CAPTAIN SWING

"Captain Swing" was the mythical leader of the laboring rural poor who rose up to destroy threshing machines in England in 1830. The number of rural laborers in England had been swollen by the return of sailors and soldiers after the Battle of Waterloo (1815), as about 250,000 men were demobilized. This glutted the labor market, providing a permanent surplus of labor and reducing the wages of those who could find work to subsistence level.

cause for unrest

Parliamentary acts of enclosure, which had begun in Tudor times and accelerated during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Era, assisted the consolidation of productive land and the division of common land. An English cottager whom the English agriculturalist Arthur Young (1741–1820) encountered in 1804 told him, "Enclosing was worse than ten wars." The enclosures helped destroy many cottage holders and small farmers. It also compromised the existence of landless laborers, by taking away their access to common lands, which were enclosed and bought up by people of means. The big fish ate the little ones. Thus by 1830, in sharp contrast to the Continent, there were very few landowning peasants remaining in England. The countryside was definitively divided between landlords, tenant farmers, and hired laborers. As the number of agricultural proletarians swelled, their wages plummeted. Farmers paid them as little as possible, taking them on as hired hands for shorter periods of time. The gulf between them and the farmers who hired them widened—for example, rarely did they eat at the same table as the farmers who employed them.

Agricultural capitalism helped increase productivity but, increasingly, fewer of the returns went to the laborers. The Speenhamland System, which had been established in 1795, supplemented the wages of laborers with funds generated from property taxes in parishes. Doles were based on the price of bread and the number of dependents in each poor family. This further encouraged landowners to pay lower wages. All of this increased the "sullen hatred" of many poor people for the rich. Conversely, solidarity among the wealthy with the poor and hungry seemed to vanish. Crime, including poaching and even arson, increased following the skimpy harvest of 1828 and an even worse one in 1829.

riots

The Swing riots began in the southeast of England in August 1830. Protestors at the first gatherings demanded higher wages. The first threshing machine was destroyed at Lower Hardres, near Canterbury in East Kent. The movement spread rapidly in Kent, and then to East Sussex and West Sussex, ultimately reaching at least sixteen other counties, most in southern England, including Hampshire, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Norfolk, Dorset, Worcester, Essex, Warwickshire, and Devon. These were hardly the first cases of the poor smashing machines. The Swing riots came not long after a certain Ned Ludd (fl. 1779)—who may or may not have actually existed—and his followers, mostly glove makers, had destroyed about a thousand stocking-frames in Nottingham in 1811 and 1812, machines undercutting their chances to find work and their wages. "Luddites" wanted a return to the economic order, to a so-called moral economy that they believed had existed before mechanization.

During the Swing riots, bands of laborers numbered between twenty-five and on one occasion as high as one thousand people. Letters warned farmers to destroy their threshing machines. One letter said, "We don't want to do any mischief, but we want that poor children when they go to bed should have a belly full of taties instead of crying with half a belly full." Another warned: "This is to acquaint you that if your threshing machines are not destroyed by you directly, we shall commence our labors. Signed on behalf of the whole. Swing." Scrawled warnings such as "Revenge for thee is on the wing, from thy determined Captain Swing" suggested an organization that was not really there. Captain Swing did not exist, but he came to represent the moral fury of the crowds of impoverished, determined laborers.

Attacks concentrated on prosperous farmers who could afford threshing machines, which were expensive and frequently broke down. Farmers with less land who could not afford the machines probably were not unhappy to see attacks on their wealthier neighbors. In some places, the smashing of threshing machines were just part of a movement that included arson threats (a potent arm of the poorest of the poor) aimed at increasing wages. The movement generated its own momentum and in some places paper mills were attacked also.

Local elites sometimes blamed political radicals, or occasionally even the French, as, following the July Revolution of 1830, tricolor flags appeared here and there. But in almost all cases, radicals had no link to the movement. Machine-breakers were most likely to find allies among craftsmen, particularly shoemakers. The participants were not necessarily the most miserable of the poor, and were most likely to be young or sometimes middle-aged men, with the average age being about twenty-seven to twenty-nine years. Unlike in grain riots in Britain and on the Continent, women played only occasional roles in the Swing riots. In some cases, the laborers elected their own leaders during meetings. The atmosphere of the movement was sometimes festival like, but accompanied by violence. In an atmosphere of fear, local gentry formed self-defense groups. Yet local magistrates assumed responsibility for the repression.

repercussions

In all, courts heard 1,976 cases and condemned 252 people to death, of whom 19 were executed (all but 3 for arson), 505 were to be transported to Australia or Tasmania (of whom 481 sailed), 644 were sent to jail, 7 received fines, and 1 was whipped; 800 were acquitted or bound over for trial on lesser crimes. The Swing riots would remain in the collective memory of the English poor and those who defended them. In the poet John Clare's "Remembrances," penned in 1832, poor folk "sweeing [swaying] to the wind" is probably an allusion to those condemned to the gallows during the Swing riots.

The Swing riots probably contributed indirectly to the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which ended the Speenhamland System and led to the creation of workhouses, in which poor people without jobs would be incarcerated, splitting families apart. In 1841, some two hundred thousand people in Britain were inmates in workhouses. Even if in some areas the purchase of threshing machines fell off, in the end the Swing rioters lost.

In France at about the same time, a strikingly similar series of events reflected the fact that on the continent, too, the wealthy were easily able to get the law on their side to promote agricultural capitalism. During the period from 1829 to 1831, in the mountainous department of the Ariège in the Pyrenees mountains, peasants disguised as women chased charcoal-burners and forest guards from the forests, to which the former had always had access. The forest code of 1827, recognizing that the price of wood had risen because of metallurgical production, had deprived them of usage. Like "Captain Swing," scrawled warnings signed by "Jeanne, lieutenant of the Demoiselles," suggested an organization that really did not exist. "The Demoiselles" represented a "moral economy" in which, like enclosures and threshing machines in England, if things were as they should be, everyone would have access to the forests to glean and pasture their animals, as they had always had. It was not to be. Moreover, by disguising themselves as women, in what amounted to an "enraged Carnival," they were standing reality on its head, as well as disguising themselves. When the Revolution of 1830 came along, "liberty" took on a new guise, and the peasants of the Ariège briefly became petitioners for liberty as they saw it. When the forest code remained intact and the guards and charcoal burners returned, the "Demoiselles" returned, but only for a couple of years, and then briefly in 1848, and in 1872 for the last time. Large numbers of the peasants of the region gave up the struggle to survive in the mountains and left for cities and towns in hope of a better life. In England, impoverished landless laborers remained even more part of rural life.

See alsoAgricultural Revolution; Chartism; Luddism; Machine Breaking.

bibliography

Hammond, John L., and Barbara Hammond. The Village Labourer, 1760–1832: A Study in the Government of England before the Reform Bill. 2 vols. New York, 1970.

Hobsbawm, Eric J., and George Rudé. Captain Swing. New York, 1968.

Merriman, John M. "The 'Demoiselles' of the Arie'ge, 1829–1831." In 1830 in France, edited by John M. Merriman. New York, 1975.

Thompson, Edward P. Customs in Common. New York, 1993.

Thomson, Eric P. "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century." Past and Present 50 (1971): 76–136.

Tilly, Charles, Louise Tilly, and Richard Tilly. The Rebellious Century, 1830–1930. Cambridge, Mass., 1975.

John Merriman