Swing Riots - WikiHQ

250px|right|thumb|Horse-powered [[threshing machine]]

The Swing Riots were a widespread uprising in 1830 by agricultural workers in Southern England and Eastern England in protest of agricultural mechanisation and harsh working conditions. The riots began with the destruction of threshing machines in the Elham Valley area of East Kent in the summer of 1830 and by early December had spread through the whole of southern England and East Anglia. It was to be the largest movement of social unrest in 19th-century England.

As well as attacking the popularly-hated threshing machines, which displaced workers, the protesters rioted over low wages and required tithes by destroying workhouses and tithe barns associated with their oppression. They also burned ricks and maimed cows.

The rioters directed their anger at the three targets identified as causing their misery: the tithe system, requiring payments to support the established Anglican Church; the Poor Law guardians, who were thought to abuse their power over the poor; and the rich tenant farmers, who had been progressively lowering workers' wages and introduced agricultural machinery.

The Swing Riots had many immediate causes. The historian J. F. C. Harrison believed that they were overwhelmingly the result of the progressive impoverishment and dispossession of the English agricultural workforce over the previous fifty years leading up to 1830. A 2020 study found that the presence of threshing machines caused greater rioting and that the severity of the riots was lowest in areas with abundant employment alternatives and the highest in areas with few alternative employment opportunities.

Name and etymology

The name "Swing Riots" was derived from Captain Swing, the name attributed to the fictitious, mythical figurehead of the movement. The name was often used to sign threatening letters sent to farmers, magistrates, parsons and others. These were first mentioned by The Times on 21 October 1830.

'Swing' was apparently a reference to the swinging stick of the flail used in hand threshing.

Background

Enclosure

Early 19th-century England was almost unique among major nations in having no class of landed smallholding peasantry. The inclosure acts of rural England contributed to the plight of rural farmworkers. Between 1770 and 1830, about of common land were enclosed. The common land had been used for centuries by the poor of the countryside to graze their animals and grow their own produce. The land was now divided up among the large local landowners, leaving the landless farmworkers solely dependent upon working for their richer neighbours for a cash wage. That may have offered a tolerable living during the boom years of the Napoleonic Era, when labour had been in short supply and corn prices high, the return of peace in 1815 resulted in plummeting grain prices and an oversupply of labour. Before enclosure, the cottager was a labourer with land; after enclosure, he was a labourer without land.

In contrast to the Hammonds' 1911 analysis of the events, the historian G. E. Mingay noted that when the Swing Riots broke out in 1830, the heavily-enclosed Midlands remained almost entirely quiet, but the riots were concentrated in the southern and south-eastern counties, which were little affected by enclosure. Some historians have posited that the reason was that in the West Midlands, for example, the rapid expansion of the Potteries and the coal and iron industries provided an alternative range of employment to agricultural workers.

Critically, J. D. Chambers and G. E. Mingay suggested that the Hammonds exaggerated the costs of change, but enclosure really meant more food for the growing population; more land under cultivation and, on the balance, more employment in the countryside. The modern historians of the riots, Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, cited only three of a total of 1,475 incidents as being directly caused by enclosure. Since the late 20th century, those contentions have been challenged by a new class of recent historians. Enclosure has been seen by some as causing the destruction of the traditional peasant way of life, however miserable:

Landless peasants could no longer maintain an economic independence and so had to become labourers. Surplus peasant labour moved into the towns to become industrial workers.

Precarious employment

In the 1780s, workers would be employed at annual hiring fairs, or ‘mops’, to serve for the whole year. During that period, the worker would receive payment in kind and in cash from his employer, would often work at his side, and would commonly share meals at the employer's table. As time passed, the gulf between farmer and employee widened. Workers were hired on stricter cash-only contracts, which ran for increasingly shorter periods. First, monthly terms became the norm. Later, contracts were offered for as little as a week. Between 1750 and 1850, farm labourers faced the loss of their land, the transformation of their contracts and the sharp deterioration of their economic situations. By the time of the 1830 riots, they had retained very little of their former status except the right to parish relief, under the Old Poor Law system.

Additionally, there was an influx of Irish farm labourers in 1829, who had come to seek agricultural work which contributed to reduced employment opportunities for other farming communities. Irish labourers would find themselves being threatened from the beginning of the riots the following year.

Poor Laws

Historically, the monasteries had taken responsibility for the impotent poor, but after their dissolution in 1536 to 1539, responsibility passed to the parishes. the Act of Settlement in 1662 had confined relief strictly to those who were natives of the parish. The poor law 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. The payments were minimal, and at times, degrading conditions were required for their receipt. 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 in the knowledge that the parish fund would top up wages to a basic subsistence level (see Speenhamland system).

Tithe System

To that mixture was added the burden of the church tithe. This was the church's right to a tenth of the parish harvest. The tithe-owner could voluntarily reduce the financial burden on the parish either by allowing the parish to keep more of their share of the harvest. Or the tithe-owner could, again voluntarily, commute the tithe payments to a rental charge. The rioters had demanded that tithes should be reduced, but this demand was refused by many of the tithe-owners. They spread swiftly among the farming community and threatened the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of farmworkers. The first threshing machine to be destroyed was during Saturday night, 28 August 1830 at Lower Hardres. By the third week of October, more than 100 threshing machines had been destroyed in East Kent.

In all, sixty percent of the disturbances were concentrated in the south (Berkshire 165 incidents, Hampshire 208, Kent 154, Sussex 145, Wiltshire 208); East Anglia had fewer incidents (Cambridge 17, Norfolk 88, Suffolk 40); and the Southwest, the Midlands and the North were only marginally affected.

Tactics

The tactics varied from county to county, but typically, 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 the destruction of threshing machines, or people would take matters into their own hands. There are also recorded instances of carriages being held up and their occupants robbed.

Other actions included incendiary attacks on farms, barns and hayricks in the dead of night, when it was easier to avoid detection.

Despite all of the different tactics used by the agricultural workers during the unrest, their principal aims were simply to attain a minimum living wage and to end rural unemployment.

Aftermath

Trials

The authorities felt severely threatened by the riots and responded with harsh punitive measures. Not all rioters were farm workers since the list of those punished included rural artisans, shoemakers, carpenters, wheelwrights, blacksmiths and cobblers. Many of the protesters who were transported had their sentences remitted in 1835. He wrote an article, The Rural War, about the Swing Riots. He blamed those in society who lived off unearned income at the expense of hard-working agricultural labourers; his solution was parliamentary reform. During his trial in July 1831 at the Guildhall, he subpoenaed six members of the cabinet, including the prime minister.

right|thumb|[[Portrait of Lord Melbourne (Partridge)|Portrait of Lord Melbourne by John Partridge. Lord Melbourne - Home Secretary of Earl Grey's Whig government]]

Earl Grey, during a House of Lords debate in November 1830, suggested the best way to reduce the violence was to introduce reform of the House of Commons. The Tory Prime Minister, the Duke of Wellington, replied that the existing constitution was so perfect that he could not imagine any possible alternative that would be an improvement. When that was reported, a mob attacked Wellington's home in London. The unrest had been confined to Kent, but during the following two weeks of November, it escalated massively by crossing East and West Sussex into Hampshire, with Swing letters appearing in other nearby counties.

On 15 November 1830, Wellington's government was defeated by a vote in the House of Commons. Two days later, Earl Grey was asked to form a Whig government. Grey assigned a cabinet committee to produce a plan for parliamentary reform.

Notes

Citations

References

External links

John Owen Smith, "Headley & Selborne workhouse riot of 1830"
"The Captain Swing rebellion in Sussex"
Captain Swing Reconsidered. Papers published in Southern History vol.32 (2010)[https://southernhistorysociety.org.uk/archive/southern-history-vol-32-2010/]