The Swing Riots were a widespread set of uprisings in 1830 by agricultural workers across 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. If captured, the protesters faced charges of arson, robbery, riot, machine-breaking and assault. Those convicted faced imprisonment, transportation and possibly execution.Andrew Charlesworth, Brian Short and Roger Wells. "Riots and Unrest", in Kim Leslie, An Historical Atlas of Sussex, pp. 74–75
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. In Parliament, Lord Carnarvon had said that the English labourers were reduced to a plight more abject than that of any race in Europe, with their employers no longer able to feed and employ them.Hammond. The Village Labourer 1760–1832. Ch XI. "The Last Labourers' Revolt"Hansard. House of Lords Debate 22 November 1830, vol 1 Column. 617 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.Horspool. The English Rebel. pp.339–340 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.The Times, Thursday, 21 October 1830; p. 3; Issue 14363; col C
According to a Kent journalist, 'Swing' was 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.Coffin. The Dorset Page. "Captain Swing in Dorset". 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.Hammond. The Agricultural Labourer 1760–1832. Chapter III "Enclosure" 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. According to the social historians John and Barbara Hammond, enclosure was fatal to three classes: the small farmer, the cottager and the squatter.Hammond. The Village Labourer, 1760–1832. p. 97Elmes. Architectural Jurisprudence. Title LXVI. pp. 178–179. Definition of a cottage is a small house for habitation without land. Under an Elizabeth I statute, they had to be built with at least of land. Thus, a cottager is someone who lives in a cottage with a smallholding of land Before enclosure, the cottager was a labourer with land; after enclosure, he was a labourer without land.Hammond. The Village Labourer, 1760–1832. p. 100
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.G. E. Mingay, Parliamentary Enclosure in England: An Introduction to Its Causes, Incidence and Impact, 1750-1850, (1997) pp.17-19 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.RICHARDS, ERIC. “‘CAPTAIN SWING’ IN THE WEST MIDLANDS.” International Review of Social History, vol. 19, no. 1, 1974, pp. 86–99. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44581713. Accessed 12 Nov. 2020.
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.Chambers and Mingay. Agricultural Revolution. p. 104 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.E. J. Hobsbawm & G Rudé, Captain Swing (1969), appendix 1 Since the late 20th century, those contentions have been challenged by a new class of recent historians.J.M. Neeson. Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure: and Social Change in England, 1700-1820. p. 223 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.Hobsbawm/Rude. Captain Swing p. 16 Surplus peasant labour moved into the towns to become industrial workers.Moore. Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World pp. 29–30
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.Hobsbawm/Rude. Captain Swing. pp. 18–33 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.Hobsbawm/Rude. Captain Swing. pp. xxi–xxii
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. Local newspapers of the time reported that rioting occurred in Lincolnshire and Northamptonshire over the employment of Irish labourers as late as 11 August 1832.
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.Friar. Sutton Local History. pp. 324–325 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.Hobsbawm/Rude. Captain Swing. p. 29 The 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 lower and lower levels of relief were offered. Three "one-gallon" bread loaves a week were considered necessary for a man in Berkshire in 1795. However provision had fallen to just two similarly-sized loaves being provided in 1817 Wiltshire.Hammonds. The Village Labourer. pp. 183–185 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).Friar. Sutton Companion to Local History. pp. 324–325
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.Hobsbawm/Rude. Captain Swing. pp. 14–15 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.
Industrialisation Separating the grain seed from the stalk and husks, threshing, was traditionally done manually via flails and occupied up to a quarter of the agricultural workforce. In the late 18th century, the threshing machine was invented and spread swiftly among the farming community, threatening the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of farm-workers.Hobsbawm/Rude. Captain Swing. Appendix IV The terrible harvests of 1828 and 1829 proved to be the last straw, and farm labourers faced the approaching winter of 1830 with dread.
Riots
The riots, being largely improvised and spontaneous in nature, started in Kent with rioters smashing threshing machines and threatening the farmers who owned them.Hobsbawm/Rude. Captain Swing. p. 71 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. The riots spread rapidly and systematically, following pre-existing road networks, through the southern counties of Surrey, Sussex, Middlesex and Hampshire before they spread north into the Home Counties, the Midlands and East Anglia. Originally, the disturbances were thought to be mainly a southern and East Anglian phenomenon, but subsequent research has revealed just how widespread Swing riots really were, with almost every county south of the Scottish border involved.John Beckett "Swing riots" The Oxford Companion to British History. Oxford Reference Online.
More recently 'The Swing Project' has supported this analysis and suggested that the southern counties of England were not the epicentre of the disturbance; as their project had identified a lot more incidents in the eastern counties.
Tactics