Captain Swing Riots’ in Berkshire and Adjoining Districts*

Tumult, Riot and Disturbance: Perspectives on Central and Local Government’s roles in the Management of the 1830 ‘Captain Swing Riots’ in Berkshire and adjoining districts* Margaret Escott I: Introduction Forty years ago, Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude delved into the lives and living conditions of the labourers and artisans of southern and eastern England who became followers of Captain Swing and analysed their motives for doing so. They suggested explanations for the rioters’ conduct, the authorities’ eventually harsh response and the geographic diffusion, timing and distribution of the disturbances; and prefaced their account with a working analysis of regional farming, poverty and poor— relief practices that highlighted the importance of parish politics, long before David Eastwood complained that most ‘historians of Hanoverian England had not fully appreciated how the development of the parish as a political unit was predicated on the parallel development of a distinctive parochial political culture'.1 Later research has built on and occasionally questioned Hobsbawm and Rudé’s findings.Z For example, * My thanks go to the staff of Berkshire Record Office, The National Archives, the Museum of English Rural Life and the National Library of Wales who made this study possible. I would also like to thank Elmar Torenga for drafting the map. 1 E. Hobsbawm and G. Rude, Captain Swing (London, 1988); D. Eastwood, Government and Community in the English Provinces, 1700—1870 (Basingstoke, 1997), preface. 2 For example, C]. Griffin, ‘Swing, Swing Redividus or Something after Swing.7 On the Death Throes of a Movement, December 1830 7 December 1833', International Review of Social History 54 (2009), 459#97; S. Poole, “‘A Lasting and Salutary Warning": Incendiarism, Rural Order and England’s Last Scene of Crime Execution‘, Rural History 19(2008),163—77. 140 Margaret Escott we now know that certain parliamentary papers of the early 1830s, including the report and evidence of the 183 3 select committee on beer sales, and responses to the rural queries (published in 1834) which inquired about the riots and poor law administration, were self— or pre— selected.3 Allowing for important regional variations, it is also possible to detach the endemic social crimes of arson, poaching, plant and animal maiming, from the milieu of collective rural protest and machine breaking associated with ‘Swing’fl Captain Swing dwells on tensions within parishes and differentiated between the roles played in the disturbances by craftsmen, who were assumed to be literate and politically aware, and labourers, who were not — a distinction pressed throughout the trials by the reporters of the Times which deemed the former culpable and the latter for the most part vulnerable or unfortunate} Captain Swing skims over or understates the pressure that the disturbances and precipitate prosecutions by special commission placed on government departments and individuals at all levels of county government - from parish constables to magistrates and their clerks, gaolers, clerks of the peace, county sheriffs, lords lieutenant and the yeomanry. In Berkshire the latter had in any case been disbanded in 1828 when, implementing the late Goderich administration’s decision, the duke of Wellington’s ministry withdrew government funding from small county corps. This left hurriedly improvised peace’keeping forces, often lacking legal sanction and suitable weapons, to fill the gap during the 1830 Swing riots.6 As 3 Parliamentary Papers [hereafter PP] (1833), XV(i), 17260; (1834), XXX, App. B1; M. Blaug, ‘The Poor Law report regexamined’, Journal of Economic History 24 (1964), 229—45. See also on this point, M.A. Lyle, ‘Regionality in the late Old Poor Law: the treatment of chargeable bastards from Rural Queries’, Agricultural History Review 5 3 (2005), 141757; N. Verdon, ‘The Employment of Women and Children in Agriculture: a Reassessment of Agricultural Gangs in Nineteenthvcentury Norfolk', Agricultural History Review 49 (2001), 41755, 4 C1]. Griffin, ‘Protest Practice and (tree) Cultures of Conﬂict: Understanding the Spaces of ‘tree maiming’ in Eighteenth and early Nineteenth«century England’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40 (2008), 917108; CJ. Griffin, ‘Knowable Geographies? The Reporting of lncendiarism in the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Century Provincial Press’, Journal of Historical Geography 32 (2006), 38—56, Note the contrasting portrayals of T. Shakesheff, Rural Conﬂict, Crime and Protest: Herefordshire, 1800—1860 (Woodbridge, 2003), and ].E. Archer, “By a Flash and a Scare": Incendiarism, Animal Maiming and Poaching in East Anglia, 181571870 (Oxford, 1990). 5 The National Archives, London [hereafter TNA], HO52/6, f. 178; The Times, 29 December 1830. 6 TNA, H052/6, f. 67, John Pearse, of Chilton Lodge, Hungerford, MP. for Devizes to Lord Melbourne, 2 5 November 1830. ‘1 cannot refrain from lamenting that the most injudicious disbanding of the yeomanry corps ~ the expense was petty compared to its Tumult, Riot and Disturbance 141 Roger Wells, Carl Griffin and others have demonstrated the transition from Wellington’s ministry to the second Lord Grey’s in November 1830 caused no major political or strategic change in central government’s handling of ‘Captain Swing"7 Within individual counties the picture is less clear. Recent government initiatives on poverty and policing had tended to prioritize the parish at the county’s expense;8 and attitudes to labour rates, allowances and fixing winter wages — the magisterial interference on the price of labour often locally allied to ‘Swing’ — were divided and divisive.9 This was evident in Berkshire where the king’s residence at Windsor Castle and the cross»b0rder estates owned by Wellington (prime minister until 16 November), the radical Sir Francis Burdett, Bt. (1770—1844) and William PleydelleBouverie (1779—1869), 3rd Earl of Radnor generated contemporaneous interest. Just as the rioters did not confine themselves to a single parish, so too many of the magistrates, landowners and attorneys dealing with them had property and practices in more than one petty sessions’ division or county and faced simultaneous calls for action from each. In tranquil times inter, county (and divisional) variations in practices and fees or any awkward scheduling of meetings were trivial matters, commonly resolved by requests to county clerks of the peace and reference to the latest edition of Richard Burn’s Justice of the Peace and Parish Officer and the magistrates order books. During and immediately after the ‘Swing’ riots these value. it hurt and insulted the feelings of the yeomanry in all those counties where the troops were not preserved. It created an illiberal comparison with those where they were, & most assuredly if the whole had existed all these w would have been quelled instantly by the ready means that could have been thus supplied on the spot’. 7 C]. Griffin, ‘Policy on the Hoof: Sir Robert Peel, Sir Edward Knatchbull and the Trial of the Elham Machine Breakers, 1830’, Rural History 15 (2004), 1—22; C]. Griffin, “‘There was No Law to Punish that Offence”. Reassessing ‘Captain Swing’: Rural Luddism and Rebellion in East Kent, 1830—31', Southern History 22 (2002), 131—63; R. Wells, ‘Mr William Cobbett, Captain Swing, and King William IV’, Agricultural History Review 45 (1997), 37—38; R. Wells, Politics of Captain Swing, Canterbury.ac.uk web publications (2007). For a review of earlier publications see J Stevenson, ‘An Unbroken Wavel’, Historical Journal, 37, 3 (1994,), 683—95. 8 J. Innes, mCentral Government ‘lnterference”: Changing Conceptions, Practices, and Concerns, c. 1700—1850’, in J. Harris (ed.), Civil Society in British History (Oxford, 2003), pp. 45—49, 5} 9 D. Eastwood, Governing rural England: tradition and transformation in local government 178071840 (London, 1994), pp‘ 161%3, 181; A. Randall and E. Newman, ‘Protest, Proletarians and Paternalists: Social Conflict in Rural Wiltshire, 1830718502 Rural History 6 (1995), 205—27; TNA, HO52/II, ff. 127—29, Charles Ashe A’Court to Melbourne, 30 November I830. A’Court warned that the Devizes magistrates’ ruling on wages would incite further trouble by ‘interfering in the most direct manner with the price of labour’. 142 Margaret Escort differences caused problems which have been understated or conveniently overlooked.10 Buckinghamshire’s correspondence with the Home Office during the ‘mobbings’ reveals the competing interests of the agricultural and manufacturing districts, of boroughs and county,11 of the county MP. Lord Chandos12 (the lord lieutenant’s son and vice) and the high sheriff Sir Richard Howard Vyse.13 While it is evident from the Berkshire letters, that the lord lieutenant and custos rotulorm Montagu Bertie, 5th Earl of Abingdon was, through ill’health, a London’based absentee, who resisted Home Office suggestions that he should appoint a vice—lieutenant, and returned to his county only after the rioting had subsided.14 Meanwhile a deputy lieutenant, Frederick Page of Speen, apologized repeatedly to the Home Office for acting ‘before taking his dedimus’ as a magistrate.15 M.P.s were granted leave of absence by the House of Commons to return to their disturbed neighbourhoods,16 and, taking the initiative, mayors, town clerks, county deputy lieutenants and magistrates corresponded directly with the Home Office, the department responsible for law and order. There, their reports were corroborated and often anticipated by intelligence from district postmasters and postmistresses, forwarded by the Secretary to the Post Office Sir Francis Freeling in a well honed operation. Within individual counties, the chains of communication were often less efficient. In Berkshire communications with the magistrates of the eleven divisions, the sheriff and the clerk of assize were channelled through the offices of the clerk of the peace William Budd in Speen, near Newbury, and the under»sheriff John Roberts in Wokingham — a cumbersome process if the county was ‘disturbed’.17 Wokingham was also the 10 ‘Return of the orders and regulations made by magistrates in the several counties of England and Wales’ PP (1833), XXXI, 37 5—424.

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