British Literature Survey
Reference Pages: Intellectual Disability Group

The Riot Act
by Jay Godfrey

The Riot Act was a bill passed by the British Parliament in 1714 and enforced from the following year until its repeal in 1967 (Riot). It provided for the military to intervene in situations where at least twelve people were gathered and creating an illegal and violent public disturbance, but only on the condition that a magistrate read, word-for-word, the following: “Our sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assemblies. God save the King.” (Pickering)

While the actual intent of Parliament in passing the Riot Act was to give the government legal authority to quell uprisings through arrests and force if necessary, the bill had just the opposite effect, essentially restricting military intervention only to cases where the above words were actually read to the crowd by a magistrate (Babington 5). This serious flaw in the legislation was readily apparent in the inability of London’s local authorities to put down the Gordon riots of 1780. Mob violence during the riots became so destructive that magistrates refused to read the text of the act, worried they would face retribution, and as a result soldiers simply stood by and watched, claiming they were powerless to act without proper authorization (Babington 21).

Although eventually the riots were put down, doubts about the ability of local administration to handle future such uprisings remained. Still, the public was hesitant to leave the military to handle these situations at its own discretion. The result was the development of the first modern, professional police force in England (Philips 7).

Works Cited

Babington, Anthony. Military Intervention in Britain. New York: Routledge, 1990. 5-31.

Philips, David. "Policing." An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age. Ed. Iain McCalman.
New York: Oxford UP, 1999. 66-73.

Pickering, Danby. "Full Text of the Riot Act of 1714." The Reactor Core. 1714. 30 Jan. 06 .
http://reactor-core.org/riot-act.html.

"Riot Act." Wikipedia. Dec. 2005. 30 Jan. 2006. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Riot_Act.

Paul Marchbanks
marchban@email.unc.edu