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CAPTAIN SWING

IN

SUSSEX & KENT

RURAL REBELLION

IN 1830

Mike Matthews

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the author’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. © Mike Matthews 2006 Published 2006 The Hastings Press PO Box 96 Hastings TN34 1GQ hastings.press@virgin.net www.hastingspress.co.uk ISBN: 1-904-109-136 ISBN 13: 978-1904-109-136 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Set in Garamond Book design by Helena Wojtczak Printed by Biddles, England

The author is grateful to Roger Bristow and the staff of Hastings Reference Library.

Also by Mike Matthews: Alf Cobb: Mugsborough Rebel, The Struggle For Justice in Edwardian Hastings (Hastings Press, 2003) and The Decline of Hastings as a Fashionable Resort (Hastings Press, 2006).

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For Peggy

Through thick and thin

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CONTENTS

Preface vi

Introduction 1

I The Road to Rebellion 5

II Crimes and Punishments 14

III Poaching and Smuggling: Night-time Occupations 18

IV Yours Truly, Swing 25

V Swing in Kent 32

VI Swing Crosses into Sussex 58

VII Swing to the West 71

VIII An Innocent Hanged 83

IX The Rye Reform Riots 92

X The Anti-Poor Law Riots 97

XI Some Reflections on Swing 102

Bibliography 113

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PREFACE Eric Hobsbawm’s and George Rudé’s study of the Swing rebellion — entitled, simply, Captain Swing — was the first major work entirely devoted to the riots. Their history of the outbreaks was published in 1969 after extensive and painstaking research and is still recognised as the standard text. Whilst there remains some academic dispute over when the riots can be accurately judged to have begun — by this I am referring to the initial burst of incendiarism — Hobsbawm and Rudé were quite certain that the first threshing machine* to be destroyed was at Lower Hardres, near Canterbury, on the night of 28th August 1830. Howard Newby, who had written his Country Life: A Social History of Rural England in 1987, was less sure about the exact date: ‘as far as can be discovered, [the machine-wrecking] all began at Lower Hardres.’

Many years ago I happened to read some of the private correspondence of Sir Edward Knatchbull lodged in the Maidstone Archives. Sir Edward was a leading Kent magistrate in 1830 who became actively involved in a legal struggle to suppress the riots. Although a Conservative MP from 1819 until 1832 he was not without sympathy for the poor, and, often, convicted rioters were transported who might well have been executed had they been brought before other, less humane, magistrates. He mentions in his correspondence the destruction of a threshing machine at Ripple, near Deal, on 5th August, over three weeks earlier than the machine that was broken at Lower Hardres. Because this incident was never picked up by the county newspapers it went undiscovered by the co-authors of Captain Swing. This highlights the problem for any ‘Swing’ researcher: the unknown extent of under-reporting and the physical impossibility of accessing every local archive. In many cases rural crime was not recorded in the county press and the machine-breaking incident at Ripple was not regarded as especially newsworthy at a time when the rural disturbances were still in their infancy. At a later period editors may even have deliberately kept incidents of machine-wrecking and __________________________________________________ * A machine for removing the husks from grain. It was also called a thrashing machine, and the two terms are used interchangeably.

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incendiarism out of the papers for fear of inciting additional criminal activity.

Michael Holland, in a short article entitled ‘The Swing Project’, states that recent local research has frequently shown that the true level of Swing protest was higher than that identified by Hobsbawm and Rudé and continued for longer than had originally been thought: ‘between 1830 and 1832, the protest exploded across Kent, Sussex and Hampshire.’ But then Hobsbawm and Rudé did not have the advantage of being able to employ a large team of investigators to research every county involved in the riots. It was never their intention to write a definitive history, since two authors could not expect to unearth every recorded incident. When the Swing disturbances were on such a vast scale there was only so much space for coverage in any county journal or gazette. However, it is pointless to deny that the scope of the riots far exceeded the expectations of the authors of Captain Swing.

A fairer criticism of their study of the riots is made by E. P. Thompson, who considered they looked at the rising ‘through a slight haze and at a great distance’. It is perhaps true to say that their history of the Swing movement has rather a dry, academic style not perhaps best suited to the general reader who has no prior knowledge of the riots. This is admitted as much by the co-authors themselves, when they write that the Hammonds’ The Village Labourer 1760–1832, which devotes several chapters to the development of the Swing rebellion, ‘will probably continue to be read with pleasure, when we are only consulted to provide footnotes.’

Whereas Hobsbawm and Rudé set themselves the daunting task of investigating what they called ‘an entire epoch of the English farm labourers’ history’, I have chosen to narrow the focus by charting Swing’s progress through just two southern counties, which suffered the greatest levels of incendiarism and destruction of machinery. I have deliberately not set out to write a comprehensive regional study of the riots, since to list in chronological order one lawless episode after another would soon become very tedious for the reader: the destruction of farm premises and machinery in Kent and Sussex was on an immense scale, as will become abundantly clear in this narrative. Wherever possible I have tried to avoid duplicating existing published material on Swing, or otherwise have attempted to

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combine all the previous historical information on the riots into numerous detailed case-studies. Two chapters contain subject matter relating to the outbreaks that has never before been seen in print and readers interested in the emergence of agricultural trade unionism will learn something more.

This book seeks to explore closely what county and national reporters in 1830 were calling a ‘war of poverty against property’, a civil strife of ‘destitution against possession’. I have strained to breathe some life and colour into the criminal exploits and violent resistance of the Captain Swing insurgents, to endeavour to understand what their contemporaries described apprehensively as ‘their dark mischiefs’ and ‘state of reckless insubordination’.

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INTRODUCTION

series of riots swept across England’s southern counties in 1830 after a prolonged agricultural recession that followed the close of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. The outbreaks went on to spread,

largely unchecked, into East Anglia, the Midlands and several northern counties, eventually to reach Carlisle. The long-suffering, wretchedly oppressed and half-starved labourers’ economic hardship and distress had become so acute that their usual forbearance finally snapped. This agrarian rebellion was fuelled by an unrecognisable level of class hatred and bitterness and, driven by a blind desire for revenge and reprisal against the farmers and their wealthy friends, the farmhands were set on a course of violent, direct retaliatory action, regardless of the consequences.

Machine-breaking, rioting and the destruction of property can be traced back to the seventeenth century and were to remain a traditional method of social protest by both industrial workers and rural labourers who sought to defend their working conditions and livelihood. The most famous example of machine-wrecking is of course the Luddite* rebellion of 1811–1812; a violent response to the introduction of new machinery that threatened to displace labour, but also a means of compelling intransigent employers into granting wage concessions. The new mechanical devices threatened both employment and living standards.

The Captain Swing riots went beyond a fracturing of social and working relationships; this was rural class warfare on an epic scale, far exceeding any agrarian rebellion that had gone before. There was a strong Luddite element to the rioting in its major offensive against the advances in farm machinery: threshing machines, which had begun to seriously displace manual labour, were smashed in an almost frenzied ritual and vast amounts of

__________________________________________________ * The Luddites were workers who protested (often by destroying textile

machines) against the changes brought by the Industrial Revolution that they felt threatened their jobs. They clashed in battles with the army and were tried en masse at York in 1813, resulting in many death penalties and transportations.

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vulnerable stacks and barns were fired by gangs of incendiarists, often with blackened faces. The riots’ notoriety gained a fresh impetus when, in September 1830, Kent farmers began to receive letters threatening death and destruction unless the machines were dismantled and immediate measures taken to improve the desperate plight of the labourers. The letters were signed mostly ‘Captain Swing’ or simply ‘Swing’, the very name carrying the implicit threat that anyone merely in receipt of such a letter might well end his days hanging from a rope. The name ‘Captain Swing’ became synonymous with the riots and soon symbolized the whole rural resistance.

Why the rioters should adopt the name ‘Swing’ for their figurehead is not immediately clear, although there are two schools of thought suggesting an explanation. William Cobbett* thought the term originated from the part of the flail known as either a swing or swingel, which the thrasher brings in contact with the straws. But a Kent journalist called ‘swing’ an ‘ambiguous cognomen’ used by haymakers after the work-party stop to sharpen their scythes. Once they are ready to resume, the call ‘swing’ is given out as a signal by their leader to restart. The leader was known as ‘Captain’. Thus, the most feasible explanation for the title ‘Captain Swing’ comes from the signal call made by a leader of the haymakers.

It was the alarmist talk that the disturbances were only a prelude to outright civil war or, worse, a Jacobin-inspired† revolution that truly terrified the propertied rural elite and gentry. They were desperately anxious to discover the identity of the mysterious leader of the riots — Captain Swing. Could this ‘Swing’ fellow be solely responsible for encouraging the despised labourer to shed his sullen deference for open rebellion? Shortly after the outbreaks began in the summer of 1830 a trickle of ‘Swing’ letters came into circulation around Maidstone and __________________________________________________ * Surrey-born Cobbett owned a working class weekly paper, the Political

Register. In the 1820s he toured Britain on horseback, recording his observations in articles that became a book, Rural Rides (1830). After two years’ imprisonment for sedition he was charged with (and found not guilty of) libel for writing ‘Rural War’, an article supporting the Swing riots. He later became MP for Oldham.

† Jacobin and Jacobinism are pejoratives for revolutionary politics. The Jacobin was a republican club of the French Revolution. After its closure in 1794 the name passed into general use for any left-wing extremist.

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Wrotham, which rapidly turned into a flood of anonymous threats. Semi-literate, menacing letters were sent through the post, warning the recipients that they risked being burnt alive unless specific instructions were followed.

If it were true that this diabolical Captain was the inspiration behind every burning rick and broken threshing machine then he must be swiftly apprehended. Powerful landowners and the civil powers began a frantic search for Captain Swing only to discover they were chasing shadows; that in reality this detested bandit leader had no bodily existence but instead had been conjured up by the labourers as a mythical folk hero, rather like the earlier Robin Hood. This mythical status gave the Captain a powerful, romantic aura of invincibility. His very insubstantiality was perhaps a more potent force in the minds of the semi-literate farmhands. Because of this he posed a dangerous threat to the authorities: since he did not exist, he could never be tracked down as the ringleader. He was not available to be killed or captured. There was no chance of a public trial and a resulting execution, no possibility of any humiliating punishment that could have fatally weakened the movement.

Readers will notice the similarities between the Swing disturbances and the Luddite outbreaks. Historically, Luddism is remembered for its infamous machine-wrecking but, at the time, was also renowned for its spate of anonymous threatening letters. Perhaps in their increasingly despairing hunt for the eponymous Captain Swing, the Kent justices had forgotten that the Luddites were oddly named after an obscure young handloom weaver who became forever associated with the smashing of factory machinery and that other folk legends lived only in the imagination of the oppressed.

Whilst generations of schoolchildren will remember the rather minor episode whereby six Dorset labourers achieved lasting fame as the Tolpuddle Martyrs, transported to Australia for their outrageous impudence in daring to form a union, few will recall reading anything concerning the greatest rural rebellion in English history. The recent and growing interest in the riots should ensure that Captain Swing will emerge from his historical neglect and take centre stage in a mighty agrarian drama.

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Willoughby’s thrashing machine

A Scotch thrashing machine

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I

THE ROAD TO REBELLION

here is some disagreement amongst social historians about exactly when threshing machines came into common use. Hobsbawm and Rudé believe it was during the Napoleonic Wars, as the following extract

from Captain Swing shows: ‘Threshing machines had been introduced in some quantity during the labour shortage of the war years, yet they continued, curiously enough, to spread in subsequent years of depression and surplus cheap labour’.1 Michael Holland, academic adviser to the Swing Project, also accepts there was a shortfall of labour during the wars with France, covering the years 1793–1815, since significant numbers of farm labourers were recruited into the armed forces or drafted into the militia for home defence, creating ‘a manpower shortage which ultimately affected the ability of farmers to process their crops for market. Industrialisation came to the rescue in the form of the threshing machine.’2 I somehow doubt the farmhands would have seen it quite that way.

But was the shortage of labourers throughout the war years really that serious? Census returns between 1801 and 1821 showed that the population had expanded from 8.9 million to 12 million — an increase of 35% — and would continue to grow substantially afterwards. It should be remembered that, throughout this historical period, a debate had been raging over the need for population control, focusing in particular on those in receipt of parish relief. The Reverend Thomas Malthus even proposed that labourers should defer marriage until they were able to maintain a family without the aid of parish assistance. He urged ‘moral restraint’ — a euphemism for sexual abstinence — and with pessimistic self-righteousness taught that it was the laws of nature that had doomed the labourer and his family to starve. In his judgement, the population was increasing faster than its ability to feed itself. Malthus was no favourite of William Cobbett. He countered Malthus’s controversial ideas by arguing that nobody had ever suggested controlling the birth rate of the clergy or any other non-productive classes that Cobbett considered a drain on public finances.

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There is no dispute that many farm labourers in the south of England were absorbed into the war effort abroad; many others were held back as volunteers or joined the militia — the threat of invasion was very real. But was it on a scale sufficient to speed the introduction of the threshing machine ‘in some quantity’, as Hobsbawm and Rudé allege? Even in wartime the fields had to be cultivated, ploughed and finally harvested. How was the sowing and reaping accomplished if there was such a severe scarcity of labour? Surely it was the sowers and ploughmen who threshed the corn by hand in winter? No one is suggesting they were called up for military service only for the winter months.

Willoughby’s thrashing (later to generally be known as threshing) machine had been invented by 1792 and was followed by Jubb’s three years later. The early machines were of relatively simple design and were mostly constructed to be operated by horse power. There is no disagreement that these ‘thrashing mills’ were available for use during the French Wars (the nearly continuous period of warfare from February 1793 until Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815). A. J. Peacock, in his study of the East Anglia riots of 1816 and 1822, Bread or Blood, acknowledges that the machines were in existence at the end of the eighteenth century. He accepts they made work more difficult to find but believes the machines only began to aggravate the rural employment situation from 1814 onwards. Peacock maintains that, in the early stages of development, the machines were extremely expensive and unreliable. These mechanical problems were solved only by about 1807, which is well into the Napoleonic Wars. Crucially, if Peacock is correct, the threshing machine could not have been in general use before 1807.

There is no denying that England at war had come to resemble an armed camp or that rural labourers, among others, were constantly being recruited into home-defence duties. However, by about 1809 both the ‘volunteers’ and the militia had been disbanded. This means that just two years after the mechanical troubles had been largely resolved, the militiamen were back in their villages looking for work. E. P. Thompson discovered a premature Swing letter, dated 1811, sent by labourers from Early Court, near Reading. It threatened: ‘Blood and Vengeance against Your Life and Your Property for taking

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away our Labour with Your Threshing Machine’.3 This is hardly evidence of a labour shortage during the ‘wars abroad’.

John Lowerson claims in A Short History of Sussex that there were no threshing machines operating in Sussex before 1810 and that one of the first in use had been purchased by the Earl of Egremont for his Petworth estate. If Lowerson is correct then the machines would not have been seen on Sussex farms for the first seventeen years of the Napoleonic Wars. I conclude, therefore, that the machines could not have been in widespread use during the Wars, and any that were employed had been hired or purchased not through any shortage of labour but because they could make substantial cuts in wage costs. Peacock’s own research showed that a machine of between four and five horsepower could thrash as much corn in a single day as twenty manual labourers using a flail. William Cobbett, who observed rural matters very closely, reckoned that ‘one thrashing machine could deprive ten men of their daily wage’.4

In the months after Waterloo (June 1815), the demobilised soldiers and sailors disembarked from the great sailing warships to find their way home. Some were left to trudge wearily back to their villages, many miles from port; others gratefully cadged a ride in a cart or farmer’s wagon. On returning to their families they discovered the grim economic reality of agricultural recession. A sudden slump had followed the artificially-induced wartime prosperity and inflation. This agrarian depression was to continue for fifteen years after the victory at Waterloo, right up to the Swing disturbances. Cobbett always remained convinced that the farmers’ prosperity prior to Waterloo had been achieved only by ruthlessly grinding down their labourers. He believed their men had been reduced to a state of half-starvation and semi-nakedness: ‘Shivering in the cold and forced to creep under rags laid on beds of straw.’

Some idea of the numbers of returning servicemen is given in George Rudé’s history of revolutionary Europe: ‘In 1813–14, departing from previous practice [England] had made provision for nearly 300,000 men in her regular army and 140,000 sailors in her fleets.’5 Many of these troops must have encountered French prisoners of war and a small minority may have been influenced by their revolutionary ideals. How many rebelled against the patriotic call of duty and strict army discipline to join the Jacobin cause it is impossible to say, but there is some

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evidence that a few deserters were later involved in the 1830 Swing uprising. To return home and join the ranks of the unemployed, after bravely enduring the blood and thunder of battle, must have been difficult to accept. Any ex-serviceman reduced to claiming parish relief may have contrasted his situation with the 1792 decree of the French convention:

That wherever French armies shall come, all taxes, tithes and privileges of rank are to be abolished. The property of the Government, of the privileged classes and their adherents to be placed under French protection.

There are good grounds for believing that these returning military veterans stiffened the resistance to the economic depression experienced by the rural poor. It is an extraordinary fact that, even in these post-war recession years, when hundreds of thousands of demobilised men swamped the labour market, the threshing machine came to be increasingly deployed. The spreading use of these machines at a time of mass unemployment showed a callous disregard for the plight of the farm labourer. The threshing machine was also responsible for many physical injuries and deaths. When a poor boy called Humphrey Banks had both legs and arms broken by one, a writer to the Kentish Gazette said, ‘This is proof that these things ought to be destroyed; and may this serve as a caution to farmers not to have them on their premises to prevent poor men from work.’6

In the year after demobilisation, there were serious disturbances in East Anglia that far exceeded the relatively peaceful, traditional ‘bread riot’. Machine-breaking in quite significant numbers had begun in the summer of 1815 in east Suffolk, but the East Anglian riots the following year combined threshing machine destruction with the smashing up of the mole plough. The mole plough, which was used for drainage work on the heavy loam and clay soil of Essex and Suffolk, had begun to displace the agricultural manual labourer. The machine-wrecking exemplified popular resentment over the existing heavy unemployment and distress found in that region. But six years later, in 1822, the threshing machines were deliberately targeted for destruction in the Diss and Eye neighbourhood of Norfolk. This was a determined bid to drive them permanently off the surrounding farmland. The campaign was ruthlessly suppressed by military force.

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William Cobbett had described the post-war agricultural distress as an intolerable blight on the landscape of rural England. Were the economic conditions as bad as he had painted? This is what a Times journalist had to say, writing at the height of the Swing riots in October, 1830:

The farmer is now, or pretends to be, a gentleman. The farming servant is a miserable outcast from the farmer’s dwelling, — ill-paid, half-starved, heartless, and exasperated … Added to this we mean the practice of reducing the poor labourer to the tenancy of a hovel, without the comfort of a garden, thereby degrading him into the condition of a wretched room-keeper at St. Giles. This isolation of the peasant labourer is now producing its pestilential consequences. Instead of regarding those above him with hope, or gratitude, or affection, he scowls at every man but a pauper like himself with ferocious hatred and fosters no appetite but for revenge.7

Another reporter in the same edition of The Times remembers with nostalgia the pre-war days before agriculture turned into an aggressive capitalist industry:

In times not long removed the Kentish farmers, generally speaking, were favourably circumstanced. There were many small farms held by beneficial leases and these petty farmers associated much with their servants, sat down at table with them and lodged many of them. Now most of these small farms have been absorbed by monied men. The farmers have become labourers and tenants of little cottages, for which they pay £5 or £6 per annum, though they cover a few rods only of that very land which they had sold earlier for £2 per acre. On the other hand, the prodigious amounts of the poor rates, the odious tithe system, the assessed and other taxes, press heavily even upon the landlord and fall with accumulated weight on the class which is undermost.

By the outbreak of war, the vast majority of farmers were tenants of a select group of wealthy landowners. Out of all the agricultural land in England, 90% was farmed under lease. When the old ‘beneficial’ leases expired, they were replaced with vastly inflated rental values that reflected the short-term wartime prosperity that had brought such a sharp rise in farm prices.

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Although Kent was virtually unaffected by enclosure,* it made little difference to the hard lot of the agricultural labourers. As Hobsbawm and Rudé recognised: ‘The proletarianism of the rural poor proceeded everywhere in southern, midland and eastern England and the worst pauperisation was found in areas which were quite unaffected by the parliamentary enclosure of 1760–1830.’ 8

Whilst enclosure impacted on Kent far less than most other counties, the Garden of England nevertheless still keenly felt the economic depression that had followed on from the peace. Figures revealed that the cost per head of the poor rates in Kent equalled the cost incurred in the most heavily enclosed counties. There was no straightforward correlation between the density of enclosed fields and the extent of rural protest since, in some counties, varying amounts of land had already been divided amongst the landowners and had, therefore, never been open for the enclosure of common pasture and wastes. A clear indication that this was the case in Kent is given by Cobbett on his travels there in 1823: Cobbett found that, in particular, valuable areas of rich soil, devoted to corn, were largely owned by the aristocracy, while vast estates were in the possession of country gentlemen. Cobbett illustrated this with the example of the Marquis of Camden, who owned huge estates at Sevenoaks and Bayham: ‘Here alone he spreads his length and breadth over more, they say, than ten or twelve thousand acres.’9 The Earl of Darnley† was another landowner who owned estates in Kent that brought in a rent of £4,000 a year, an enormous sum in those days. Cobbett, during his 1823 journey across the Isle of Thanet, observed:

The richer the soil and the more destitute of woods; that is to say the more purely a corn country, the more miserable the labourers … In this beautiful island every inch of land is appropriated by the rich. No hedges, no ditches, no grassy lanes, a country divided into great farms — and the wretched labourer has not a stick of wood and has no place for a pig or cow to graze or even to lie down upon.10

__________________________________________________ * The various Enclosure Acts removed landless labourers’ right to farm or

graze animals on common land, which was enclosed with fences by the landowners.

† John Bligh (1767–1831), 4th Earl of Darnley.

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The year 1795 had been one of European famine; distress was so widespread that magistrates in Berkshire felt compelled to introduce the Speenhamland System, which allowed agricultural wages to be subsidised out of parish funds. The winter of 1794–95 had been unusually severe, causing food prices to soar, leading to numerous bread riots. The scheme was rapidly adopted elsewhere. The intention behind the plan was to make direct contributions out of the poor rates to cover any deficiencies in wages. Farmers were encouraged to pay a bare subsistence wage for a single farmhand, which was not increased for a married man with a family. Instead, a supplementary allowance was doled out, forcing a married man to live partly on charity. Abruptly any distinction between a hardworking labourer and an idle pauper disappeared.

This new system was eagerly seized on by tenant-farmers during the French Wars. Appreciating they were living through times of abnormal inflation, they would avoid raising wages which might prove difficult to lower at a late date, when prices fell back. The Speenhamland System effectively turned labourers into beggars, completely exposed to the whims and wiles of any arbitrary poor law commissioner. If a considerate farmer was willing to pay a living wage he was still obliged to make a contribution to the poor rates, which helped subsidise a lower wage paid by a less generous neighbouring farmer. In The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson tells the story of a jealous farmer who, knowing he was partly subsidising a rival’s labour costs, would lay off his own men in retaliation and apply for others to replace them, supplied by the overseer.

The absurd situation worsened when the returning soldiers saturated the labour market, bringing heavy unemployment to areas still dependent on agriculture. The cost of parish relief rocketed. This only served to encourage farmers to cut back even further on the number of men they employed. Kent had little industry to absorb the huge surplus unemployed. The largest industrial centres were the Chatham and Sheerness dockyards; elsewhere there was a little coal mining, salt works, stone or chalk quarrying and some papermaking, but the staple industry that sustained village life remained agriculture.

Some idea of the distress in Kent is given by the Poor Law Commissioners’ findings at the parish of Lenham. Between the years 1801–31 the population had increased from just on 1,400

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to 2,200. Two years later, 1,200 of the inhabitants were receiving some form of poor relief. High rents had forced two tenant-farmers to give up farming, leaving their farms standing idle because the landlords were unable to re-let.

The poor law authorities actively encouraged migration and assisted emigration, which was viewed as an effective and cheap way of disposing of an unwanted surplus population. Emigration to America began for Kent parishes in 1831. Between 1835 and 1837, 476 residents emigrated and a further 175 migrated to the north of England. In Sussex emigration had started even earlier; twenty emigrants having left Hastings in 1830, also bound for America. Even the few improvements to the traditional plough and harrow had a detrimental effect on employment. William Cobbett, on his travels in the Isle of Thanet, noticed that:

Almost all the work is done by horses except the reaping and the mowing … The labourers’ houses, all along, through this Island are beggarly in the extreme. The people dirty, poor-looking, ragged, but particularly dirty. It is impossible to have an idea of anything more miserable than the state of the labourers in this part of the country.11

By 1823 Cobbett had come across threshing machines at Monkton and Sarre before the harvest was in, causing men to be working in cheap labour gangs on the road. This meant that labourers were frequently seen being relieved* outside the workhouse, to be employed as stone-breakers or ditch-diggers in the lanes and highways. There was every possibility that these embittered and discontented individuals, degraded as paupers, would congregate in the workhouse yard to voice their bitter discontent and plan retaliatory action on a Saturday night after the beer-shops closed.

The rural poor had their sympathisers within the national press, as is evident from these critical editorials taken from The Times:

A Sussex farmer formerly wore a round frock, ate and drank with his men, and brought up his family to the dairy and the plough. The round frock is now discarded; the farmer’s family steps into a higher grade, and his servants … resort to the public house and the licensed retailers of beer, where they discuss their political grievances.12

__________________________________________________ * Receiving minimal welfare assistance at parish level.

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Crime is the inevitable consequence of desperation produced by a long course of improvidence and abuse of power. When the small farmer was destroyed, that his acres with those hitherto cultivated by a score of his brethren, might all merge in one large occupancy, taken by an agricultural capitalist at an enormous rent — and what has been the moral effect of this march of avarice under the name of political economy? Why, it has destroyed our people. It has annihilated the wholesome link between the man who drives his own carriage and he who guides his master’s plough. It has demolished the old English farmhouse, where the tenant of 50 or 60 acres gave bed and board and wrought his fences and spread his manure and harrowed in the seed and mowed the hay and helped to reap the stack and thrash the corn. That race has been destroyed, among whom in the language of the Kent Herald: “the farmer was once looked up to by his servants as their friend and almost their father. They formed, as it were, a part of his family, generally seated at the same board and partaking, to a degree, of the comforts of a common home. All this has passed away. An insuperable barrier has been raised between the ‘parlour’ and the ‘kitchen’. The servant has not been recognized any more than as a labouring animal on the estate. The master has become a gentleman and the servant has sunk into a brutal slave.”13

The article singled out the new political economists for scathing denunciation. Many conservatives and traditionalists, who held dear to the past, believed that leading political economists such as Jeremy Bentham and Adam Smith were directly responsible for the enclosure of common lands and the emergence of capitalism into village life. Both men had advocated the market mechanism — simply put, let corn flow like water and it would find its own level. It sounded simple but in reality was far too simplistic, since the grain stopped flowing whenever it encountered the nearest barn; here it was stored and held from circulation chiefly to keep the price up. The political economic doctrine worked to the advantage of corn dealers, merchants and millers — in fact any middleman who hoarded grain to the detriment and cost of the poor. The principles that underlined the old moral economy were dismissed as sentimental foolishness to allow commercialism free entry into the countryside. Toll gates and turnpikes were to proliferate in its wake.

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II

CRIMES AND PUNISHMENTS

lthough agricultural labourers were paid little more than a starvation wage they were given no choice but to vigorously defend their menial working conditions. Opposing them were commercially-minded farmers,

mostly in occupation of farms as tenants, in acute recession, ruthlessly determined to cut costs. This brought an emphasis on the casual hiring of farmhands who might be employed only for the odd day or morning. Any Irish labourer or ‘foreigner’ from outside the area who was prepared to work for a pittance was encouraged to apply. The expansion of capitalist agriculture had rarely operated on sentiment in the days before Swing. If machinery coming onto the market was reliable and cheaper to run than the employment of manual thrashers, it was hired or purchased with few misgivings. And if farmers’ men turned up to work on a frosty morning, or if the weather turned wet, they were frequently laid off without much regret. Once the harvest had been gathered, the ploughmen had always known they could fall back on the long winter hours spent on thrashing corn by flail. This had meant protection from the elements under the shelter of a barn and the certainty of regular work.

Life for a downtrodden farm labourer in early-nineteenth century rural England was often of short duration. The gallows also played some part in reducing average life expectancy in the slaughter of men and women for petty misdemeanours. Abroad, England’s penal code had a well-deserved reputation for savagery: its barbaric code was so bloody in character as to easily outrival revolutionary France and all its continental neighbours. Crimes which carried the death penalty at the time of Captain Swing are too numerous to mention but certainly stealing a watch, a silk handkerchief or a small sum from a landlady’s purse were judged sufficiently serious for the offenders to be sentenced to the ‘long drop’ at the gallows, described by the great social historian E. P. Thompson as ‘Albion’s Fatal Tree’.

Judges’ hackles rose whenever they detected evidence of a growing contempt for the legal system, especially amongst the

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lower ranks. Without the backing of a strong force of police they feared any hint of a breakdown in law and order. They also understood the need to balance terror with mercy and would closely monitor the prevailing mood in the courtroom. Some judges were known to sound out the feeling of the townspeople before the trial was scheduled to start.

Exemplary executions could be considered necessary to help quell the unruliness of a mob or if local magistrates were convinced the rioting was out of control. But a careful balance had to be struck: too much hanging could brutalise the poorest classes to a degree of insensitivity that weakened their already shaky respect for the law. The judge, clothed in his intimidating full wig and red ermine, was wary enough to avoid tipping the scales of justice too far one way. He appreciated his pivotal role in the theatrical drama played out in the courtroom and would watch the emotional reaction of the spectators, sometimes building up the expectancy of a terrifying outcome and then abruptly abandoning terror for leniency, if he considered it more expedient. Nevertheless, cruelty was commonplace: for example, a deserter from the Coldstream Guards was given three hundred lashes and had his back pickled in hospital as a result. Stealing was considered so serious that the culprit was often transported for the most trivial offence. One thief received seven years’ transportation for stealing a pound of sausages in 1830; another, the same punishment for taking a tame rabbit.

Whilst the death penalty for breaking a threshing machine had been removed from the statute book, incendiarism and sheep stealing were still capital offences in the 1830s. Machine-wreckers could expect transportation for seven or fourteen years and occasionally for life.

Before the authorities could organise defensive measures following the Swing outbreaks, farms in southern England stood largely unprotected. Under cover of darkness a fire-raiser had little chance of discovery. Any farmhand subsisting on a daily wage dreaded the prospect of being discharged, particularly if he was married with a family. Once a labourer had been told bluntly by his master to get off his land he was often compelled to fall back on parish relief and all its humiliations. A sense of outrage and injustice could easily turn into a thirst for revenge. Firing a hard task-master’s stacks was one way of settling a

~16~

score. When so many barns and outbuildings were built with roofs of straw, they offered a tempting target for any malcontent determined to redress a grievance. Rural incendiarism stretched back several centuries before Swing and posed an anonymous threat rarely absent from the English countryside.

Guarding farm premises at night was extraordinarily

difficult. There was no street lighting, so that the lanes and fields would have been in total darkness and any full moon might be obscured by cloud. After midnight, when most villagers were asleep, the dark was impenetrable for any traveller, except for the occasional glimmer of a candle at a cottage window. Travelling at night was an experience not for the faint-hearted stranger. As in the Blitz, country dwellers spent the hours of darkness in a virtual blackout, with only the stars as a guide in a

The Times, 9th October 1830

~17~

clear night sky. This was greatly to the advantage of highway robbers and thieves, and any would-be incendiarist.

If family members had been ordered to keep watch inside the farmhouse, they would have peered out towards the yard, where the barns and outbuildings stood, and seen only an inky blackness. It was all too easy to fire the base of a stack on the windward side and disappear long before the alarm was raised. Some bands of incendiarists would have worn dark clothing and blackened their faces, so maintaining a night vigil indoors would invariably have been a complete waste of time. There was a better chance of detection if farmers were prepared to establish their own nightly patrols, perhaps with family and trusted farmhands working shifts. Even then, according to an article in the Maidstone Journal, ‘no vigilance can guard against’ incendiaries because some fires were caused by ‘a chemical preparation, made into a hard ball, which can be thrown into a stack from a considerable distance, and ignites after the lapse of four or five hours.’14

Lying awake at night waiting for the arsonists to strike could play havoc with the nerves. Many farmers, unable to sleep under the threat, would instead patrol their yards and surrounding fields with dogs.

On the first day of November 1830, Mary Tylden wrote to Sir Edward Knatchbull:

I can speak as an eye witness, having seen from our windows fires night after night in regular succession in different and opposite directions and without the omission of a single night during ten days. Every night the inhabitants assemble from all parts by the light of those fatal beacons and the cottagers tremble for their lives. No one goes to rest in any security and hope seems to be banished from the neighbourhood. The people stand aloof here like frightened sheep, as if the calamity were unavoidable or supernatural. Why is justice asleep or afraid to show itself ?15

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III

POACHING AND SMUGGLING:

NIGHT-TIME OCCUPATIONS

n 1833 the Commissioners published their report on the proposed reform of the poor law, which examined in detail the agricultural disturbances of 1830. In regard to the riots of Sussex and East Kent, they believed that smuggling was

a main contributory factor: smugglers had become so accustomed to assembling in large gangs at night that they developed a systematic resistance to authority. They had become such experts in the art of law-breaking and its legacy of ‘high living’ that they were unable to contemplate any return to lawful employment and its ‘moderate pay’. In short, what the Commissioners were saying was this: smugglers played a key role in the disturbances because their criminal night activities had become so habit forming.

Strangely, poachers were not cast alongside smugglers for condemnation in their report, which is difficult to understand since large poaching gangs also operated at night, mostly for self-protection. But could that number of smugglers have become so adjusted to an extravagant lifestyle that any idea of reverting to legally acquired earnings was unthinkable? It all seems rather farfetched. And were they serious in suggesting that farm labourers received ‘moderate’ levels of pay when so many were obviously half-starved? Contrast this gross distortion with the realism of the Kent Herald, reporting in late October, 1830:

The fact is that the labouring classes have been long borne down, oppressed in every way by their superiors. They have been gradually thrust down and trampled on, despised, driven to starvation, misery and despair. The tendency of the whole social arrangement in England for many years has been to foster and protect the great properties at the expense of the poor and industrious. The pressure has worked through the middle order and descended at last with its full weight on the lowest. The labourer has been really ground down to the very dust.

I

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The 1833 official report not only glossed over the facts but

also contained a glaring contradiction. It concluded that, after the establishment of the Coastal Blockade,* smuggling had been considerably reduced, so that unemployed smugglers had placed an increased burden on the poor rates. It even quoted an overseer who claimed that ‘putting down smuggling’ had brought ruin to some coastal villages, stretching from Bexhill eastward towards the Kent border. Many of these villagers had become paupers in the winter months after the sharp decline in smuggling; small farmers were grumbling at the cost to their pockets because of the numbers of men thrown on the parish. At least smuggling had given these villagers employment. The contradiction comes when the Commissioners describe the batmen, who went out armed and with faces blackened to protect the tub bearers, as of a superior class, yet mostly in receipt of parish relief. If a large proportion of the smugglers were also paupers then logic would dictate that a serious decline in their night’s work would only marginally impact on any cost to the poor rates. The truth is that probably the farmers had good cause to grumble, and very few smugglers were claiming parish relief.

The Commissioners freely admitted that, although reduced in number, the smugglers were considerably more ferocious than in the past, and quite prepared to use firearms. This is hardly to be wondered at, since smuggling remained a felony punishable by death or transportation. Further research is needed to show if the law was being more harshly applied at the time of the Swing riots. Cobbett certainly believed that the increasingly violent affrays were caused by the smugglers’ fear of suffering transportation for fourteen years. The Times, disregarding any fatuous talk of high living, thought the reason why labourers so frequently resorted to poaching and smuggling had a simple explanation: it was motivated by a desperate drive to add to their earnings. On some nights poachers swapped their usual night-time activity and became smugglers; on other nights smugglers turned to poaching. The very damaging arson attacks concentrated around Sevenoaks, Orpington and Brasted in __________________________________________________ * The Royal Navy’s Coastal Blockade existed to help the coastguards prevent

the illegal landing of smuggled goods.

~20~

September 1830 do not appear to have been random acts of violence. According to The Times: ‘There are many persons in that neighbourhood who follow the joint occupations of smuggling and poaching and it is said that Manning and Thompson have been particularly active in opposing these gentlemen.’16 Both men, owners of farm premises, must have been unusually successful in stamping out these unlawful activities because their property was repeatedly subject to incendiarism.

Jonathan Thompson, a retired tradesman, in particular had made himself deeply unpopular. A fire discovered at his Hendon Farm on 15th October was the ninth occasion his premises had been set alight (although what could have remained of Thompson’s farm for arsonists to fire is hard to imagine). A month earlier a massive fire had ravaged his barns, stables, outbuildings and even his farming utensils — all were destroyed. His new house, which Thompson had painstakingly built himself, was also set on fire. When the fire engine duly arrived its leather pipes were deliberately cut, forcing the family, with outside help, to struggle to extinguish the flames themselves; many hundreds of people, for half a mile, stood in two rows, handling pails down and back. By this time there were reports that Kent farmers and gentry appeared either ‘supine or petrified’.

Nor did Manning, a local magistrate, lightly escape the poachers’ and smugglers’ vengeance. His large, well-stocked barn was totally destroyed by fire on 2nd September, after which he received several anonymous letters threatening further destruction to his property. One incendiary letter informed Manning that the authors were resolved on burning his house down while he and his family were in residence.

A Times reporter, obviously unaware of the circumstances behind these reprisal attacks, found the fires difficult to understand, since neither Thompson nor Manning used threshing machines or employed strangers on their farms. He did, however, mention ‘the extraordinary state of alarm which has been caused throughout the county of Kent by the proceedings of Swing.’17

Manning had the distinction of being the first Kent justice of the peace to receive a threatening Swing letter. Another early recipient was a Mrs Hubble, described as a poor widow, who

~21~

picked up one dropped near her house under Ide Hill, west of Sevenoaks, which threatened to burn her property and ‘give her a rap on the head if she was out late in the day’. A Peter Nourvaille from Sevenoaks had another, probably written by the same hand, warning him that his house might be burnt down if he should leave home, in which case he’d have his head broken. Nourvaille took this threat seriously enough to travel to London to ask Sir Robert Peel for military assistance — without outside aid he was too afraid to move around. Meanwhile, well-armed men were employed to watch Manning’s house and farm premises day and night.

The so-called ‘beer-shops’ came under intense official scrutiny by the poor law officials and were censured as dens of iniquity and vice:

They allow of secret meetings beyond any places previously existing, being generally in obscure situations, kept by the lowest class of persons: they are receiving houses for stolen goods and frequently brothels; they are resorted to by the most abandoned characters — poachers, smugglers and night depredators, who pass their time in playing at cards for the expenses of the night, in raffling for game and poultry and concocting plans for future mischief.

How the Commissioners discovered hard evidence for such condemnation is not clear, since the report admits these ‘abandoned characters’ were never without a scout and no responsible outsider was ever allowed to observe or interrupt their activities; nor could any information be obtained from the innkeepers. However, these ‘night depredators’ had to find somewhere private to discuss any future plans — a secluded beer-shop set up to exclude eavesdroppers and possible government agents would be safe bet. Secret oaths were probably taken to limit the danger of informers, as the penalties for sedition were extremely severe.

If the Kent and Sussex labourers were determined to avoid being ‘ground down to the very dust’ they had little alternative but to act outside the law. Denied both political and legal redress, the door to lawful resistance was firmly closed to them. They were driven by misery and wretchedness towards crime. A Times editorial written during the riots makes the case:

~22~

In many places the rioters have turned to mere robbers — highway robbers demanding money; this at least is a capital offence to be punished by death. From our souls however we feel compassion for the poor creatures whose first stimulant to break the laws was want. Magistrates and landlords who resolutely swore they would not yield to intimidation to advance wages have been the most ready to capitulate to what the rioters had no right to — namely their purses, under the influence of pure fear.

We entreat farmers and landlords to consider the case of the poor labourer in his ordinary state — to think of his starving family and ill-requited toil, of the game laws, the poor law, the parish rates appropriated to his pay, the hireling overseer, the insolent bailiff and all the traps and gins which are laid against his liberty and have at last sunk him into the degraded being that he is now, almost reckless of his own life and the life of others.18

The Commissioners’ report fudged the issue. Any cursory

reading of The Times or the Kent Herald gives an informed opinion about the causes underlying the Swing outbreaks. That the riots were brought on by acute poverty and hardship; basically, a situation of sheer want, was too hard a pill to swallow in an official report. Instead, they cast around searching for other, more palatable factors — an inefficient and inadequately manned ‘new police’, the ‘mischievous’ beer-shops, the incompetent special constables, the smugglers’ compulsive habit of assembling in large gangs at night etc.

Before examining the riots in separation let us investigate other means of rural resistance open to the labourers. As the economic situation deteriorated after Waterloo there was a corresponding increase in agrarian crime. This included poaching, sheep stealing and cattle maiming. The reaction of the authorities was to tighten up the game laws. An Act was passed in 1816 by which ‘a person who was found at night armed with a net for poaching, in any forest, chase or park’ was to be punished by transportation for seven years.19 Did this include a child walking home at dusk carrying a butterfly net? This Act was subject to so much ridicule that it was repealed the following year to cover only poachers actually caught with firearms and other offensive weapons. As the years passed, the game laws became increasingly oppressive. An Act in 1820

~23~

allowed any landowner to seize a trespasser without an application for a warrant, enabling him to be hauled before a fellow magistrate for suitable summary punishment; by 1828, should three men be found in a wood, one carrying a gun, all three became liable for a sentence of fourteen years’ transportation.

Between 1827 and 1830 over 8,500 were convicted under the game laws — one in seven of all criminal convictions. Some were transported for life, others were shipped out to Australia or Van Diemen’s land (now Tasmania) for seven or fourteen years.20 Cobbett roughly estimated that one-third of all prisoners languishing in English gaols were guilty of ‘having killed or attempted to kill hares, pheasants or partridges.’ 21

The use of spring guns was commonplace before 1817, when they were made illegal mainly because of accidents to children and gamekeepers; although in Upstreet, near Canterbury, Cobbett could still detect, in 1823, the irony of a sign which read ‘Paradise Place, spring guns and steel traps are set here’. Between 1830 and 1832 Lord Darnley’s estate near Maidstone came under attack by both poachers and incendiarists. On 24th October 1830, a Kent newspaper gave sparse details of a fired barley stack close to his residence, Cobham Hall.*22 Darnley appears to have been a stern magistrate and may have made himself greatly disliked, if not with his own men then with others who had incurred his wrath. Only days after the fire he wrote the following letter to his friend and fellow magistrate Sir Edward Knatchbull:

You will, I am sure agree with me the utmost exertion is becoming necessary to rescue our country from the miserable state of anarchy in which it will inevitably fall, unless we can succeed in making an example of some of the offenders. I have written to propose a general meeting and some central plan, but have not received an answer.

I have some consolation in being able to inform you that nothing could behold better than the labourers here at the last fire, at Cobham Hall, my lot in consequence of their exertion has been trifling. 23

__________________________________________________ * A fine, red-brick mansion built in Elizabethan, Jacobean, Carolean and 18th-

century styles, the Hall is one of largest and most important houses in Kent.

~24~

There are some interesting features to this letter. It seems, from Darnley’s extravagant appreciation of his labourers’ assistance, that either the flames from his stack were threatening to engulf Cobham Hall or the Hall itself was the main target of the incendiaries. He shows genuine relief about his ‘lot’ after his men had rescued the situation. However, his steward had felt compelled to publish a letter refuting claims that many agricultural labourers had been unwilling to help in extinguishing the fire. This hasty public denial was later confirmed by the ‘noble Earl’ in the House of Lords. Since there is rarely smoke without fire, it seems likely that some farm workers had shown a marked reluctance to come to the aid of Lord Darnley. There is the odd coincidence that this ‘last fire’ on his estate occurred on the same day as his friend Sir Edward was presiding magistrate at the Canterbury sessions, where the first Swing insurgents were in the dock. News of the impending court proceedings would have been widely broadcast and the remarkably light sentences were not anticipated. Carters and the early morning mail coach-drivers provided a ready source of information, but it might have taken several days before news of Sir Edward’s extraordinary leniency reached the outskirts of Maidstone. To fire Cobham Hall on the very night of the court hearing might have been a symbolic act of retaliation against another despised enemy of the poor.

Sir Edward could not have failed to notice the letter’s implied criticism of his lenient sentencing. Darnley was clearly hinting that unless Kent’s magistrates succeeded in making an example of some of the culprits, a state of anarchy would soon prevail over the country. The leniency must not be repeated.

Darnley’s estate must have been of vast dimensions; it comprised Earl’s Wood, Cobham Park, Cobham Hall and the surrounding farmland. Less than two years after the fire, a party of poachers was surrounded in the wood by gamekeepers. Two of the gang were captured and later sent for trial at Maidstone quarter-sessions. The poachers were described as well-armed with guns and sticks and had ‘dealt great destruction amongst the game’.24

A year later, on 1st May 1833, three armed poachers engaged in shooting pheasants made a desperate attack on two of Darnley’s keepers near Cobham Hall. All three poachers were later held in custody after one gamekeeper had been badly beaten up. Two months later there were reports in the Kentish Gazette that sheep stealing in the neighbourhood of Rochester prevailed to a greater extent than ever.

~25~

IV

YOURS TRULY, SWING

y the autumn of 1830, the anonymous threatening letter had become an intrinsic element in the Swing uprising. Anonymity was an essential part of the movement, and without it Swing could not possibly

have developed into a great rural rebellion. A band of night incendiarists would blacken their faces to make identification difficult, so that — unless individual gang members were captured — the civil powers found it frustratingly difficult trying to ‘pick off ’ potential leading activists. After any major riot, the authorities’ main priority was to discover the identity of the ringleaders, knowing this was the best means of breaking the resistance of their followers.

Once what had been thought of as isolated attacks on property had been repeated often enough to justify the term ‘riot’, magistrates sat up and took notice, appreciating the urgent need to apprehend the leaders to help diffuse the unrest. Before a riot gained in strength and achieved mass support any small band of rioters would have felt particularly weak and vulnerable, causing them to seek, at all costs, to shield their identities behind the cloak of anonymity.

Mary Tylden, in her long letter to Sir Edward Knatchbull, wrote of her disenchantment with the initial response to the outbreaks:

And may we not ask where are the shepherds of the people? Why is … the strong hand of protection disarmed? During so public and so fatal a calamity, not a single effective measure has been appraised.

Tylden was obviously deeply concerned about the riots at Frinstead but, like the authorities, she was stumbling around in the dark, clueless about how to uncover the names of those behind ‘these dark mischiefs’. She had dismissed any idea that ‘these base incendiaries’ were committed by a distressed or rising Kent peasantry, but had become convinced the ‘detestable banditti’ had travelled from outside the county:

B

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The cloud that is charged with this pestilence is distinct and distinguishable. Strangers in all parts, in companies of two or three a time, lurking about in the villages and in the lanes and woods are daily to be seen like peddlers dealing in provisions. Some like peddlers go into the cottages but far from being intent on gain, they employ their time in asking strange questions.

E. P. Thompson considered that anonymity was absolutely vital to all early types of industrial or social protest; that the poor possessed weak means of organised defence, capable of providing only scant shelter to any identified rebel. Many of the early anonymous letters that showed up in rural England had a common thread to them: the explicit threat of incendiarism. Thompson found it hard to envisage what other forms of protest were left to rural workers when open and peaceful protests were met with execution and transportation: ‘in a situation in which the gentry and the employing farmers held a total control over the life of the labourer and his family.’25

As Thompson’s research shows, rural incendiarism hardly ever resulted in the death of an individual and only rarely took the lives of farm stock. This conviction is supported by a Times article headed ‘Another Burning in Kent’, published in late October 1830. The article describes how a gang of arsonists had broken open a stable door in a yard at a farm at Ash, turning out more than a dozen horses into the high road. The gang, after being disturbed by the approach of two men on night watch, had immediately left the premises:

It is conjectured they intended to fire the buildings; but, commiserating the inevitable fate of the animals, in case their diabolical scheme had succeeded, with a feeling that does them credit, however ill-intentioned their design, they determined to set them loose.

Even in times of relative rural tranquillity, the receipt of an incendiary letter could have a devastating impact on a farmer’s peace of mind. When other fires were blazing fiercely, often in sight of his premises, receiving one of these ‘slaughter-breathing epistles’ could quickly develop into a waking nightmare, causing intense mental anguish and sometimes nerve-racking fear, perhaps partly relieved by an intake of alcohol or the heavy reinforcement of night patrols. But the reaction of farmers

~27~

could differ; some kept the letters in their pockets to re-read out of sight of the family, others would ignore them and tear them up, refusing to take the threats seriously — often to their cost.

Many farmers must have anxiously scrutinised the handwriting, searching for any sign of recognition, knowing that most of their men were illiterate but wondering if they had turned to better-educated sympathisers for help with the writing. If the letter had been penned by a rebellious farmhand, he would have been careful to disguise his writing, possibly making the wording appear clumsy and less literate.

Only a very small proportion of these threatening letters came to the public’s attention. Newspapers were usually extremely reluctant to publish because of the violent language and seditious content: publication might only fan the flames of discontent and generally led to imitation and a spate of hoax letters. A Times reporter based at Battle had been shown some incendiary letters which had often accompanied the fires in the neighbourhood of the town. He considered them tolerably well expressed and apparently written by the same hand. Most were signed ‘Swing’ or ‘Fire and Sword’. He was not prepared to be more specific in print.26

E. P. Thompson relates how a straw-plait manufacturer named Joseph Saville was discovered rattling around Cambridgeshire in a gig with between six and seven hundred inflammatory letters in his possession, all self-written, available for selection to the highest bidder.27 Some of the gentry and farmers kept these messages of malice secret, whilst others were all too ready too comply with their blood-chilling demands. The anonymous authors well understood that the greater the terror they could inspire, the more likely the recipients’ reaction would be servile compliance.

In the few cases where the threatening letters were published in the county and national newspapers, it was only because the editors felt obliged to print the full contents, since they had been read out in court as evidence at quarter-sessions or assize hearing that had been covered by the press.

Towards the end of November 1830, Lord Gage,* a wealthy and prominent landowner, had arranged to meet a large body of labourers on the village green at Ringmer in Sussex. __________________________________________________ * Henry Hall Gage (1791-1877), 4th Viscount Gage of Firle Place. Held

strong reactionary conservative views and opposed the Reform Bill.

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Forewarned of an imminent riot, Gage was prepared to calm the situation and asked for their leader or captain to step forward. The labourers were wary and there was no movement within the assembled crowd; instead a letter, spelling out in detail the harsh reality of labouring life, was thrown into the ring. Although this could not be deemed a threatening letter it was nevertheless an anonymous collective response to distress.

At the Lewes Assizes on Christmas Eve 1830, Thomas Brown, a young labourer aged just seventeen, was indicted on suspicion of sending a threatening letter to the Earl of Sheffield. The letter was read out during the trial and published in a short-lived local paper, the Hastings & Cinque Ports Iris:

Please, my Lord, I don’t wish to hurt you. This is the case all the world over. If you don’t get rid of your foreign steward, and farmer, and bailiff in a few days time, — less than a month, — we will burn him up and you with him — my writing is bad, but my firing is good, my Lord.

Tom Brown stood in the dock without defence counsel and watched Lord Sheffield give evidence on how he first received the letter. When the accused was asked by Justice Taunton if he wished to cross-examine the witness, he merely replied that he hoped his Lordship would forgive him. The judge replied that this was beyond the Earl’s powers and duly sentenced Brown to transportation for life. The severity of the sentence must have shocked Lord Sheffield as he afterwards tried unsuccessfully to have the lifetime banishment reduced.

Two respectably dressed young schoolmasters, William and Henry Bish, were also charged at the same assize hearing with sending an anonymous incendiary letter to the Reverend George Woodward in residence at Maresfield, near Uckfield:

Sire, we have enquired into your tithes and we have determined to set fire to you in your bed if you do not lower them. You receive from Fletching £500 a year and give your curate only £100 a year, and you starve your labourers that work for you, you old canibal [sic]. You parsons have fleeced the country long enough. Strain, if you dare. You and your daughter shall be burned in your beds if you do. We shall tell all the people in the parish not to pay you, for we are determined, and our names are legions of liberty. Deem this as friendly and consider that we would not burn you up without notice. Y. Z. X.

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On turning the letter over to the unwritten side, the Reverend Woodward could not have failed to notice the drawing of a penknife together with a single drop of red ink, to indicate blood dripping from a wound. The two brothers, who taught at a school in Newick, were found not guilty through lack of evidence.

Since there is such a scarcity of Swing letters published in the newspapers during the riots in Kent and Sussex in 1830, I have included an anonymous letter taken from the Maidstone Journal in 1834. Several of those threatening letters had reappeared in the neighbourhood of Maidstone, warning ‘respectable’ farmers of vengeance for alleged injustices. Rather like Mary Tylden, the county paper refused to believe that the letters could have come from the local ‘peasantry’ but were penned by ‘worthless wretches who live by plunder and extortion’:

Sir, this to inform you that unless is there is one alter [sic] and others with you — and all the rest of the farmers to in ploy all your own poor that is running about the village and county starving for a bit of bread — we are determined to put up with it no longer, so look out for your brains or your farms if not altered.

Unsuccessfully searching for more anonymous Kent and Sussex Swing material, I uncovered the humorous story of a hoax letter writer in Windsor. During the week ending 20th November 1830, numerous anonymous letters had been handed in to the Windsor post office for mailing — so many, in fact, that the postmaster had come to recognise the handwriting and to believe he would remember the individual responsible. The press were uncertain how to respond to the flood of letters. Reporters accepted that ‘Mr Swing was enjoying himself ’ by sending in so many threatening letters but he must surely realise the alarm that was created in the minds of the recipients and should be warned of the severe penalties if caught.

By a twist of fate, the Mayor of Windsor received three letters, all written in the same hand. The first one delivered demanded that he increase his rates of pay, on pain of hearing further from the writer; a second letter arrived shortly after, stating that the letter of the previous day had been sent out by mistake and was really intended for someone else (sensibly, he didn’t leave a return address). The third threatening letter, the

~30~

one the Mayor ought to have received first, recommended that a more efficient guard should be maintained at Windsor Castle than appeared to be stationed there at present, that Mr Swing’s followers intended to launch an attack on the place, but that the writer would be sorry to see ‘the walls of that venerable pile razed to the ground’. How this warning could have been taken seriously is difficult to imagine; perhaps it was symptomatic of the jittery state of the London authorities. Nevertheless, the town’s ‘worthy chief magistrate’ immediately ordered the castle’s custodians to be on the alert. Six additional sentinels were hurriedly placed on duty and an express* was sent to London requesting an additional small military force to be posted at Windsor. Those residing within the castle walls kept a strict watch throughout the night, ‘in the hourly expectation of being called upon to resist the threatened assault’.

Since the postmaster was sure he would recognise the handwriting, because of the volume of letters which had passed through his office, a plan was hatched to watch the building. For two or three nights the strictest watch was kept up. Incredibly, a man was placed in the house opposite, concealed from view to lie in wait for a signal from the postmaster, who was waiting to catch and scrutinise the letters as they fell in his office box. The threatening letters continued to be received but they were not posted via the main post office.

Before closing this chapter I have included two more threatening letters, both from outside the two counties researched. Late in December 1830, Sarah Bird was indicted for sending a letter with a fictitious signature addressed to Messrs. Young, Nurserymen, Epsom, Surrey. It read as follows: ‘Unless you rise the pay of the men and boys in your imployment [sic], in less than five days, your green houses shall be blown up into ten thousand peaces [sic]. So mind what your at’. It was signed ‘H.Y.N., SWING.’ The jury failed to convict as the supporting evidence was too thin. As E. P. Thompson has shown in his research on anonymous crime, there is a general lack of private grievance conveyed by the authors: instead the writing reveals a commonly held belief that the treatment of the poor is reprehensible and must be changed.

__________________________________________________ * A messenger on horseback.

~31~

The following letter, however, is motivated purely by a desire for private gain, in a blatant attempt at blackmail and extortion. On 13th January 1831, for reasons which are unclear, Sir Richard Birnie received a letter (afterwards discovered to have been sent by a soldier in the dragoons) in which was enclosed the following threatening letter addressed to Mrs Chandler, Church Farm, Pursey, Wiltshire:

Madam — I have to request that you will send me by return of post the sum of £10, or else your house will be burned with the ground very shortly, as I know that you can well afford to spare that sum for a short time, until I have the effects to repay it. Keep this secret, or it will be the worse for you, as I have spys about your neighbourhood. Direct to me, ‘X.Y.Z.’ The Nag’s Head, James-street, Covent Garden. ‘SWING’. P. S. Be not to make no delay in sending it.

Another scheme of entrapment was set in place, as the blackmailer is most vulnerable at his designated site. Instead of putting ten sovereigns (£10) into the package, ten shilling pieces were enclosed in an envelope and placed in the hands of the Nag’s Head landlord, whilst a Bow Street police constable named Dodd was positioned in the public house, to await collection by the blackmailer. At some point Dodd observed a recent enlister in the 14th Dragoons enter the pub and heard him enquire at the bar for a letter addressed to ‘X.Y.Z.’, but the package was held back because the blackmailer was told that he owed 2s 3d postage, perhaps this was to allow Dodd to hide behind the bar and wait for his return. When he eventually came back with the postage money he was seized, taken into custody and conveyed to Bow Street Police Office.

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V

SWING IN KENT

illiam Cobbett was convinced that an influx of Irish labourers into the Kent countryside had helped precipitate the Swing uprising. Large numbers of migrants had moved into Kent after

the experience of the terrible famine of 1822.* In his assessment, local farmhands who were themselves on the edge of starvation were unwilling to stand idly by and watch bands of Irishmen take over their work and be paid next to nothing. Cobbett maintained that the disturbances began on the Isle of Thanet in July 1830, after labourers discovered to their fury that several score of Irish itinerants had accepted an offer that would have halved the usual wage rates. They were told to move on, under threat of violence. Cobbett’s strong belief that the fires began in East Kent directly contradicts the research of later social historians, but any such fires may have gone unreported.

As Cobbett was travelling through Kent at the time, compiling material for his Political Register, his opinion cannot easily be dismissed. A year later, on 14th August 1831, the Kentish Gazette reported an attack on Irish reapers, who just happened to be passing through the village of West Hougham, near Dover: they were stripped and robbed, to be finally dragged into a pond. This angry assault occurred purely on the supposition that the reapers were looking to secure employment. In that month the Gazette also reported that a large gang had assembled at Thomas Rutley’s farm at Maxton, Dover, and destroyed all the scythes they could find to prevent the corn being mowed:

It is thought there were a few labourers amongst them but many bricklayers. Ill-will has arisen from preference given to Irish labourers willing to work for any wage and from the use of scythes instead of sickles in reaping corn.

__________________________________________________ * Cobbett, in his Political Register for July 1822, commented: ‘the food is there

[in Ireland] ... And we know it is there; for since the “famine” has been declared in parliament, thousands of quarters of corn have been imported every week from Ireland to England.’

W

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If scythes rather than sickles were judged as labour-saving farm tools in August 1831, it is not difficult to imagine the bitter opposition generated a year earlier by the growing use of the threshing machine. In October 1830 there were reports that bands of labourers, in many instances numbering one hundred and fifty, were moving from farm to farm coolly demanding the keys to the barns in order to destroy any threshing machines found inside. Farmers who had previously employed Irish labour were singled out and those awaiting a visit remained in constant dread. When farmhands were asked to assist their masters in repelling these audacious raids, the farmers were mostly met with a flat refusal. Cobbett was to write that: ‘the same principle which pointed out the necessity of driving out the Irish invaders pointed out the necessity of putting down the threshing machines.’ These hated machines were the labourers’ first experience of agricultural mechanisation, a technical innovation that undermined age-old farming methods and were to seriously cut back the numbers of farmhands employed. Machine-breakers were to play a dominant part in the Captain Swing riots and gained considerable local sympathy and support.

Cobbett may have been correct in locating the emergence of the Swing riots on the Isle of Thanet in July 1830, but incendiarism had been a common feature in rural England for many decades. However, a series of arson attacks a month earlier in west Kent appeared to transcend this traditional form of agrarian protest. The villages of Orpington and Bromley were the main targets selected by the incendiarists. Here, farmers were subjected to seven unusually destructive fires. The resulting damage went well beyond the normal experience of this region’s farmers and quickly produced a general state of anxiety and alarm. The farmers began to believe that an organized band of incendiarists was at work, hell-bent on causing panic and confusion. On the last day of June, Love’s Farm at Shoreham, a village south of Orpington, had several thorns, hurdles and faggots reduced to ashes. There is some dispute among modern historians as to whether these fires heralded the emergence of the Swing rebellion. A Times correspondent writing in mid-October was certain that the wave of attacks in the Orpington area had resulted from the revenge of a few ‘miscreants’ — that a failure to detect the culprits had only encouraged others to follow their example. So it remains

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entirely possible that the Swing riots began almost by accident, in a localised act of retribution that escalated into widespread rural resistance at a time of severe economic distress.

For a few brief weeks, west Kent experienced a reprieve. A wet summer, the third in a row, may explain the sudden lull in the reported number of fires. Weeks of incessant rain brought on a serious case of sheep rot. During this wet spell, only two farms were fired: one at Farningham, to the east of Orpington, on 22nd July, the other at Great Chart, near Ashford, on 3rd August. But once the rains had cleared by late August, the fires picked up. By early September there were reports that the fires had restarted at Orpington, while Brasted and other farms on the Riverhead Road, below Bromley, were under incessant incendiary attack. By the end of September, Hobsbawm and Rudé’s research shows that twenty incendiary fires had occurred around Bromley, Sevenoaks and Orpington. Crops were also set ablaze near Herne and at Stodmarsh on 28th August, and only days passed before another fire was discovered at Cowden, near East Grinstead. An Orpington resident expressed her misgivings a fortnight later: ‘It is natural enough that the farmer who sees his neighbour’s stack on fire tonight may expect his own will not long escape destruction.’

As the fires continued to rage unabated to the west of the county, the justices in East Kent were confronted with a new challenge — how to contain an unprecedented outburst of machine-wrecking of a magnitude that shook the farming community out of any past complacency. The wrecking was on a scale that had never before been witnessed in Kent. The destruction was most heavily concentrated on the Isle of Thanet and around the towns of Canterbury, Dover, Deal, Sandwich and Folkestone.

The parishes of Monkton and Sarre, where William Cobbett discovered threshing machines operating in 1823, can be placed at the heart of the wrecking, and two machines were smashed up at Monkton in November and December of 1830. But while the machine-breaking was to be largely confined to East Kent, by October incendiarism had travelled eastwards to merge with areas already affected by the destruction of machinery. This general observation is confirmed by Hobsbawm and Rudé:

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In early October, the movement spread to the Dover area, west of Canterbury and to the Isle of Thanet and now for the first time arson and machine-breaking appeared in the same district … as elements in a joint operation.28

Incendiarism was less restricted in the regions it covered, and was maintained for a far longer duration than machine-wrecking — it was to extend far beyond the Captain Swing riots and continue into the 1840s.

The destruction of a second threshing machine at Hardres on 5th September 1830 appears to have acted as a catalyst — afterwards an estimated four hundred agricultural labourers assembled and began smashing up other machines in the immediate vicinity, a level of destruction that brought a request for assistance from the 7th Dragoons, stationed at Canterbury. If these reports are correct, it was the first time in the rioting that the military was called out to assist. Before the month ended the dragoons were again ordered to Hardres Court, where between one and two hundred labourers were threatening further wreckage to the machines. On 24th September the owner of Hardres Court, William Dodd, published an appeal on the front page of the Kentish Gazette, calling all East Kent farmers to a crisis meeting at the Rose Inn, Canterbury on 27th to discuss ‘the threatened injuries of an unlawful combination of Persons.’29 A later editorial stated that the meeting’s objective was ‘to devise means for the suppression of the riotous destruction’ and that, to this end, a large body of special constables was being sworn in, and a reward of £500 was offered for the capture of ‘the instigators or ringleaders.’ The writer hoped that ‘the deluded men … will at length learn how hopeless their endeavours are’.30

A blacksmith and a butcher were committed for trial after a machine had been broken in Digges Place, Barham. But this provided little deterrence as exactly a month later, on 20th October, another machine was destroyed in the same village.

On 26th September individual concerns were being expressed privately to Sir Edward Knatchbull:

I feel it is important to inform you of the proceedings of the machine breakers. About nine o’ clock, a party of forty young men from Barham, chiefly farm servants, passed through this village on the way to Swingfield [north of Folkestone] — there were other parties about the same

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time, hallooing along the hills in this neighbourhood towards the same spot, and they eventually met, I think to the number of one hundred and fifty.31

The first threshing machine to be destroyed in October was at Hougham, near Dover, where between one and two hundred labourers had gathered. The month had also begun with arrests after a riotous assembly at Lyminge, five miles from Folkestone. One of the magistrates involved in the committal procedure was the Reverend Ralph Price. Price would have been fully aware that his determination to uphold the law might well mark him out for reprisals. In the dead of night, only days after the arrests, incendiarists crept onto his farm and left his corn stacks and barns swept by fire.

Fear of such retaliation must have weighed heavily on the mind of the justices in their legal battle to break up the disturbances. On the same night as the Reverend’s barns were fired, 5th October, Michael Becker, another magistrate and overseer of the poor, suffered the same fate. Almost inevitably, the fire at his Solston Farm at Ash began in a barn containing a threshing machine. Several stacks of wheat, barley and oats were also entirely consumed, at a cost of £3,000.

Some indication of the farmers’ growing concern is evident a day later in a letter from a Dover correspondent sent to the Maidstone Journal:

The county of Kent is in a very agitated state and not without reason on account of the organised system of stack burning and machine breaking. The farmers flatter themselves that the large reward which has been offered would have the effect of inducing some of the incendiaries to betray their accomplices — but in this way they have hitherto been disappointed. Last night several corn stacks in the neighbourhood of Ash and Lyminge were burnt to the ground. One of the sufferers boasted that if the incendiarists came to him, he was prepared to meet them with bullets. It appears the incendiaries do not seek for money or plunder of any kind — when offered money not to destroy property they have uniformly refused it.

On 20th October the Maidstone Journal learnt that: ‘The dead walls all through Dover and for several miles on the road to Canterbury bear the same significant word “Swing” written in chalk.’ E. P. Thompson writes that ‘Chalking on the walls and

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pavements, which had certainly been known in London from at least the time of Wilkes, became a far more serious means of propaganda during the French Wars.’ 32

As already noted, threatening letters had started to play a prominent part in the Swing movement. As early as September 1830 some had been found at Wrotham and two more were picked up on 21st October in the neighbourhood of Maidstone, signed ‘Swing’ and threatening to set fire to the recipients’ outbuildings unless they afforded employment to the poor in their parishes. One letter, rather chillingly sealed with blood, warned of the imminent destruction of the farmer’s property and the murder of his bailiff.

The Times had reported that a series of destructive fires was causing considerable alarm in the outlying districts of Sittingbourne; farmers were terrified at the appearance of the rioters:

Marching about in great numbers, breaking the machines in open day and many of them armed with hatchets, hammers, saws and even guns which they discharged in the midst of the cheering when their work of destruction is accomplished.

On Thursday 21st October, close to midnight, the premises of a Mr Knight, a farmer and overseer at Borden, near Sittingbourne, was discovered in flames. His barn, which was situated close to his residence, was completely ablaze and a gusting wind was rapidly spreading the flames to the thatched roof of his house. A frightened farmhand had raised the alarm and, scarcely before the family had time to flee the premises — ‘which they did almost in a state of nudity’ — ‘the roof fell in, and not an article was rescued from the flames.’

About an hour before the fire was discovered, an elderly lady who lived in a cottage close to Knight’s farmhouse was startled by the unusual sound of carriage wheels. Climbing out of bed, she crept softly to the window and soon heard footsteps approach the carriage, and the occupant being addressed in a low voice, ‘Well, it’s done’. ‘Are you sure of that?’ The first speaker responded, ‘Clean done, by God!’ The old lady at the window then witnessed the carriage drive off at speed.

As fires took hold at Sandwich, a Times journalist was astonished to see some labourers casually looking on while

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‘actually smoking pipes at the time’: ‘A large band of men armed with bludgeons had been seen on the road below Rainham and signal rockets are occasionally observed in different directions. Some threshing machines are so completely destroyed that not a wheel or any other part was left whole.’33

The following day, 22nd October, there was a riot at the workhouse at Ulcombe, near Maidstone, over complaints about the distribution of parish relief. Parish officers were in the middle of transacting business when suddenly their meeting was broken up by the unexpected appearance of labourers, who put out the candle lights, smashed the table and forced the meeting to disband. The rioters presumably made their escape before justices could be summoned, because there was no indication of arrests. The riot happened to be on the very day that the first Swing machine-breakers were brought before Sir Edward Knatchbull at the Canterbury East Kent sessions. Nine prisoners were charged with wrecking threshing machines in ‘different parts of the eastern division of the county’. The announcement of the forthcoming trial had aroused considerable local interest and the courtroom was thronged with spectators. The accused were charged with involvement in various acts of machine destruction in the villages of Newington, Barham and Upper and Lower Hardres. Sir Edward Knatchbull had some sympathy for the distress the labourers had suffered the previous winter — labourers had told him they could never experience another like it. The winter of 1829–30 had been exceptionally harsh and unremitting. Deep snow had lain for months and there had been no break in the heavy frost. In the neighbouring county of Sussex the snow remained thick and crisp on the hilltops of Hurst Green, Fairlight and the South Downs for a period of three months. The Times made the following debatable assertion:

The labourers in Kent, at the commencement of the disturbances, had told the magistrates and land-lords candidly and reasonably, that they could not exist with their families on less than 12s a week, and in those places where the farmers yielded to this very fair demand no breaches of the peace had occurred.34

In Sir Edward’s summing up, he recognised that the men who stood before him represented only part of a much larger gang of machine-breakers operating in the area. Hobsbawm and

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Rudé estimate that over a hundred machines had been destroyed before the East Kent sessions had opened. Even this number may be a conservative figure. He may have understood the labourers’ desperate situation but, as presiding magistrate, seemed at a loss about: ‘what has caused such a state of things — I cannot accurately describe. Some have ascribed the whole to a general state of distress.’ He thought the offenders ‘misguided and deluded’ but accepted they had acted ‘under the influence of ill-advisers’. Bearing this in mind, and since the accused had admitted their guilt and manifested their contrition, he had decided to be merciful and pass light sentences. All those in court, especially the accused, were amazed at his display of leniency. The prisoners were sentenced to between three and five days’ hard labour, when the law was clear that machine-wrecking carried a minimum of seven years’ transportation. The accused were unable to contain their astonishment and joy.

These light sentences, passed ‘in kindness and moderation’, only encouraged the lawlessness. The night of the hearing there were incendiary fires at Upstreet and Ash and a threshing machine was destroyed at Hartlip. Hobsbawm and Rudé noted: ‘it was the first operation of the kind in that part of the country and it was observed that the assailants had blackened faces.’ 35

Magistrate J. Poore, obviously caught up in the prevailing panic, wrote from Munstone to Sir Edward Knatchbull, on 24th October:

At Faversham fear was blended with political prejudices and although it might have been expected that the fire at Selling Court [below Faversham] would have roused the whole population to have discovered the offenders, yet so great was the panic that it appeared to me as if all were paralysed.

A body of fifty at Mr Stacey’s at Stockbury demanded beer, bread and cheese — then retired to the Squirrel Inn and ordered beer and refreshment in the name of Mr Stacey — they enlarged to two hundred, proceeded to Hartlip to make further contributions and insist on an increase in wages — from there they went to Rainham.

The alarm these proceedings caused I cannot well describe; magistrates desired to watch the movements of the insurgents and to collect as large a civil force as possible to meet at Hartlip Hill and then we should join them with an additional force and force obedience to the laws. The

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rioters were headed by a perfect stranger about six feet in height and very large in front of bulk — he was their spokesman and director. They also had the Tricolour flag.* The rioters heard of our advance and dispersed. We recommend nightly patrols in every parish and watching each farmer’s premises and a regular communication kept up with each adjoining parish — unless some effective system be introduced we cannot allay the present excitement.36

John Neame, the farmer who suffered the ‘calamitous’ incendiary attack on his Selling Court premises, published a statement vigorously denying newspaper allegations that the farm labourers had rejected all requests to assist in putting out the fire. But after making further enquiries, the Kent Herald refused to print an apology for any error, adding that no one could deny that the pipe of one of the fire engines had been cut: ‘No doubt, as Mr Neame asserts it, many of the labouring class evinced a laudable disposition to aid their good neighbours — we only regret that it was not universal.’37 Poore was so alarmed that he even wrote Sir Edward another brief letter on the same day: ‘There are an immense number of strangers of the lowest sort, collected in this neighbourhood and who seem anxiously mixing themselves with the farming servants and labourers.’

Before the trial, Sir Edward had probably been informed of an unwritten community undertaking, promising that farmers would revert to the thrashing of corn by hand. This gentlemen’s agreement covered parishes running in a line above Hythe towards Canterbury and included Newington, Lyminge, Elham, Selling and Lower Hardres — significantly, some of these villages were later caught up in the machine-wrecking after the parish accord had been broken. Some farmers had reluctantly reached an agreement only after being warned of a violent response should they not accept.

The East Kent labourers must have heaved a collective sigh of relief at word of the parish agreement. That sense of relief quickly evaporated when they learnt that some farmers had chosen to ignore the agreement to set aside the threshing machines, in order to gain a competitive edge on their rivals. __________________________________________________ * The red white and blue striped flag of the French Republic.

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The machine-wrecking began as a direct retaliatory action against these farmers. The weakening bonds of social constraint that had held together a fragile rural peace were finally severed. A sullen and brooding discontent was released into an uncontrollable fury. The distress in Kent was sufficiently deep for the wrecking of the few machines to unleash a chain-reaction of destruction. This enormous upsurge in wrecking, combined with the incendiarism that was spreading into East Kent, turned into a major riot of epic proportions. As for the adjoining county of Sussex, it lay open, exposed and completely unprepared.

As the disturbances gained ground, the deeply apprehensive farmers struggled to appease their men by making another offer to withdraw the threshing machines, but were rebuffed. Any remaining trust between the two sides had melted away.

On 23rd October the Kentish Gazette informed its readers that two hundred machine-breakers were passing through Charing and Lenham towards Maidstone, endeavouring to persuade others to join them. According to Hobsbawm and Rudé, there were also reports that large bodies of men had been observed marching on the roads near Ash and Rainham, armed with bludgeons:

What is more interesting, for the first time we observe a distinct influence of political radicalism. A tricolour was hoisted at Newington … and indeed (in one or two cases combined with black flags) were also seen in various villages in the Sittingbourne–Faversham–Maidstone area, through which a band led by an evidently Jacobin and Republic naval deserter, Robert Price, passed. 38

The perfect stranger, about six feet in height and very large of bulk, referred to in Poore’s letter to Sir Edward, had been identified. On the night of Saturday 23rd October machine-breakers were in action at Patrixbourne and Beaksbourne,* near Canterbury, and on the following morning a machine was wrecked near the Three Colts public house at Sandwich. In the early hours, a huge fire gutted the premises of a farmer named Castle on the outskirts of Sandwich. The Times vividly described the scene of devastation: __________________________________________________ * The current spelling is ‘Bekesbourne’.

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[Near] St Clement’s Church stands a beautiful and extensive farmhouse, called the ‘Salutation’, deriving its name from a small inn of that name proximate to it. It was here the devilish machinations of the scoundrels were carried into complete effect. The barns … were fired first, but scarcely had the discovery been made than the sacks of corns, haulm,* etc., of many hundred pounds’ value, were in a complete blaze and beyond human power to control.39

A burnt-out stack was no trifling matter for a tenant-farmer, since invariably most of his yearly profit went up literally in smoke. In early November as many as fourteen stack-yards were observed to have been in flames at the same time, signals having been given by sky-rockets. In late October, a fire broke out in a well-stocked barn belonging to a Mr Catt at Nicol Farm, Chartham. The barn, together with several outbuildings, were entirely consumed by flames which illuminated the sky to a ‘fearful degree’. The farmhouse and stacks, in close proximity were saved by the arrival of the Canterbury fire engines. Many labourers bluntly refused to provide any assistance; in some cases they even appeared somewhat jubilant:

A terrible proof of this revolted spirit has been exhibited throughout the recent conflagrations in Kent. It is asserted positively, that although numbers — in some cases hundreds — of the class of labourers were looking on at the destruction of stacks and buildings, not a man of them would lend a hand to extinguish the flames; but all stood by, with an appearance of apathy, or of savage exultation and triumph.40

From these observations it is obvious that, while not directly involved, large numbers of farm workers sympathised with the Swing cause. When J. B. Wildman, a Chilham magistrate, applied to swear in several parishioners as special constables many of those approached positively refused to undertake the duties of office. This same strong reluctance to serve was also demonstrated at Ashford. In a letter dated 27th October, a frustrated farmer displayed his anger to Sir Edward Knatchbull:

Machine breaking has recommenced, two having been broken in Beaksbourne. The leniency of the sentencing has

__________________________________________________ * Stalks of potatoes, beans etc.

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I fear encouraged others to exceed the previous outrages and that in the open face of day. These subsequent outrages bear out the arguments of my last letter, temporising with anarchists seldom succeeds; as a seditious and revolutionary spirit pervades the country — nothing less than the extreme vigour of the law will preserve social order and the protection of property. 41

This unnamed farmer was correct: the Swing insurgents were becoming less concerned with restricting their lawlessness to the relative safety of darkness; rather they were prepared to broaden their campaign by marching in swelling numbers during the hours of daylight. They were moving about the countryside in ever-larger gangs, aware that their lines of communication were good and their local sources of information sound. This allowed them to disperse at any hint of a closing military force. The Kentish Gazette reported on 30th October 1830:

Desperadoes surrounded a barn at Benstead — near Ospringe — in which some labourers were engaged in threshing corn. They were requested to desist — but reluctant to obey, they were therefore forcibly dragged from the barn and obliged to accompany them on a threshing machine-breaking expedition.

The Swing movement was gathering momentum, attracting greater village support and growing daily in confidence and daring. The rioters were emboldened by their knowledge that the authorities thus far had proved weak and vacillating in their response, seemingly tormented by fears that, in struggling to regain control, they themselves would become marked men — vulnerable prey for the incendiarists.

Only five days elapsed before J. Poore felt obliged to communicate again with Sir Edward:

Things continue here much as when I last had the pleasure of addressing you — this part of the country must continue in its present state until the leaders at Wormshill and Frinsted [parishes near Hollingbourne] are in custody and I believe they are well known. I suspect the meetings at Stretbury are principally composed of the same persons and I should hope the Bearsted magistrates will take care to have them apprehended without delay.

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Unless some measures are proposed by the Government to afford relief to the general prevailing districts, the termination must be lamentable. There are many Government pensioners about the country who I believe are considered as members of the veteran battalion, would it not be a prudential measure to embody them at the present moment? They are good old soldiers and the expense would be comparatively trifling as their pensions would be saved and they would be withdrawn from the ranks of the disaffected.

October 30. The aspect of affairs in the neighbourhood of Maidstone is most gloomy. A large body were buying contributions at Langley Heath and its vicinity. Some say the numbers were five hundred, others seven hundred. Another body of three hundred and similar numbers on the Tunbridge side — this body was going to the Weald to meet another of one thousand. The magistrates had been employed in swearing-in special constables and had resolved on marching with Sir John Brown and the military for the purpose of dispersing the rioters and if possible to seize the ringleaders. The same individual was haranguing the people at Langley as exhibited at Stretbury. That man should be apprehended at any cost.

Employment must be given to the poor — the tenantry are too reduced, I fear, to do this themselves, so the landlords must in some way adjust. I, this day, committed a man at Canterbury, and if magistrates exert themselves, I think something important will be discovered. Our police officer knows just as much as I please to communicate — I dare say he is a man of judgement but not adapted for this service — we want someone who can go among them and glean the necessary information to preserve the public peace.

The suggestion that pensioners and war veterans should be dragged out of retirement and that police spies ought to be recruited is some measure of the desperation shown by the local law officers.

Towards the end of October Sir Robert Peel, founder of the Metropolitan Police, was expressing deepening concern: ‘I beg to repeat to you that I will adopt any measure — will incur any expense at the public charge — that can promote the

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suppression of the outrages in Kent and the detection of the offenders.’42

Hobsbawm and Rudé noticed how the Swing riots had entered a new and more radical phase whereby it was ‘no longer a case of isolated attacks on ricks or machines.’43 My own research has shown that many of these so-called isolated night attacks occurred on farms which were designated targets, carefully selected to create maximum terror and confusion amongst the local justices and their supporters. However, demands for a living wage had moved onto the labourers’ agenda and, increasingly, levies were being enforced either in cash or kind, perhaps in anticipation of future wage rises. At the beginning of November, two to three hundred labourers appeared in the neighbourhood of Hollingbourne, many carrying printed cards with the words ‘Starving at 1s 6d a week’. It was observed that each man held a large bludgeon and went from house to house demanding food and money.

William Cobbett had always maintained that the cause of the agricultural distress did not originate with the tenant farmers, who were simply unable to afford higher wages because their circumstances had been so reduced by high rents, heavy poor rates and the burden of being obligated to pay tithes. A Times correspondent agreed; he thought that the Swing movement ‘originated from high rents and consequent agricultural depression.’44 A new emphasis on the reduction of tithes and rents began to dominate the whole insurgency.

On 9th November 1830 Elizabeth Studham was committed to Maidstone Gaol, accused of setting fire to a thatched outhouse belonging to the Birchington Guardians of the Poor, with intent to burn down the workhouse. Later found guilty, Studham was transported to Tasmania. Only a few days passed before news spread of a serious riot at a Benenden victualling office. Labourers had assembled outside the house of Samuel Santer, which was also used as a public victualling office, before forcibly breaking and entering the premises. Once inside, the mob declared that concessions made in respect of wages at Rolvenden must be repeated at Benenden. The labourers were determined to remain ‘until something satisfactory was done for them in respect of an increase in wages.’ But the magistrates present judged any concessions as unreasonable; they were not prepared to make promises that could not be fulfilled — if they

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did, they would be yielding to menace. At that point one hundred and fifty labourers rushed into the room and the magistrates were rescued only after troops finally arrived to free them.

Five of the protagonists were indicted, for riotous assembly and disturbance of the peace, at Kent Winter Assizes on 14th December. In their defence it was stated that the wages they received during the summer were only 1s 7d a day, insufficient for a man to keep himself and his family. They had entered the victualling office in the hope of an increase in wages that might support their families. All but one of the prisoners were sentenced to one year’s hard labour; the other received four months.

During the entire evening of Monday 15th November the flames of another ‘very great fire’ could be seen on the Margate Road at a considerable distance in the direction of Minster, on the Isle of Thanet. The Canterbury townspeople were described as ‘flying in all directions’ to the commanding heights of Dane John Hill, near the city wall. The flames were of such great extent that, looking in their direction, the whole horizon was completely illuminated. Horses were immediately kept in readiness for the Norwich Insurance fire engine, in case an express arrived, requesting assistance. It was later established that the fire was at Allen Court, near Minster, about four miles from Margate:

Mr Hammond, the farmer, had put some threshing machines up in the barns this morning, declaring his determination to make use of them despite the reported threats of the labourers and the example set in so many instances around him. The fire was discovered at 8 o’clock when the Ramsgate mail coach for Canterbury passed the road in the vicinity, the flames were raging in a most destructive manner.45

Drivers of the Deal and Ashford mail coach also saw the flames distinctly from a distance not less than sixteen miles. The arson attack on Hammond’s farm was not isolated or random but a swift response to an open challenge to the rioters. Hammond must have bitterly regretted his rash and foolhardy bravado. On the same day as the massive fire at Allen Court, labourers were observed calmly smashing up a threshing machine at Longhurst Farm in Hawkhurst — a town with adjoining parishes where

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large numbers of the ‘poor and ill-disposed’ had gathered to demand higher wages and a proportionate rise in the scale of parish relief — whether in employment or out of work. Their manner of assembling was judged riotous and alarming, especially to the timid, and their invitation to the landowners and farmers for a wage meeting was apparently ‘not of the most courteous’.

The following day several postmen, driving the first stage home on the London road, stopped to report that another stack of furze had been fired that morning near Boughton Hill and that, but for change in wind direction, it would have ignited a wood belonging to the Dean and Chapter of Canterbury, consisting of several hundreds of acres. There were strong suspicions that this had been the main aim of the incendiarists.

A few days later, there were reports that many villagers in New Romney had voluntarily come forward to be enrolled as special constables and since then a nightly watch had been established; the inhabitants of Lydd and other villages throughout the Marsh responded by taking the same precautionary measures. Soon after, it was announced that additional precautions had been taken at Tunbridge Wells, where a party of soldiers was to be stationed, to be in readiness should the labourers again assemble.

Around 22nd November there was a serious disturbance in the Canterbury Workhouse which, according to the Maidstone Journal, had been plagued for some time past by a spirit of insubordination. Trouble had flared from the moment the guardians insisted that the paupers must attend on Sunday ‘those places of worship most congenial to their creed’. The new regime had evidently upset old procedures and tended to ‘shake off the indolent habits of the able-bodied paupers much to their manifest dislike.’ A large body of paupers, refusing to have their names placed on a list for church attendance, went into the workhouse yard and rushed the gates, gaining entry to the street, and were still to be seen parading outside the following night.

Between four and five hundred labourers, in an aggressive and violent condition, assembled in Wrotham on 24th November and proceeded to the mansion of the rector, the Reverend Moore, which they surrounded, crying out for ‘bread or blood’. They demanded an immediate reduction of fifty per cent in his tithes, telling him it was impossible for farmers to pay fair wages

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whilst so much went to the clergy. Moore tried to reason with them, lamenting their improper conduct, saying he would rather submit to be hanged on the nearest tree than accede to such violent behaviour. The labourers, thinking they might be entertained to food and beer should they follow the rector back to his vestry, arrived only to discover the overseer. They placed him in a cart and wheeled him in triumph for more than a mile to the parish boundary. The overseer promised to give the labourers a sovereign to buy drink if they would not ill-treat him. While still being wheeled ignominiously in the cart, they assured him of his safety if he would swear never to act in the capacity of overseer again. Once this was readily agreed to, they turned the cart round and took him back to the vestry.

The following day the Kentish Gazette described the Isle of Thanet as a scene of confusion, agitation and alarm. Organised gangs were making nightly appearances, each disguised with whitened faces and armed with bludgeons for the avowed purpose of destroying every threshing machine on the island. In late November and early December, threatening letters were found at Tonbridge and Aylesford, whilst other anonymous letters (Luddite in intent) were sent to the principal factories around Greenwich and Deptford, warning that seven hundred men would march from Kent to destroy all descriptions of machinery. However, after this action failed to materialise, the threat to machinery subsided, maybe because there were very few threshing machines left intact.

The adjourned Canterbury quarter-sessions recommenced on the same day, 25th November, again before Sir Edward Knatchbull and other magistrates of the county division. At least thirty prisoners stood accused of breaking threshing machines and other agricultural property. This time the magistrates took a much tougher stance, expressing a determination that, if any of the offenders present were convicted, they would not escape so lightly as those who had pleaded guilty at the last sessions.

A month later, on Christmas Eve, three convicted incendiarists were executed on Penenden Heath near Maidstone. John Dyke and two brothers, William and Henry Packman, were conveyed to the heath in a wagon, escorted by a troop of Scotch

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Greys,* to forestall any desperate last-ditch attempt at a rescue — something that had been openly mooted only that morning. The melancholy spectacle went undisturbed, according to The Times, ‘by any such absurd and dangerous attempt.’ The two brothers, in their late teens or early twenties, were described as looking much younger. The three condemned had stood accused of the capital offence of arson, successfully implicated in the firing of a Mr Wright’s stacks and barn. According to contemporary accounts all three paid scant attention to their religious duties and, in circumstances that were very unusual, the sacrament was not administered before they were put to death. Predictably, the chaplain seemed far more preoccupied with obtaining a full confession of guilt — something not unusual, which was often demonstrated in the final moments before execution. The chaplain spoke to John Dyke in a low voice: ‘Now you have come to the worst and there is no chance of escape, do tell the truth.’ Dyke answered that he was innocent and that witnesses for the prosecution had sworn false evidence against him. He urged all who could hear him in the crowd below to ‘mind the ninth commandment.’

On their arrival at Penenden Heath, one of the young Packman lads was heard to remark that ‘the gallows look an awful thing’. Henry Packman also addressed the onlookers waiting below the gallows, accusing prosecution witnesses of actively encouraging them both to burn the barn. He turned to his younger brother William and said, ‘Brother, let us shake hands before we die.’ At the last moment William raised the cap off his eyes and, when told to pull it down, at first refused, saying he wished to see the crowd. All three bodies were given to friends for burial.

__________________________________________________ * The 2nd Royal North British Dragoons, so called because they were

mounted on grey horses.

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Blaming the Irish. The Times, 25th September 1830

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Blaming the French. The Times, 29th November 1830

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The Times, 14th October 1830

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The Times, 21st October 1830

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The Times, 30th October 1830

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The Times, 2nd November 1830

The Times, 2nd November 1830

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The Times, 15th December 1830

From ‘An Address to the Labourers on the Subject of Destroying Machinery.’ The Times, 11th December 1830