dragoon Guards, the Queen's Bays, rode up the slope with the police behind them, and the rally became what a Nottingham poet would call, a month later, the Battle of Mapperley Hills.

Battle of Mapperley Hills: The Charter and the Stocking Frame

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 m...

Battle of Mapperley Hills: Six Days of Skirmish

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 for...

Battle of Mapperley Hills: Swords Flashing in the Sun

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 sold...

Battle of Mapperley Hills: The Verdict and the Poem

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 t...

Battle of Mapperley Hills: What the Hill Remembers

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 res...