Smashing threshing machines bought 252 death sentences, and the workers still lost
Nineteenth-century English farm laborers protested unemployment by destroying threshing machines. What they got was 252 death sentences, 481 or 505 people transported to Australia, and the limited parliamentary reform of 1832 — the laborers' fortunes did not change, but the political map did.
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The threshing machine was only the last straw; enclosure was the root cause
Enclosure had been under way since the twelfth century, but after 1750 it entered its peak: between 1770 and 1830 roughly six million acres of English common land were enclosed. People who lost the right to graze animals and cut fodder on the commons either went to the towns looking for work, or lost their livelihood outright with no compensation, leaving them dependent on the farmers who held the land. Unlike the familiar "machines caused unemployment" story, the show first lays out the institutional dispossession: enclosure, the surplus of labor once the wars ended, the Corn Laws, and the reform of poor relief. The threshing machine was only the straw that broke the camel's back.
One machine took away half of a laborer's winter income
Threshing is the autumn and winter job of separating grain from the ear, and before the machine it was done entirely by hand, with laborers beating the sheaves with a flail. It was not just hard physical work: it could account for as much as fifty percent of a farm worker's winter income, and winter offered almost no other way to earn money. People had tried to build threshing machines as early as the seventeenth century, but it was not until the 1710s that water-powered and horse-powered designs became reliable and cost-effective. The moment a landowner bought one, the hand threshers were out of work. The more efficient the machine, the more directly it hit seasonal employment — and that is the economic root of the threats and the riots.
Machine-breaking was not something the Luddites invented
Breaking machines as a form of protest can be traced in Britain back to at least the seventeenth century. In 1675, Spitalfields weavers in London destroyed a new kind of loom said to "do the work of twenty men"; in 1779, Samuel Nead's three hundred knitting frames were wrecked. The Luddites pushed this pattern to its peak. Defenders of the machines argued that over the long run they would lower prices, expand demand and increase employment — but that was no help to the people out of work right now. There was also a reason that often gets overlooked: the quality of machine-made goods was worse. For craftsmen who depended on the guild system, none of this was abstract economics; it was a question of eating.
Captain Swing was a signature on threatening letters, not a person
The Swing Riots take their name from Captain Swing, the signature on the threatening letters. Unlike Ned Lud, who was built up into a legendary leader of the Luddite movement, Captain Swing had no persona as an organizer — he was simply the author of the letters. They carried the threat that "if you don't put your threshing machines away, you'll have a swing" — swing meaning both the swing of a body on the gallows and the swing of a flail at threshing. Nor was the action pure destruction: the protesters would first negotiate with landowners and clergymen, and some landowners smashed their own machines voluntarily, or agreed to raise wages and give back tithes, to avoid worse losses.
The man who spoke for the laborers was a royalist who had opposed reform
William Cobbett started out a royalist: he attacked the French Revolution, opposed democratic reform, and supported enclosure. After buying a farm in 1805 and traveling to see conditions for himself, he saw the destitution of agricultural workers, admitted he had been wrong, and turned into a forceful advocate of parliamentary reform. But he was not simply a spokesman for labor: his thinking contained racism and anti-Semitism, and a nostalgia for a romanticized England that had never actually existed. That contradiction is why he could later condemn arson as an "abominable crime" while insisting that its root cause was extreme poverty — the government did not arrest him for nothing.
The real violence happened in the courtrooms, not in the fields
The rising swept across southern and eastern England, with at least three thousand separate incidents. Rather than wait for the regular circuit courts, the government set up special commissions for rapid trials. Between December 1830 and January 1831, 252 people were sentenced to death, though only 19 were actually hanged; 481 or 505 were transported to Australia (both figures appear in the research); and nearly 650 were imprisoned. The defendants were not only farm laborers but blacksmiths, shoemakers, carpenters and wheelwrights. That repression is what made the Swing Riots the largest popular revolt in England since the Peasants' Revolt of 1381.
The rising did not improve laborers' lives, but it pushed through parliamentary reform
After the Swing Riots, daily life for farm workers barely changed: many of the concessions landowners had promised were never delivered, and the New Poor Law of 1834 actually expanded the workhouse system, producing the Victorian workhouse Dickens wrote about. But there is a clear connection between the rising and the passage of the Great Reform Act in 1832: the constituencies where protests occurred overlap heavily with the constituencies that backed reform. The act abolished a large number of "rotten boroughs", created new constituencies and widened the franchise — but only for men, and the poorest workers still did not qualify. Cobbett won a seat in Parliament through one of the new constituencies, publicly called for a rising after the 1834 Poor Law, and died bankrupt in 1835.
In their own words · checked verbatim
Manual threshing was hard work, but it could provide up to fifty percent of a farm laborer's winter income, and of course in the winter there were not many other ways for a farmer to make more money.
Unlike the Luddite Uprising, in which ned Lud became something of a mythical leader of the demonstrators, Captain Swing wasn't really the persona of a leader, just the author of menacing notes and documents demanding the end of threshing machines or other concessions.
He was also motivated by the thought of returning to a romanticized idea of England, more like what he nostalgically remembered from his childhood. He had an idyllic picture in his mind of how things used to be an authentically English countryside of the past, but that was something that it just never really existed.
Can God, who commanded that even the ox should not be muzzled as he trod out the corn, be pleased to see men who have tilled the land, sowed the corn, and reaped it and housed it, forbidden to touch the flower, and condemned to eat roots or herbage not sufficient to keep a pig in good plight.
as the working people have gone on getting poorer and poorer, they have become more and more immoral.
During these proceedings, two hundred and fifty two people were condemned to death, although ultimately only nineteen of those were hanged.
This makes the Swing Riots one of the largest popular uprisings in England since the Peasant's Revolt of thirteen eighty one, which is also known as wat Tyler's Rebellion.
Figures
| English common land enclosed, 1770–1830 | about 6 million acres | 3:11 |
| Hand threshing as a share of a farm worker's winter income | up to 50% | 7:18 |
| People sentenced to death in the Swing Riots | 252 | 27:55 |
| People actually hanged | 19 | 27:55 |
| People transported to Australia | 481 or 505 (the sources give two figures) | 27:55 |
| People imprisoned | nearly 650 | 27:55 |
| Total Swing Riots incidents | at least 3,000 | 28:56 |
| The largest previous revolt, used for comparison | the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 (Wat Tyler's Rebellion) | 28:56 |
| The parliamentary reform act passed in 1832 | Great Reform Act | 29:57 |
| The poor law passed in 1834 | Poor Law (expanding the workhouses) | 31:00 |
Glossary
- threshing machine
- Mechanical threshing equipment that appeared in the eighteenth century, far more efficient than hand labor, and the trigger for the Swing Riots.
- flail
- A hand threshing tool: a long handle swinging a shorter stick that beats the sheaves to separate the grain.
- Corn Laws
- British laws restricting grain imports to protect landowners' grain prices, which workers saw as pushing the price of food up.
- workhouse
- An institution where the poor were compelled to live and labor, the emblem of Victorian poor relief.
- select vestries
- Parish committees that administered poor relief, with the power to distinguish the "deserving" poor from the idle.
- rotten boroughs
- Constituencies with tiny populations that still held parliamentary seats; the 1832 Reform Act abolished many of them.
How to listen
Founders, policy researchers and podcast listeners interested in technological unemployment, modern British history, and the question of what happens after the machines are smashed.
The last ten minutes — listener mail and the cats grooming each other — can be skipped.