Captain Swing

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is about the threatening letters of the Swing Riots. For the Peter Whelan play, see Captain Swing (play).

Captain Swing was the name appended to some (but not many) of the threatening letters during the Swing Riots of 1830. These were popular protests by impoverished farm workers across the agricultural south of England, and they had a number of structural causes. The main targets for protesting crowds were farmers, whose threshing machines they destroyed or dismantled, and who they petitioned for a rise in wages. They also demanded contributions of food, money or beer (or all three) from their victims. Where appropriate, they sought to enlist local parish officials (and occasionally magistrates) to raise levels of poor relief as well. Throughout England 600 rioters were imprisoned; 500 sentenced to transportation; and 19 executed.

The protests were notable for their discipline and the customary protocols favoured by the crowds, characteristics that which were very much part of the tradition of popular protest (especially food riots) going back to the eighteenth century. Though the structural reasons for the Swing 'riots' (or risings) are relatively straightforward - un- and underemployment, low wages, low levels of relief and competition for winter employment from machinery - the nature of the events of 1830 suggest that they demand just as subtle an interpretation as the events of the previous century, something that has arguably not yet happened.

For the majority of contemporaries, the actions of the crowds presented less cause for alarm than the high incidence of incendiarism during the period of Swing (October to December 1830). Swing the rick burner was (for obvious reasons) not only more destructive, but infinitely harder to apprehend in this heightened atmosphere of tension and hostility. The relationship between Swing the rick burner and Swing the protester is difficult to assess - although there is little doubt that a relationship existed. Perhaps the best we can say so far is that whatever the immediate motivations of the arsonist in 1830 and 1831, his (or her) actions undoubtedly gave added strength to the demands of protesting crowds, intentionally or otherwise.

Just like the Luddites of 1812, the movement had an imaginary leader with a multiple-use name. His name was no doubt chosen, in a form of black humour, to echo the gallows which awaited rebels who got involved in his movement.

The eponym 'Captain Swing' has continued to resonate with protestors, radicals, and self-conscious "rebels" down to the present day. An early version of the New Wave rock group the "Cars" was called "Cap'n Swing." "Captain Swing" has been used as a band name by at least two radical folk groups, as an album name by a famous and successful female solo artist, and as a pseudonym for at least one eco-protestor. Nonetheless, the risings of 1830 - which were, in scale at least, undoubtedly the most important in rural England since the thirteenth century - are generally less well-known than their urban-industrial counterpart, the Luddite disturbances.