Swing Riots

The Swing Riots are a widespread uprising by the rural workers of the arable south and east of England in 1830.

The rioters, largely impoverished and landless agricultural laborers, seek to halt reductions in their wages and to put a stop to the introduction of the new threshing machines that threatened their livelihoods.

They reinforce their demands not only with riots in which objects of perceived oppression such as workhouses and tithe barns are destroyed, but also with more surreptitious rick-burning, the destruction of threshing machines and cattle-maiming.

The movement parallels its urban-industrial counterpart, the Luddite disturbances.

The first threshing machine is destroyed on Saturday night, August 28th, 1830.

By the third week of October, over one hundred threshing machines have been destroyed in East Kent.Mystery surrounds the nominal leader of the riots, Captain Swing, whose name is appended to several of the threatening letters sent to farmers, magistrates, parsons and others.

The "Swing letters" are first mentioned by The Times on the 21 October.

Captain Swing has never been identified, and many people believe that he never existed, having been created by the workers as a fictional figurehead who could function as a safe target for their opponents.The Swing Riots have many immediate causes, but are overwhelmingly the result of the progressive impoverishment and dispossession of the English agricultural workforce over the previous fifty years, leading up to 1830.

The anger of the rioters is directed at three targets that are seen as the prime source of their misery: The Tithe system, the Poor law guardians, and the rich tenant farmers who have been progressively lowering wages while introducing agricultural machinery.

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