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Luddism, Machine-Breaking and the Swing Riots

Le luddisme, le bris de machines et les Swing Riots
Carl J. Griffin

Abstracts

If the eighteenth century in England was the age of the riot, the early decades of the nineteenth century might usefully be labelled as the age of machine breaking. Between 1811 and 1830, several extraordinarily intensive waves of machine breaking swept both rural and urban England alike. Against popular misconceptions, such protests – including the Luddite movement of 1811-12, the Bread or Blood riots of 1816, and the Swing quasi-insurrection of 1830 – tended not to oppose technological innovation but rather challenged the ways in which machinery impacted upon labour and wider social relations. Further, the paper shows that machine breaking, especially in the countryside, had a deeper history going back into the late seventeenth century. It also argues that the history of machine breaking in Wales and Scotland has received remarkably little scholarly attention, something the paper begins to address.  

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Introduction

  • 1 Arthur Young, ‘Gleanings in an Excursion to Lewes Fair’, Annals of Agriculture 17 (1791), pp. 168-1 (...)

1Wimbledon might seem like a strange place to start an essay on machine-breaking in Britain – or strictly speaking England, for Scotland and Wales will figure relatively little – the now-bustling part of Greater London best known for its ‘grand slam’ tennis tournament and for those animated avatars of sustainability aheadness, the Wombles of Wimbledon Common. Indeed, I am not aware that an act of machine-breaking has ever occurred in Wimbledon, or at least not in the sense that we shall concern ourself here: attacks on machinery because their use threatened employment, demeaned skilled trades, impacted upon gender relations, and changed the organization of work. Rather, in 1791 a newly installed threshing machine by farmer Patterson of Wimbledon, then a rural parish in the English county of Surrey at some remove from the fringes of London, prompted threats of vengeance and incendiarism. Whilst we do not have a record of if the machine was targeted by incendiarists, the archive for that part of rural England deficient for the period, we do know thanks to a report in the national Annals of Agriculture that the fire ‘was expected to be done’. Not only had Patterson used the threshing machine to thresh the grain on his farm but also, by way of demonstrating the utility of his investment, he had also offered to thresh the crops of his neighbours. This had met with the ire of the local labourers, who ‘felt the conviction of what that tended to’ – a loss of employment – and as such muttered threats against the operation of Patterson’s machine.1

  • 2 The first recorded acts of threshing machine breaking – as opposed to destruction by arson – occurr (...)
  • 3 Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy 1815-1848 (Cambridge, Cambr (...)

2This case matters, for it is the first recorded example of machine-breaking threats against threshing machines, the invention and adoption of which represented the first major act of mechanisation of agricultural processes.2 And this – that is to say delineating the spaces and timing of machine breaking – because, as Maxine Berg has argued, as ‘mechanisation… took the centre stage from the late eighteenth century … [m]achinery became the most immediate basis for the relationship between capitalist and worker.’3 Understanding machine breaking helps us to understand the changing relationship between capital, employers and workers and, indeed, the nature of political economy during this vital period of industrial and economic ‘revolutions’.

  • 4 Adrian Randall, Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Hanoverian England (Oxford, Oxford Universit (...)
  • 5 On which see: Thomas Ashton and Joseph Sykes, The Coal Industry of the Eighteenth Century (Manchest (...)
  • 6 Griffin, The Rural War; Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (London, Lawrence and Wishart, (...)
  • 7 Randall, Riotous Assemblies, ch. 11; Matthew Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism and the Makeshift Economy of t (...)

3If the Wimbledon case represents the start of machine breaking sentiments in agrarian Britain, it does not mark the start of machine-breaking in rural Britain. Attacks on machinery in the countryside – as the paper will go on to detail – go back to at least the 1720s when weavers in the English West as part of a bitter trade dispute destroyed the ‘utensils’ of their trade.4 Together with miners, another occupational group who resided and worked in the countryside and who often turned to breaking machines (and other technologies),5 the actions of weavers reminds us that in eighteenth-century Britain, industry was not synonymous with the urban, and, indeed, that machine-breaking was arguably more a feature of rural than urban spaces. This, dynamic as this paper will go on to show, was something that held up until the last great wave of machine-breaking in England, the so-called Swing Riots of 1830 when anti threshing machine sentiment again came to the fore.6 The same was also true for much of that famed set of protests, the Luddite movement, that started in rural Nottinghamshire in the summer of 1811 before engulfing the textile areas of the East Midlands, Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire, town and country alike.7

  • 8 Frank Darvall, Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (New York, Oxford Universit (...)
  • 9 Edward Palmer Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, Gollancz, 1963).
  • 10 Carl Griffin, ‘“Cut Down by Some Cowardly Miscreants”: Plant Maiming, or the Malicious Cutting of F (...)
  • 11 The classic account of this derision given voice in academic work is: Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A (...)

4The Wimbledon case also speaks to the complexity of machine breaking – the motives; the sociology; the timing; the geographies – and to the enduring interest and ever-evolving academic work on the subject. The case also speaks to the fact that despite being subject to a century of scholarship, there is still much that remains obscure and ill understood. Indeed, few topics in British economic and social history have been so generative of so rich and sustained a series of academic studies as machine breaking and yet still have such striking gaps. From the early work of Fabian historians John and Barbara Hammond and political historians like Frank Darvall, through the genre-defining works of Eric Hobsbawm and Malcolm Thomis, through critical revisionist works by John Dinwiddy and Adrian Randall, to more recent work by Kevin Binfield, Katrina Navickas and Matthew Roberts, machine breaking has long captured both scholarly attention and public interest.8 Much of this is due in particular to the extraordinary legacy (and influence) of the Luddite movement of 1811-12. Part of this is due to the seminal influence of E.P. Thompson’s treatment of the Luddites in The Making of the English Working Class – the work of British social history that has proved most influential beyond the academy – but more immediately because of the way in which their actions have captivated British popular culture.9 As I have argued elsewhere, that the stocking frame and power loom breakers who followed ‘Ned Ludd’ – more on the etymology and meaning of this nom de guerre later – have left a linguistic legacy in the terms ‘Luddite’ and ‘Luddism’ is ‘an inspiring testimony to the ability of protestors to be something other than fodder for the footnotes of history.’10 Yet both words are steeped in scorn: the terms being used as a popular shorthand for someone unthinkingly unwilling to embrace new technologies – or even unwilling to embrace the future. In this way, the acts of the Luddites (and by association all other machine breakers) were not only doomed to failure – a howling against the future – but also temporary and transient, reactionary and evidence of mental inertia.11 There is also something viscerally enthralling in the image of men – for machine-breaking was almost exclusively a male protest practice – smashing machines, a fascination that perhaps speaks to our frustrations with technology in the here-and-now.

5The history – and the historiography – of machine-breaking in Britain is thus both long and complex, and whilst it is beyond the scope of this paper to offer an in-depth history, what follows offers a review of both the state of our knowledge and an analysis of some of the major themes, drawing on some original material. The paper starts with a conceptual reflection on what we understand by machine-breaking and how historians have studied the phenomenon. It then goes on to consider some of the key periods and moments in British machine-breaking, starting with, after Randall, the period ‘before the Luddites’, then examining the Luddite movement of 1811-12, the ‘Bread or Blood’ rising of 1816 with the East Anglian protests of 1822, and finally, the Swing quasi-insurrection of 1830.

Machine breaking: meanings and concepts

  • 12 Hadrian Cook and Tom Williamson (eds.), Water Management in the English Landscape: Field, Marsh and (...)
  • 13 Randall, Riotous Assemblies, p.132.

6What do we mean by machine breaking? The definition adopted here is all attacks (and planned and threatened attacks) on mechanical devices that, when enacted or powered, performed a particular task. Some might consider this understanding of what machines are is too wide, embracing as it does clocks and ploughs as well as spinning jennies and threshing machines. But the critical point here is the impact of mechanical devices had upon social technologies – the range of skills and practices associated with using the machine – as well as their impact upon the regulation of work, labour relations, and the product ‘produced’. Perhaps, then, the definition of a machine is too narrow, for devices such as sluices, pond heads, and locks – amongst other technologies involved in managing water – were no less impactful, transforming landscapes and altering the nature of work and generating opposition.12 We know, for instance, that as part of a trade dispute in the south Gloucestershire coal mining area, in October 1738 colliers first destroyed mining gear and pulled pits in, then the next month threatened to destroy locks on the River Severn.13 As such, no distinction was made between the machines of the mine and those that made its export possible: all were part of the apparatus of capitalism, technologies of domination.

  • 14 Humphrey Jennings, Pandemonium: the Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, 1660-1 (...)

7For the purpose of this paper, however, I am restricting the understanding to received understandings as to what machines are: mechanical devices that are enacted. The level of complexity is of little consequence, for however complicated – or simple – the device, its introduction instigated changes in the nature of work. As we will see, during the so-called ‘Bread or Blood’ riots of 1816, mole ploughs – a plough used to create field drains – were targets of labouring wrath, whilst in the aftermath of the Swing Riots scythes were broken by labourers used to harvesting by sickle. Indeed, as Humphrey Jennings in his curated collection of writings on the ‘coming of the machine’ has powerfully shown, the introduction of any technology that modifies, or makes redundant, existing skills invariably provokes some form of opposition.14

  • 15 Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales, 1300 (...)
  • 16 On this dynamic see: Roger Wells, ‘Counting Riots in Eighteenth-Century England’, Labour History Re (...)

8If it is easy to overplay the point – many new technologies after initial scepticism, became, as Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift have argued in relation to the acceptance of clock time, ‘grooved into the body’15 – it also easy to ignore the subtle forms of opposition to machines that fell short of machine-breaking. As the vignette that opened this paper suggests, to limit concerns to just those acts in which a machine was physically attacked (and destroyed) is to deny a more complex range of popular responses (and protests). Of course, we are at the mercy of the archive: threats against the use of machines, let alone grumblings against their introduction and operation, are rarely recorded – the cases that make the record likely to be the tip of a larger anti-machine iceberg.16

  • 17 Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, p. 62.

9Actual physical attacks on machinery were more likely to be reported, whether by newspapers – and here the proximity to major towns and cities was critical – or in correspondence to government departments, than threats. As such whilst we know that in 1675 weavers in Spitalfields, a poor part of London home to many migrants, spent four days in rioting and breaking and burning new looms by which ‘one man can do as much . . . as near twenty without them’17 – this the first major recorded act of machine breaking – we know nothing of what preceded the attacks. We can speculate that the introduction of the machines was generative of much grumbling but we know not how quickly the looms were attacked after their introduction nor whether all looms were targeted.

  • 18 Randall, Before the Luddites, pp. 41-4.
  • 19 Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford, Oxford Uni (...)
  • 20 Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 30 November 1816. For an elaboration of this point see: Berg, (...)
  • 21 Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 30 July 1831

10It is important to note that popular, collective opposition to machinery was both first manifested and was sustained longest in the textile trades, and especially so in the cloth industry. In part, this was a reflection of the level of capital invested, relatively high labour costs, and (when overseas markets were open) increasing levels of foreign competition, these factors driving technological innovation.18 Indeed, it is important to note that whatever the successes of anti-machine thought and protests, the advent of new machines and processes were not reflexively generative of popular loathing and acts of machine breaking. As we will see in relation to the case of Swing, in many places threshing machines had been used without any resort to collective opposition – whatever the unrecorded grumblings of poor labourers – for decades before being targeted in 1830. Thus, not only did the adoption of new machines drive labour productivity and output in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries but also potentially create new labour opportunities by expanding markets. The machine was, as Joel Mokyr put it, the ‘lever of riches’.19 Even some political radicals came to the defence of the use of machinery in the face of sustained plebeian protests. No less a figure than William Cobbett, in many ways the figurehead for the radical movement in the early decades of the nineteenth century, argued in his 1816 ‘A Letter to the Luddites’ that ‘I am quite sure, that there cannot be any solid opposition’ to the use of machinery. Wages saved by the labour supplanted, Cobbett went on, were spent on wages in other areas of production, the outcome being increased output across the board.20 This line had shifted by the early 1830s, Cobbett relating in the aftermath of Swing that the use of threshing machines ‘was by no means a profitable concern’. Besides, it was in the interest of the farmer and the labourer alike that men who would otherwise be engaged ‘in doing useless work with half a belly-full’ might be employed in threshing by flail. ‘[I]s it best, then, that the labourers of the parish should do the thrashing, or that it should be done by iron-founders, machine-makers and horses?’.21

  • 22 Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, passim.
  • 23 Randall, Riotous Assemblies, p. 131.
  • 24 Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, pp. 58-9, citing Darvall, Popular Disturbances, ch. 8.
  • 25 Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, p. 58; Thomis, The Luddites; Randall, Riotous Assemblies, ch. 11.
  • 26 David Walsh, ‘The Lancashire “Rising” of 1826’ Albion 26, 4 (1996), pp. 601-621.

11It is also important to remember, as Hobsbawm first suggested in his landmark essay ‘The machine breakers’ (1952) that machine breaking as a category of protest did not necessarily either target labour-supplanting mechanical innovation nor even the use of machinery per se.22 Rather, machines might be targeted as the property, as the capital, of exploitative and vexatious employers, the attack a comment on labour relations rather than the use of technology as such. For instance, striking miners at Long Benton near Newcastle (Northumberland) in March 1789 as part of their trade dispute not only struck work but also destroyed pithead gear, and even subjected one pit to an incendiary fire. And to ensure that all work stopped, the pumping engines were smashed at some other collieries.23 Such machines were vital in making deep mining possible rather than labour-replacing: they were not the subject and object of opprobrium, rather their being put out of operation served a wider protest goal. Or as Hobsbawm, drawing on the earlier work of Frank Darvall, put it, such acts of machine breaking were ‘“a means of coercing their employers into granting them concessions with regard to wages and other matters.” This sort of wrecking was a traditional and established part of industrial conflict in the period of the domestic and manufacturing system, and the early stages of factory and mines.’24 As we will see, even in the early stages of the Luddite movement in Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire in 1811 this was the most common reason for machine-breaking rather than a direct targeting of the machines themselves.25 We do well to remember too that the major episodes of machine breaking in England coincided with moments of economic and trade crises, notably the financial crises of 1811 and 1826 (the year of the Lancashire ‘Rising’ in which power looms were destroyed)26 and the depressions of 1816 and 1830.

  • 27 Charles Tilly Regimes and Repertoires (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2010).
  • 28 Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1 (...)

12Thus whilst we need to appreciate that machine breaking was a distinctive and important protest practice, it also needs to be understood in the wider context of, to draw on the work of Charles Tilly, the protest repertoires of the poor.27 To Hobsbawm, machine breaking was a form of ‘collective bargaining by riot’, this an allusion to the fact that practice was all but exclusively a collective act and as such had similarities with other dominant protest forms in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth centuries: food riots and forms of proto trade unionism.28

  • 29 James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT, Yale Univers (...)
  • 30 George Rudé, ‘Review of Malcolm Thomis’s The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England’, Journa (...)
  • 31 For instance, in East Kent where Swing was first manifest. See: Carl Griffin, ‘“There Was No Law To (...)
  • 32 Robert Shoemaker, ‘The London Mob in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Journal of British Studies 26 ( (...)
  • 33 Katrina Navickas, Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798-1815 (Oxford, Oxford University Press (...)

13Emphasising the riotous nature of machine breaking though tends to obscure the other more ‘covert’ – or at least non-riotous – protest practices that could predate or actual accompany forms of destruction. Again, the Wimbledon case is instructive. It invoked the protest methods of threats of destruction with, after James Scott’s pioneering work on everyday forms of resistance,29 grumbling and plotting amongst the labourers of the area. Luddism in 1811 and 1812 brought together ‘[c]riminals, food-rioters, parliamentary reformers, trade unionists, oath-takers, agents provocateurs, and machine-breakers (with the latter playing a comparatively modest role)’.30 Likewise, in the areas in which the destruction of threshing machines was the defining feature of Swing, machine-breaking went hand-in-hand with threatening letters, calls for higher wages and reductions in tithes, demands for religious and parliamentary reform and the abolition of parish workhouses.31 The Spitalfields weavers who broke engine looms in 1675 also resorted to other protests in support of their cause, in 1697 attacking the houses of prominent merchants and the East India House, the headquarters of the East India Company which controlled the import of raw silk into Britain. The weavers even coalesced with employers in 1689 and 1697 to march on parliament to ask for protections for their trade, a tactic that was also supported by petitioning (this a strategy adopted by weavers in the cloth trades throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries).32 As Navickas has put it of Lancastrian Luddism, the ‘connections among all [protest] forms were ambiguous and fluctuating.’33

  • 34 Berg, The Machinery Question, esp. pp. 15-6.

14Further, Maxine Berg in her seminal book The Machinery Question has argued that we need to be careful to understand machine breaking not just as ‘individual occurrences of resistance to the machine’ but instead ‘as part of a more general phenomenon – a national debate on the machinery question’. As the aforementioned interjections by Cobbett show, the adoption of machinery was an issue that transcended popular resistance, instead it involved intense political, economic and cultural debate as to the impact of technological change on society and the very nature of political economy and economic policy. Berg’s chiding of social historians for not linking popular opposition and wider intellectual debates, tended though to imply that the machine breakers were not themselves engaged in deep, complex thought about ‘the machine question’.34 If this was successfully rebuffed by Adrian Randall in important essay on ‘The philosophy of Luddism’ – and in the book that followed, Before the Luddites, it is still fair to say post-Randall’s interjections studies of machine breaking have again tended to not systematically consider the popular philosophical basis that underpinned protest.

Before the Luddites: Machine breaking before the 1810s

  • 35 Randall, Before the Luddites, passim; Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism’, p. 365.

15As the previous section detailed, whilst the Luddite attacks of the early 1810s and the Swing movement of 1830 represented by far the largest (and most significant) waves of machine breaking in British history (so far), these were not the first cases of machine breaking. Not only, as Randall has argued, it is important to understand the pre-histories of machine breaking that pre date Luddism but also, as Roberts has persuasively asserted the initial Luddite outbreaks only make ‘sense’ when situated in a longer chronological context. Indeed, he argues that the East Midlands Luddism represented not something new but rather the beginning of an end, ‘one of last episodes in an older style of traditional and largely rural popular protest.’35

  • 36 John Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry (London, Croom Helm, 1981), p. 1 (...)
  • 37 William Felkin, History of the Machine-wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufacture (Newton Abbot, David an (...)
  • 38 Felkin, History, pp. 115-17; John Rule, ‘General introduction’ to John Hammond and Barbara Hammond, (...)
  • 39 Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism’, pp. 370-1

16Yet, as noted above, the first major acts of machine breaking occurred, so the archive relates, not in the countryside but in London. Beyond the aforementioned protests of the silk weavers at the end of the seventeenth century, in the early 1710s the then London-based hosiery trade was the focus of sustained disputes over repeated breaches by master weavers of regulations on the use of apprentices. Here the smashing of the frames of the masters was a key tactic, the protest then not against the use of machinery per se the attacks instead a strategic way of preventing work by untrained labour and also an attack on capital.36 Indeed, frames had first been successfully introduced at the turn of the seventeenth century, the trade shifting from hand knitting to loom knitting, so frames were well-established and far from a new innovation.37 After the trade had relocated to the East Midlands, the employment of apprentices remained a perpetual issue that occasionally spilled over into machine breaking, something that was also true of the lace trade. Before the 1811 Luddite protests – which were also initially sparked by issues surrounding the use of colts – the most notorious protests occurred in the 1770s. Against the ‘constant influx of too apprenticed boys and girls and non-freed workmen’ in the East Midlands trade, in 1776-7, the Stockingmakers’ Association for Mutual Protection was formed. This quickly assumed a huge amount of local power, so much so that in Nottingham it was able to exert its influence to secure the return to Parliament of individuals who supported their cause. But if the election of Abel Smith as MP for Nottingham in October 1778 was marked by a huge procession of the association, supported by a delegation from the London Frame-Work-Knitters company, matters soon moved from celebratory to destructive. The failure of petitions to parliament and the failure of a parliamentary Bill to regulate their wages and the use of apprentices provoked a furious response. Samuel Need, a serial entrepreneur and supporter of innovation in the hosiery trade, had provided evidence to Parliament against the workers’ demands, and it was he that bore the brunt of the stockingmakers’ fury. His houses in Nottingham and Arnold – we shall return to that rural Nottinghamshire parish later – were attacked and the interiors sacked, whilst some 300 of his frames were destroyed. The spree of machine breaking and destruction only came to an end when the military were called out.38 Yet this was not the end of the machine breaking. In 1779 and again in 1783 ‘villager knitters’, to draw on Roberts’ evocative phrase, ‘poured’ into Nottingham to protest their lot. Upon military intervention, those gathered left the city and began to break frames in the surrounding villages, which shows that frame breaking was well established.39

  • 40 House of Commons Journal, xviii (1717), 715, cited in Randall, Riotous Assemblies, p. 138.
  • 41 Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, p. 59.
  • 42 Randall, Riotous Assemblies, pp. 139-41; Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, p. 59.

17The English west was also a place of repeated acts of machine breaking before the 1810s. Attempts to reduce piece rates in the Devon serge industry prompted a proto-trade unionist response. The woolcombers and weavers, so a petition to Parliament from Devonshire clothiers and the Mayors and Corporations of Bradninch, Exeter, and Tiverton in 1717 related, had ‘been confederating how to incorporate themselves into a club’ and had been ‘in a very riotous and tumultuous manner’ exacted ‘tribute from many’. That October, 300 weavers at Exeter pulled down clothiers’ houses, carried away serge cloths, and broke looms.40As Hobsbawm noted, in 1718 and 1724 clothiers complained to Parliament that weavers ‘threatened to pull down their houses and burn their work unless they would agree with their terms’.41 More sustained, and notorious, were a series of disputes in 1726-7 that started in Wiltshire but extended into Devon, Gloucestershire, and Somerset. Building upon the established culture of combination in the region, weavers reacted to a reduction in piece rates and a lengthening of the cloths the weavers had to make, large groups marched about the countryside and through the cloth towns in an attempt to both effect a stoppage in trade and to bring attention of their grievances to the authorities. After an initial rapprochement engineered by a sympathetic Wiltshire magistrate, two days later protests flared up again: the premises of a clothier at Bradford-upon-Avon being destroyed and riots breaking out at Frome in Somerset. After further attempts at finding a solution, government-appointed commissioners condemning the actions of the clothiers and supporting the weavers’ cause. The promise of redress in the next session of Parliament though was no balm to the effect of the arrest of several weavers, the acting magistrate supposedly acting under pressure from a leading and popularly-loathed clothier. What unfurled combined the strike action of the weavers with riot, breaking into the houses of master weavers (and blacklegs), the spoiling of wool and cloths then in the loom, as well as the tools of their trade.42

  • 43 Randall, Riotous Assemblies, pp. 246-8.

18Beyond the extensive protests of 1726-7, the spatiality and temporality of resistance to machinery was complex and fractured. For instance, the introduction of scribbling, or carding, engines that mechanised the labour-intensive process of separating fleece out into long fibres ready for spinning provoked different responses in the cloth industries of the West Country than in the northern counties. After initial opposition in Lancashire in 1779 and in the mid 1780s in Yorkshire, the machines were broadly accepted as they fitted into the pre-existing ‘Domestic System’ where scribbling was one of several processes undertaken by journeymen in clothier’s workshops. In the west though, scribbling was customarily a practice undertaken by specialist male workers employed directly by gentlemen clothiers. Because of this arrangement, resistance in the West Country was more sustained. Initial attempts to introduce the scribbling engine by Bradford-upon-Avon manufacturer Joseph Phelps in the spring of 1791 met with fierce opposition, while subsequent attempts to introduce the machine elsewhere in Wiltshire and in neighbouring Somerset met with an equally vigorous response from local scribblers.43 Resistance to the introduction of spinning jennies – machines that could spin multiple reels of wool compared to using a spinning wheel – was equally complex.

  • 44 John Styles, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Spinning Jenny: Domestic Mechanisation in Eighteenth-Century (...)

19The introduction of the first jennies in and around Blackburn and Bolton in late 1768 and early 1769 prompted muscular but short-lived resistance, the burning of machines and demolition of weavers’ houses containing the jennies soon giving way to a grudging acceptance as the rapid expansion of the cotton industry engaged otherwise displaced labour. New, powered, ‘large’ jennies introduced in the late 1770s provoked more bitter resistance, Arkwright’s mill at Birkacre being destroyed by a determined group on the second time of trying after two of their number were fatally shot and another drowned on their first attempt. This and other riots delayed the uptake of the machines, though not by as long as in Somerset where protests in 1776 and again in 1781 prevented widespread use of spinning jennies in the region until the late 1780s.44

  • 45 Adrian Randall, ‘The Shearmen and the Wiltshire Outrages of 1802: Trade Unionism and Industrial Vio (...)

20It was not until 1802 that sustained opposition to machinery was again manifested. This came in the form of the so-called ‘Wiltshire Outrages’ of 1802, a series of protests against new cloth finishing technologies: the revised gig mill (used to bring up the ‘nap’ on cloth, displacing a skilled trade) and shearing frames (that sheared the nap on cloth, otherwise done by hand). Gig mills had long been a source of popular contention, both elsewhere and in Wiltshire, but despite a mill being destroyed at Horningsham near Frome in 1767 and an (unsuccessful) prosecution being brought against Samuel Cook for erecting an ‘experimental’ gig mill on the edge of Marlborough in 1795, other clothiers also introduced the new mills. Threatening letters and assaults followed, with rising tensions coming to a head when in April 1802 two Warminster clothiers introduced gig mills. A turn out of the workers on the introduction of the mills quickly spread to encompass shearmen in other local mills, those refusing to strike being threatened. As the strike deepened, threatening letters were sent to the clothiers, one clothier’s trees cut down and incendiary attacks made against the clothiers’ agricultural property. Tellingly, even the ‘agricultural’ workers refused to assist in extinguishing the flames. This was not the end of it. When the strike spread to Staverton, the location of a new six floor factory, proprietor John Jones responded by both calling for military protection and, provocatively, by introducing shearing frames. The mill was duly attacked, but armed guards prevented anything more than the windows being broken. Further mills – and the property of clothiers – were duly set on fire, with Staverton again attacked. Legal attempts to prove that gig and shearing mills were a ‘nuisance’ came to nothing though, hardly surprising considering the terror generated amongst the property owners the Wiltshire grand jury represented. In some places wages were forced (temporarily) upwards, and many offending mills put out of use. Indeed, outside of the factories of the most ardent innovators, mills, gig mills and shearing frames were not adopted for several years.45

  • 46 Hobsbawm, Labouring Men, pp. 7-8. On protest and the moral economy see: Peter Jones, ‘Swing, Speenh (...)
  • 47 Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism’, p.367. The earlier claim comes from – and the previous three paragraphs a (...)

21As with the actions of the later Luddites, the Wiltshire Outrages combined both sophisticated ‘new’ forms of proto trade unionism – the weavers engaged in a short-lived proto-union called the ‘Brief Institution’ – with ‘moral economy’ models of disorder in which the aggrieved looked to their social betters (and especially the magistrates) for redress against injustices. Such a reading challenges Hobsbawm’s initial interpretation of early machine breaking as not only a form of collective bargaining by riot but also occurring where ‘organised unions hardly as yet existed’.46 It is also important to note that union-like tactics were not deployed in all machine breaking locales. Roberts has recently taken this author to task for an earlier suggestion that alluded to the universality of trade unionist principles and the recourse to the law in accompanying machine breaking. As he convincingly argues, ‘neither trades unionism nor recourse to the law were central features in the villages (in marked contrast to Nottingham town).’ Such difference, between town and country knitters, he goes on, ‘underscores the need to pay greater attention to the places and spaces in which Luddism occurred’.47 Further, we might add, it served as a useful reminder that universalising concepts invariably fail to capture complexity, and ride roughshod over local difference and different experiences through time.

The Luddites, 1811-1816

  • 48 Binfield, The Writings of the Luddites, passim.
  • 49 Hammond and Hammond, The Skilled Labourer, pp. 46-70; Randall, Riotous Assemblies, pp. 260-3.

22It is now well-established that whilst machine breaking was a distinctive protest practice, there was nothing intrinsically different or modern to it, in the strict sense of the word, compared to other protest forms. Just as longer-established practices such as the food riot represented a form of collective disorder, a collective bargaining by riot, and covert protests like incendiarism and plant maiming were strategic and often symbolic attack against an iniquitous employer, so the resort to machine breaking responded to a breakdown in social relations. As Binfield in his pioneering study of the ‘writings’ of the Luddites – the extensive archive of threatening letters sent in the Luddite areas – has shown, the language and discourses deployed were no different to those penned in other protest contexts in the previous fifty years: rich in religious references and allusions, and underpinned by calls to community, custom and a restoration of the social order.48 And in the deployment of many customary and carnivalesque forms from rough music to cross-dressing, Luddite actions appear little different from many earlier protest ‘ceremonies’. The customary and paternalistic could be, and was, successfully mobilised in emergent and rapidly expanding industries like cotton weaving.49

  • 50 On which see: David Hay, ‘The State and the Market in 1800: Lord Kenyon and Mr Waddington’, Past an (...)
  • 51 Randall, Riotous Assemblies, pp. 263-70.
  • 52 Ibid., p. 273.

23The resort to machine breaking in 1811 responded precisely to these established contexts: a dislocation in social relations as a result of the failure of customary calls to, and for, paternal protection. The repeal of older paternalistic legislation and the promotion of market competition was a defiant political trend of the final decades of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth century.50 Conversely, the introduction of legislation to protect workers was not on the political agenda. This was especially the case in the clothing trades, master clothiers a persistent lobby seeking whatever competitive advantage they could. Notwithstanding that a 3,000 strong Gloucestershire Cloth Weavers’ Society had campaigned to ask for a revision of the law against the hiring of non-apprenticed workers to extend to ‘loomshops’, in 1809 legislation prohibiting the hire of non-apprenticed workers throughout the woollen trades (2 and 3 Philip and Mary c.11) was repealed. This was a pivotal moment. Further mass petitioning, one supposedly containing over 130,000 signatures, ensued, but this failed to find meaningful government support: the 1808 Select Committee into the weavers’ grievances being a toothless sop. This failure provoked a bitter response. Mass meetings of weavers in St. George’s Fields, Manchester, were met by military force, two weavers being shot dead and thirty arrested. A strike of rural and urban weavers that held for a fortnight was initially more successful, but the 20% advance in wages secured did not last for long, a stagnation in trade in late 1810 led to renewed wage reductions.51 The reduction in wages also coincided with a severe dearth and a huge spike in the price of provisions. None of this made Luddism, as Randall suggests, inevitable. Rather, it sowed the seeds for a crisis in which the question of machinery was at the fore.52

  • 53 Navickas, ‘Luddism’, p. 60.
  • 54 Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism’, p. 368.
  • 55 Carl Griffin, ‘The Culture of Combination: Solidarities and Collective Action Before Tolpuddle’, Hi (...)

24As is well established, what came to be known as the Luddite disturbances started in the Nottinghamshire hosiery trade in the early months of 1811, the early protests, again, linking town and country. Roberts’s recent revisionist study has highlighted that in terms of the number of protest incidents and the numbers of frames broken, the protests in this first locus of Luddite activity were more rural than urban. This conclusion extends the work of Navickas which persuasively argued for northern Luddism that it ‘was not a solely urban phenomenon’.53 Not only did many protests occur in the countryside, for many frames were hired out by urban hosiers and master weavers to those living in the countryside whilst many frameshops and factories were located in rural areas, but also contractions in the rural economy helped to shape Luddism.54 We also now realise that the agrarian-industrial and the rural-urban were not separate worlds but rather intricately interconnected through location, familial networks, the fluidity of employment, and the mobility of many workers.55

  • 56 Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism’, p. 369-71, 395; Randall, Riotous Assemblies, ch. 11.

25The first signs of mischief were at Arnold in February and early March 1811 when framework knitters broke into workshops and removed jack-wires from frames. Nothing was broken. Rather, the wires were placed in local churches as ‘hostages’, their return being on the condition of the good behaviour (as regards fair prices for work; the employment of apprenticed men; against the use of larger frames to make lower quality ‘cut-ups’; and payment in truck rather than cash). The failure to accede to these demands precipitated more muscular action. During the day on 11 March 1811 a large crowd of knitters from the surrounding countryside gathered in the market place in Nottingham to complain to the hosiers about the conditions of their employment. Dispersed by the magistrates, some of the group reassembled later that day at Arnold where they had resolved to destroy some of the stocking frames. 60, so reports suggest, were destroyed that night. Over the next fortnight, several other acts of stocking frame-breaking occurred in the vicinity of Nottingham by small, orderly groups acting in disguise. A public meeting on 26 March while condemning the attacks resolved to increase piece rates to previous levels, a measure which acted to pacify the stockingers for a while, although this did not prevent further frame-breaking at Mansfield three days later and in rural Bulweel and Radford in mid-April.56 Thereafter things appeared, at least for a while, becalmed.

  • 57 Thomis, The Luddites, pp. 87, 177; Randall, Riotous Assemblies, pp. 277-279.

26However, worsening trade conditions and the increased use of new ‘wide’ frames which allowed for the deployment of cheaper female labour in place of male labour led to renewed tensions in late autumn. Frames were again smashed in the villages around Nottingham, something that followed the sending of threatening letters to several hosiers. The turning point came on the night of 10 November when the house of hosier Hollingworth at Bulwell was attacked. Notwithstanding that one of the attackers was shot dead in the affray, the group still managed to gain entry to the house and destroyed all the wide frames and household furniture. Symbolically, the standard frames were not touched.57

  • 58 Ibid., pp. 278-279; Binfield, Writings of the Luddites, pp. 168-9.
  • 59 Randall, Riotous Assemblies, pp. 271-283.

27Hereafter attacks became more frequent and bolder, many occurring in daylight and by bigger groups. By late November frame-breaking had spread into neighbouring Derbyshire and Leicestershire, even the stationing of the military in Nottingham did not prevent attacks in that neighbourhood, the protestors now reverting to smaller groups carrying out their attacks in outlying parishes in greater secrecy. Some standard frames being operated at reduced wages – or by women, a theme also raised in threatening letters sent to owners of Lancashire cotton mills – were also now destroyed.58 Attempts to reconcile the stockingers and hosiers met several false dawns, agreements to increase rates and to listen to grievances not being followed through by all the employers and thus almost inevitably reinvigorating machine-breaking. The creation of a £2,000 fund by a ‘secret committee’ of Nottingham civil officers and leading hosiers to offer rewards for information leading to the conviction of the machine-breakers only tending to further strain social relations. Besides, popular support for the Luddites’ cause tended to undermine the committee’s efforts. Even the stationing of further troops and the passing of an emergency Frame Breakers Act, increasing the maximum punishment of frame-breaking from fourteen years transportation to death, proved ineffectual, machine-breaking continuing into March.59

  • 60 Thomis, The Luddites, esp. pp. 105-6, 183-4; pp. Randall, Riotous Assemblies, 284-288.
  • 61 Navickas, Loyalism and Radicalism, 193.

28By then attention had already passed to the cotton districts of Lancashire and Cheshire and the cloth-making areas of the West Riding of Yorkshire where power looms and shearing frames respectively were the primary targets. In Yorkshire, protests focused on the area around Huddersfield: a January meeting of hammer-wielding, face-blackened croppers stating their intention to destroy the frames being the first explicit manifestation of Luddism in the northern counties. The first acts of actual machine-breaking occurred on 22 February at Marsh near Huddersfield and at nearby Crosland Moor, shearing frames in both cases the target. After intensive machine-breaking in and around Huddersfield in late March, the protests spread to Leeds, where so intensive were the actions of the oft-armed groups that within a fortnight most frames outside of the largest mills had either been destroyed or rendered inoperable by their owners. The shift was now to attack the larger mills, starting on 9 April when a 300 or so strong group destroyed the frames, shears, cloths and the windows in the mill owned by Joseph Foster at Horbury near Wakefield. This success begat other such attacks, though the attempt on William Cartwright’s mill at Rawfolds on the night of 12 April was eventually repelled after a confrontation between the Luddites and the military force stationed at the mill, the fire fight claiming the lives of two Luddites. Enraged, the croppers resolved to murder the owners of the large mills: Cartwright surviving an attack, William Horsfall of Otiwells mill at Marsden being assassinated on his return from Huddersfield market. This ‘success’ encouraged the campaign to shift from attacking machinery to highly organised raiding for arms, a practice supported, so reports suggested, by the taking of secret oaths and military-style drilling.60 The impact of twenty years of war on the wider populace was clearly not lost. In adopting military forms and terms – the Luddites being led by the fictional ‘General Ludd’ – Navickas has argued that workers were engaged in a ‘cathartic reaction… against the pressures of militarization’, although the exposure to military forms and the experience of military service no doubt was important here too.61

  • 62 Binfield, Writings of the Luddites, 169; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p.51. O (...)
  • 63 Randall, Riotous Assemblies, p. 290.

29Lancashire Luddism was based on a broader set of anti-machinery grievances compared to the East Midlands and Yorkshire and, arguably, in coalescing with food rioting and radical politicking, assumed a very different tone. As Binfield has suggested, in and around Manchester it was ‘difficult to distinguish the various motivations’ of the different groups, the artisan unions, weavers secret committees, Paineite radicals and the ‘ebullient Irish fringe’ that Thompson listed as being active.62 It was also more squarely, if not, as noted above, exclusively, focused on the mill towns, especially Manchester and Stockport where the sending of threatening letters in February 1812 marked the start of the protests in the county. But assuming that those who were part of urban crowds and engaged in acts of urban Luddism were necessarily urban workers is to deny both the complex interplay between town and country in the lives of many industrial workers as well as the fact that many rural workers were involved in the spate of urban food riots. For instance, the food riot at Macclesfield on 13 April involved not only Stockport spinners but also carters and colliers from the surrounding villages. This same group on the following day turned their attention to a steam-powered factory at Edgley, destroying windows and after having similarly damaged several mills and manufacturer’s houses in Macclesfield returned to the Edgley mill, forced their way in and broke the looms.63

  • 64 Navickas, Loyalism and Radicalism, pp. 195-6.
  • 65 Navickas, ‘Luddism’, p. 65.

30Luddism in Lancashire, as well as in the East Midlands and Yorkshire, was a community response as opposed to an exclusive trade response. Arguably, the influence of the ‘secret’ weavers’ committees on the course of protest events was not as strong as the deeper running regional connections that allowed for the participation of workers from outside the immediate neighbourhood and, critically, the immediate trade. The prominent involvement of colliers in and around Saddleworth and Stockport, for example, attests to the tight social bonds forged across employments in the south-west Lancashire coal belt and long community histories of inter-trade solidarity.64 Even against an often underhand and brutal response from local magistrates, something especially profound in the area around Stockport and the border areas with north-east Cheshire, solidarities remained strong. Further evidence also comes from the firing of two threshing machines at Soothill and Birstall in the West Riding on the nights of the 10 and 11 May respectively. While no definite evidence attaches to the authorship of the fires, the belief that ‘discontented’ croppers were responsible suggests an understanding that the paths of industry and agriculture were not perceived as being mutually exclusive. Indeed, on 21 April the deputy lieutenant of the West Riding had issued handbills advising farmers to keep watch over their threshing machines due to rumours that the Luddites were to turn their attention to agricultural machinery.65

  • 66 Navickas, ‘The search for “General Ludd”’, p. 284.

31Beyond local and regional connections, there is also tantalising evidence that suggests some contact between the different Luddite groups. One letter seized by a spy working for Huddersfield magistrate Joseph Radcliffe concerned the correspondence of ‘Peter Plush, secretary to General Ludd senior at Nottingham’ to a ‘General Ludd, junior’ at Huddersfield.66 The ready use of ‘Ludd’ derived from a Leicestershire idiom for a machine-breaker, itself taken from a Ned Lud – the second ‘d’ was added later – who had destroyed stocking frames in Leicester in 1779. Thus the way in which the eponym Ludd was adopted in all of the machine-breaking areas attests to not only the way in which language and shared tropes gave cohesion to an otherwise only conceptually connected set of protests, but also to the ways in which knowledge could diffuse through pan-regional trade networks.

  • 67 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 594. Also see: Peter Linebaugh, Ned Ludd & Qu (...)
  • 68 Navickas, ‘Luddism’, pp. 64-7.

32‘Community’ mattered on a number of levels. Luddism may have been more violent than many earlier trade-based disputes – the relatively little machine-breaking there was in Lancashire quickly gave way to arms raids, drilling and oath taking as it had in Yorkshire – but it only took this form in desperation at the apparent abdication of community responsibility by the masters, magistrates and government ministers. It represented, as Thompson so perceptively noted, a ‘crisis point in the abrogation of paternalist legislation, and in the imposition of the political economy of laissez-faire upon, and against the will and conscience of, the working people’.67 These working people, we would do well to remember, were not just the industrial workers forging ‘new’ urban communities – and besides many had deep kinship networks that folded family links with trade societies – but also industrial and non-industrial workers in the countryside. Luddite gangs used the moors to hold their ‘drills,’ industrial workers being familiar with the moors as recreational spaces and as routeways. In Lancashire, as with Nottingham, Luddism even resorted to incendiarism against agricultural property, with threats issued against the users of threshing machines too.68 As the rural and urban blended together in everyday working life, so it did in Luddism. What follows examines the working through of this ‘crisis’ by agrarian workers in the context of the events of 1816, 1822 and 1830.

The Agricultural Machine I: ‘Bread or Blood’ and 1822

  • 69 Binfield, Writings of the Luddites, pp. 153-166; Thomis, The Luddites, p. 182.
  • 70 Norman Gash, ‘After Waterloo: British Society and the Legacy of the Napoleonic Wars’, Transactions (...)
  • 71 Peacock, Bread or Blood, pp. 27-9.
  • 72 See Andrew Charlesworth, A Comparative Study of the Spread of the Agricultural Disturbances of 1816 (...)

33The often-brutal repression of the Luddite protests and, especially in Lancashire and Yorkshire, the inability of direct action to undermine the heavily-mechanised factory system, effectively put an end to organised machine-breaking in the clothing trades. It did not, however, snuff out anti-machine sentiment or protests. Even in the Luddite heartlands, isolated acts of machine-breaking continued into the crisis year of 1816, while the spectre of open insurrection was kept alive through the sending of threatening letters signed by General Ludd.69 But anti-machine protests in 1816 occurred in a profoundly different context to 1811-12. The end of hostilities in Continental Europe occasioned the return of nearly a third of a million demobbed soldiers in 1816 and 1817. Labour markets were duly saturated, and this at the same time that the price of farm and manufactured goods collapsed. Mass unemployment and chronic underemployment followed.70 The woollen and weaving districts of Essex and East Anglia were also in long-term decline, competition from more highly capitalized and machine-operating Yorkshire effectively putting the once huge cloth industry almost completely out of work.71 These structural factors were further exacerbated when, from April 1816 rapid price movements in response to both localised supply problems, avaricious marketing practices and the anticipation of a poor harvest created a subsistence crisis.72

  • 73 Peacock, Bread or Blood, pp. 71-5.
  • 74 The National Archives [herein TNA], Home Office [HO], 42/ 149, fos 1-2.

34The initial collective protests in 1816 occurred simultaneously, and quite unconnectedly, on 17 April at Mile End Heath near Colchester, where threshing tackle was destroyed, and at Gedding in south Suffolk, where threshing machines and mole ploughs – which slashed labour costs for creating field drainage on the heavy local soils – were broken by a huge crowd. Beyond the firing of a malt kiln at Maunden later that month, for which 26 year-old ex-serviceman Joseph Bugg was hanged, no further protests were reported to have occurred in Essex. The Gedding protests though acted as the catalyst for a wave of protests in west Suffolk the area between Bury St. Edmunds, Stowmarket and Lavenham over the following ten days, including further acts of threshing machine and mole plough breaking as well as wages ‘riots’.73 This wave of collective protests, combined with incendiarism and the ‘dropping’ of letters in churchyards and farmyards warning of ‘vengeance’ unless wages were increased were generative of considerable paranoia. According to one Home Office correspondent, the labourers were holding nightly meetings and ‘taking oaths to stand by each other’.74

  • 75 Bury and Norwich Post, 8 May 1816; TNA, HO 42, 150, fos 8-11.
  • 76 Peacock, Bread or Blood, pp. 75-7. Stoke-by-Clare saw renewed machine-breaking on 22 May: Morning C (...)

35Stung into action after criticism that the magistracy had appeared passive in the face of a growing revolt, a general quarter sessions was hastily called to meet at Bury on 29 April. Those hoping for measures that would put a stop to the unfurling protests were to be disappointed. Beyond ‘signify[ing] their determination to take prompt and effectual measures to put stop to all such assemblages, and to bring to justice all persons who are found offending against the peace’, the gathered magistrates did nothing beyond agreeing that the civil force in each district would be strengthened.75 Indeed, the measures taken were neither strong enough nor enacted quickly enough to prevent more widespread protests. A series of incendiary fires in south Suffolk and north Essex and threshing machine-breaking at Stoke-by-Clare in South Suffolk were followed by a shift to demonstrations in the market towns of East Anglia, though a seemingly isolated attempt by 50 labourers and artisans to force an increase in their wages also occurred at Swaffham Bulbeck in neighbouring Cambridgeshire.76

  • 77 Peacock, Bread or Blood, p. 77.

36The first of these ‘urban’ protests was self-contained: a 100 strong ‘mob’ destroyed the windows of a flour mill at Needham Market on 7 May before being persuaded to disperse. What followed though was more persistent and determined. Bury was the scene of at least three days of riots starting on 14 May, the premises of a hosier containing spinning jennies only avoiding destruction due to the intervention of the West Suffolk militia. On the 16th protestors also took to the streets of both Norwich, where the populace attacked the military, and, famously, Brandon, where on the third day of rioting on Saturday 18th the crowd carried a banner proclaiming ‘Bread or Blood’ and threatened to march on London.77

  • 78 Charlesworth, Atlas of Rural Protest, p. 148.
  • 79 Bury and Norwich Post, 27 May 1816; Philip Warren (ed.), Report of the Trials for Rioting at Ely an (...)
  • 80 Charlesworth, Atlas of Rural Protest, 146; Peacock, Bread or Blood, 116-9.

37The example of Brandon was immediate, something Home Secretary Sidmouth felt was due to the sympathy shown to the protestors by the local authorities. From Brandon protests spread over the Norfolk border, and from there into the fenlands of Cambridgeshire, in particular to the towns of Downham Market (20th), Littleport (22nd) and Ely (23 May). This was, as Charlesworth has suggested, the tipping point.78 These market town protests did not target machines – indeed, perhaps there were no machines to target – but instead combined looting with demands for cheaper flour and beer and higher wages. More muscular than the protests in the countryside, these riotous assemblies were variably met either by magistrates agreeing to their demands – as initially was the case at Littleport79 – or by military intervention. For example, protests at Ely were easily put down by the arrival of the Royston Volunteer Cavalry and a detachment of 1st Royal Dragoons. From there the military headed to Littleport where they found many of the men drunk and up for a fight. In the ensuing battle, one labourer was shot dead, another had part of his jaw cut off by a sabre, others received gunshot wounds while several soldiers were also hurt.80

  • 81 Charlesworth, Atlas of Rural Protest, 146; Peacock, Bread or Blood, 116-9.
  • 82 Charlesworth, Atlas of Rural Protest, p. 147.

38The issuing of rewards for information leading to successful prosecutions and the stationing of troops throughout Norfolk and Suffolk appeared to put down the spirit of revolt. Indeed, it is telling that machine breaking thereafter occurred only in Essex, an area outside of the proclamation and not protected by the military detachments.81 To reinforce the deterrent and wanting to make an example of the Ely and Littleport rioters, Sidmouth also ordered that a Special Commission of Assize be held to try the Cambridgeshire men. 24 men were sentenced to death: nineteen of which were reprieved to lesser sentences, with the other five men hanged on 28 June. Two men, tried at the Norwich Assizes, were also executed on 31 August for their part in the Downham riots. In total, eight men – including Thomas Sindall who was shot in the head by a Dragoon at Littleport – lost their lives, while fourteen men were transported to Australia for their involvement at Downham, Littleport and Ely. Despite this heavy toll, it is important to note that while much property was destroyed and violence was often used in resisting the military, at no point did the protestors’ calls ever exceed very modest demands: an end to the use of threshing machines; cheaper flour and bread; and a minimum wage or support from the parish of 2s a day.82

  • 83 For examples see Paul Muskett, ‘The East Anglian Agrarian Riots of 1822’, Agricultural History Revi (...)
  • 84 For an exploration of these dynamics see Griffin, Protest, Politics and Work, ch. 1
  • 85 Neil Fox, ‘The Spread of the Threshing Machine in Central Southern England’, Agricultural History R (...)
  • 86 Ipswich Journal, 2 February 1822; Muskett, ‘East Anglian Agrarian Riots’, p. 5.
  • 87 Ibid., 5; Bury and Norwich Post, 20 February 1822.

39Beyond isolated episodes of collective protest,83 the occasional fire and acts of animal and plant maiming, rural East Anglia next exploded in widespread protest in the early months of 1822, the year that represented the absolute nadir of the post-Napoleonic War agrarian depression. While food prices were both significantly lower and far less volatile than in 1816, poor relief had become even more stingy, meaningful employment harder to procure, and wages lower still.84 Moreover, the penetration of threshing machines had significantly increased.85 But as Paul Muskett has suggested, there was ‘no anticipation of a second rising’. Even a flurry of (unrelated) incendiary fires in Suffolk and the sending of threatening letters generated little in the way of feverish comment.86 When threshing machine-breaking broke out in mid-February to the north of Diss and in the vicinity of Eye, on either side of the Norfolk and Suffolk border respectively, they both quickly assumed a localised intensity and caught the authorities unaware. The response though, in Diss at least, was swift: warrants were ‘immediately’ issued against several of those active in machine-breaking at Shimpling on 14 February with six men arrested on Saturday 16th. The arrests did nothing to stop further acts of machine-breaking at nearby Winfarthing and at and Tivertshall.87

  • 88 The Ipswich Journal, 9 and 16 March; Morning Chronicle, 9 March; Bury and Norwich Post, 20 March 18 (...)

40Collective protests started again on 2 March, with at least 20 threshing machines being destroyed or dismantled over the next four days in at least twelve different parishes to the north of Shimpling, a 250 strong force of mostly mounted special constables eventually putting down the mobile groups. Troops from Ipswich were also dispatched to Diss in precaution. A threshing machine was also destroyed at Southolt and at least a further six were also destroyed at Cratfield and Laxfield, some eleven miles east of Eye, on 4 March. There were other isolated protests too, both in the area in which protests had already occurred and, in the case of the resort to incendiarism, in areas otherwise unaffected by collective protests, one clergyman at Stonham Aspal being targeted twice.88

  • 89 Muskett, ‘East Anglian Agrarian Riots’, pp. 6-7; Muskett, Riotous Assemblies, pp. 66-8.

41The protestors were swiftly tried. At three different courts nearly 120 men were tried for their involvement in the revolt. Most of the men were given prison sentences of between one week and a year, but two protestors met a different fate. At the Norfolk Assizes, Noah Peak and George Fortis, both Waterloo veterans but now reduced to being employed on the roads by the Bressingham parish surveyor, were found guilty of riot and of setting fire to poor law official John Kent’s stacks by virtue of an accomplice turning King’s Evidence. Both ended their lives on the Thetford scaffold. Such exemplary justice did put down the revolt, though some occasional acts of threshing machine breaking occurred that summer in Suffolk and south Norfolk. One final act of destruction occurred at Mendham, between Diss and Bungay, in mid-December.89

  • 90 Ibid., 68; Charlesworth, Atlas of Rural Protest, p. 148.

42What was striking about these ‘post-trial’ protests was the fact that not only had the earlier deterrents proved ineffectual but also that more individuals were brought to trial than for the earlier, more intensive wave of machine-breaking. As Muskett notes, ‘nearly 120 men’ were brought to trial for their part in the protests during 1822, and all but five of these were farm workers. Of these five, two were farmers, one an innkeeper, one a carpenter and one a shoemaker. The protestors were, as Charlesworth has suggested, far less socially heterogeneous than in the 1816 protests. This most commercially-orientated and highly capitalised part of rural England had become less socially diverse: the loss of small farmers and dual-occupationalists supported in pre-enclosure parishes, the consolidation of ever larger farms with wealthier farmers, and chronically-pauperised, under-employed field workers. Where smaller farmers held on, they were commercially disadvantaged by the use of expensive threshing machinery by the large farmers, a dynamic best evidenced by farmer Goose inciting the men through bribes to break a threshing machine at Ditchingham.90

The agricultural machine II: The Swing Riots

  • 91 Maidstone Journal, 12 April 1822.
  • 92 Griffin, The Rural War, pp. 67-8.
  • 93 Walsh, ‘Lancashire “Rising”’, pp.601-21.
  • 94 quoted in John Archer, By a Flash and a Scare: Incendiarism, Animal Maiming, and Poaching in East A (...)
  • 95 Kent and Essex Mercury, 13 and 27 January, 3, 17 and 24 February, 3, 10, 17 and 24 March 1829.
  • 96 Archer, By a Flash and a Scare, pp. 87-8.
  • 97 Devizies and Wiltshire Gazette, 5 November 1829.

43If the East Anglian protests of 1816 and 1822 had disabused Westminster of any notion that field workers were more inclined to quiescently accept their lot than industrial workers, there was still no sense in the early 1820s that a more-than-regional rural rebellion was possible. Claims in the London-published Morning Chronicle in April 1822 that ‘outrages… among unemployed agricultural labourers’ had also occurred in Kent and Sussex were denounced as ‘evil’ by the Maidstone Journal, the editor counterclaiming that the countryside was ‘never in a more peaceful and tranquil state’.91 By the late 1820s though, commentators were warning that a widespread rural revolt was not just possible but likely.92 The example of three days rioting and the breaking of some 1,000 power looms in Accrington, Blackburn and Chatteron in April 1826 – this a response to chronic under- and un-employment in the cotton trades exacerbated by the introduction of powerlooms which acted to displace handloom weavers – was no doubt fresh in the minds of the authorities, especially in Westminster.93 As ‘The poor labourers’ of the Hundred of Cosford put it in an extraordinary letter to the Suffolk Chronicle: ‘our class are starving weigh’d down with oppression and worn out with vexations’. ‘We shall’, the letter continued, ‘shortly fight for ourselves we count it an absolute right for us to rise for support for our wives and beloved children... our side is strong and hang as it were by a thread ready ripened for a revolt’.94 A spate of threshing machine breaking in north Essex in early 1829,95 was followed by further attacks in mid- Suffolk that autumn.96 At Handsworth near Sheffield, there was also reported to be an ‘anti-threshing machine spirit’ among the ‘flail workers’ due to the arrival of a travelling threshing machine.97

  • 98 Griffin, The Rural War, pp. 87-90; Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, p. 85; Carl Griffin, ‘Policy o (...)
  • 99 Kentish Gazette, 8 and 15 October; Brighton Herald, 16 October 1830.

44A series of coordinated attacks on threshing machines in and around the Elham Valley area of East Kent proved rather more influential. The first recorded attack on a threshing machine occurred at Wingmore, a small hamlet between the villages of Barham and Elham, by a gang of ‘three or four and twenty’ men on 24 August. This was no ‘bolt from the blue’ as Hobsbawm and Rudé claimed, but rather was the result of long-running local disputes over the use of threshing machines. The group of labourers, artisans and small farmers had approached local farmers warning them that if they did not stop using their machines they would be destroyed. Some heeded the warnings. Those who did not were targeted. Over the following four weeks, the gang grew in size and destroyed machines over an ever-wider area. It was not until 22 September that the magistrates and ‘gentlemen’ finally met to discuss the unfurling protests, with arrests and the taking of recognizances starting five days later.98 Notwithstanding further machine-breaking episodes on the night of the arrests and again on 1 October, their protests duly turned to incendiarism and the issuing of threats, incendiary letters being sent by post to two individuals near Dover. Both letters were signed for the first time by ‘the same significant word’, ‘Swing’.99

  • 100 Griffin, ‘Policy on the Hoof’, pp. 136-7.
  • 101 Griffin, The Rural War, pp. 91, 92-3.

45What transformed a series of intensive but essentially localised protests into a more-than-local protest movement was the reaction of other workers elsewhere to the trial of the initial machine-breakers. Sentenced only to four days in gaol – the maximum sentence permitted being seven years’ transportation – due to one clerical magistrate and a further clergyman having comprised themselves leading to the fear of reprisals if the maximum penalty was imposed, the actions of the Elham men were duly read as having been vindicated.100 The sentence acted as a spur to protests beyond the gang’s range, machine-breaking extending to the vicinity of Ash in East Kent and, more critically, wages protests to the area between Maidstone and Sittingbourne to the west.101

  • 102 Maidstone Journal, 12 October 1830.

46The sentence was even more extraordinary given the wider political context. In one sense against the backdrop of the recent revolution in France, the Trois Glorieuses, the death of George IV and the ensuing general election, Prime Minister the Duke of Wellington’s fragile hold on power and the associated parliamentary reform crisis, the breaking of machines in Kent was small beer. Yet, given the relatively recent experience of Luddism and the 1816 and 1822 East Anglian riots, and the fear that the example of the revolution in France would have an electric effect on English workers, was, many commentators argued, reason enough to make an example of the Elham men. This paranoia was indeed partly justified, for evidence of radical political discourse and sentiment was present in many Swing episodes. Even at Elham where the agenda was purest, one machine-breaker was reported to have said ‘Next year we will have a turn with the Parsons, and the third, we will make war upon the Statesmen’.102 But in some localities, like Maidstone, radical politics underpinned Swing: the potent symbolism of the tricolor combining with politically-charged claims and speeches.

  • 103 Centre for Kentish Studies, Q/SBw/124/7; TNA, HO 52/8, fos 365-6 and 361-2.
  • 104 Roger Wells, ‘Mr William Cobbett, Captain Swing, and King William IV’, Agricultural History Review  (...)

47The protests in the vicinity of Maidstone were of note for reasons beyond the radical influence and the extension of Swing’s canon to wages protests. Here, highly mobile groups led by two politically-active Maidstone shoemakers physically diffused protests throughout much of West Kent and into the Weald at the start of November.103 Beyond the actions of the Maidstone groups, Swing was first manifest in the Weald through two indigenous sets of protests: at Battle over wages and poor relief starting on 1 November – here radical politics and in particular a recent lecture by William Cobbett were again implicated – and four days later at nearby Brede over poor relief. Thus, in this area marked by chronic levels of unemployment and pauperization, the agenda widened to embrace calls for more generous poor relief and, critically, better treatment of rural workers at the hands of poor law officials. Further impetus for protests here came from the large number of small and tenant farmers who expressed their willingness to support the labourers’ cause if they, in turn, used their collective power to secure tithe reductions from the clergy.104

  • 105 Griffin, The Rural War, pp. 97-103.

48Between 8 and 14 November virtually every Wealden and southwest Kent parish rose, protests spreading in essentially predictable and linear forms, although here attacks on threshing machines were not a defining feature of the protests. Thereafter, the protests lost their geographic coherence having several concurrent foci often at some remove from other centres of protest. On 13 November labourers’ assemblages occurred independently in the northwest Sussex parishes of Kirdford and Wisborough Green some 40 miles distant from Mayfield, the previous most westerly parish to ‘rise’. Radical agitation over taxes and tithes at Horsham was central to several days of intense protests in the town and the surrounding countryside, as well as being responsible for the diffusion of wages and anti-tithe protests into the parishes around Dorking and Reigate in Surrey. A wave of threshing machine-breaking in the vicinity of Chichester – the most extensive beyond Elham – physically diffused into the south-east Hampshire parishes of Emsworth, Havant and Warblington on 18 November, the day after a series of wages assemblages had started in the vicinity of Whitchurch in north Hampshire.105

  • 106 TNA, HO 52/8, fos 621-2; West Sussex County Record Office, QR/Q 51.
  • 107 For the role of fires before the outbreak of collective actions see: Carl Griffin, ‘“The Mystery of (...)

49In both West Sussex and Hampshire incendiary fires and the receipt of threatening letters immediately predated the start of collective protests, although there was no direct link between these early fires and the first collective protests. The first incendiary fire in West Sussex after the spread of protests into neighbouring East Sussex occurred at Coldwaltham on the night of 12 November, some 20 miles distant from Kirdford parish, which ‘rose’ the next day.106 In Hampshire, a flurry of incendiary letters ‘asking’ the farmers to remove their threshing machines were received around Gosport on 11 November, the threat being made good against one farmer that night. But it was not until 18 November in the area around Havant that the collective destruction of threshing machines started in Hampshire, the protests having diffused over the border from neighbouring Sussex.107

  • 108 Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, pp. 122-123 and appendix 3.
  • 109 Ian Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), (...)

50While it took over 12 weeks from the destruction of the first machine in the Elham Valley until Swing was first manifest in central southern England, so intensively did the protests take hold that by 24th November in Hampshire and the 25th in Berkshire collective protests had either run their course or had been repressed. This is even more extraordinary for Wiltshire, where notwithstanding the receipt of Swing letters and several fires from 15th November, collective actions did not start until 19th November (through a combination of indigenous activism and physical spread) and effectively concluded by the 25th.108 The only area of these three counties where protests did not pass very quickly was the Dever Valley in central Hampshire, where, much like at Battle and Maidstone, radical politicking and plotting through a ‘Musical and Radical Society’ that met at Sutton Scotney gave the protests both greater temporal depth and a more resilient organisational form.109

  • 110 Peter Jones, ‘Finding Captain Swing: Protest, Parish Relations, and the State of the Public Mind in (...)
  • 111 Adrian Randall, and Edwina Newman, ‘Protest, Proletarians and Paternalists: Social Conflict in Rura (...)

51Notwithstanding the sudden outbreak of protest in all three counties, the authorities coped far better than their Kentish and Sussex counterparts, partly a function of the Home Office now readily agreeing to the deployment of troops. If initially the rapidity of Swing’s diffusion caught magistrates on the hop, especially so in and around Thatcham and Newbury, the swearing in of large numbers of special constables and ready deployment of troops quartered in various locations throughout the region soon filled local gaols to capacity with arrested machine-breakers and ‘rioters’. Still, the mobile nature of many of the groups, and the very fact that so many districts ‘rose’ at once, meant that it was hard to be proactive in preventing protests. Groups at Kintbury, Yattendon and Lambourne in Berkshire and in communities in Wiltshire close to the Berkshire and Hampshire borders were thus able to destroy threshing machines with an openness and rapidity more akin to the Havant protests than those at Elham.110 For north west Wiltshire though, Randall and Newman have argued that pre-emptive wages and poor relief increases were particularly successful in helping to at least moderate protests in that locale.111

  • 112 Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, pp. 304-5.
  • 113 Griffin, The Rural War, pp. 104-5, 108-10 and 113-14.

52According to Hobsbawm and Rudé, some 97 machines were destroyed in Wiltshire, Berkshire and Hampshire being the next highest ranked counties with 75 and 45 machines destroyed respectively.112 While their figures woefully underestimate the scale of machine-breaking, especially in Swing’s initial centres, these rankings highlight the importance of machine-breaking as the key expression of discontent in south-central England. Indeed, this was most profoundly given voice in the destruction of machine works at Fordingbridge near the Wiltshire border in south-west Hampshire and the aforementioned Tasker’s at Upper Clatford. However, if threshing machine-breaking was the primary motive in west Berkshire, south-east and north-west Hampshire, and in south, east and mid Wiltshire, it was not to the exclusion of other claims. Machine-breaking groups on their perambulations were invariably to be found demanding higher wages and poor relief, and doles, often in payment for the ‘work’ done in breaking the machines. In short, the many temporary alignments of individuals, ‘memberships’ often overlapping parish boundaries and attachments that were forged in the heat of Swing did not necessarily see the threshing machine as the only evil. Rather, in many of these communities where threshing machines had been in operation for many years, Swing gave rural workers the opportunity to attack symbols of their pauperisation, of their oppression. In areas where threshing machines were not widely used, most notably the heavily forested areas of east Hampshire and the New Forest, Swing activists focused their attentions on other symbolic targets, the destruction of workhouses at Headley and Selbourne on 22 and 23 November respectively being the most dramatic examples.113

  • 114 Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, pp. 253-6.
  • 115 Kevin Bawn, ‘Social Protest, Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Dorset, 1790–1838’ (PhD disse (...)

53Military interventions and the organization of ‘constabularies’ of special constables had a significant effect in south-central England in dispersing Swing groups and making large numbers of arrests. The mobilization of still extant yeoman cavalries in Wiltshire and neighbouring Dorset – yeomanries further east having long since been dissolved, many now being revived but not in time to help with the repressive effort – were also an important factor in dispersing many groups. This stiffening of governmental resolve and an increased preparedness as Swing diffused westwards ultimately changed the pattern and depth of subsequent protests.114 Indeed, elsewhere in the south Swing was only manifest in an intensive form in isolated pockets. In Dorset, for instance, Swing in its overt forms was limited to machine-breaking on Cranborne Chase (protests having spilled over from south Wiltshire and Hampshire), in the Blackmore Vale (the same group also destroying machines at Henstridge in neighbouring Somerset), between Blandford and Dorchester over wages and machines, and, finally, on the western fringes of the Isle of Purbeck. The individual who took it upon himself to lead the repressive response in the latter two areas was no less a figure than landlord and head of the local yeomanry James Frampton Esq., conducting his men with a zeal and vitriolic force that he later visited upon the early agricultural trade unionists at Tolpuddle.115

  • 116 Ibid., 130-1; Western Flying Post, 6 December 1830; J. Maynard, ‘The Agricultural Labourer in Worce (...)
  • 117 Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, pp. 128-9, 140, 141.
  • 118 Ibid., 143-50; The Standard, 1 December 1830. Also see Gillian Chambers, Buckinghamshire Machine Br (...)

54The extent to which Swing was truly meaningful as a coherent protest movement beyond Dorset is open to interpretation. For, on the one hand, there were few, isolated, overt protests in the other western counties. Threshing machine breaking at Hanley Williams and Wadberrow in Worcestershire were evidently inspired by the example elsewhere, but food riots in Cornwall appeared to be little more than coincident expressions of grievance. Conversely, it is possible to read the spike in levels of incendiarism and the receipt of Swing letters as evidence of explicit linkages to the southern protests.116 A clear connection can be read too in threshing machine-breaking in south-east Gloucestershire and south Oxfordshire diffused over the north Wiltshire border from 26th November and from Berkshire respectively.117 The destruction of the machinery of several paper mills in and around High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire and the concurrent receipt of Swing letters also attests to the power of the ideas that Swing, as a movement, embodied.118

  • 119 Archer, By a Flash and a Scare, pp. 89-95; Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, pp. 152-62; Rose Walli (...)
  • 120 Ibid., 146-7.
  • 121 Tom Richardson, ‘The Agricultural Labourers’ Standard of Living in Lincolnshire, 1790-1840: Social (...)

55The other major wave of protests occurred in East Anglia. Here though threshing machine-breaking on the north coast and south west of Norfolk – Hobsbawm and Rudé recording 29 cases – and the less intensive wage and invariably farmer-supported tithe riots in south-east Norwich and east Suffolk were informed by the cultural memory of the events of 1816 and 1822 and the example of southern Swing, although the use of the eponym ‘Swing’ was almost entirely absent here.119 In neighbouring Essex and Huntingdonshire, both significant arable centres, threshing machine breaking was also important. Great Clacton (Essex) witnessed eight of the fifteen threshing machines to be broken in that county. Threshing machine owners at Bluntisham (Huntingdonshire) were threatened as to their use as early as 10th October, this unlikely to have been inspired by the East Kent protests. In total, fifteen machines were destroyed in the west of the county, the protests in Sawtry on 26th November also acting as the pole from which machine-breaking spread into Northamptonshire.120 Fears that the Huntingdonshire men would also turn their attentions to Lincolnshire proved unfounded. There were protests – indeed Richardson’s study of the county has shown that Hobsbawm and Rudé significantly underestimated the resort to machine-breaking and wages riots – but there was little geographical coherence outside of a cluster of protests in the fenlands of the south. What was most striking was the resort to incendiarism that assumed an intensity otherwise not seen outside of the south-east, the western fringes of the Wolds being particularly affected.121

  • 122 Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, appendix 3; Katrina Navickas, ‘Captain Swing in the North: the Ca (...)
  • 123 Jones, ‘Finding Captain Swing’, p. 457.

56It is possible to also discern the influence of Swing – as shared grievance and discourse as well as threatening metonym – beyond the south and east, the areas where Swing constituted a protest movement through diffusion. Using the resort to collective action and/or the receipt of a ‘Swing’ letter as the necessary qualification, Hobsbawm and Rudé claimed that Swing was manifest in 37 counties, 16 being only marginally affected. Beyond Cornwall, Hertfordshire, London and Middlesex, these were all northern and Midlands counties. For instance, according to their tabulations, in ‘marginal’ Yorkshire only two threshing machines were destroyed and several Swing letters received. Herefordshire qualified on the basis of two Swing letters, and Lancashire because of one strike and five political demonstrations. One might argue that breaking threshing machines anywhere in late 1830 necessarily happened in the context of the intensive resort to machine-breaking in the south and east. Similarly, deploying the motif of ‘Swing’ was to clearly invoke the symbolic power of Swing as movement. Yet, as Navickas has argued in her treatment of the ‘riots’ that occurred in Carlisle in November and early December, events that occurred outside of the areas where protests physically diffused from place to place were more likely to be expressions of longstanding local concerns rather than symptoms of ‘contagion’. The cause of the riots in Carlisle, so Navickas asserts, had nothing to do with events elsewhere and everything to do with ‘a running debate about policing and authority in the city’, itself the ‘culmination of growing social and political tensions among a divided population’. And yet, even here Swing the word, the concept, was used to invoke terror and a more-than-local strength, while elsewhere in the county threatening letters were sent to the users of threshing machines, an atypical protest discourse in the northern counties in 1830.122 Peter Jones in his study of Swing in Berkshire has offered a similar reading. It was, he suggests, ‘a series of discrete moments of impact, like pebbles in a pond, each specifically meaningful within its own locality, but creating overlapping ripples that had a marginal impact on other localities.’123 For there was no ‘guiding principle’, no overall plan or organization however much the press were concerned about the possible existence of a ‘Captain Swing’.

  • 124 West Sussex County Record Office, QR/W/758 fos 280, 269, 270, 271 and 272.
  • 125 Jeremy BurchardtThe Allotment Movement in England, 1793-1873 (Woodbridge, Boydell & Brewer, 2002) (...)
  • 126 Griffin, The Rural War, p. 319.

57As the foregoing analysis of the protests suggests, while in some localities magistrates, landlords, clergy and farmers were quick to respond to Swing’s pleas by acting in a paternalistic way by increasing wages and poor relief allowances and stopping the use of machines, in others the response was not to listen to grievance but instead to repress all dissent. Wages increased through fear or in an attempt to pacify protestors in the heat of movement were all too quickly cut. For instance, a group of West Chiltington road workers marched on the Petworth Bench as early as 4 December 1830 to complain that their parish had reneged on a local agreement.124 This is not to claim though that all farmers, vestries and landlords were as hard-hearted as to hide behind the state-sponsored repression in again cutting wages and poor relief allowances. As Jeremy Burchardt has shown, late 1830 marked the effective start of the allotment movement, Swing prompting many landowners in as quasi-paternalistic gesture to set aside blocks of land to let to rural workers.125 Far harder was it to either repair broken machines or buy replacements, though many farmers tried and found themselves subject to incendiarism in the ensuing months and years. Arguably, this was Swing’s greatest success, for threshing machines in many districts were not again in general use until the start of the 1840s. Indeed, elsewhere I have suggested that post-1830 there was a ‘heightened hostility’ to all forms of machinery in the countryside, paper mills and the property of early adopters of steam engines being attacked.126

  • 127 Binfield, Writings of the Luddites.
  • 128 Griffin, The Rural War, p. 218.
  • 129 TNA, HO 52/10, fo. 373.

58In the foregoing analysis, Swing protestors have been referred to as labourers, even artisans and small farmers, and always as men. With few documented exceptions, this was overwhelmingly true of the many collective acts that constituted the movement. However, it does not follow though that neither were women involved or that Swing had nothing to say about gender relations. First, mirroring Binfield’s analysis of the earlier Luddites, Swing gangs and groupings were often rooted in a profound homosociality, building upon pre-existing friendships and working relationships, bonds that were further forged through both protesting together – ‘we are as one’ – and drinking together.127 Second, I have argued elsewhere that this sense of togetherness was, at least in part, a deliberate performance of a plebeian masculinity, something imperilled, neutered even, by being forced to be reliant on the parish vestry for support. In relation to threshing machines, this was a direct comment on the fact that in robbing men of the wintertime occupation of flail threshing male labour was often replaced by cheaper female and child labour in the feeding of threshing machines. As one member of the Elham gang was reported to have exclaimed during one of their machine-breaking ceremonies, ‘Kill Her! – More Oil! – More Grease!’, the machine being both gendered as female and the act of destruction graphically alluding to rape.128 Third, where women were involved was invariably in poor relief related protests, for instance, a large number of women and children were reported to have joined the procession that followed the Brede assistant overseer being wheeled out of the parish.129

  • 130 Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, p. 281.
  • 131 Griffin, The Rural War, ch. 11.

59992 criminal cases were heard at the government-sponsored special commissions held for the counties of Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire. At these one-off courts, the sentence of death was passed on 227 individuals, the sentence executed in the case of five men singled out to make an example. According to Hobsbawm and Rudé, across all the Swing counties, there were a total of 1,976 cases, resulting in 644 prison sentences, 19 executions, and the transportation of 505 men and women to the penal colony at Van Diemen’s Land. This was the single biggest ever act of transportation. Yet these ‘draconian punishments’ did not totally demoralize rural workers.130 Rather, in some locales the sentences generated bitter reprisals, in other areas there was unfinished business, and in others attempts to reinforce Swing’s meagre gains required occasional protests. Incendiarism dominated, but wages strikes and the collective destruction of threshing machines were also important in many areas, including the original Swing centre of East Kent. Thereafter attacks on threshing machines were rare, and even incendiary attacks on barns containing machines few, for there were so little threshing machines left.131

Coda/Conclusions

  • 132 Young, ‘Gleanings’, p.168.

60Machine breaking, so the foregoing analysis suggests, was rarely just machine breaking. As a protest form, it was often combined with other methods of registering displeasure and dismay. Further, as we have seen, it was rarely practiced as a response to the introduction of new technologies, although as the example that this essay opened with, sometimes the fear of the new was the stimulus to protest. Indeed, in relation to the events of 1811-12, 1816, 1822 and 1830, many of the machines attacked had long been in use, for instance the spate of threshing machine breaking in West Sussex during Swing came nearly 40 years after the first threshing mill had been installed on a farm at Bignor.132 Rather, it was in most cases that the situation of the use of machines that had changed (e.g. trade slumps, recessions, acute unemployment), or that machines were now being used in new ways (for instance in making cut-ups in the East Midlands in 1811).

  • 133 Marie Rowlands, Masters and Men: in the West Midland Metalware Trades Before the Industrial Revolut (...)
  • 134 Maynard, The Agricultural Labourer, p. 193.

61In many ways, this is quite a partial essay. It represents both the dominant themes of the historiography and the most famed episodes of machine breaking. In this, many places, regions and episodes of machine breaking have been underrepresented – the 1826 Lancashire Cotton Riots, for instance, are ripe for further systematic study – or ignored. For instance, we know virtually nothing of machine breaking in the West Midlands, the centre of the metal trades and also a critical region for mining, notwithstanding Marie Rowland’s superb study of the metal trades in the early eighteenth century.133 Systematic archival study of neglected regions and places will not reveal forgotten revolts, but individual episodes of machine breaking are potentially illuminative of wider attitudes to machinery and to the social role of technology outside of the major centres of machine breaking. Take, for instance, the arrest of six young men for destroying needle-making equipment at Tardebigge, a small village near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, on 6th December 1830. Evidently inspired by attacks on threshing machines elsewhere, if the case remains obscure it clearly shows tensions over the place and use of machines in the local metal trades.134 What too of the place of the machine in the mining trades and iron industries of the north-west and of Cornwall in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries?

  • 135 David Jones, Before Rebecca: Popular Protests in Wales, 1793-1835 (Allen Lane, London, 1973), pp. 8 (...)
  • 136 On Rebecca see: Lowri Ann Rees, ‘Paternalism and Rural Protest: the Rebecca Riots and the Landed In (...)

62Another even more critical gap is our knowledge of machine breaking in Wales and Scotland. I started this essay rather gnomically alluding to the fact that both countries would figure little here. And so far they have not. This is a simple function that, again, machine breaking in Wales and Scotland has not been subject to systematic study. What we have are mere snippets of reference. David Jones in his seminal study of the resort to protest in Wales between 1793 and 1835 notes that ‘There was nothing in industrial Wales to compare with the Luddism of northern England and the Midlands.’ He does relate that the homes of iron founder Josiah John Guest and of Newtown master weavers were attacked in 1816 and 1819 respectively. Since the turn of the nineteenth century, so Jones claims, the miners of Merthyr had been known for their assertive brand of ‘trade unionism and Luddism’, though no examples of the latter are detailed. It seems inconceivable that the industrial workers of south Wales, in particular, did not take some inspiration from their English kin just over the border, something made even more likely by the high degree of labour mobility.135 Further, it is arguably useful to think of the turnpike toll gates whose destruction was central to the Rebecca Riots (1839-43) as being machines of movement, technologies of the road.136 Limiting understandings of the reception and role of technology to acts of the breaking of mechanical labour-saving devices represents an unhelpful narrowing of vision. It means that we fail to comprehend the many ways in which innovation was contentious and contested.

  • 137 Chris Whatley, The Industrial Revolution in Scotland (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), (...)

63The situation for Scotland is arguably even more disappointing. If the lack of systematic work speaks to the powerful stranglehold in the historical imagination of the two poles of Jacobitism (even beyond the Battle of Culloden) and the reception and impact of the Highland Clearances (especially from the 1820s) with little space for other lines of protest enquiry between. Labour and industrial history have instead tended to figure most strongly in relation to early twentieth century in relation to the so-called ‘Red Clydeside’, that period of extraordinary energy and political radicalism in industrial labour relations in and around Glasgow. Chris Whatley’s important survey of the industrial revolution in Scotland is a notable exception. Whatley details both anti-machine feeling – such as the handloom weavers of Dundee who ‘continued to resist the introduction of steam power into the 1830s’ – and actual acts of machine breaking – as at the border town of Jedburgh where journeymen stocking makers smashed a loom in 1817. As Ian Donnachie notes of the Jedburgh case, it was directly informed by English Luddism. The stocking makers had formed themselves into a combination to maintain ‘a proper rate of wage’. When stocking maker Veitch was found to be working for a lower rate, he was warned that ‘General Ludd’ would be set upon him. Threats were followed up by a visit to his loomshop by some of the men who further instructed him that they operated under orders from General Ludd to horsewhip him if he continued to work, and that they would break his frame ‘as was done in England by the people who call themselves Luddites’. That night, Veitch’s loom was destroyed.137

  • 138 Gordon Pentland, The Spirit of the Union: Popular Politics in Scotland (London, Routledge, 2015), p (...)

64The Jedburgh case followed earlier attempts to ‘import’ Luddism into Scotland. We know from the autobiographical account of weavers’ leader Alexander Richmond that he had – and there is arguably a sense of bravado in his account – organised petitions against the infamous Orders in Council. He also claimed that he made repeated attempts to bring the ‘Luddite system’ to Scotland. Whether directly because of his efforts or otherwise, we also know in 1812 that some webs – the cloths in process – were destroyed in loomshops. Home Secretary Sidmouth, so Gordon Pentland relates, was also informed that handloom weavers in Scotland and England were planning a coordinated insurrection driven by salaried delegates and bound the taking of oaths that same year. That said, as Pentland notes, the same ‘creative manner’ of Luddism did not extend to the Great Weavers Strike of 1812 in Scotland.138

65Whatever the gaps in our knowledge – and even the gaps in this paper – it is hard not to conclude with a defiant assertion that machine breaking was a critical weapon of the weak, a vital tool of applying pressure on employers (and the authorities) in moments of acute distress. The very fact that it transcended supposed divisions between agriculture, mining and industry, and between country and city, perhaps says more about our love of simplistic dualisms than it does the complex, hybrid, heterogenous lives and spaces of the period. In the same way, machine breaking was neither ‘modern’ or ‘premodern’, but rather combined elements of custom and a challenge to particularly avaricious assertions of futurity. As a protest practice, it could meet a variety of circumstances, from trade dispute, changing working methods, rural revolt, personal vendetta, enforcing trade unionism, and even be a visceral response to the introduction of new technology – even if this latter category was, against popular perceptions, relatively rare.

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Navickas, Katrina, ‘Captain Swing in the North: the Carlisle Riots of 1830’, History Workshop Journal 71 (2011), pp. 5-28.

Navickas, Katrina, ‘Luddism, Incendiarism and the Defence of Rural ‘Task-scapes’ in 1812’, Northern History 48, 1 (2011), pp. 59-73.

Navickas, Katrina, ‘The Search for ‘General Ludd’: the Mythology of Luddism’, Social History 30, 3 (2005), pp. 281-295.

Navickas, Katrina, Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798-1815 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009).

Peacock, Alfred, Bread or Blood: A Study of the Agrarian Riots in East Anglia in 1816 (London, Gollancz, 1965). Griffin, Carl, The Rural War: Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012).

Pentland, Gordon, The Spirit of the Union: Popular Politics in Scotland (London, Routledge, 2015).

Randall, Adrian and Newman, Edwina, ‘Protest, Proletarians and Paternalists: Social Conflict in Rural Wiltshire, 1830–1850’, Rural History 6, 2 (1995), pp. 209-213.

Randall, Adrian, ‘The Shearmen and the Wiltshire Outrages of 1802: Trade Unionism and Industrial Violence’, Social History 7, 3 (1982), pp. 283-304.

Randall, Adrian, Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Hanoverian England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, Oxford).

Randall, Adrian, Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776-1809 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Rees, Lowri Ann, ‘Paternalism and Rural Protest: the Rebecca Riots and the Landed Interest of South-West Wales. Agricultural History Review 59, 1 (2011), pp. 36-60

Richards, Eric, ‘“Captain Swing” in the West Midlands’, International Review of Social History 19, 1 (1974), pp. 86-99.

Richardson, Tom, ‘The Agricultural Labourers’ Standard of Living in Lincolnshire, 1790-1840: Social Protest and Public Order’, Agricultural History Review 41, 1 (1993), pp. 10-14.

Richmond, Alexander, Narrative of the Conditions of the Manufacturing Population; and the Proceedings of Government which Led to the State Trials in Scotland (London, Miller, 1824).

Roberts, Matthew, ‘E. P. Thompson, Shirley, and the Antinomian Tradition in West Riding Luddism and Popular Protest’, Labour History Review 86, 2 (2021), pp. 187-214.

Roberts, Matthew, ‘Rural Luddism and the Makeshift Economy of the Nottinghamshire Framework Knitters’, Social History 42, 3 (2017), pp. 365-398.

Rudé, George, ‘Review of Malcolm Thomis’s The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England’, Journal of Social History 5, 2 (1971), pp. 260-263.

Rule, John, ‘General introduction’ to John Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Skilled Labourer, new edition, edited and introduced by John Rule, (London, Longman, 1979), pp. viii-xxxiii.

Rule, John, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry (London, Croom Helm, 1981).

Scott, James, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1985).

Shoemaker, Robert, ‘The London Mob in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Journal of British Studies 26 (1987), pp. 273-304.

Styles, John, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Spinning Jenny: Domestic Mechanisation in Eighteenth-Century Cotton Spinning’, Textile History 51, 2 (2020), pp.195-236.

Thomis, Malcolm, The Luddites: Machine Breaking in Regency England (Newton Abbot, David and Charles, 1970).

Thompson, Edward Palmer, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 50, 1 (1971), pp. 76-136.

Thompson, Edward Palmer, The Making of the English Working Class (London, Gollancz, 1963).

Tilly, Charles, Regimes and Repertoires (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2010).

Van Cruyningen, Piet, ‘Dutch Investors and the Drainage of Hatfield Chase, 1626 to 1656’, Agricultural History Review 64, 1 (2016), pp. 17-37.

Wallis, Rose, ‘Prosecution, Precedence and Official Memory: Judicial Responses and Perceptions of Swing in Norfolk’, in Carl Griffin and Briony McDonagh (eds.), Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500: Memory, Materiality and the Landscape (Farnham, Palgrave, 2018), pp.159-185.

Walsh, David, ‘The Lancashire “Rising” of 1826’ Albion 26, 4 (1996), pp. 601-621.

Warren, Philip (ed.), Report of the Trials for Rioting at Ely and Littleport (Wilburton, self-published, 1997).

Wells, Roger, ‘Counting Riots in Eighteenth-Century England’, Labour History Review 37 (1978), pp. 68-72.

Wells, Roger, ‘Mr William Cobbett, Captain Swing, and King William IV’, Agricultural History Review 45, 1 (1997), pp. 34-48.

Whatley, Chris, The Industrial Revolution in Scotland (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Young, Arthur, ‘Gleanings in an Excursion to Lewes Fair’, Annals of Agriculture 17 (1791).

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Notes

1 Arthur Young, ‘Gleanings in an Excursion to Lewes Fair’, Annals of Agriculture 17 (1791), pp. 168-170.

2 The first recorded acts of threshing machine breaking – as opposed to destruction by arson – occurred in the spring and summer of 1815: Alfred Peacock, Bread or Blood: A Study of the Agrarian Riots in East Anglia in 1816 (London, Gollancz, 1965), pp. 69-70; Carl Griffin, The Rural War: Captain Swing and the Politics of Protest (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012), p. 52.

3 Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy 1815-1848 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 101.

4 Adrian Randall, Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Hanoverian England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, Oxford), p. 59.

5 On which see: Thomas Ashton and Joseph Sykes, The Coal Industry of the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1929).

6 Griffin, The Rural War; Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé, Captain Swing (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1969).

7 Randall, Riotous Assemblies, ch. 11; Matthew Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism and the Makeshift Economy of the Nottinghamshire Framework Knitters’, Social History 42, 3 (2017), pp. 365-398.

8 Frank Darvall, Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (New York, Oxford University Press, 1934); John Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Skilled Labourer 1760–1832 (London, Longmans, 1920); Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, Past and Present 1 (1952), pp. 57-70; Malcolm Thomis, The Luddites: Machine Breaking in Regency England (Newton Abbot, David and Charles, 1970); John Dinwiddy, ‘Luddism and Politics in the Northern Counties’, Social History 4, 1 (1979), pp. 33-63; Adrian Randall, Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776-1809 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991); Kevin Binfield, The Writings of the Luddites (Baltimore, ML, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Katrina Navickas, ‘The Search for ‘General Ludd’: the Mythology of Luddism’, Social History 30, 3 (2005), pp. 281-295; Idem., ‘Luddism, Incendiarism and the Defence of Rural ‘Task-scapes’ in 1812’, Northern History 48, 1 (2011), pp. 59-73; Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism’; Idem., ‘E. P. Thompson, Shirley, and the Antinomian Tradition in West Riding Luddism and Popular Protest’, Labour History Review 86, 2 (2021), pp. 187-214.

9 Edward Palmer Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, Gollancz, 1963).

10 Carl Griffin, ‘“Cut Down by Some Cowardly Miscreants”: Plant Maiming, or the Malicious Cutting of Flora, as an Act of Protest in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Rural England’, Rural History, 19, 1 (2008), p. 30.

11 The classic account of this derision given voice in academic work is: Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (New York: MacMillan, 1895, first published in French in 1895).

12 Hadrian Cook and Tom Williamson (eds.), Water Management in the English Landscape: Field, Marsh and Meadow (Keele, Keele University Press, 1999); Piet Van Cruyningen, ‘Dutch Investors and the Drainage of Hatfield Chase, 1626 to 1656’, Agricultural History Review 64, 1 (2016), pp. 17-37.

13 Randall, Riotous Assemblies, p.132.

14 Humphrey Jennings, Pandemonium: the Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, 1660-1885 (London, Free Press, 1986).

15 Paul Glennie and Nigel Thrift, Shaping the Day: A History of Timekeeping in England and Wales, 1300-1800 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 94.

16 On this dynamic see: Roger Wells, ‘Counting Riots in Eighteenth-Century England’, Labour History Review 37 (1978), pp. 68-72.

17 Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, p. 62.

18 Randall, Before the Luddites, pp. 41-4.

19 Joel Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1992).

20 Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 30 November 1816. For an elaboration of this point see: Berg, The Machinery Question, pp. 100-102.

21 Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 30 July 1831

22 Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, passim.

23 Randall, Riotous Assemblies, p. 131.

24 Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, pp. 58-9, citing Darvall, Popular Disturbances, ch. 8.

25 Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, p. 58; Thomis, The Luddites; Randall, Riotous Assemblies, ch. 11.

26 David Walsh, ‘The Lancashire “Rising” of 1826’ Albion 26, 4 (1996), pp. 601-621.

27 Charles Tilly Regimes and Repertoires (Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press, 2010).

28 Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1968), pp. 7-8

29 James Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT, Yale University Press, 1985).

30 George Rudé, ‘Review of Malcolm Thomis’s The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England’, Journal of Social History 5, 2 (1971), p .261.

31 For instance, in East Kent where Swing was first manifest. See: Carl Griffin, ‘“There Was No Law To Punish That Offence”: Re-assessing ‘Captain Swing’: Rural Luddism and Rebellion in East Kent, 1830-31’, Southern History 22 (2000), pp. 131-163.

32 Robert Shoemaker, ‘The London Mob in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Journal of British Studies 26 (1987), pp. 273-304; Norah Carlin, ‘Liberty and Fraternities in the English Revolution: The Politics of London Artisans' Protests, 1635–1659’, International Review of Social History 39, 2 (1994), pp. 223-254; Philip Loft, ‘Petitioning and Petitioners to the Westminster Parliament, 1660–1788’, Parliamentary History 38, 3 (2019), pp. 342-361.

33 Katrina Navickas, Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798-1815 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 192.

34 Berg, The Machinery Question, esp. pp. 15-6.

35 Randall, Before the Luddites, passim; Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism’, p. 365.

36 John Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth-Century Industry (London, Croom Helm, 1981), p. 116.

37 William Felkin, History of the Machine-wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufacture (Newton Abbot, David and Charles, 1967, first published 1867, London), chs. 4 and 5.

38 Felkin, History, pp. 115-17; John Rule, ‘General introduction’ to John Hammond and Barbara Hammond, The Skilled Labourer, new edition, edited and introduced by John Rule, (London, Longman, 1979), pp. viii-xxxiii.

39 Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism’, pp. 370-1

40 House of Commons Journal, xviii (1717), 715, cited in Randall, Riotous Assemblies, p. 138.

41 Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, p. 59.

42 Randall, Riotous Assemblies, pp. 139-41; Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, p. 59.

43 Randall, Riotous Assemblies, pp. 246-8.

44 John Styles, ‘The Rise and Fall of the Spinning Jenny: Domestic Mechanisation in Eighteenth-Century Cotton Spinning’, Textile History 51, 2 (2020), pp.220-221; Randall, Riotous Assemblies 240-5.

45 Adrian Randall, ‘The Shearmen and the Wiltshire Outrages of 1802: Trade Unionism and Industrial Violence’, Social History 7, 3 (1982), pp. 283-304; Randall, Riotous Assembles, 250-9.

46 Hobsbawm, Labouring Men, pp. 7-8. On protest and the moral economy see: Peter Jones, ‘Swing, Speenhamland and Rural Social Relations: the ‘Moral Economy’ of the English Crowd in the Nineteenth Century’, Social History 32, 3 (2007), pp. 271-290; Andrew Charlesworth and Adrian Randall (eds.) Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority (London, Macmillan, 2000) p. 1; Edward Palmer Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 50, 1 (1971), pp. 76-136.

47 Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism’, p.367. The earlier claim comes from – and the previous three paragraphs are based on: Carl Griffin, Protest, Politics and Work in Rural England, 1700-1850 (Farnham, Palgrave, 2014), pp. 120-2.

48 Binfield, The Writings of the Luddites, passim.

49 Hammond and Hammond, The Skilled Labourer, pp. 46-70; Randall, Riotous Assemblies, pp. 260-3.

50 On which see: David Hay, ‘The State and the Market in 1800: Lord Kenyon and Mr Waddington’, Past and Present 162, 1 (1999), pp. 101-162.

51 Randall, Riotous Assemblies, pp. 263-70.

52 Ibid., p. 273.

53 Navickas, ‘Luddism’, p. 60.

54 Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism’, p. 368.

55 Carl Griffin, ‘The Culture of Combination: Solidarities and Collective Action Before Tolpuddle’, Historical Journal 58, 2 (2015), pp.443-480; Carl Griffin, ‘Rural Workers and the Role of the Rural in Eighteenth-Century English Food Rioting’, Historical Journal 64, 5 (2021), pp. 1230-1256.

56 Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism’, p. 369-71, 395; Randall, Riotous Assemblies, ch. 11.

57 Thomis, The Luddites, pp. 87, 177; Randall, Riotous Assemblies, pp. 277-279.

58 Ibid., pp. 278-279; Binfield, Writings of the Luddites, pp. 168-9.

59 Randall, Riotous Assemblies, pp. 271-283.

60 Thomis, The Luddites, esp. pp. 105-6, 183-4; pp. Randall, Riotous Assemblies, 284-288.

61 Navickas, Loyalism and Radicalism, 193.

62 Binfield, Writings of the Luddites, 169; Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p.51. On the ways in which radical politics informed and infused Lancashire and Yorkshire Luddism see: Dinwiddy, ‘Luddism and Politics’.

63 Randall, Riotous Assemblies, p. 290.

64 Navickas, Loyalism and Radicalism, pp. 195-6.

65 Navickas, ‘Luddism’, p. 65.

66 Navickas, ‘The search for “General Ludd”’, p. 284.

67 Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 594. Also see: Peter Linebaugh, Ned Ludd & Queen Mab: Machine-Breaking, Romanticism, and the Several Commons of 1811-12 (Oakland, CA, Retort, 2012), p. 13.

68 Navickas, ‘Luddism’, pp. 64-7.

69 Binfield, Writings of the Luddites, pp. 153-166; Thomis, The Luddites, p. 182.

70 Norman Gash, ‘After Waterloo: British Society and the Legacy of the Napoleonic Wars’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 28 (1978), p. 147.

71 Peacock, Bread or Blood, pp. 27-9.

72 See Andrew Charlesworth, A Comparative Study of the Spread of the Agricultural Disturbances of 1816, 1822 and 1830 (Liverpool, Department of Geography, 1982).

73 Peacock, Bread or Blood, pp. 71-5.

74 The National Archives [herein TNA], Home Office [HO], 42/ 149, fos 1-2.

75 Bury and Norwich Post, 8 May 1816; TNA, HO 42, 150, fos 8-11.

76 Peacock, Bread or Blood, pp. 75-7. Stoke-by-Clare saw renewed machine-breaking on 22 May: Morning Chronicle, 25 May 1816; Andrew Charlesworth An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain, 1548-1900 (London, Croom Helm, 1983), p. 146.

77 Peacock, Bread or Blood, p. 77.

78 Charlesworth, Atlas of Rural Protest, p. 148.

79 Bury and Norwich Post, 27 May 1816; Philip Warren (ed.), Report of the Trials for Rioting at Ely and Littleport (Wilburton, self-published, 1997), pp. 1-42.

80 Charlesworth, Atlas of Rural Protest, 146; Peacock, Bread or Blood, 116-9.

81 Charlesworth, Atlas of Rural Protest, 146; Peacock, Bread or Blood, 116-9.

82 Charlesworth, Atlas of Rural Protest, p. 147.

83 For examples see Paul Muskett, ‘The East Anglian Agrarian Riots of 1822’, Agricultural History Review 32, 1 (1984), p. 3.

84 For an exploration of these dynamics see Griffin, Protest, Politics and Work, ch. 1

85 Neil Fox, ‘The Spread of the Threshing Machine in Central Southern England’, Agricultural History Review 26, 1 (1978), pp. 26-8.

86 Ipswich Journal, 2 February 1822; Muskett, ‘East Anglian Agrarian Riots’, p. 5.

87 Ibid., 5; Bury and Norwich Post, 20 February 1822.

88 The Ipswich Journal, 9 and 16 March; Morning Chronicle, 9 March; Bury and Norwich Post, 20 March 1822; Muskett, Paul, Riotous Assemblies: Popular Disturbances in East Anglia 1740-1822 (Ely, Earo, 1984), pp. 61-70.

89 Muskett, ‘East Anglian Agrarian Riots’, pp. 6-7; Muskett, Riotous Assemblies, pp. 66-8.

90 Ibid., 68; Charlesworth, Atlas of Rural Protest, p. 148.

91 Maidstone Journal, 12 April 1822.

92 Griffin, The Rural War, pp. 67-8.

93 Walsh, ‘Lancashire “Rising”’, pp.601-21.

94 quoted in John Archer, By a Flash and a Scare: Incendiarism, Animal Maiming, and Poaching in East Anglia, 1815-1870 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 88.

95 Kent and Essex Mercury, 13 and 27 January, 3, 17 and 24 February, 3, 10, 17 and 24 March 1829.

96 Archer, By a Flash and a Scare, pp. 87-8.

97 Devizies and Wiltshire Gazette, 5 November 1829.

98 Griffin, The Rural War, pp. 87-90; Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, p. 85; Carl Griffin, ‘Policy on the Hoof’: Sir Robert Peel, Sir Edward Knatchbull and the Trial of the Elham Machine Breakers, 1830’, Rural History 15, 2 (2004), pp. 131-5.

99 Kentish Gazette, 8 and 15 October; Brighton Herald, 16 October 1830.

100 Griffin, ‘Policy on the Hoof’, pp. 136-7.

101 Griffin, The Rural War, pp. 91, 92-3.

102 Maidstone Journal, 12 October 1830.

103 Centre for Kentish Studies, Q/SBw/124/7; TNA, HO 52/8, fos 365-6 and 361-2.

104 Roger Wells, ‘Mr William Cobbett, Captain Swing, and King William IV’, Agricultural History Review 45, 1 (1997), pp. 35-6, 39; Griffin, The Rural War, pp. 95-7.

105 Griffin, The Rural War, pp. 97-103.

106 TNA, HO 52/8, fos 621-2; West Sussex County Record Office, QR/Q 51.

107 For the role of fires before the outbreak of collective actions see: Carl Griffin, ‘“The Mystery of the Fires”: ‘Captain Swing’ as Incendiarist’, Southern History 32 (2010), pp. 31-4.

108 Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, pp. 122-123 and appendix 3.

109 Ian Dyck, William Cobbett and Rural Popular Culture (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 171-7; D. Kent, Popular Radicalism and the Swing Riots in Central Hampshire, Hampshire papers, no. 11 (Winchester, Hampshire County Record Office, 1997), pp. 3-9, 13-14.

110 Peter Jones, ‘Finding Captain Swing: Protest, Parish Relations, and the State of the Public Mind in 1830’, International Review of Social History 54, 3 (2009), pp. 429-458, 443-54; Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, pp. 135-40.

111 Adrian Randall, and Edwina Newman, ‘Protest, Proletarians and Paternalists: Social Conflict in Rural Wiltshire, 1830–1850’, Rural History 6, 2 (1995), pp. 209-213.

112 Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, pp. 304-5.

113 Griffin, The Rural War, pp. 104-5, 108-10 and 113-14.

114 Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, pp. 253-6.

115 Kevin Bawn, ‘Social Protest, Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Dorset, 1790–1838’ (PhD dissertation, University of Reading, 1984), ch.4; Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, pp. 129-30, 338-9, 344-5.

116 Ibid., 130-1; Western Flying Post, 6 December 1830; J. Maynard, ‘The Agricultural Labourer in Worcestershire: Responses to Economic Change and Social Dislocation 1790-1841’ (PhD dissertation, Coventry University, 2006), pp. 184, 191-3, 198. On the paucity of protest but depth of paranoia in the West Midlands see: Eric Richards, ‘“Captain Swing” in the West Midlands’, International Review of Social History 19, 1 (1974), pp. 86-99.

117 Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, pp. 128-9, 140, 141.

118 Ibid., 143-50; The Standard, 1 December 1830. Also see Gillian Chambers, Buckinghamshire Machine Breakers‬: the Story of the 1830 Riots‬ (Lutterworth, self-published, 1991).

119 Archer, By a Flash and a Scare, pp. 89-95; Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, pp. 152-62; Rose Wallis, ‘Prosecution, Precedence and Official Memory: Judicial Responses and Perceptions of Swing in Norfolk’, in Carl Griffin and Briony McDonagh (eds.), Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500: Memory, Materiality and the Landscape (Farnham, Palgrave, 2018), pp.159-185.

Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, pp. 146-7.

120 Ibid., 146-7.

121 Tom Richardson, ‘The Agricultural Labourers’ Standard of Living in Lincolnshire, 1790-1840: Social Protest and Public Order’, Agricultural History Review 41, 1 (1993), pp. 10-14; Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, pp. 135-6, appendix 1.

122 Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, appendix 3; Katrina Navickas, ‘Captain Swing in the North: the Carlisle Riots of 1830’, History Workshop Journal 71 (2011), pp. 15, 17.

123 Jones, ‘Finding Captain Swing’, p. 457.

124 West Sussex County Record Office, QR/W/758 fos 280, 269, 270, 271 and 272.

125 Jeremy BurchardtThe Allotment Movement in England, 1793-1873 (Woodbridge, Boydell & Brewer, 2002), pp. esp. 51-5.

126 Griffin, The Rural War, p. 319.

127 Binfield, Writings of the Luddites.

128 Griffin, The Rural War, p. 218.

129 TNA, HO 52/10, fo. 373.

130 Hobsbawm and Rudé, Captain Swing, p. 281.

131 Griffin, The Rural War, ch. 11.

132 Young, ‘Gleanings’, p.168.

133 Marie Rowlands, Masters and Men: in the West Midland Metalware Trades Before the Industrial Revolution (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1975).

134 Maynard, The Agricultural Labourer, p. 193.

135 David Jones, Before Rebecca: Popular Protests in Wales, 1793-1835 (Allen Lane, London, 1973), pp. 83, 86.

136 On Rebecca see: Lowri Ann Rees, ‘Paternalism and Rural Protest: the Rebecca Riots and the Landed Interest of South-West Wales. Agricultural History Review 59, 1 (2011), pp. 36-60; Rhian Jones, Petticoat Heroes: Gender, Culture and Popular Protest in the Rebecca Riots (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2015),

137 Chris Whatley, The Industrial Revolution in Scotland (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 76, 87; Ian Donnachie, ‘“The Darker Side”: a Speculative Survey of Scottish Crime During the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Scottish Economic and Social History 15, 1 (1995), p. 16.

138 Gordon Pentland, The Spirit of the Union: Popular Politics in Scotland (London, Routledge, 2015), pp. 12-13; Alexander Richmond, Narrative of the Conditions of the Manufacturing Population; and the Proceedings of Government which Led to the State Trials in Scotland (London, Miller, 1824), esp. 10-34.

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References

Electronic reference

Carl J. Griffin, “Luddism, Machine-Breaking and the Swing Riots”Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique [Online], XXX-1 | 2025, Online since 13 January 2025, connection on 20 April 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/12984; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/133dc

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About the author

Carl J. Griffin

Carl Griffin is professor of Historical Geography at the University of Sussex and visiting professor in the Centre for History at the University of the Highlands and Islands. A scholar of our rural pasts, the main foci of his work are protest and popular politics, agrarian change, and human–environment relations in the 18th and early 19th centuries. His latest books include Remembering Protest in Britain Since 1500: Memory, Materiality and the Landscape (with Briony McDonagh, 2018), Moral Ecologies: Histories of Conservation, Dispossession and Resistance (with Roy Jones and Iain Robertson, 2019), and The Politics of Hunger: Protest, Poverty and Policy in England, c. 1750–c. 1840 (2020). He is currently working on two Leverhulme Trust funded projects, one writing a new history of enclosure “from the bottom up”, and another on the topologies of protest in the Scottish Highlands.

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Copyright

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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