“Captain Swing” The Signatory

The question of who or what “Captain Swing” actually was in relation to the events of 1830 is central, yet it is one that has seems to have escaped the attention of just about everyone who has looked at them. Most historians follow Hobsbawm and Rudé’s formidable lead in using “Swing” as a metonym, a substitute identity not only for the perpetrators, but for the discrete events that took place during the period of the disturbances.Footnote 19 But, as we shall see, in 1830 and 1831 the character of “Swing” took on a number of narrative identities whose paths crossed and re-crossed in the public imagination, and an understanding of the way in which the identity of Swing appeared and then evolved in a number of different contexts is of crucial importance in explaining how contemporaries and subsequent commentators have given meaning to the disturbances.

According to Carl Griffin, who recently reassessed the origins of the disturbances in Kent, the eponymous “Swing” first put his name to a threatening letter in Dover in early October 1830: “You are advised”, he wrote to a farmer, “that if you doant put away your thrashing machine against Monday next you shall have a ‘SWING’ ”.Footnote 20 Thereafter, his name was chalked on walls between Dover and Canterbury, and scores of letters signed in his name were received by victims of arson and machine-breaking over the following months and, indeed, years. The creation of an eponym during periods of popular protest is not confined to the labourers’ revolt of 1830, of course: it is easily recognisable during the Luddite disturbances of 1811–1817 and the Rebecca Riots in Wales during the 1840s, for example.Footnote 21 Indeed it is possible to see something similar happening during many periods of popular protest in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Adrian Randall and others have pointed to the figure of Jack O’Lent, who was synonymous with the riots against the Bristol turnpikes in 1749, to show how the development of an eponymous figurehead is at least partially explicable within the framework of the carnivalesque milieu of popular culture, custom and practice that formed the backdrop to rural protest.Footnote 22

Alun Howkins and Linda Merrick go even further in their 1993 study of “Ritual, Disguise and Rebellion”, providing a sophisticated anthropological rationale to demonstrate that the practices of disguise, cross-dressing and face-blacking were essential components of protest throughout Hanoverian England and Wales – all ways of creating alternative identities that share characteristics with eponymous invention.Footnote 23 They point to the transformative function of such disguise, allowing participants to transgress not only the rigid normative rules of the tightly stratified society within which they lived, but the internal rules of their own communities, cultures, and even households. They suggest that it is only through the agency of disguise – of which the use of an eponymous “other” is also a clear example – that individuals could act as they must in extremis while safeguarding the very rules that they have chosen (or been forced) to transgress.

But as useful as this perspective is in assessing the mentalité of protesting crowds (to use Edward Thompson’s favoured term), it turns out to be much less profitable within the context of the “last labourers’ revolt”. Although isolated examples can be found of individuals disguising themselves in 1830 and 1831, one of the defining characteristics of the protesting crowds was their transparency and a lack of ambiguity.Footnote 24 Crowds broke machines, petitioned for higher wages, and even committed robbery (in statutory terms) in the full light of day, largely without any thought of disguise, and often over protracted periods lasting two or three days. Clearly, most of those involved had little intention of evading capture, and no sense of conflict in terms of the “norms” and “rules” they transgressed in doing so.

Alternatively, Kevin Binfield provides a linguistic rationale for the development of the mythic figurehead with specific reference to Luddism. In fact, he suggests that Ned Ludd was both “an eponym for a subculture, a selective trade culture, that grew out of a larger culture”, and “a metonym that [protesters] hoped could concentrate a variety of discourses and enable [them] […] to constitute themselves as a self-determining and articulate body”.Footnote 25 In other words, Binfield suggests that the creation of Ned Ludd was not so much a case of inventing a disguise for the purposes of anonymity or license as a means by which coherence could be conferred to a disparate set of discourses which constituted protests across time and space. Once again, though, in the case of Swing this perspective is less than convincing. Despite the fact that “Swing” appended his name to a number of threatening letters during the disturbances, many others were received by farmers on which he made no appearance at all.Footnote 26 Far more importantly, there is little or no evidence in the sources that Swing was a figurehead recognized as such by those who actually took part in the disturbances, either as arsonists or protesters, and as such he cannot be said to act as a point of coalescence for a “movement” of agricultural labourers as Binfield suggests is the case with Ned Ludd. No mention that I am aware of was made of him directly during crowd actions, and the number of incidents that were accompanied by threatening letters, let alone those signed by Swing, is negligible.Footnote 27

Of course, the very question of who authored threatening letters, and what their motivation might be, is highly vexed and has troubled a number of historians. Even the briefest survey of Swing letters is enough to convince us that a multiplicity of voices is represented: to quote Edward Thompson again, “one can rarely prove that any letter indicates general protest rather than the voice of a crank”.Footnote 28 Sometimes, it is easy to tie a specific threat to other evidence in order to indicate that the author or authors were local and were, at the very least, acting on behalf of aggrieved labourers. A letter received by Dr Jones of Bedfont informed him that “[i]f you do not do a something for the numerous poor of this Parish […] we mean to serve you as we did our neighbour”, alluding directly to a fire in the town that occurred two weeks earlier.Footnote 29 But ultimately, we are forced back on Thompson’s uncharacteristically vague conclusion that “one is left to judge by the ‘feel’ of a letter, its style [and] the particularization of grievances”Footnote 30; and in the case of the so-called “Swing” letters, one is also forced to the conclusion that many (perhaps even the majority) had little or no connection with agricultural labourers themselves.

Take, for example, the rhetorical flourishes of which “Swing” writers were so fond. “You have gorged upon the vitals of the poor half starved labourer till he has sworn to wear the chains of slavery no longer”, wrote Swing to a farmer in Horsham: “Not a Barn Outhouse Stack or even your own Dwelling House shall escape the devouring element”. “Your name is down amongst the Black Hearts in the Black Book and this is to advise you and the like of you, who are Parson Justices, to make your Wills”, he wrote again, this time to Farmer Biddle of High Wycombe. A note dropped on the outskirts of Coventry contained the simple but potent message: “The Bag is Burst wee shall soon be with you between now and Christmas”.Footnote 31

What also becomes clear is that very quickly, following his emergence in Kent in October 1830, Swing the signatory assumed a number of guises, signing letters that aired a multiplicity of grievances. A letter received by W.M. Hurlock in Dedham, Essex, for example seems to have been written by a local farmer or farmers who resented his position as Lecturer of the Parish and receiver of the Great Tithes: “Prepare your wicked soul for Death”, it warns, “[t]here is not a Farmer in the parish but what hates you”.Footnote 32 The picture becomes even less clear when Swing signed letters with an overtly macro-political message, such as the one received at Coventry which called for “[an end to] machinery and a free trade in corn”, or another that demanded “Parliamentary Reform in a full and fair representation of the people or Death!!!”.Footnote 33 Still more, how are we to assess the “authenticity” (in this context) of a letter dropped in Kent which purported to have been written at the “Hotel de France”, and began, “My spelling is bad but de French are not so English”, especially as the author clearly had a grievance against a particular local landowner. “Monsieur”, he wrote in his best Franglais, “de English be upon it, if we do not come, de moon does not shine nor does stars look bright to night […] .The lane down to your farm is dark – we will light it up”.Footnote 34

The Myth Of “Swing” And The Public Mind

Questions of “authenticity” hover over these letters like flies over a corpse, and it is a brave historian indeed who would attempt to pick the bones for anything resembling empirical truth. But if we shift our focus away from normative questions of social history then perhaps we can begin to see a different kind of truth emerging in the pattern and progress of Swing’s output. That Swing emerged as an eponymous figure in Kent in October 1830, a mythic figure who could speak anonymously for the grievances of labourers, is not in doubt (regardless of who wrote his letters for him). That he was taken up by others who were definitely not labourers, and who had their own specific or more general axes to grind is also self-evident. Yet the truth that there appear to be a number of discrete Swings behind the letters should not blind us to the fact that they were, in one crucial sense, mutually dependent: the case of each of these different constituencies could only have been strengthened by the continuing progress of the myth of Captain Swing.

Word of the letters circulated quickly in the locality, adding to an already heightened atmosphere of tension and fear; mention of them found their way into the local press and thereafter into the national papers. This, of course, stimulated every disaffected employee, every sympathetic radical, and a sprinkling of cranks and crackpots to have a go themselves. Edward Thompson has suggested that by the earliest years of the nineteenth century, Home Secretary Portland was cautioning against reprinting anonymous threatening letters for fear of adding to the notoriety of the authors and inviting imitation, and despite the unprecedented upsurge in the numbers of such letters during 1830 and 1831, it is nonetheless true that the text of very few actually appeared in the press.Footnote 35 Yet something had happened which served to advertise them far better even than the reprinting of their contents: that something was the signature of Swing.

As early as the beginning of December 1830, it was sufficient for the Hampshire Chronicle merely to report that “[n]umbers of ‘Swing’ letters continue to be received by farmers on the Isle of Thanet” for their readers to understand precisely the nature of the threat.Footnote 36 The press rarely found it necessary to debate the authorship or “authenticity” of a Swing letter, either; indeed, as we have seen, many of those alluded to were not even signed by Swing himself. But having begun as the author of threatening letters, by mid-December Swing was beginning to take on a much more tangible form. On 18 December, The Times (after the Leeds Intelligencer) reported that “Captain ‘Swing’ has got into Yorkshire”, in response to fires and the destruction of machinery in the south of the county.Footnote 37 On 21 December, the Taunton Courier printed a letter addressed directly to Swing, arguing against his methods and describing him as “a stout fellow, but a bad adviser”.Footnote 38 The culmination of this personification of Swing occurred around 23 December, when the Morning Chronicle (among others) sensationally announced the “arrest of Captain Swing” in Suffolk.

Swing, it reported, was none other than Joseph Saville, a former corn factor who was latterly “more in the straw plait line”. He was apprehended and taken before the magistrates at Bury after being spotted throwing inflammatory letters bearing the signature “Swing” from a gig.Footnote 39The Times reported that his arrest caused “a more than ordinary sensation”, and it was rumoured that he was “the actual and original Swing”, an impression strengthened by the apparent discovery of another 600 or 700 letters and more than £500 in cash on his person. In the end, the authorities decided that Saville was a relatively harmless crackpot, and his sentence of a £50 fine and 12 months imprisonment stands in stark contrast to that of others who were convicted of sending only a single threatening letter, yet were sentenced to 7 years’ transportation.Footnote 40

The point here is not whether Saville actually was the “real Captain Swing”, nor even whether the press believed him to be so. Rather, it is how and why a situation had arisen whereby a man not directly connected with the plight of agricultural labourers, a man very much on the fringes of rural society, could generate so much interest by appearing to be the real Captain Swing. The answer, of course, is that his case fed directly into the imagination of the wider reading public that was, by 1830, just about ready to believe almost any tale of conspiracy and intrigue. And in turn, this explains another important theme in the rhetorical construction of Swing that emerged soon after the disturbances began: the claim that outsiders, agents and provocateurs were to blame for fomenting them, rather than the feelings and experiences of ordinary agricultural labourers. Correspondents to Colonel Jervoise of the North Hants Militia wrote to him of their fears that “the people are discontented by agency for concealed purposes”, and that “there is some secret engine at work that has not yet been discovered”.Footnote 41 As late as 1832, one Devon clergyman concluded that “[t]he commencement of the fires, I always fancied, [was] aided by emissaries from France or Ireland”.Footnote 42

In the heady atmosphere of pre-Reform England, with revolution in continental Europe close at hand, such conspiracies are hardly surprising. But it is important to note, once again, that the press did little to diminish them. Newspapers printed account after account of “strangers” who incited, and even ignited, the fires that lit up southern England. According to them, the mysterious Swing was a malcontent, possibly foreign, certainly politically motivated, and always “respectable” in manners or dress. The Times gave details of “a man, dressed in shabby genteel, but of manners apparently above the ordinary class”, who had been spotted close to fires at Battle, Sussex. The Examiner reported that “previous to several of the […] fires in Kent […] a post chaise had arrived in the neighbourhood, and after staying a short time, had gone away again”.Footnote 43 This cloak-and-dagger Swing, a man of “gentlemanly appearance”,Footnote 44 whose motives were concealed but who sought to bring instability and discontent to the countryside, clearly fed on, and in turn sustained, the enigmatic letter-writing Swing. In the heightened atmosphere of November and December 1830, it was virtually impossible for onlookers to separate the two.

What is of most interest here is the way in which the mysterious and enigmatic figure of Swing – first as a writer of threatening letters and then as a shadowy, well-dressed malcontent – moved from the farmyards and lanes of rural England, through the imaginations of newspaper correspondents and leader writers, and back into the countryside again. At one stage, at the beginning of December, even The Times (hardly innocent in sustaining the mythology of Swing) was moved to report that in Hampshire: “A traveller in this unfrequented part who is too inquisitive is sure to excite suspicion […]. Gentlemen in gigs and postchaises are peculiar objects of jealousy […] [and] an innocent inquiry of, ‘Whose house or farm is that?’ is, under existing circumstances, an overt act of incendiarism.”Footnote 45 Though it is a difficult commodity to measure, there can be little doubt that the growing mythology of Swing served both to advertise, and to strengthen and invigorate the disturbances as they spread from the eastern counties across the whole of southern England. Word of his progress reached as far west as Taunton in Somerset, where his emissaries sent a letter to a woollen manufacturer at Shepton Mallet suggesting that “[a]s Swing is travelling on his [way] through England, he must nesessily [sic] soon be here”.Footnote 46

This symbiotic relationship between events on the ground and the widespread reporting of them raises important questions about the proprietorship of an eponymous figurehead. Kevin Binfield suggests that “Luddism [as a movement] is generated not by conspiracy or the sudden emergence of class consciousness, but by a single, forceful act of naming – the creation and appropriation of the eponym ‘Ned Ludd’ ”.Footnote 47 During the so-called “Swing risings”, though, things are much more complicated. There is little doubt that the creation of the mythic Swing contributed to the momentum in the countryside; we might even suggest that he was absolutely vital, as a figure around which events could cohere in the public mind. But this is very different from suggesting that the creation of the eponym “Swing” created a coherent “movement” of these discrete events, or even that such a “movement” was self-naming in the way that Binfield claims for Luddism. The “naming” of Swing – indeed, his mythic creation – was less a conscious act on the part of agricultural labourers than the result of a symbiotic relationship between labourers, cranks, crackpots, Radicals, leader writers, frightened farmers, correspondents, and finally the imagination of a public hard-wired in 1830 to find Frenchmen, Free Irishmen, and radical agitators hiding behind every haystack and lurking down every country lane.

Perhaps the most useful way of understanding the role of Captain Swing is to follow the lead of Katrina Navickas, another biographer of Ned Ludd. In her recent Social History article on “The Mythology of Luddism” she goes beyond Binfield’s definition of it as an act of self-naming, suggesting rather that “ ‘General Ludd’ was perhaps only the most visible manifestation of what was in fact a mythology of Luddism, a whole mindframe of opposition which was framed by both participants in, and suppressors of, the disturbances”.Footnote 48 In a similar way, Swing too was formed by the psychological needs of protesters and opponents of the disturbances, and in this case the balance of influence probably tipped in favour of those who required an enemy on which to focus their fears and disapproval rather than protesters who sought a mythical ally. In the drawing rooms of Kensington and the farmhouses of Kent, Swing was an agent provocateur, possibly French or Irish, but more likely one of the home-grown variety.

Little wonder, then, that two of pre-Reform England’s most notorious agitators – Cobbett and Carlisle – were prosecuted for sedition and incitement in the months immediately following the disturbances. But Cobbett (who was many contemporaries’ best bet for the “real” Captain Swing) knew better. On the influence of “outsiders” and “designing Radicals” in the disturbances, he wrote:

Clearly, contemporaries felt compelled to find some “organizing principle” behind the disturbances of 1830, and in the absence of any real evidence they allowed their imagination and the rhetorical tool of the press to do the job for them.

What is more surprising, though, is the extent to which historians have gone along with this exercise. Not only have most used the language of a “movement” when describing the disturbances, as I have already suggested, but one or two have even attempted to find radical conspiracies of their own. The most notable exercise of this kind is Roger Wells’s 1997 article, “Mr William Cobbett, Captain Swing, and King William IV”, in which he ties together the loose ends of Cobbett’s lecture tour of the southern counties, the appearance in east Sussex of Treasury Solicitor, George Maule, the slightly unhinged figure of former London policeman Charles Inskipp, and the close interest of the King into a common thread of political influence in the events around Battle in East Sussex.Footnote 50 In the final analysis, though, the ends remain loose and, while it would be foolhardy to deny any involvement of known radicals in the events of 1830, the evidence simply does not exist to suggest that they played anything other than a minor supporting role. It is impossible to imagine that the “village Hamdens” of pre-Reform England could be persuaded to stay out of the events as they unfolded, but this is very different from suggesting that they were instrumental in any substantial way.Footnote 51

Locating Popular Protest In Its Local Context

When one looks in detail at individual “moments” of protest, one is forced to the conclusion that Cobbett had it just about right; that these were quintessentially local events, explicable only with direct reference to the local conditions from which they arose. Take, for example, the crowd actions that took place around Hungerford and Kintbury on 21 and 22 November 1830. These two settlements lie on the banks of the River Kennet in Berkshire (see Figures 2 and 3). In 1830, Hungerford was a prosperous market town of 2,700 souls dominated by agriculture and the artisan trades. Kintbury was smaller, having a population of around 1,700, and its dependence on agriculture was even greater.

Figure 1 A contemporary cartoon that neatly shows not only the personification of “Captain Swing” in the public mind, but also the way that the disturbances as a whole became coopted by many factions in pre-Reform England. Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images. Used with permission.

On 21 November 1830 a vagrant approached the house of Mr Hogan Smith of Kintbury Holt, overseer, and asked for relief, but instead he was thrown into the Blind House, or Cage (the local lock-up). On hearing this, local labourers proceeded to liberate him not once but twice.Footnote 52 Later that evening, a crowd of around 200 arrived at a farm at Inkpen and broke a threshing machine there, and then went on to another farm at Anvilles and did the same thing.Footnote 53 In the early hours of the following morning, the crowd processioned around Kintbury, breaking threshing machines and demanding money and victuals from farmers and others, including Captain Dunn of Inglewood House and the Revd Fowle, Vicar of Kintbury (see Figure 4).Footnote 54

Figure 2 County map of England and Wales, showing the location of Hungerford and Kintbury, Berkshire.

They also persuaded Revd Fowle to act as intermediary for them, and had the threshing machines of Charles Dundas, MP brought into the centre of the town where they were destroyed, along with that of Thomas Leaver.Footnote 55 By 5 am the crowd had made its way to Hampstead Marshall where demands were made of Joseph Randall for food and cash. Having resisted them, Randall’s window, sash, and frame were beaten in.Footnote 56 By 8 o’clock, the crowd had made its way to Titcomb, where the machines of Frederick Webb were destroyed, and then on to Denford where they visited John Willes’s estate at Hungerford Park and George Cherry of Denford House.Footnote 57

Eventually, the Kintbury crowd met with around 100 men from Hungerford who had been engaged in destroying threshing machines in Stanham Green and other places south of the town. On the main London Road (now the A4), the combined crowd was met by a party of local ratepayers and gentlemen who persuaded them to appoint a deputation and to meet with them later at Hungerford Town Hall.Footnote 58 On their way into the town, the crowd broke windows and proceeded to destroy the ironwork and moulds at Richard Gibbons’s foundry in the High Street.Footnote 59 The men then went on to the Town Hall as appointed, where a deputation of five men from each location (Kintbury and Hungerford) negotiated on their behalf.

The Hungerford representatives successfully requested 2 shillings a day in wages for labourers until Lady Day next, and 2s and 6d a day thereafter, and then left the meeting. The Kintbury men were both more militant and more intransigent: they refused to leave their weapons outside, they demanded the same as the Hungerford men, and finally they demanded a one-off payment of £5, threatening that “they would be Damned if they would not smash the Place, and down with the Town altogether” if they did not get it.Footnote 60 The leader of the ratepayers’ delegation, Mr. Willes, then gave them 5 sovereigns, and proceeded to offer the same amount to the Hungerford delegation gratuitously, believing it would be unfair to treat them differently as they had behaved “so well” during the negotiations.Footnote 61 There was some indication later that the money had been given on the condition that it would spent in Hungerford itself.Footnote 62

Following the Town Hall meeting there was much drunkenness and disturbance in Hungerford town centre, and the Bath to London coach was stopped and damaged, and money extorted from its passengers. Disorder and demands for money and food continued in the town that afternoon and into the evening. Most of the Kintbury men returned home following the meeting, but not before they had demanded £5 and a promissory note for 20s worth of beer from Farmer William Clarkson and a visitor, Herbert Hogsflesh.Footnote 63

These are, of course, only the bare facts, but immediately we can make a number of observations on the progress of the disturbances. The first is that the Hungerford and Kintbury crowds comprised two quite distinct bodies of men. Both had been engaged in coercive behaviour around their own towns before coming together – serendipitously or otherwise – on the London Road. Looking particularly at Kintbury (for which the Home Office records are unusually rich) it becomes clear that a specifically circumscribed procession around the town was its primary activity (see Figure 4).

Figure 3 Sites of crowd action at Kintbury and Hungerford, 21–22 November 1830.

Figure 4 The paths taken by the Kintbury and Hungerford crowds during the disturbances 21–22 November 1830.

It is also important to note that even though the two crowds had already combined by the time the gentlemen met them on the London Road, during negotiations at Hungerford Town Hall it was obvious to both sides that delegates from the two localities should be dealt with separately, despite their core demands (of an increase in labourers’ wages) being identical. In other words, the disturbances were highly and self-consciously localized both in conception and progress, being demarcated along place or parish lines. The second observation is that despite the obvious risks attached to any open activity of this kind, the crowds in no way sought to mitigate their actions by avoiding those in a position of local authority. In fact, the Kintbury crowd seems to have gone out of its way to target the most influential parishioners: Charles Dundas of Barton Court was MP for Berkshire and later Lord Amesbury; George Cherry of Denford House was a JP and Under Sheriff of Berkshire, a post previously held by John Willes of Hungerford Park; the Revd Fulwar Craven Fowle, a relative of the Earl of Craven, was also a magistrate and was unusually well connected, having come to the attention not only of Jane Austen (who, it was rumoured, wrote verses for him) but of George III himself. Of the others, Captain (later Major-General) William Dunn of Inglewood House was a major landowner, and Mr Cuthbert Johnson of Wallingtons was lord of the manors of Wallington and Balsdon.

Thirdly, although most crowd activity related to wages and hindrances to the employment of agricultural labourers (threshing machines), they also appear quite specifically to have targeted the Richard Gibbons iron foundry, despite being told on arrival that no threshing machines were actually made there. Indeed, one of the leaders of the Hungerford crowd, John Aldridge, was heard to remark as he destroyed a threshing machine earlier in the day, that, “I would like to down with all the foundries”.Footnote 64 The Revd Fowle (among others) later observed that “Ploughs with cast iron shears appear to be as much the object of their hatred as machines, and I hear they have broken many.”Footnote 65 This would suggest that it was not simply threshing machines that were problematic for the protesters, but the issue of the mechanization of tasks per se in an environment of rising un- and under-employment (though it may also have had something to do with the influence of blacksmiths in the crowd, who recognized the foundry and its products as a direct threat to their livelihood; John Aldridge was himself an apprentice blacksmith).

Finally, it is important to note that really disorderly behaviour seems only to have occurred as a result of the crowd meeting en masse in the centre of Hungerford. Prior to this, Frederick Page noted that “the conduct of the Labourers was almost without exception marked by forbearance and civility”, and the Kintbury crowd in particular seems to have been marked by its self-discipline.Footnote 66 In fact, there is a real sense that the ratepayers brought this disorder upon themselves: it was they who suggested the mass meeting (of up to 500 men) in the centre of town, and they who apparently made the condition that the money they gave should be spent there. One wonders if, as substantial landowners and occupiers of farms in the surrounding area, it suited them to have the crowd as far as possible contained in the town and away from their homesteads.

So far, we have dealt with events which have already been described, to a degree, in the sources.Footnote 67 But what of those who took part in them, either as protagonists or victims? It has already been noted that the crowd action at Kintbury appears to have been ignited by the maltreatment of a vagrant by the overseer, Hogan Smith, and we can take this line of enquiry further. From the parish records, we know that of the fourteen named targets of crowd action at Kintbury, eleven were vestrymen in the town itself, and at least two held specific parish offices at the time of Swing. Another, John Stevens, was a vestryman at Hungerford (Table 1).Footnote 68

Table 1 Victims of the Kintbury crowd, 21–22 November 1830, and their links with the parish vestry

On the one hand, this is to be expected: as we have seen, almost all of those targeted were substantial farmers or major landowners. But it also raises the possibility that they were targeted, not simply because of their status as employers or because they held positions of general influence in the locality, but because they were instrumental in formulating and administering parish policy. This in turn raises the question: how far was this likely to have been a direct influence on those who took part in the disturbances?

Again, from various official sources we know the names of sixty-seven members of the Kintbury crowd who may have been resident at Kintbury.Footnote 69 Referring back to the Overseers Accounts, we can also say with a high degree of certainty that twenty-five, and possibly twenty-seven, of these received casual relief or weekly allowances from the parish in the twelve months before the disturbances.Footnote 70 These range from John Annetts and Charles Cox, both of whom received only one casual payment over the year, to Edmund Steel, one of the crowd’s spokesmen at the Town Hall, who received relief on twenty-six different occasions. Turning to the Hungerford Crowd, on the one hand we know a lot less about those who took part and what they did (we only have the brief details given at the Special Assizes at Reading), but on the other we can find out a lot more about their histories as paupers. As a result, we know of twenty-two men who were seriously implicated in the disturbances, and of these we can be fairly confident that ten received some kind of direct financial relief between 1823 and 1828, the period covered by detailed parish records.Footnote 71 Again, a range of experiences is evident, from William Chitter who received a single one-off payment of 9d in 1825, to Thomas Dance, who was given £38 4s 1d in casual payments, family allowances, and payments in lieu of work.

So what do these figures tell us about the possible links between poor labourers, parish relations, and participation in the disturbances? They tell us that a significant number of those involved in the disturbances are known to have been in direct receipt of monetary relief either in the period immediately before, or in the years leading up to, November 1830 – around 40 per cent of those at Kintbury, and nearly one-half of those we know of at Hungerford. But they also tell us that their experiences were very different, ranging from long-term dependence to the most casual contact with the overseers. With a different emphasis, of course, we could say that the figures suggest that between half and two-thirds of those who made up the Hungerford and Kintbury crowds did not have any direct financial dealings with the overseers immediately before the disturbances, which is something of a surprise given what we know about the situation of agricultural labourers in the south of England after the French Wars.Footnote 72 But there is one more vital element in the story of parish relations in these two places which has so far gone unmentioned.

It is true that most crowd activity around Kintbury and Hungerford related to issues surrounding the employment of agricultural labourers. But it is also true that a demand for money was made at every place where the crowd made its presence felt. Frederick Page (from whom we heard earlier) reported that “at each respectable House [the crowd demanded] money of the farmers who had a Machine – 2 sovereigns for every Machine – amongst others of whom money was thus demanded was the Revd J Fowle who gave them £2 and some beer”.Footnote 73 Most historians have noted this phenomenon, which was widespread throughout the south central counties during the disturbances, and have linked it to the giving of “civility money” or the custom of “crying largesse” during other customary occasions.Footnote 74 But around Hungerford (and, as I have demonstrated elsewhere, across Berkshire and Hampshire as a whole) most of these demands actually took the form of payment for work done, usually the smashing of a threshing machine, as Frederick Page suggests.Footnote 75 At Joseph Randall’s house, where the window was broken, the crowd was offered only £1 and someone was heard to remark, “they would not have it it is hard work breaking Machines”.Footnote 76

The fact that the leader of the Kintbury crowd, William Winterbourn, was described as its “Captain” is also relevant.Footnote 77 Across the landscape of the disturbed counties, many (possibly even most) crowds had their appointed, or self appointed “Captains” (or, occasionally, “Generals”, and even the odd “Counsellor”) mirroring the eponymous Captain Swing himself.Footnote 78 What most historians have overlooked is the wider importance of the informally appointed “Captains” in the working lives of many agricultural workers. Captains negotiated wages and conditions with farmers on behalf of those who laboured without the security of service: in effect, they were the unofficial leaders of unofficial work-gangs at the level of the parish or township.Footnote 79 So in a sense, the issue of payment for what the crowd defined as work seems to have been part of a wider symbolic language that reflected the legitimacy, not only of their demands but of the very constitution of the crowd itself. But in the context of parish relations in Kintbury and Hungerford, the demand for payment for breaking machines had an even more striking and immediate resonance.

The fact is that by 1830 the agricultural labour market in both towns had been regulated, not by the free market, or even by a simple cartel of employers, but by the vestry. In Hungerford, for example, the parish was already employing paupers on the roads as early as 1784, but shortly after the end of the French wars its role in the working lives of all labourers became much more substantial and systematic. On 20 October 1818, in response to rising unemployment and rocketing poor rates, the vestry passed a number of resolutions: first, “that no land occupier or inhabitant contributing to the Poor Rates do employ out parishioners & that they agree to immediately discharge such as are not hired servants”; second, that a list of all parish labourers should be compiled, including details of who employed them, in order that “a fair and just proportion of labourers be proportioned to each inhabitant or pay master according to his rate”; and third, that “the price of labour be reduced […] to 9s a week” – not relief, but the price of labour; and not just of those who were employed by the parish, but of all settled labourers.Footnote 80 These measures were restated and reinforced again and again between 1818 and 1830, and they were by no means unique to Hungerford.Footnote 81 At Kintbury, a number of similar measures were adopted: unemployed men were set to grubbing in 1817 and sent to the gravel pit in 1822, a roundsman system was formally established in 1823, a list of all parish labourers and their employers was compiled in 1829, and the wages of labour – not just relief – were regulated at various times from 1823 onwards.Footnote 82

In other words, it is no exaggeration to suggest that from the end of the French wars to the outbreak of the disturbances in 1830, the parish authorities of Hungerford and Kintbury took on, not only the role of central labour exchange for agricultural labourers, but de facto that of their indirect employer, regulated who could be employed, by whom, and even the wages they were to receive. In addition, although we do not have a list of precisely who was being employed directly by the parish prior to 1830, for Hungerford at least we know that the amount spent by the parish on “men out of employ” almost trebled between 1825 and 1828. Hardly surprising, then, that labourers found it impossible to make a clear distinction between the issues of employment, entitlement to relief, and the obligations of their social superiors. After all, in Hungerford and Kintbury the roles of parish employer, parish official, and, in extremis, local charitable benefactor had become hopelessly entangled by1830.

In other words, the protocols, the methods, and the very language (not least the “body language”) of the Kintbury and Hungerford crowds really only make sense when we start to uncover the long-term social and economic trends that gave rise to them in the locality, and the relationships – between employer and employed, and between the vestry and the labouring poor – which were specific (though not exclusive) to this particular place and time. Of course, it goes without saying that many of these long-term trends were shared across the parishes and townships affected in 1830 and 1831; nonetheless, it is important to bear in mind that each locality was host to its own small drama within the larger performance of the disturbances as they swept across southern England, and that both sides in the negotiating process were anxious to keep it that way.

“Swing” was not a movement of the labouring poor in the way implied by historians, and neither was it initiated, orchestrated, or organized by outsiders or fifth columnists as many contemporaries seemed determined that it should be. Instead, it was the aggregate response of many thousands of small “movements”, made up of many thousands more labourers and their sympathizers, whose only organizing principle was the desire to see the restitution of “just”, “fair” (and even “natural”) relations between all sides in the social compact at the level of the parish and the workplace. While this may seem a small enough return to those who view their actions from the heights of posterity, we would do well to recall that it was sufficient reason for those many thousands of ordinary men and women, acting with no protection save that of custom and a collective belief in the justice of their demands, to put their lives, and their livelihoods, at risk.

It is also important to remember that protesters simply would not have exposed themselves in such an obviously dangerous way had they not had at least a reasonable expectation that their grievances would be heard and their demands met. Protagonists on both sides of the vestry table agreed that things could not go on as they were, and most – whether landowner, farmer, vestryman or labourer – were determined that solutions should be found locally. The Revd Fowle of Kintbury was a living example of this acting as he did, in his combined capacity as incumbent, magistrate and vestryman, as an intermediary between labourers, their employers and the vestry. As the chief negotiator with the labourers, he was able to secure both their demands, and their agreement to cease the disturbances, and appeared equally satisfied to have done both. Immediately following the meeting in the Town Hall at Hungerford, he reported to Charles Dundas:

In a postscript, he added: “I have just met the men – I [agreed] the same terms which had been agreed at Hungerford and told them that as far as was in my power I would endeavour to persuade the Farmers to agree to them. The men gave three cheers and expressed themselves perfectly satisfied.”Footnote 83