GORDON RIOTS DOCUMENTS IN THE PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE
In the Public Record Office there are two large volumes of documents connected with the Gordon Riots of 1780 mainly reports, informations etc. relating to London (S.P.37 /20 & 21). These are not consistently in chronological order, but in the present volume they are thus rearranged . These papers have been utilised by Professor George Rudé in The Gordon Riots : a Study of the Rioters and their Victims Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series , VI, 1956; (reprinted in Paris and London in the 18th Century, 1970 ) and by other writers, e.g. Christopher Hibbert in King Mob ( 1958 ) and J. P. De Castro , The Gordon Riots ( 1926), as well as in a " Jackdaw collection for use in schools , but little mention has hitherto been made either of the Bath rioting or of the State Papers connected with it and they are therefore published in this volume. Like the London documents, they include first-hand reports on the episode , together with rumours and scaremongering , and official appeals for information and they supplementthe material from other sources cited in the Introduction local newspapers , Corporation records and the MS . account of the Bath Mission compiled by Dom J.A. Birdsall O.S.B. which contains information communicated to him by Father Michael Pembridge . The latter had come to Bath to replace Father Brewer who, in the penultimate document in this collection , describes himself as the unfortunate Roman Catholic clergyman , who was hunted from place to place and pursued through several streets the evening of the Bath riot . This letter , written in November 1780, drew the attention of Lord Stormont , one of the two Secretaries of State concerned with home affairs, to the threat of a further anti-Catholic outbreak in Bath; the earlier items, connected with the June rioting, are from the mass of intelligence communicated, either directly or indirectly , to Stormont's colleague Lord Hillsborough. The majority of these documents are endorsed with the date of receipt, usually signified by the letter " R , and such endorsements are here printed prior to each document. In these transcripts punctuation and capitalisation are modernised , erroneous repetitions are eliminated and obvious omissions made good in square brackets. The latter also enclose editorial comments , which are italicised. Obvious abbreviations are silently expanded ; otherwise spelling , including the persistent and inappropriate rendering of gaol as goal , remains uncorrected.
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S.P.37 /21 127 . [ Handbill re Bath Riots, 10 June 1780.j Bath City, June 10, 1780 .
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Whereas a great number of disorderly persons have assembled them-
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