The Volunteer Infantry of the British Army

The Rifle Volunteers from 1859 to 1880

In the years 1859-1861 Rifle Volunteer Corps (RVC) were created all over Britain. They were of different sizes and were soon combined in Administrative Battalions to administer them. Some, mostly in urban areas, were large enough (several companies, battalion size) to administer themselves. During the years that followed more were created, some were disbanded, absorbed by others or merged into larger Corps. When all RVCs of an Administrative Battalion merged into one RVC, that was called "consolidation".

Counties got a precedence number (1 - 95) in the sequence of the date of acceptance of the first RVC in a county. The corps were numbered inside each county in the sequence they were accepted. After amalgamation or consolidation, the resulting corps got the number of the lowest numbered corps involved. Vacant numbers due to disbandment or merge should be left vacant. Nevertheless there was some double, or even triple, usage of designations. To make it possble to follow the lineage of these units, they are indicated by ^(I), ^(II) and ^(III) in the table. These indications were of course never part of the designations themselves.

Below are 1355 RVCs created during the period. At the beginning of 1880 there were 1070 of them, large and small.

In 1880 all Administrative Battalions were consolidated. Following the rules, these new RVCs were numbered after the lowest number involved and this left many great gaps in the numbering. Accordingly, later in 1880, many corps were renumbered to get uninterrupted sequences within each county. These renumbered designations are in the last column of the table below and secondary titles are included there. The secondary titles are omitted in the other columns for reasons of space. At the end if the year this resulted in 211 RVCs.