Swing Riots
[1][3] 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 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.
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.
[11] According to the social historians John and Barbara Hammond, enclosure was fatal to three classes: the small farmer, the cottager and the squatter.
[16] 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.
[17] 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.
[18] 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.
[23] 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.
[1] Starting in the south-eastern county of Kent, the Swing Rioters smashed the threshing machines and threatened farmers who owned them.
[5] 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.
[40] 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.
[40] Threshing machines would be broken, workhouses and tithe barns would be attacked and the rioters would then disperse or move on to the next village.
[42] Other actions included incendiary attacks on farms, barns and hayricks in the dead of night, when it was easier to avoid detection.
[1] Despite the prevalence of the slogan "Bread or Blood", only one person is recorded as having been killed during the riots, which was one of the rioters by the action of a soldier or farmer.
[40] Similar patterns of disturbances and their rapid spread across the country were often blamed on agitators or on "agents" sent from France, where the revolution of July 1830 had broken out a month before the Swing Riots had begun in Kent.
[43] 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.
[1][45] Not all rioters were farm workers since the list of those punished included rural artisans, shoemakers, carpenters, wheelwrights, blacksmiths and cobblers.
The authorities had received many requests to prosecute him for the speeches that he had made in defence of the rural labourer, but it was for his articles in the Political Register that he was eventually charged with seditious libel.
He blamed those in society who lived off unearned income at the expense of hard-working agricultural labourers; his solution was parliamentary reform.
[50] 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.
[52] 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.
He blamed local magistrates for being too lenient, and the government appointed a Special Commission of three judges to try rioters in the counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Dorset, Wiltshire and Hampshire.
