The Swing Riots

DURING the course of English history, there have been many occasions when ordinary people have risen up against tyranny and injustice. Mainstream historians tell, us that there are only two sides to the historical debate: the Whig Version on the one hand, and the Marxist interpretation on the other. But the historical perspective which is so often attributed to the Marxists - that of 'oppressors vs. oppressed' - is hardly the personal property of the dialectical materialists. National-Anarchists, too, subscribe to the concept of an ongoing struggle against oppression and injustice. Indeed, concentrated wealth in the midst of widespread poverty is something that has prevailed far longer than Karl Marx and his worthless legacy.

This problem, which has led to certain political, social and economic factors being hijacked by the Left has not, however, eaten its way into all areas of history. Despite efforts to the contrary, Marxists are unable to claim credit for those events which have been totally spontaneous and which have not been framed by either ideology or dogma. One such case is the agricultural labourers' revolt of 1830, also known as the Swing Riots, which came about simply because the lives of working class men and women were being threatened by low wages and the new technological developments which undermined their traditional way of life.

Ironically, by far the best source of information of the Swing Riots - 'Captain Swing' - was published in 1973 by E.J. Hobsbawn and George Rude, themselves Marxist historians and testimony to the continuing efforts of such people to associate working class struggle with their own obnoxious creed. However, to give Hobsbawn and Rude their due, they rate among the few people to have actually bothered to recount the tumultuous events of 1830 in any real detail. This fact alone should illustrate why National-Anarchists should use learning as a springboard towards the education of our people and the replenishment of history itself.

Slightly before the Swing Riots began, William Cobbett published 'Rural Rides', an account of his journeys through the English countryside on horseback. This work was invaluable to those seeking to establish the motives behind the agricultural rebellion itself, and Cobbett tells us a great deal about what life was really like for rural labourers. In 1825, Cobbett had found that in north Hampshire the average wage was just 6d a day[1]. In addition, if a labourer was not receiving as much as 7d a day - then considered to be an average rate of pay - he was able to receive a relief supplement from the local parish. This included 'a gallon loaf a week for the rest of his family.'[2]

In fact Cobbett was surprised to discover that agricultural families received less food than a criminal inhabitant of the average nineteenth-century prison[3]. Two modern historians - C. Orwin and E. Whetham - consider the lives of the rural poor of the south and south midlands of England to have been 'probably the hardest of all at this period.'[4] The same source explains how wages were paid in weekly fashion, with nothing at all paid for those days affected by wet weather[5]. Hobsbawn and Rude, meanwhile, assert that previously, during the 1790s, 'the labourer's income was by custom, convention and justice a living wage, though a very modest one.'[6] However, less than forty years later there was a vast difference of opinion between what was generally considered by the ruling class to be a 'living wage' and what the agricultural labourers themselves considered to be a fair rate of pay for the basic sustenance of both themselves and their families.

Such discontent soon led to the subsequent rebellion, which began in rural Kent with the destruction of several ricks at Orpington on June 1st, 1830[7]. On August 28th of that year, a threshing machine - soon to become the symbolic object upon which labourers set their anger and frustration - was destroyed at Canterbury[8]. These events soon spread to upwards of twenty counties, each found to be in the low wage bracket of agricultural England[9]. It soon became apparent that labourers were demanding, rather than requesting, an increase in wages. By October, the tactic of direct action and sabotage had also spead across parts of Surrey and Sussex, but the spirit of resistance took a more defiant turn as mass demonstrations began to take place in broad daylight[10]. On November 15th, in the Sussex village of Ringmer, labourers had demanded a wage of 2s 6d for married men and 2s for those who were single. Such a strategy appears to have failed, however, one particular example being that of Goudhurst in Kent on the same day, when labourers were dispersed by a company of twenty-five dragoons[11].

Another slightly less confrontational tactic was the series of threatening letters which were sent to, amongst others, parsons and justices of the peace, each signed by the mysterious 'Captain Swing'. The letters hinted at further disturbances if the recipients were unwilling to acknowledge their demands. Most labourers, however, were unable to read, let alone compose a written demand for fair wages. The standard of literacy contained in the letters suggests that they were written by one or more fairly intelligent men, smething virtually unknown among agricultural labourers during this period of elitist education. Some of the letters 'affected an illiterate style'[12], whilst others had 'a gay, lyrical quality'[13]. Even the great William Cobbett, himself a fierce defender of the rights of working class people, found himself in the dock as the suspected leader of the disturbances, although he was later released without charge. It was certainly a fact, on the other hand, that whenever Cobbett had actually spoken at various functions, riots broke out in the same district[14].

At this time Europe was in a state of revolutionary crisis, although the failure of those responsible for the 1789 French Revolution to successfully export its ideological tenets a mere twenty-six miles across the English Channel, meant that the Swing Riots could not have been orchestrated by conspirators from abroad. This fact is something that even Hobsbawn and Rude had to contend with during the course of their research[15]. However, throughout this period the imagination of the public ran wild and there was much talk of French and Irish spies, foreign revolutionaries, government agents, bigoted Protestants, itinerant Radicals and even O'Connell-supporting papists[16]. The ruling class also tried to heighten the atmosphere of tension and, after 'The Times' had reported that 'in several instances, we hear that the labourers have hoisted the [French] tricoloured flag'[17], foreigners were rounded-up amid a confused outbreak of xenophobia designed to safeguard against potential conspiracy. But despite all the rumours and paranoia, the Swing Riots were an entirely organic and home-grown English phenomenon.

There is even less evidence to suggest that the riots were in any way co-ordinated or part of a national strategy of any kind. Indeed, in the words of one senior magistrate in Wiltshire: 'the insurrectionary movement seems to be directed by no plan or system, but merely actuated by the spontaneous feeling of the peasants, and quite at random.'[18] This view is validated by the fact that the demands of the labourers differed from county to county, with different areas formulating their own distinct and innovative methods of action. Although there was obviously some co-operation on a local level, with labourers marching from village to village and from farm to farm, this was inevitable and not enough to warrant the charge that some form of organised resistance was taking place on a national scale. Financial geography was one determining factor relating to the way in which the riots spread, with the lowest paid labourers being the first to revolt. If we combine the evidence surrounding the agricultural uprising of 1830, it soon becomes clear that the Swing Riots were caused by the failure of the ruling class to recognise the basic needs of those it systematically condemned to utter misery, squalour and degradation.

Finally, the rebellion itself illustrates how people can only stand so much before they are moved towards determined resistance and counter-action. The Swing Riots are an important example in that its participants, according to E.L. Woodward, 'were only asking for a living wage; there was no organised plot and no co-ordination between the various outbreaks.'[19] That such collective action can be initiated by individuals motivated by nothing more than a profound sense of social justice and a simple desire for economic freedom, can only serve to frustrate the devious machinations of bourgeois Marxian posers, who are traditionally renowned for their manipulation of ordinary working class people.

Notes:

1. William Cobbett, 'Rural Rides' (Harrap & Co. Ltd., 1948), p.198. [Back]
2. Ibid. [Back]
3. Ibid., pp.198-9. [Back]
4. C. Orwin & E. Whetham, 'A History of British Agriculture 1846-1914' (1964), pp.80-1. [Back]
5. Ibid. [Back]
6. E.J. Hobsbawn & George Rude, 'Captain Swing' (Penguin University Press, 1973), p.27. [Back]
7. Ibid., p.71. [Back]
8. Ibid. [Back]
9. J.H. Clapham, 'Economic History of Modern Britain I (undated), p.147. [Back]
10. Hobsbawn & Rude, op.cit., p.76. [Back]
11. Ibid., p.81. [Back]
12. Ibid., p.173. [Back]
13. Ibid. [Back]
14. Ibid., p.184. [Back]
15. Ibid., p.187. [Back]
16. Ibid., p.182. [Back]
17. 'The Times', October 30th, 1830. [Back]
18. H.O. 52/11 (Letters of November 20th & 28th, 1830). [Back]
19. E.L. Woodward, 'The Age of Reform: 1815-70' (Oxford University Press, 1962). [Back]