At Battle library we met a descendant of Mary Fildes who told us about her. Mary was president of the Manchester Female Reform Society in 1819, and played a leading role at the mass rally at Manchester in that year which ended in the Peterloo massacre . Hers is one of 70 victims’ petitions in the parliamentary archives [which] reveal[s] some shocking tales of ferocity. She carried the flag on the platform at the rally at St Petersfield and was injured when the cavalry were sent in to disperse the crowds.
From Wikipedia: Fildes herself was knocked to the ground by the truncheon of a special constable who seized her flag, and narrowly escaped a swipe with a sabre. She escaped and lay low for a fortnight, possibly sheltered by her loyalist family in the northern quarter. Much later she got to know the Manchester novelist Isabella Banks, who included a further detail in her 1876 novel The Manchester Man: “Mrs. Fildes hanging suspended by a nail on the platform of the carriage had caught her white dress. She was slashed across her exposed body by an officer of the cavalry
Read more about Mary Fildes on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Fildes
Read more about the Peterloo Massacre on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre
Image: Manchester Libraries, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/98/Peterloo_Massacre.png