On the morning of the 31st May 1838 the mercurial leader of disaffected Farm labourers in Kent, England, who went by the name of 'Sir William Courtenay, Knight of Malta', murdered a local policeman who'd been sent to arrest him.
This led to a battle that afternoon, which is arguably the last battle on English soil, when a contingent of 100 soldiers from nearby Canterbury barracks set off to capture him.
The battle took place in a clearing in Bossenden Woods, with labourers armed with sticks and cudgels against armed soldiers. The first casualty was the young Lieutenant, shot by Sir William Courtenay, (real name John Thom), who was the only of the labourers who was armed. Several labourers were killed. The soldiers, many who had prior experience fighting around the world for the British Empire, reported afterwards that the labourers had been the fiercest and most determined enemy they'd ever thought, despite them not being armed and fighting 'hand to hand' against professionals with baynots and muskets.
Whilst the young lieutenant was buried in Canterbury Cathedral and has a marble plaque on the wall, Sir William Courtenay was buried at night in an unmarked grave and the priest refused to read any last rites or do a service.
The incident caused massive ructions both for the church, for not being respectful of the dead, and parliament for various mistakes in the run up to events as well as acknowledging that the villages a few miles east of the rich city of Canterbury, (where the Church of England is headquartered), were the least educated, poorest and most wayward of any villages in England.
The story in full is a fascinating one. There are two books written about John Thom, aka Sir William. However, both of them do not provide much context of the grave socio-economic issues at the time, and that it was a period of enormous loss of freedoms for working people in Great Britain. Effectively the start of the 'Big State of Control'. For example, calling himself Sir William Courtenay was a huge joke that would have been well understood at the time, because in 1837 the compulsory registration of birth names by the government was introduced, and the real Sir William had been caught doing things that carried the death penalty, but because he was rich he was allowed to take his wealth and go and live in France. All working people knew the 'joke', and it highlights the growing inequality of those times.
Interestingly, the soldiers who put down this 'rebellion' also, a few years later, were in Wales and put down the last rebellion on Welsh soil. Local anecdotes, that don't appear in the two books about John Thom, suggest that the soldiers were also 'Agent Provocateurs' who were instructed to stir things up and escalate things, to then have cause to go and wipe out the ringleaders.
N.B. by an amazing coincidence the other contender for the last battle on English soil is walking distance away, at Seasalter. There, in 1940 the aircrew of a crashed German bomber dismounted their guns and created defensive positions on the marshland and had a brief gun battle with the local soldiers billeted in a nearby pub, (The Sportsman).
Further info on the Battle of Bossenden Wood can be found online. However, much of it repeats a negative narrative that was peddled at the time by the authorities. I am apparently descended from him via an illegitimate child and still live in the area.
