Agricultural History Review, Volume 54 Part 2 (2006), p. 352

The Swing rising of 1830, a series of locally based riots rather than a nationally co-ordinated rising is famous for its scale and for the involvement of the agricultural labourers, a group not normally known for its political mobilization. During this brief but dramatic moment, which coincided with a year of wider political crisis, labourers and craftsmen protested over agricultural machinery, low wages, high rents, tithes, poor relief, and Irish labour, as their varied forms of protest – arson, machine-breaking, threatening letters, impressment, intimidation, coercion, the use of mobile bands of activists – were replicated nationally in neighbourhood after neighbourhood. The Swing protestors broke the machinery that they blamed for causing winter unemployment; some 400 machines were destroyed. Historiographically, of course, the rising is indelibly associated with George Rudé and Eric Hobsbawm’s classic, Captain Swing (1969 and 1973), one of the most influential history books of the 1970s.

The rising has many facets. One of the most interesting aspects of 1830 is the evidence of fleeting successes. Farmers did surrender their machinery for destruction or stopped using it. Wages were in fact raised and rents lowered – until the inevitable repression, for one should not forget that the riots resulted in 19 executions and nearly 500 transportations. Swing also allows the historian to examine the actual tactics employed by the supposedly politically inarticulate, the notable range of forms of mobilization and negotiation: the menacing (and contagious) hill-top fires, the delegates who met and parleyed with magistrates and farmers, the bands of labourers who went from farm to farm, pressing for an increase in wages or smashing machines, the emergent local leaders, self proclaimed military men such as the various ‘Captains’ and the man known ominously as the ‘Counsellor’.

Michael Holland’s Swing unmasked is clearly a labour of love. Produced by a team of local researchers, members of the Family and Community Historical Research Society, it consists of an introductory chapter, core chapters on Swing in Surrey, Shropshire, Essex, Derbyshire, and Berkshire, and then some more peripheral studies on associated (and probably not associated) topics. The strengths of this sort of project are obvious: local knowledge, exhaustive research, and an infectious enthusiasm. The weaknesses, however, are no less apparent: repetition, the inclusion of unnecessary background material, the threat of mere antiquarianism, a certain organizational unruliness (for instance, a chapter on the cholera riots of 1832), a plethora of appendices, and a lack of awareness of some key academic publications on their very subject matter. Indeed the gaps in secondary reading are rather worrying, for one of the claimed contributions of the volume – to demonstrate Rudé and Hobsbawm’s underestimation of the sheer scale of Swing – has already been anticipated by Griffin in an article in Southern History (2000), and the team’s ‘new work’ on the transportation of prisoners does not cite the fascinating study by D.Kent and N.Townsend, The convicts of the Eleanor: protest in rural England, new lives in Australia (2002), which traced a cohort of Berkshire, Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Dorset rioters to their transportation and experiences in Australia, and which is useful for this and many other aspects of Swing.

These criticisms aside, collectively the essays in Swing unmasked provide a wealth of detail about the forms of protest employed by the Swing protestors – several of the contributors deal with threatening letters, machine breaking, and arson. Their research certainly confirms earlier demonstrations that Hobsbawm and Rudé underestimated the extent of this rural protest, even if the collective effort is somewhat short on analysis. Those interested in the last major rising of the agricultural labourers should not yet discard their copies of Captain Swing.