Inoffensive persons were constantly in danger, day and night, of being waylaid and maltreated in the streets. Disturbance was chronic in certain localities, and a trifling quarrel might at any moment blaze into a murderous riot. On execution days the mob was always rampant; at times too, when political passion was at fever-heat, crowds of roughs were ever ready to espouse the popular cause. Thus when the court party, headed by Lord Bute, vainly strove to crush the demagogue John Wilkes, and certain prisoners were being tried at the Old Bailey for riot and wounding, a crowd collected outside the Mansion House carrying a gibbet on which hung a boot and a petticoat.[166] The Mayor interfered and a fray began. Weapons were used, some of the Lord Mayor’s servants were wounded, and one of the prisoners was rescued by the mob. Sometimes the disturbance had its origin in trade jealousies. A clerk to a weaver’s club was arraigned with others for tying two weavers back to back, setting them on horseback, and in a riotous manner driving them through the streets; their offence being that they had worked under price. Again, a number of men riotously assembled and destroyed a saw-mill, for which they were sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment in Newgate. At the execution of two weavers on Bethnal Green for destroying work on the looms the mob behaved outrageously as the convicts were being conveyed from Newgate to Bethnal Green--insulted the sheriffs, pulled up the gallows, broke the windows, destroyed the furniture, and committed other outrages in the house of a manufacturer in Spitalfields. The sheriffs harangued them without effect, and it was not till they were threatened with calling out the military that they dispersed.