Swing Riots

The Swing Riots were a widespread uprising by the rural workers of the arable south and east of England in 1830. The rioters, largely impoverished and landless agricultural labourers, sought to halt reductions in their wages and to put a stop to the introduction of the new threshing machines that threatened their livelihoods. They reinforced their demands not only with riots in which objects of perceived oppression such as workhouses and tithe barns were destroyed, but also with more surreptitious rick-burning, the destruction of threshing machines and cattle-maiming. The movement paralleled its urban-industrial counterpart, the Luddite disturbances. The first threshing machine was destroyed on Saturday night, August 28th, 1830. By the third week of October, over one hundred threshing machines had been destroyed in East Kent. Mystery surrounds the nominal leader of the riots, "Captain Swing", whose name is appended to several of the threatening letters sent to farmers, magistrates, parsons and others. The "Swing letters" were first mentioned by "The Times" on the 21 October. Captain Swing has never been identified, and many people believe that he never existed, having been created by the workers as a fictional figurehead who could function as a safe target for their opponents.

The Swing Riots had many immediate causes, but were overwhelmingly the result of the progressive impoverishment and dispossession of the English agricultural workforce over the previous fifty years, leading up to 1830. The anger of the rioters was directed at three targets that were seen as the prime source of their misery: The Tithe system, the Poor law guardians, and the rich tenant farmers who had been progressively lowering wages while introducing agricultural machinery.

Background to the uprisings

Early nineteenth century England was virtually unique among major nations in having no class of landed smallholding peasantry. The parliamentary enclosure movement of the previous century had eradicated the last rights of poorer countryfolk to graze their livestock, be it cattle, sheep, chicken or geese, on what had formerly been "Common" Land. The common grazing of older times was divided up among the large local land-owners, leaving the landless farmworkers solely dependent upon offering their labour to their richer neighbours for a cash wage. Whilst this may have offered a tolerable living during the boom years of the Napoleonic wars, when labour had been in short supply and corn prices had been high, the coming of peace in 1815 brought with it plummeting grain prices and an oversupply of labour.

The social status of agricultural workers had also declined. In the 1780s workers would be taken on at annual Hiring Fairs, to serve for a whole year. In this period the worker would receive payment in kind and in cash from his or her employer, would often work at his side, and would commonly share meals at the employer's table. As time went by the gulf between farmer and employee widened. Workers were hired on stricter cash-only contracts, which ran for shorter and shorter periods. At first monthly terms became the norm; later contracts were offered for as little as a week at a time. Farm labourers were thrown on to parish relief the moment that their services were no longer profitable. This casualisation and growing insecurity of rural labour lent much to the anger of the 1830 riots.

The "Old Poor Law" introduced in Tudor times began to break under the strain. The system charged a Parish Rate to landowners and tenants which was used to provide relief payments to settled residents of the parish who were ill or out of work. These payments were minimal, and at times degrading conditions were required for their receipt. As more and more people became dependent on parish relief, ratepayers rebelled ever more loudly against the costs, and a lower and lower level of relief was offered. Three and a half "one gallon" bread loaves were considered necessary for a man in Berkshire in 1795. However provision had fallen to just two similar-sized loaves being provided in 1817 Wiltshire. The way in which poor law funds were disbursed led to a further reduction in agricultural wages, since farmers would pay their workers as little as possible, knowing that the parish fund would top up wages to a basic subsistence level.

To this incendiary mixture was added the burden of the Church Tithe. Originally this had been the Church's right to ten percent of the parish harvest. However the earlier collection of goods in kind had been replaced by a cash levy that was payable to the Church of England Parson, and which went to pay his (often considerable) wages. The cash levy was generally rigorously enforced, whether the resident was a Church member or not, and the sum demanded was often far higher than a poor person could afford. Calls for a large reduction in the Tithe payment were prominent among the demands of the rioters.

The final straw was the introduction of horse-powered threshing machines, which could do the work of many men. They spread swiftly among the farming community, threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of farmworkers. Following the terrible harvests of 1828 and 1829, farm labourers faced the approaching winter of 1830 with dread.

The riots

Farm labourers finally snapped in the late summer of 1830. With fewer jobs, lower wages and no prospects of things improving for these workers, the "immoral" threshing machine seemed to be the object that was to place them on the brink of starvation. Starting in the south-eastern county of Kent, the Swing Rioters smashed the threshing machines and threatened farmers who had them. The riots spread rapidly through the southern counties of Surrey, Sussex, Middlesex and Hampshire, before spreading north into the Home Counties, the Midlands and East Anglia. Moving on as far as Lincolnshire, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire, the Swing Riots soon became the largest popular rural uprising since the Peasants Revolt of the fourteenth century.

The pattern of the riots was remarkably similar. Threatening letters, often signed by Captain Swing, would be sent to Magistrates, Parsons, wealthy farmers or Poor Law Guardians in the area. The letters would call for a rise in wages, a cut in the Tithe payments and for the destruction of the hated threshing machines, otherwise people would take matters into their own hands. If the warnings were not heeded local farmworkers would gather, often in groups of 200 - 400, and would threaten the local oligarchs with dire consequences if their demands were not met. Threshing machines would be broken, workhouses, tithe barns and other hated buildings would be attacked and the rioters would disperse or move on to the next village. Despite the prevalence of the slogan "Bread or Blood", not one person is recorded as having been killed during the riots, whose main intent was to damage property. The burning of barns and hayricks took place in parallel to the riots.

The similar pattern of the disturbances, and their rapid spread across the country was often blamed on sinister agitators, or upon "agents" sent from France, where the revolution of July 1830 had broken out a month before the Swing Riots began in Kent. The campaign against the Tithes and threshing machines was met with considerable sympathy, even among many farmers and magistrates, who put up little resistance to the destruction of thousands of threshing machines across the country.

However the government, led by Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne, dealt with the riots harshly. Blaming local magistrates for being too lenient, the government appointed a Special Commission of three judges to try rioters in the counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire. Agreements made to raise wages or cut tithes were rarely honoured. Many arrests followed the riots. Across the country, nine of the rioters were hanged and a further 450 suffered transportation to Australia.

These riots added to the strong social, political and agricultural unrest throughout Britain in the 1830s. The 'Swing' riots were a big influence on the Whig Government, leading to the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, which made life for the poor even harsher, ending "outdoor relief" in cash or kind, and setting up a chain of grim workhouses across the country, to which the poor had to go if they wanted help.

Controversy has been persistent among historians about the diffusion of the Swing events and whether they indicated a larger incipient class consciousness.

References

Hobsbawm, Eric and George Rudé (1973) Captain Swing: A Social History of the Great English Agricultural Uprising of 1830. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Bohstedt, John (1994) “The Dynamics of Riots: Escalation and Diffusion/Contagion.” In The Dynamics of Aggression, edited by Michael Potegal and John Knutson. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

External links

* [http://www.johnowensmith.co.uk/riot/ Headley & Selborne workhouse riot of 1830]