Agricultural History Review, Volume 61 Part 1 (2013), p. 175

Our understandings of the Swing protests of 1830–31 have been significantly augmented and enriched in recent years and the interpretative framework established by Hobsbawm and Rudé’s seminal Captain Swing in 1969 has been considerably challenged and revised, although perhaps still not completely eclipsed. Carl Griffin’s The rural war is the latest and most voluminous contribution to an exhilarating wave of scholarship associated with the likes of Peter Jones, Katrina Navickas and Steve Poole and possibly also the most ambitious. Like others before him, while eager to challenge and escape the paradigm established by Hobsbawm and Rudé, Griffin explicitly and implicitly acknowledges Captain Swing as a benchmark. Indeed the declared ambition of The rural war is to supersede Captain Swing as the standard work on the disturbances.

As the author himself acknowledges however, in one respect at least, this ambition is unfulfilled. The rural war is a study of Swing in what Griffin describes as its ‘heartlands’, focusing on the southern counties of Kent, Sussex, Surrey and Hampshire, with some references to Berkshire and Dorset. Events in those counties of the South West, East Anglia, the Midlands and the North that were also witness to the disturbances are left aside. Indeed Griffin argues that any attempt at a fresh national study of Swing would inevitably founder on the movement’s varied local contexts. This seems a curious contention in an account which examines Swing across an extensive geographic area itself, but leaving this aside The rural war is a very impressive study on its own terms and provides yet more fresh perspectives on the last great uncoordinated rising of the rural poor.

Griffin’s interpretation is expounded in eleven chapters, themselves organized within the four constituent parts of The rural war. Focusing in turn on Swing’s context, diffusion, politics and the responses to it, the author develops an interpretation which ultimately presents the protests, in terms of mobilization, as the result of the effective fusion of parish-level grievances and radical politics. This interpretation is not entirely new, but these themes are key to one of Griffin’s most impressive achievements which is to reconstruct a mass of individual protest events in detail, particularly those in Swing’s area of genesis, and to demonstrate how and by what mechanisms the disturbances ultimately spread beyond East Kent. Earlier significant outbreaks of machine-breaking, notably in parts of Norfolk and Suffolk in 1822 and specifically in mid-Suffolk in late 1829, where mobilizations far larger in scale than those in and around Elham in August 1830 were recorded, notably failed to acquire momentum beyond a relatively confined area. The role that pre-existing combinations and associations within rural communities, as well as newly emergent and sometimes fluid solidarities, played in propelling the protests is well documented by Griffin. Indeed, one of the most striking conclusions of The rural war is that without such groups and specifically key actors within them such as the Maidstone radicals Robert Price and John Adams, there would have been no Swing outside the Kentish Weald, in fact no Swing as we understand it.

Of course Swing was not just characterized by machine-breaking, albeit that Griffin demonstrates that instances of such were even more numerous than earlier accounts have allowed. Supported by an impressive command of the extant south-eastern newspaper archive the author is able to highlight the direct link that existed in some locales between covert incendiarism and overt collective protest. The potential complexity of the connections between arson and machine-breaking is not understated, nor local or temporal variations in the tactics of protesters, but Griffin succeeds in reaffirming that, in parts of East Kent and Hampshire in particular, arson was often integral rather than marginal to the movement.

Griffin’s treatment of incendiarism builds on his earlier published article on this topic. Previously published material on the aftermath of the protests is also incorporated into The Rural War, but much else is new and, in the context of Swing, innovative. Perhaps one of the book’s most important contributions is to re-examine the involvement of women in Swing and to highlight the gender politics of the movement. Certainly Griffin demonstrates that women sometimes had a greater involvement or influence than is traditionally understood. More significantly, ideas akin to those pioneered by Anna Clark are very effectively applied within the context of Swing to argue that the movement was strongly informed by the imperiled masculinity of male farm labourers increasingly beholden to the parish vestry and struggling to maintain position and status as family breadwinners. Nonetheless, other arguments within The rural war’s treatment of gender politics appear more speculative and less substantiated. The contention that protesters viewed threshing machines as ‘proxies for female bodies’ and that machine-breaking could represent a transference of sexual violence seems based largely on a single example of gendered language used toward a machine and a number of broadly concurrent, but unrelated cases of sexual violence against women in the locale in question. Interesting and provocative ideas perhaps, but ones which require slightly more reflection, not least in terms of whether the evidence deployed is sufficient to corroborate the claims made.

Criticisms aside, and although genuinely few they might also encompass proof-reading, The rural war is an important and at times original contribution to the resurgent historiography of Swing and deserves to be widely read. Griffin’s meticulous research brings us closer than ever to the conditions, relationships and events that underpinned the movement in those parishes of south-eastern England in which it began.