Community «Law», Policing, and the Structures of Legitimacy: The High Wycombe Chairworkers’ Lock-Out, 1913-1914

Sociologists, legal theorists and historians have noted the existence of temporary but extensive codes of behaviour that emerge during prolonged industrial disputes. This article examines one dispute in southeast England before the First World War to show the contours of collective behaviour, and how striking chair workers in High Wycombe developed and maintained alternative local sources of legitimacy in opposition to lawful authority and parliamentary legislation. It demonstrates that local or community law can generate and imitate legitimate structures of authority, in this case, an Anti-Violence Brigade modelled on the police force, and a committee of strikers modelled on a magistrates’ court.