As Carl Griffin reasonably points out, it is perhaps time for another synthetic book about the Captain Swing riots, given the passage of forty-two years since the publication of Captain Swing, Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé's magisterial social history of rural unrest in 1830. Interest in the riots spiked after 2006, benefiting particularly from a Family and Community History Research Society genealogical crowdsourcing project that identified as many as 3,300 examples of localized rural protest between 1830 and 1832. Drawing on newer studies and local records that have been made available since 1969, The Rural War adds to the historiography of the Swing riots through its focus on the geographical transmission of ideas and discontent, the role of gender in the riots, and the political radicalization of common rural laborers.
Griffin places part of the context for the Swing unrest in the pre-Napoleonic practice of poor relief. While few parishes actually adopted the famous “Speenhamland system,” the Southeastern parishes Griffin studied had methods of supplementing laborers' wages in hard times, at rates that were negotiated among farmers, laborers, and magistrates. Although it was well intentioned, this system of supplemental payments subsidized farmers to pay their workers low wages and provided no incentive for workers to avoid early marriage. In the wake of demobilization from the Napoleonic Wars and several bad harvests, the tenuously balanced system disintegrated, and workers responded with protests.
As Griffin shows, Swing rioters employed a vocabulary of protest activities already in use. Before 1828, all of the elements of the Swing riots occurred intermittently in the Southeast: threshing-machine-breaking, fires, and threats against the bureaucrats in charge of distributing poor relief. As poverty and distress deepened in 1828 and 1829, the incidence of protest increased, creating the epistemic problem of delineating a movement from a number of often very divergent episodes that, unlike (for example) Chartism, had neither a newspaper nor a national leader. Although in some localities rioters graffitied “Swing” on walls or sent anonymous notes to their future victims, other acts lacked even the imaginary Captain Swing's imprimatur. The problem of defining a movement is exacerbated, as Griffin shows, by “instant histories” of the Swing riots, published in 1831, which, for political reasons, attempted to reify disparate events into a continuously threatening prospect of rural unrest.
Radical artisans led the Swing movement. Men like Maidstone shoemakers Robert Price and John Adams addressed the crowds with Cobbetian analyses and political sashes, foreshadowing the arguments of local political unions. But as Griffin valuably argues, farm laborers were also radicalized by the politics of everyday experience. Their opposition to threshing machines, tithes, and particularly abhorrent assistant overseers who ground the poor and their support of fair, consistent farm wages and parish-based employment as a kind of moral right seem to have been generated from the ground up. Griffin shows that protests were somewhat effective, with violence or the threat of violence as a useful tool that influenced vestries to hire the unemployed or to discuss the possibility of allotments of land for the poor. In the best-case scenario, groups of magistrates temporarily imposed wage scales on farmers. Finally, Griffin demonstrates that, despite the prosecution of individual participants in the Swing riots, with some transported and others condemned to death, incendiary activity and machine-breaking reports continued to trickle in between 1831 and 1833. He contends that, far from having had their wills broken by government prosecutions of Swing laborers, former rioters and farmers and vestrymen settled into an uneasy standoff, with the threat of incendiarism on the one side and transportation on the other, as the weapons of mutually assured destruction.
Griffin's larger analytical points are occasionally drowned out by the sheer copiousness of the evidence, as he relates many, often similar, episodes of protest, in chronological order. Sometimes Griffin's method of weighing the evidence is unclear or contradictory. Given that stored crops can spontaneously combust, if a landowner was accused but not convicted of setting his own crops on fire, should we infer, as Griffin does, that a laborer lit the fire, or should we conclude that there is not enough evidence to count this incident as part of the Swing protest? Can we necessarily read an ideological position from the decision by a group of farm laborers to watch a farm fire burn rather than help to extinguish it?
Griffin's reading of the gender politics of Swing is also slightly tendentious. For example, he asserts that although only 22 of the 1,976 people arrested for Swing-related activities were women, a huge number of other women must have participated, particularly in incendiarism. Why must they have? If women were discouraged by their families from participating in Swing riots, is that not an equally interesting bit of data? Finally, although Griffin has indeed restored some sense of agency to participants in the Swing riots by illustrating the logic behind their actions, it is hard to agree with his contention that the Swing riots were not a failure on their own terms, because they were used as a rationale to enact both the Rural Constabulary Act and the New Poor Law over the next decade. Despite these shortcomings, which prevent it from being the last word on the Captain Swing riots, The Rural War is a valuable addition to a growing body of literature on rural protest.
