The Yeomanry Cavalry was the mounted component of the British Volunteer Corps, a military reserve force established in 1794 amid fears of invasion and insurrection during the French Revolutionary Wars. A yeoman was a person of respectable standing, one social rank below a gentleman, and the yeomanry was initially a rural, county-based force. Members were required to provide their own horses and were recruited mainly from landholders and tenant farmers, though the middle class also featured prominently in the rank and file. Officers were largely recruited from among the British nobility and landed gentry. A commission generally involved significant personal expense, and although social status was an important qualification, the primary factor was personal wealth. The newly rich, who found in the yeomanry a means of enhancing their social standing, were welcomed into the officer corps for their ability to support the force financially. Urban recruitment increased towards the end of the 19th century, reflected in the early 20th century by increasingly common use of hired mounts.
The yeomanry was first used in support of local authorities to suppress civil unrest, most notably during the food riots of 1795. Its only use in national defence was in 1797, when the Castlemartin Yeomanry helped defeat a small French invasion in the Battle of Fishguard. Although the Volunteer Corps was disbanded following the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, the yeomanry was retained as a politically reliable force which could be deployed in support of the civil authorities. It often served as mounted police until the middle of the 19th century. Most famously, the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry was largely responsible for the Peterloo Massacre, in which 17 people were killed and up to 650 were injured, while policing a rally for parliamentary reform in Manchester in 1819. The yeomanry was also deployed against striking colliers in the 1820s, during the Swing riots of the early 1830s and the Chartist disturbances of the late 1830s and early 1840s. The exclusive membership set the yeomanry apart from the population it policed, and as better law enforcement options became available the yeomanry was increasingly held back for fear that its presence would provoke confrontation. Its social status made the force a popular target for caricature, particularly after Peterloo, and it was often satirised in the press, in literature and on the stage.
The establishment of civilian police forces and renewed invasion scares in the middle of the 19th century turned the focus of the yeomanry to national defence, but its effectiveness and value in this role was increasingly questioned. It declined in strength, surviving largely due to its members' political influence and willingness to subsidise the force financially. A series of government committees failed to address the force's problems. The last, in 1892, found a place for the yeomanry in the country's mobilisation scheme, but it was not until a succession of failures by the regular army during the Second Boer War that the yeomanry found a new relevance as mounted infantry. It provided the nucleus for the separate Imperial Yeomanry, and after the war, the yeomanry was re-branded en bloc as the Imperial Yeomanry. It ceased to exist as a separate institution in 1908, when the yeomanry became the mounted component of the Territorial Force. Yeomanry regiments fought mounted and dismounted in both the First World War and the Second World War. The yeomanry heritage is maintained in the 21st century largely by four yeomanry regiments of the British Army Reserve, in which many 19th century regiments are represented as squadrons.
Background
Europe began experiencing explosive population growth from the mid-18th century, which in Britain was fed by improved farming methods introduced by the British Agricultural Revolution. The concurrent Industrial Revolution led to the rapid increase of urbanisation of Britain, which increased urban demand for food. The more intensive cultivation required to meet this demand led to higher costs but did not increase agricultural wages, resulting in increasing amounts of poverty and starvation in rural British communities. Poverty was also a problem in urban centres as the increasing use of machinery placed skilled labour out of work. Meanwhile, Britain's political system had not kept up with the changing population; while once prosperous towns that had become de-populated were still able to elect Members of Parliament, major new towns such as Birmingham and Manchester were not represented in Parliament. Poverty and disenfranchisement led to social discontent, giving rise to fears that the French Revolution, which began in 1789, would provide a model that might be emulated in Britain.Athawes pp. 1–3
On 1 February 1793, Revolutionary France declared war on Britain, which was now faced with the risk of foreign invasion. The British Army, which had sent six brigades to the Low Countries as part of the Flanders campaign, was not sufficient to defend the country, and the militia was neither effective nor trustworthy. It had been demobilised following the end of the American War of Independence in 1783, and in the intervening decade had been subject to cost-cutting measures which left it deficient. The militia was embodied in 1792 as a precautionary measure against insurrection, but a body recruited predominantly from among the working class was itself suspect to the extent that militia units were not trusted to be deployed in their own areas of recruitment until 1795. The government had previously resorted to raising volunteers to augment its forces in 1779 amid fears of a Franco-Spanish invasion, though most of these units had been disbanded by 1793. Considering that there was not enough time to address the militia's deficiencies, the government turned again to volunteers to bolster the nation's defences in 1794.Mileham 2003 pp. 8–10Beckett 2011 pp. 69–73
Origins
The appeal for volunteers led to the creation of the Volunteer Corps, of which the Gentlemen and Yeomanry Cavalry, as it was then called, was the mounted component.Wyndham-Quin p. 7 A yeoman was traditionally a freeholder of respectable standing, one social rank below a gentleman, and the yeomanry's ranks were filled largely by landholders and tenant farmers. The officers were appointed by royal commission, in the person of the Lord Lieutenant, and generally came from the British nobility and landed gentry.Mileham 2003 p. 10 Yeomen were expected to provide their own mounts, which represented a high financial barrier to entry and ensured that the yeomanry was an exclusive and prestigious organisation.Mileham 2003 p. 11Beckett 2011 p. 76 In addition to farmers, the yeomanry attracted professionals, tradesmen and skilled craftsmen to its ranks, though the strong ties to the farming community meant that yeomanry activities were scheduled with an eye on the agricultural calendar, and harvests in particular informed the training schedule.Beckett 2011 pp. 75–76
The yeomanry was county based and could be called out (embodied) by the Lord Lieutenant or Sheriff. Members were paid while embodied and subject to military law in the event of invasion. Initially, troops were liable for service only in their home or adjacent counties, though some troops voted to be liable for service nationwide while others restricted themselves to service only in their home county.Mileham 2003 pp. 10–12Beckett 2011 p. 75 Although some troops quickly combined to form county regiments, such as the Wiltshire Yeomanry Cavalry in 1797, many remained independent for years.Mileham 2003 pp. 11–12Wyndham-Quin p. 8 By the end of 1794, between 28 and 32 troops of yeomanry, each up to 60 men strong, had been raised. A government attempt to raise more cavalry by compulsion, the Provisional Cavalry Act 1796, increased interest in volunteer cavalry, and by 1799 there were 206 yeomanry troops. By 1800, all Provisional Cavalry units had been either disbanded or absorbed into the yeomanry, where they were frequently ostracised due to their lower social status.Beckett 2011 pp. 75–77Mileham 2003 p. 12
Initial deployments The yeomanry was as much an instrument of law and order as it was a military organisation, and its terms of service stressed defence against both insurrection and invasion. It was only once called upon to repulse a foreign invasion, in 1797, when the French Légion Noire landed at Fishguard in Wales, and the Castlemartin Yeomanry was part of the force that defeated the invaders in the Battle of Fishguard.Beckett 2011 p. 78 The yeomanry was more active as a constabulary, and corps were called out during the treason trials in 1794, during the food riots of 1795, and in response to enclosure protests, the destruction wrought by Luddites and disturbances caused by disaffected, demobilised servicemen in the years leading up to the end of the wars with France.Hay 2017 p. 141
By 1801, the yeomanry was 21,000 strong, with troops in most English, many Welsh and some Scottish counties. They were based in towns, villages and the estates of the nobility, and varied in quantity from one to more than twenty in any given county. Troops were also raised in Ireland, where they reflected the Protestant Ascendancy. The Peace of Amiens in 1802 resulted in reductions across the military, with cuts to the army and navy and the disembodiment of the militia. Legislation was passed to allow the Volunteer Corps to be retained without pay, but the yeomanry establishment nevertheless declined, only to increase again when war resumed in 1803.Mileham 2003 pp. 12–13Beckett 2011 p. 87 There were frequent invasion scares – most notably in 1804, when the beacons were lit in the Scottish lowlands and 3,000 volunteers and yeomanry assembled for what turned out to be a false alarm – and victory at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805 did not fully eradicate the fears of a French landing.Beckett 2011 pp. 92–95
Early 19th century legislation and decline The threat of invasion occupied much of the British political thinking until the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815, and in the period 1802–1803 alone there were 21 separate pieces of legislation designed to raise forces either voluntarily or compulsorily for the defence of the nation.Beckett 2011 p. 92 The Yeomanry Act 1804 (44 Geo. 3. c. 54), which effectively governed the yeomanry until 1901, rationalised the confusion of legislation. The net result was to make voluntary service more attractive, a significant motivation being to avoid the compulsion of service in the unpopular militia.Beckett 2011 pp. 101–102 Faced with a deluge of volunteers, the War Office attempted to limit numbers. This caused an outcry, and administrative responsibility was transferred to the Home Office in 1803 as a result.Becket 2011 pp. 102–103 By the following year, the number of volunteers and yeomanry together exceeded 342,000 men, significantly more than the government could arm in the immediate term, and in 1805 the yeomanry numbered just under 33,000 men.Beckett 2011 pp. 103–104Athawes p. 18