CAPTAIN SWING Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude

1969 PHOENIX PRESS ' 5 UPPER SAINT MARTIN S LANE LONDON

WC2H

9EA

CONTENTS

Preface Introduction t.

l.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

]]

Part I.

IO.

13. 14..

BEFORE SWING

Agrkultural England

The Rural Poor

The Village Wodd From Waterloo to Revolution Part II.

THE RISING

The Riots in the South�East In Hampshire and the West Country In Home Counties and Midlands In East Anglia and the North The Distribution of Riots PCJrt III.

11 . 12.

page 9

The Pattern of Revolt

REPRESSION AND AFTERMATH

Repression

Australia

15. Aftermath Appendix I. Distribution of Dist urbances by Counties U. Summa.ry of Repression Ill. Table oflncidents IV. The Problem ofthe Threshing Machine Select Bibliography Subject Index. Index of Places Index of Names

72

97 n6 134 152 173

THE ANATOMY OF SWING

Sw:ing's Victims and Allies Who Was Swing?

Part IV.

23 38 56

195 221 239 253 265 281

3o3 307 3u 359 367 372 37 4 383

'l'JIE ROME OF TUE RICK-BURNER.

Acknawlrlgnrtr1110 "PUNCH"

PREFACE The writing of this book has been divided between us: E.J.H. has been mainly responsible for the Introduction, Chapters 1-+. 9, 15 and

Appendix IV; and G.R. for Chapters 5-8, l0-14 and Appendices I-ill. But we have collaborated closely throughout in both planning and writing the book. It is strictly a joint enterprise and not merely the stringing together of two sets of chapters written by two independently

operating authors. We wish to expres5 our thanks to the secretaries and directors of The London Assurance and the Norwich Union Fire Insurance Society and to the librarians and archivists in London, Aylesbury, Bedford, Cambridge, Carlisle, Chelmsford, Dorchester, Gloucester, Herefurd, Hobart, Huntingdon, Ipswich, Leicester, Northampton, Norwich, Oxford, Reading, Sydney, Taunton, Trowbridge and Worcester, who have placed their records so freely at our dispo5al. Our special thanks are due to the late Peter Eldershaw, archives officer of Hobart, Tasma11ia, who gave us so unstintingly of his skill and energy and whose tragic and untimely death last year has robbed Australia of one of its most gifted and devoted public servants. We are also indebted to Miss Carol Co ombe and Miss Ruth Meyerowitz who, a5 research assistants, have helped in the preparation of the bo ok; and to Professor Norman Gash, Miss A.M. Colson and Dr. M onju Dutt for permitting U5 to draw on their unpublished the5es, concerned respectively with the labourers' movement in Berkshire, Hampshire and the south�tern counties; the extent of our debt to them will become evident in Chapters 5, 6, 7 and IO. Mr. Rex Russe11 has made available to us h is expert knowledge of the farm labourers of Lincolnshire and his notes on the local press and local sources. It is not possible to measure the benefit we have derived from the discussiom arising from papers we have read to various groups of colleagues and students during the time we have been working on this subject, but it is considerable. Mrs. Diana Wood in London and Mn. Eileen Penny cote in Adelaide have been largely responsible for typing the manuscript. T he index was compiled by Mrs. Betty Ll oyd. Finally, we express our gratitude to Cambridge University Pres5 for permhsion to reproduce Caird's Map of England in 1850 from Clapham, &:Dnomic History of Modern Britain, Vol. r. We have confined our bibliography to a list of contemporary

CAPibIN SWING

10

pecifia

sources,

both

manuscript and in print, and to works

doling

s lly with the agitations of farm·labourers in our period. Other works we have used arc listed in the refo:encc notes. February 1968

E.J. H. G. R.

INTRODUCTION " "Hodge" ; "th e secret peopIe" , brot her to t he

ox

· own Th ru in.articulateness, our own ignorance, are symbolised by the vefy titles of the few books which have attempted to recreate the world of the Englis h farm-labourer of the r9th century. Who were they? Nobody except themselves and the rulers of their villages knew or cared,

"

•

rarely)

nobody except the clergyman or (much more dissenting minister entered the few basic facts of their obscure lives in the parish register: birth, nwri3.ge and death. The directories of their co1mty, which recorded the details of their parishes, their landlords, their inn­ keepers, village artisans, shopkeepers and carriers in extraordinary detail, said nothing about them. If they could write-and in 1830 most could not-they would have little occ.:ision to, except perhaps, " laboriously, to some daughter or sister "in service in a town too

remote to be visited, some brother or son in the army. Except for

their gravestones and their children, they left nothing identifiable behind them for the marvellous surface of the .British landscape, the work of their ploughs, spades and shears and the beam they looked after, bears no signature or mark suc h as the masons left on cathedrals. We know little about them, because they are remote from us in time. Their articulate contemporaries knew little more, partly because: as townsmen they were ignorant about the country or cared nothing for it, p.:irtly because: .:is rulers they were not allowed to enter the self­ contairu:d world of the subaltern orders, or because .:is rur.:il middle class they despised it. It is a salut.:iry exercise: for the modern histoxian to read-in most ases vainly-through the opulent volumes of that monument to the gentleman's view of the countryside, the older

volumes of the Victoria County History, in searc h of any information about the rising of 1830, a movement which, after all, affected up­ wards of .20 counoo. Or, for that matter, of any but the most jejune information about the labourers. It is equally instructive: to glance through the reports of those well-meming e�lorc:rs , the r9th cc:ntuxy ' " collectors of folkleirc: or popular customs , and to observe the triumph with which they brought back from their forays into their neighbouring l.:inc:s, elementary information which evc:fy cottage child ' learned at its mother s breast. The vicars of Victorian England found medieval documents a less recalcitrant source dun their parishioners. As for the townsm.c:n, their ignorance: was quite swtling. The Liberal

CAPTAIN SWING

policic:Uns of the 184os, always anxious to comment on the abuses of squire and parson in the interests of Free Trade and in order to palliate the horrors of their own towns, often display an insouciance about the &m of the labourer's life which rcB.ects both a fondamental l ack

of intc:rcst and a virtually total lack of knowledge. The publishers of broadsheets and ballads for the urban mass market could not £ill to notice so dranwic and newsworthy an event as the riots of I 8 lo, but the few London pamphlets and b roadsheets on the subject might have been written a bout Sweden rather than Kent. "Captain Swing", for instance, may be treated as an honest but wronged yeoman &rmer rather than a labourer.* Indeed, the very term "Captain Swing" and

its association above all with rural incendiarism rcB.cct the journalistic creation of the city and not the reality of the countryside, for as we shall sec, incendiarism was only a marginal aspect of the rising-it became the characteristic form of rural unrest only after 183o�and there is no evidence that any labourers except perhaps in some small parts of Kent ever bdicvcd themselves to be following any "Captain Swing". The task of this book is therefore the difiicult one, which nowadays -and rightly-tempts many social historians, of reconstructing the mental world of an anonymous and undocumented body of people in order to understand their movements, themselves only sketchily documented. It is technically f:i scinating to an extent which the layman can scarcely grasp, and we cannot be sure that we have avoided the consequent temptation to put our pleasure above the reader' s. For there is a real diftcrcncc between the atti tudc of the researcher, whose reward is the sheer rock-lk) only a bout on&­ thitd of t h e paris h es had m.ore th an 75 per cent of their families e nga ged in a gricultur e; rather under a guarter had half or less of their families in a gricu lture (x S3 I Cenius), :j: By ! Ss 1, ac cording to the map attached to the census, there was a large area south

of the North Downs,

and covering also most of East Kent, Hampshire md. Berkshire,

as

Nor eh oflinc • • • • • • • • high wage area .Eastofline­ cerea\ area

I

EN

G

J,

J

S

ll

c

NOl\W1'H•

Il

ENGLAND: AGRICULTURAL STRUCTURE

�er 0Urd (r Printed in J. H. CfaPbam, &o,,o.,;, HisJP'f of Mttdtm Britain.[, Tht .&rly Railwtit ,e, P.

I(i)

.. /

J-S

S-10

l()-.JI)

JO-SO

somd-

ENCLOSURE OF COM.MON FIELD BY ACT 18ra-1grn: CENTURIES A!ta lL c. K. Oouno-. c-.,,. � ,.,,, lr7' J:

80·8 n·3 61'6 52·6 61 · 2 1.i.8 51•9

Highest

price

H/3 4 6/u 54/3 S"/9 15/1. I 13/ 10 119/6 1o6/s 126/6 96111 68/6 66/3 66/4 7o/8

6"/.i

69/9

Lowest price

48/7 34/8 43/1

.io/o

43/o 51/10 &2{3 75/.i 65/7 67/10

.i.i/1

S8/6 3* .iS/6 so/I

40/J

never fell below 50 shillings, which would have been considered attemely high prices before 1795. Yet landowners and farmers after 18 IS measured thcir prosperity not against the remote pre-war years, but against the abnormal boom profits of 1795-1815, when the golden sovereigns had rolled in, when credit had been easy, when marginal land had been leased at inflationary rents, money borrowed in the confidence that prices would stay up, and lUXUL] articles accumulated in the parlours of farmers who saw themselves as potential gentlemen, and on the bad:s of their wives and daughters who saw themselves

even more passionately as ladies. After the dramatic fall of prices there is no evidence that British fuming was going to rack and ruin. Taking the good years with tbe bad, prices remained pretty well stable until the very substantial improvements in agricultural methods from the 183os on pushed up productivity. But there can be no question that

in the years from 1815 to 1850 the British Canning community saw icself under extreme pressure. The various Corn Laws (1815-46) were attempts to maintain prices by exploiting the political strength of a "landed interest" grossly over-represented in Parliament. It was equally natural that the farmers should seek to cut their costs by all means in their power--at the expense of their labourers. Contrary to the traditional textbooks, British fuming did not achieve its great increase of output during this period by an "Agri­ cultural Revolution" similar or analogous to the contemporary Indwttial Revolution. Before the 1840s there was little mech;uiigtion,

AGRICULTUltAL ENGLAND

JI

except in most of the region which concerns us in this study, the threshing-machine, 6 though this spread during the W4llimc years of labou r shortage. There was virtually no application of steam-power, and vc[y little application of such modem sciences as chemistry (fertilisers) and the biological disciplines. With the exception of the new means of transport�, improved roads and coastal shipping, and in the use

184os,

bu t hardly before, railways-f.arming made no grea t

of the Industrial Revolution; even the new earthenware pipes for

the drainage of exceptionally heavy day lands did no t come into wide use until the middle of the I9th century. Essentially, agriculture achieved its remarkable increase in production p artly by bringing new land (i.e. former waste or rough pasturcland) under cultivation,

partly by applying the best of traditional farming methods more widely, adopting certain common-sense innovations which had long been p�d here and there* and, p erhaps as important as anything, by applying systematic business calculation to fanning. ''The peasant", it bas been observed, "docs not o perate an enterprise in the economic sense; he runs a household, no t a business conc:c:m." The £.a rmer, on the other hand, runs "primarily a business enterprise, combining factors of production purchased in a market to obtain a profit by sdling advantageously in a products market" .7 But even among £.armers,

especWly among tho se that have emerged gradually and slowly ou t of a pre-capitalist society, there arc degrees of economic ratiOO.ality. The impetus of the growing market for food turned British land­ owners and farmers with increasing rapidity into business calculators. So far as the landlord was concerned, economic rationality consisted in linking his land as closely as he could to the market (e.g. by en­ couraging improvements in communications) and in getting the maximum rent from the most business-like tenant-farmers, i.e. of arranging his t�cic s on suc h terms as to encourage the most profit­

able production by £.armers. How far landlords actually did this is not so dear. The richest of them had such vast rent-rolls in any case that a little extra hardly counted much, unless they went in for particularly opulent luxmy living; and their habit of no t actually exploiting much of their land directly kept them somewhat out of touch with the realities of the £.a rming business. (Of course, the aristocracy and gentry

*The crop-rotatioos and !reeding metbods assod�ted witb such names as Robert Bakewell and "Tumip" Towruhc.nd and po� by the agricultuol propagandises of the late rStb antury, � oot m;w. It is now acapted chat, in so fu as they wac oot taken over from the Low Countries, they � devdopeJ in England well before the middle of the J Sth �entury.

32

CAPT AIN SWIN G

did spend their rents freely : between r 76o and I S J o countty-houses were built and rebuilt at a rate hardly ever paralleled before an d never since, and those notably expensive pastimes, hunting and shooting. developed as never befo re.) There was p robably much less rationalisa­ tion of leases than the agricultural "improvers" advocated and ho ped for. Even in the mid-19th century, when the subject for the lint ti me- the n:volt (of r8Jo) and enc lo rure" .

AGRICULTURAL ENGLAND

37

social obliga tion, there was now the Poor Law, administered exclus­ u ge ively by the rulers of the co ntryside.* Instead of family, patro � or c usto m, there was now the s traightforward nexus of wages, wh1eh

bound the landl ess t o the landed.

Nons ro � I

C4p h.am. An Etor1omi, History of MoJem Britain. n. P· 253. 1831 Census contain s some, which h.11.ve been used in rllls book. but �Y for the study of individual parishe$ and hundred s . 3 , C £ Select Committee on Agxiculture (P arliament:iry P .11.pen V of 18) 3 , I.

2.

4. j. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. n.

J.

H.

The

Q 9443)-

This

was, incidentally, the

view

express ed by Karl

Man, cf. Werii t XXIII,

p . 75 0 . For the b.11.Si c m.11.ps of nationa l enclos ure distribution. see E. C K. Gonner, Commott UmiJ and [nc/osure (London 1 9 1 2) . See .11.lso W. E. '!.11.t e, The &iglilh Village Community a1uJ rlit Enclostm Movemtr1ts (London 1967). See Ap pendix IV. Eric R . WoJf, Peara/11.s (Foundations of Modem Anthropology Series, Prentice-Hall . 1966 ) , p . 2. Cf. the Sdect Comm itt ee on Ag n'cu ltural Custcms (Parl. P.11.pers VII of 1847-48). G. E . Ming.11.y , "Thi: size of farms in the 1 8th century" (Econ. Hist. Rev., XN , 1961-6 2) . Europ 'me11 a11d Childre11 in Agrfi:ulr11rc (London 1 843) , p. 75 . From the rep ott 00 Wilt,_, Dorset, Devon and Somerset, whe re annual hiring mai ntai ned itself be t te r than elsewher e. 6 · T. Da tf farmer, parson and squire, acted as their centres.7 Can we generalise that in rhe scattered settlement the social control of the ruling classes was less direct ? If so, we mus t always remember that the stimulus for action was mo re likely to work w here men habitually and daily me t in large numbers.

THE Vlll A GB WORLD

59

Mo reover, there w as at least one type of village where social structure and control were proverbially loose : rhe very large so-aile d "open " villages which often lived in a sort o f symbiosis with the su rrounding smaller or "close" parishes, provi ding them with labour. The large village was , sometimes by its very tradition and structure

311 d like the small provincial town, much less of a landed monopoly of the nobility and gentry, especially when it had a fair o r was a decayed town. In Wil tshire, for instance, Pewsey and Ramsbury, though in a zone of very large (mainly absentee) owners, contained a lot of plots owned by shopkeepers, artisans, and the like, who tended to run up cottages for rent to labourers, thus attracting the othe[wise

homeless and creating those straggling rural slums which so pre­ occupied the reformers of rural life. In "clo se" villages the planning was under the effective control of the local squire o r gent[ y, and as often as not the si ze of the settlement and the building of cottages were kept down in order no t to interfere with the amenities and ' ' picturesque

view" of country house and park.* Several such villages became proverbial "problem settlements" : Castle Acre in Norfolk, where neighbouring fa rmers recruited the "gangs" of women and children for their field-labour, 1 Ixworth in Suffolk, and others. Certainly i f criminality is any index of the tightness or loosenes s of social control, the large or open village had mo re of it. In the Thingoe Hundred of Suffolk, three out of the five villages with abno[mally high criminality . were "open " . (The re were a1 togethe r 27 "close , I I II open " and rune ..

unclassifiable parishes.) 9 In the Hartismere Hundred of the same

county three of the five crim..i nal villages ha d above 750 inhabitants

in 1 8 3 I (there were altogether six parishes of thls size out of over

30) ,

an d none o f them were obviously "close" . In Cosford Hundred the four largest parishes were also among the six mo st criminal. Large o r small, concentrated or scattered, the settlement wa s a place which provided meeting-points. The li ttle "village parliaments " of neigh­ bours talking over the business and gossip of the day o r season we re the least formal ;0 the chu rch the mo st forma l . In 1 8 30 we find examples of labourers' movements starting on Sundays in the church (as at Ringmer in Sussex), and in 1 83 4 pro tests again st the new Poor • I t i 1 i n1possible to

ge ne r.>l i 1e

about the validity o f the fre quent co mplaims tha t

squiies a n d l a rge farmer! act ually pulled down co tt>ges , though th i 1 i:ertainly happe ne d, and when it h appened. left bitte r and lo ng memo rie1. In Tilbury (Wilts.), a large village near nu merous p ark s and counir � o we1, an act of dii- kind by Benett o f P yt Ho use,

o ne of the co tmty MPs,

sec bel ow, pp .

125-6.

in 1 8 17, wa1 1till remembered in I96S. For the Pyt House a1fair

6o

CAPJ'AIN SWING

Law which took the form of church boycotts, the p eople demon­ strativdy leaving the church and "smoking pipes in the cemetery" (at Wroughton in Wiltshi re) , or walking out "every poor mm, woman and child . . . to the number of 1 50". 1 1 It was natural to arrange

for more formal negotiating meetings with the local farm.en and g entty in church or churchyard. as in Horsham {Sussex) and Thatcharn (Berks.) . n Similarly other formally o r informally localise d institutions -the Hundred Pound in Brede (Sussex), the space in front o f the vestty rooms (Pulborough, Sussex), the village green o r a field near the church (Kentish Weald) could provide places of assembly and dis­ cussion . However, the general impression is that such movements

of

began more often with informal groups an d propaga ted themselves by the silent consensus of th e poor, until they reached the point open demonstra tion in front of the house of farmer, rector or squire.

It was natural that the inn , a natural centre of meeti ng and dis­ cussion, saw the start of many such movements, though the innkeeper might not always be happy about this : he depended on th e goodwill of the notables who licensed him. Stil l , in the pre-temperance era the inn wa s the automatic locus of secular organisation, from the village club even to the Petty Sessions, and the less formal and o fficial beer­ houses were constantly accused of being centres o f subversion, i .e. of discussion. The inn , where not the onl y secula r meeting-place, was ofu:n one of two, u so it could not help but become a vehicle of politics. It is not an accident tha t in East Kent, where the machine­ brea king began, Saturday and Sun day night, when the men lefi: the pubs. saw the start of action. Just so in 1 8 1 6 the Little port riots (Isle of Ely) began when men of that village left the Globe inn a fter a meeting of the local Benefit Club. u The fact that in many smaller villages the publican or beerhouse keeper was himself also a small craftsman or trader, brought him closer to the labo urers.* Neverthdess, these un its of administration or settle ment were not com munities if that w o rd implies that t:he ties of l ocaliry prevailed over those of class. Or rather, they were communities only within the limits of the village poor. When a "threatening paper" signed simply "North Cun:y" and "Stoke St . Gregory" was distributed ro und that ar� in 1 8 l4, it was evident that the men who signed i t wi th the name of their villa ges did not regard the ' j entelmen" and farmers whose * Jn the l!rpitt glwn Hundre.i of Norfolk we 6nd publicans who Wcte wrighis. � butrhen,, join=.. coopen. l>rid* Swaflli ;un jai� which becom� iviilible only from 1 8 22, has been o m itted. . t "The great increase in rni�deiru:i nours t.his ye� r wa s oc= ioned by the �grkultural

tlOlS .1'

:j: Norwich

C�stle and W�lsingharn o n ly .

CAPTAIN S WIN G

can give us a mo[e rep resentative picture. Let us take 22 counties, which comprise v i rt ually che whole area affected by the "Sw.ing" movement, 1 6 and count the nu mbers in which ctime increased O[

declined (o[ remained stable) in each year from 1 805 to 1 8 30. The following table is the result : Year 1 807 I8o6

1 808

lho

l 8o9

I 812 l8I I

l 8 r4

M011 tmmr of crime m n ccun tiu

Number o f c:ues laa=e Decrc.1se 8

8

II

II

I]

12

4

18

IO

I8 I6

ISIS

19

1S

I 8 17

21

l8I8

II

r ho

6

1 8 19

14

1821

15

I 822

l] 14 14

1823

l hS

1 8 24

I4

10

1813

I 8 16

I4

u

8

1 826

15

1 8 27

1 8 28

17

1 8 29

21

4

4 9

6

4 I 3

II

8

16

1 J4 9 8 8 1 s 18

A num her of concl usions c an be drawn from this vet y revealing series.

Fint,

the relatively good situation until the last years of the

wa r,

Until 1 8 1 o the number of counties in which crime increased averaged less than half the total, between I 8 10 and 1 8 29 it was below half in only fou r yea rs . Second, there were two periods of abnormal increase in pressure : 1 8 1 1-17 {inter r up ted by the exceptionally m ild year of 1 8 14) , and 1 82 3 -29 (interrupt ed by the equally good yea[ of 1 828 . I t is obviously no accident that the outbreak of 1 8 16 occ urred as the fim of these was about to reach its peak, that the rising of 1 8 30 followed the wo rst year of the second-as bad a year in terms of OU[ criminal index as any in the entire quarter-.

Cun bs.

� Gloucs. Ha. y "litde pe t t y k inds of

th� b y hard bboor" the lower orders and then:­

small tradesmen who will rather get their b read by a ny o ther way

(Q l l ),

and (b) beca we they we re freq oen ted exclosi vel y by

fore most be ifu2ff"«ted. The Rev. Robert Wri ght of Itchen Abb•s , Hants . . wa� �nabl c to ezpbie> why, if this was so and the .leaders of the riots had all been abo ve the labo min g statos..- rho o gh he admitted they did no t a c t u• liy inclode a bcerhousc. kee per-the be«­ hoosei l OUid be responsible for th e trouble. (Q l05). Logical or not, he had sent the rio ters to transportation or the gallows in

l83o.

How ever, among the rar e c ilc ccive

pieces of sob version actuall y q uoted as takin g place a t a beershop-at Ing3testone , Essex -was a meeting of al mo$t the entire pa r� to refuse service as s pe,i� I constables (498). Th e political Wis of these cottagers seem to have coniistcd entirely in providing me eting pb a:s for hbooren be yond the $llpervis ion of their betlers. As an informant of Mr. M *ndie, one of the Assin•nt Poor Law Commissioners , put it disarmingly : "He w» corutable and co old go in to an y of the publ i c hous�s and pahaps eicape no tice and make h is obse rv� tion�. but

iu the \> .,.,r shops he was i mmediately a marked p erson . " (Q :;:6,9.) in to the role of the bee rhousei in 1830 comes from the R.�pe

The only enqui ry made

of H.:min g