Swing Riots Research Paper

Historians have established that the ‘Swing Riots’ comprised 1500 disturbances between 1 June 1830 and 3 September 1831, and were characterised by incendiarism and the smashing of threshing machines by agricultural labourers. Macdonald asserted that the threshing machine was a scapegoat for rural resentment of their economic position. The potential threat to their livelihoods was characterised by the threshing machine, a semiotic representation of the declining fortunes of the labour force. This, as a motivation, rings true; this rural unrest was motivated primarily by the labourers ‘degrading dependence on the caprice of employers’ following changes to agricultural and paternalistic practice in the southern and eastern coastal counties during …show more content…
Furthermore, endemic underemployment ensued from the periodicity of wheat farming; harvest and hay time were the only times where work was sufficiently available. In order to maintain the levels of workforce necessary for seasonal work, the assistance of the Poor Law was a demoralising and insufficient provision forced on the labourers by necessity, especially considering the repeal of earlier protectionist and paternalist laws – the Act of Apprentices was the last to be repealed in 1813. was Radical ideologies and their Owenist notions of economic self-determinism and independence found an easy foothold in this economic context. Mingay argued that agricultural radicalism was motivated, in part, due to the prevalence of ‘grassroots radicals’ in rural villages, who displayed considerable continuity in this period, as well as influential radicals like Cobbett. It was maintained by some contemporaries that the Sussex disturbances had been due to ‘lecture lately given here by a man named Cobbett.’ Working class radicalism, by calling on what Thompson and Hobsbawm established as public memory of a perceived paternalistic moral economy of the previous century, and offering alternatives through reform and Owenism, found its