Captain Swing
Captain Swing is an enjoyable collaboration
between E. J. Hobsbawm and George
Rude that depicts the social history of
the English agricultural
wage-laborers’ uprising of 1830. According to
Hobsbawm and Rude,
historiography of the laborers’ rising of 1830 is
negligible. Most of what is
known by the general public comes from J. L. And
Barbara Hammond’s The Village
Laborer published in 1911. They consider
this an exceedingly valuable work, but
state that the Hammonds oversimplified
events in order to dramatize them. They
placed too much emphasis on
enclosure, oversimplified both the nature and
prevalence of the "Speenhamland
System" of poor relief, and neglected the
range and scope of the uprising.
Hobsbawm and Rude do not claim to present any
new data, and believe that the
Hammonds will still be read for enjoyment, but
believe that by asking
different questions, they can shed new light on the
social history of the
movement. Therefore, this book tries to "describe and
analyze the most
impressive episode in the English farm-labourers’ long and
doomed struggle
against poverty and degradation." In the nineteenth century,
England had
no peasantry to speak of in the sense that other nations did. Where
families
who owned or occupied their own small plot of land and cultivated
it
themselves, apart from work on their lord’s farms, farmed most of
Europe,
England’s "peasants" were agricultural wage-laborers. As such,
both tithes
and taxes hit them hard. Lords and farmers were also against
tithes and taxes
and tolerated or even welcomed some outcry against them.
Most county leaders in
1830 agreed with the laborers, but the government
in London did not. Further,
enclosure eliminated the common lands whose use
had helped the very poor to
live. As a result, the relationship between
farmers and laborers changed to a"purely market relationship between employer
and proletarian." At the same
time, work once done by annual servants was
given over to wage labor. Farmers
were driven by income rather than social
concerns and it was cheaper to pay a
small wage for all positions and let
laborers pay their own living out of it
than to provide them room and board,
however minimal. The laborers were not
revolutionary, however. They did not
wish to overturn the traditional social
order. They merely demanded the
restoration of their meager rights within it.
Unfortunately, they only
had five forms of protest or self-defense available to
them. They
occasionally protested against wage cuts or demanded higher wages,
grasped
ever tighter to parish poor relief, resorted to crimes such as stealing
food
or poaching game, performed acts of terrorism such as incendiarism,
and
destroyed the machines which created or intensified unemployment.
Threshing
machines took away the standard winter labor, creating high
unemployment at the
worst time of year and generating an almost universal
hatred of them among
laborers. Of these, the most ambitious was the
destruction of threshing
machines, but poaching was most indicative of
increasing social tensions in the
villages. Theoretically, political devices
such as petitions and delegations
were available tools as well, but
agricultural wage-laborers had neither
political rights nor the experience to
put them to use. Local correspondents
almost universally attributed the riots
of 1830 to unemployment and harsh
treatment of laborers. The winter of 1829
had been particularly hard. The
unemployed, tired and hungry, knew that they
would not likely survive another
winter as hard. Aware of the French
revolution and Britain’s own upcoming
elections, which offered the promise of
a Whig overthrow of the Tories, English
laborers rebelled against the cause
of their hunger. Laborers destroyed their
first threshing machine on the
night of August 28, 1830. This became the
characteristic feature of their
uprising of 1830, although it was only one of
many. Other forms of revolt
included arson, threatening letters (signed by
"Captain Swing"),
inflammatory handbills and posters, robbery, wages
meetings, and assaults on
overseers, parsons, and landlords. Spreading from
county to county, the
universal demand was for a living wage and an end to rural
unemployment. In
spite of the severe living conditions suffered by the laborers
and their
informal support from many of those against whom they rebelled, the
rioters
were punished severely. Of 1,976 prisoners, 252 were sentenced to death
and
nineteen were actually executed. 505 were sentenced to transportation
to
penal colonies and 644 were imprisoned. Less than half (800) were
acquitted or
bound over. The defeat of the 1830 rising did not end the
laborers' efforts,
however. While some might claim that the failure of the
revolt plunged the
laboring class into dumb acquiescence, Hobsbawm and Rude
argue that it woke the
farmers and nobility to the inner strength of their
hitherto silent workers.
Hobsbawm and Rude, in this collaborative effort,
made use of an enormous amount
of primary and secondary source material yet
managed to produce an eminently
readable work which looks at the rebellion
from a social, rather than purely
economic, point of view. I enjoyed reading
this book and would recommend it to
anyone who desires and in-depth
description of the social causes of a rebellion
by men who many believed did
not have it in them to rebel.
Bibliography
Hobsbawm, E. J. and
Rude, George (1975) Captain Swing. New York, NY: W.W.
Norton and Company,
Inc., 384 pp.