Swing, Swing Redivivus, or Something After Swing? On the Death Throes of a Protest Movement, December 1830–December 1833

Abstract

SummaryPublished in 1969, Hobsbawm and Rudé’s Captain Swing remains the sole national account of the so-called “Swing riots” that diffused throughout most of rural southern, central, and eastern England in the autumn and winter of 1830. Whilst much revisionist work has been published since, Hobsbawm and Rudé’s contention that Swing’s brutal judicial repression effectively ended the protests has remained essentially unchallenged. Through an archival re-examination of the resort to protest between the 1830 trials and December 1833, this paper contends that the received understanding that Swing was crushed is too simplistic. In some locales, Swing maintained its momentum, in others it revived. Swing also morphed into different forms, both real and phantasmagorical. But the intensity of protests did decline. By the autumn of 1833, protests were less frequent, now representing a fractured, isolated spatiality instead of a coherent protest campaign.