Kmflett's Blog

Tolpuddle Festival 2026. Their oaths & ours

The Tolpuddle Martyrs were jailed for forming a trade union which, based on a highly selective reading of the law, was illegal. At the centre of this however was the taking of an oath.

As E.P Thompson noted in the Making of the English Working Class oaths had a long history in British society, fundamentally they were part of traditions of secrecy, keeping authority out of the business of private individuals, for one reason or another.

Thompson noted of trade union oaths in the early nineteenth century:

Such oaths had a long ancestry, owing something to freemasonry, something to old guild traditions, and something to commonplace civil ceremonies, such as the burgess oath.

Under conditions of illegality trade unions used oaths to maintain membership and discipline.

The authorities were distinctly unhappy about the lower orders taking oaths. Indeed the matter was central to the transportation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs.

The Tolpuddle men were prosecuted under the 1797 Unlawful Oaths Act- aimed at the Navy after the French Revolution- which made it an offence to take an oath that was not required by law. It provided for a maximum sentence of 7 years transportation. It had in fact been overtaken by several other pieces of legislation not least the Combination Acts of 1824/5 which provided for lesser penalties. The decision to use the more draconian 1797 Act was of course a political one.

The taking of oaths was an important part of how ruling class society was ordered. Doctors and lawyers took them and the oath, formulated at least partly in religious terms, was designed to keep Catholics and Jews out

Thompson argues that the tradition declined rapidly after the Martyrs conviction but in reality those in favour of openly organised democratic trade union organisation, necessary if unions were to become mass organisations, were already ditching oaths.

The oath remained important in official society- for example the swearing in of MPs- until the atheist MP Charles Bradlaugh successfully campaigned for the right to affirm rather than swear an oath.