This chapter offers a different perspective on the themes of the politics of memory and contested meanings of protest. It considers the perceptions and responses of the authorities to social unrest, and their role in shaping subsequent understandings of protest. Much of the historiography on social protest has rightly been focused on its perpetrators; but addressing the actions and attitudes of the authorities affords a more nuanced understanding of protest, and the social and political relationships that underpinned it.1 Concentrating on the Swing disturbances of 1830, this chapter draws on Norfolk as a case study, a county that has received comparatively little attention in this context. The experience of repeated unrest in Norfolk between 1816 and 1830 is significant: it formed a vital part of the complex of causes and contexts that informed the perceptions of the local authorities. By focusing on their perspective, we gain valuable insights into the scope of Swing as a movement.
Swingâs historians can now perhaps agree that it did constitute a movement, one that was not nationally coordinated, but in its shared tactics and patterns of diffusion, a popular rising that embodied a mutual awareness amongst its participants.2 But there has been very little discussion of the perspective of the authorities. Their role in shaping the diffusion of protest has been acknowledged, but whether they saw Swing as systemic, or as an outpouring of local grievances, has not been drawn out. The authoritiesâ conception of Swing is an important consideration in understanding their responses to it. From the evidence presented here, the county magistracy saw Swing as locally contingent, national and international, all at once.
This analysis also pursues the prosecution of Swing offenders and the role of the courts in shaping understandings of protest in its aftermath, in the ways in which the authorities deliberately sought to shape subsequent popular memories of the protests. As such, this chapter offers a more nuanced account of the role of prosecutions in what, until recently, has been framed exclusively as ârepressionâ, as simply putting down rebellion.3 Work by Carl Griffin and others has sought to move beyond such a narrow reading, emphasising the proactive role the local judiciary played in the shaping of prosecutions at the Special Commissions and at the county courts both in terms of creating examples, but also in the broader context of restoring âorderâ.4 The courts were, as Peter King has argued, âa vital arena in which social tensions were expressed and social relations reconfiguredâ.5 These prosecutions should, therefore, be considered as acts of local and national government.
Past prosecutions of protest must likewise be considered as part of this context of judicial decision-making. They provided an important point of reference in local memory against which subsequent proceedings were understood. Griffin has shown how the experience of protest and its suppression across communities and over the longer-term informed the development and response to rural trade unionism at Tolpuddle in 1834.6 Certainly, in studies of East Anglia, Swing cannot be divorced from the phases of unrest that preceded it. It has been cast as another battle in a âprotracted rural warâ.7 A. J. Peacock, Paul Muskett and John Archer, in particular, have drawn attention to the most dramatic and open manifestations of agricultural labourersâ discontent in 1816 and 1822. These discussions have emphasised the longevity and evolution of popular resistance to changes in the rural economy and society.8 While the protests of these years have served as an explanation for the occurrence and form of Swing in Norfolk, they must also be considered as part of the context that informed the actions of the magistracy in 1830â1831. The memory of popular protest was, in short, central in shaping both the resort to protest in the present and the responses of the authorities.
To borrow from Andy Wood, this chapter contends that the prosecution of Swing was part of a process of simplifying or condensing the âmessy historical realtiesâ of protest, to establish an official narrative or memory of social upheaval.9 The process of selection, the prosecution of cases, their punishment, and the rhetoric employed by the courts, reduced the complex of causes to inclusive and exclusive narratives that buoyed particular social relationships. Motives and modes of protest were disaggregated, recharacterising the (more) acceptable and unacceptable faces of Swing. This process of simplification also reveals the ways in which older official memories of protest were mobilised to create new ones. Considering the frequency of open collective protest in Norfolk in this period, the county provides a unique opportunity to consider the formation, and impact, of popular and judicial memories of rebellion.
Swing: Another Battle in the Rural War
Norfolk boasted one of the most advanced agricultural economies in England, and was reputed for pioneering improvements in farming techniques. Such successes in reclaiming land and revolutionising method pushed up land value, and the expense of making and managing improvements, further added to the burdens of tenant farmers. Threshing machines, first introduced to counter labour shortages during the Napoleonic Wars, grew in popularity amongst the yeomanry in peacetime, as they allowed the farmers to cut labour costs and accelerate production. With the majority of the countyâs population engaged in agricultural labour, an increasing population and demobilisation after 1815, intensified competition for employment.10
By 1816, the effects of depression were marked in the county. Reports to the Board of Agriculture outlined the plight of the farmer: land values had increased; without wartime profits and with decreasing prices for produce, he struggled to pay his rents and tithes. Consequently, smaller occupiers were giving up their tenancies, and those who persisted could not afford to employ labour, or pay adequate wages.11 Thus, increasingly, the poor applied to the parish for relief, further pushing up the rents and the rates. The burden of the depression appeared to affect every stratum of society: many landowners were forced to abate rents and retrench. The majority of respondents to the board testified to the increasing distress of the poor, and approximately half of them indicated an increase in the poor rates, lamenting the pernicious practice of relieving able, but under-employed, labourers. These problems foreshadowed many of the issues and social divisions underlying the disturbances of 1830. Indeed, one respondent from Norfolk had some doubt as to âhow the poor are to be kept peaceableâ.12
They were not. In the spring of 1816, a series of collective protests broke out: attacks on farm machinery in Suffolk bookended food and wage riots in Norfolk and the Fenlands of Cambridgeshire.13 The most violent, and arguably most problematic, disturbances took place at Downham (Norfolk), Littleport and Ely (Cambridgeshire). On 20 May, magistrates and overseers meeting at the Crown Inn at Downham received a deputation from a crowd comprised of villagers from the surrounding area and local townspeople. Fronted by Justice John Dering, an offer of 2 s. a day wages and increased allowances for larger families was made. Wishing for the allowances to extend to all (as it had at Brandon in Suffolk), the crowd refused to disperse and the magistrates were forced to flee and hide themselves. Bread was redistributed, and goods and money were demanded of the townâs shopkeepers and publicans. The arrival of the cavalry allowed the authorities to regain control, albeit temporarily, dispersing the crowd and taking prisoners. However, the people reassembled the next day and succeeded in securing the release of their comrades from Dering.14 Allegedly spurred by the successes at Downham, the labourers of Littleport demanded the same concessions on 22 May, and proceeded to Ely with the same end on the 23rd. In both places, riotous crowds demanded money from local tradespeople and beer from the publicans. Finally, on 24 May, Sir Henry Bate Dudley arrived at Ely with the Royston Volunteer Cavalry, and violently dispersed the people still assembled at Littleport.15
More than one provincial newspaper reported with incredulity that the labourers were to âhave an advance of wages, and that the persons already taken should be allowed to return to their homes!â16 To counter the level of concessions made, thirty people were capitally convicted at the Special Commission convened at Ely and at the Norfolk Summer Assizes. Five men were executed at Ely and two of the Downham rioters were hanged at Norwich.17
In 1822, threshing machines â concentrated in the southern division of the county âwere the avowed targets of the labourersâ protests. Multiple petitions to parliament in 1820, 1821 and 1822 testified to the persistence of agricultural distress in the southern and central hundreds of Norfolk.18 The burden on the rates was felt from Holt on the North coast to Diss in the South.19 Twenty machines were broken in Norfolk, at Diss, and in the surrounding...