This volume originated in an Economic and Social Research Council sponsored research project on ‘Social Protest and Community Change in the West of England, 1750–1850’ which ran from December 1991 to November 1993. The members of that project were Andrew Charlesworth and Adrian Randall, the ‘principal investigators’, and David Walsh and Richard Sheldon who were respectively Research Fellow and Research Assistant. We would all like to acknowledge the support of the ESRC in funding the project.

The objective of this archive-centred project was to examine, within a community context, the character and development of social protest within one region, namely the West of England, historically defined as the counties of Gloucestershire, Somerset and Wiltshire, though, as the reader will note, we strayed further afield when the evidence indicated. We were particularly concerned to view such protest both from the ‘top down’ and from the ‘bottom up’ and in particular to focus on the way in which local elites perceived and reacted to different types of protest in different kinds of community. We also set out to investigate connections between different forms of protest and changing economic and community structures and to locate social protest within the wider context of changing industrial relations and community politics. Finally, we aimed as a group project to attempt to break down the compartmentalization which continues to isolate specific forms of protest and assumes that there was no inter-connection between them.