Captain Swing in the North: the Carlisle Riots of 1830

On the evening of Tuesday 30 November 1830, incendiaries set fire to a wheat-stack and a hay-stack situated in two fields a quarter of a mile outside Carlisle, Cumberland. Large crowds gathered at the sites of both fires and proceeded to riot. Disturbances continued the following day when workmen attempted to salvage what little remained of the stacks. Local newspapers and witnesses at the ensuing trial assumed that the incidents were the work of 'Captain Swing', the imaginary leader of the wave of arson and agricultural machine-breaking that was concurrently raging across southern England. This impression of the unusual nature of the agitation was amplified when, some days later, the clerk of the peace and several local gentlemen received threatening letters signed with pseudonyms including 'Swing'. Two handloom weavers, James Mendham, alias Montgomery, aged twenty-six, and Robert Thursby, aged thirty-eight, were eventually arrested and tried for arson, and five other men were charged with rioting.¹

This outbreak of 'Swing' in Carlisle was highly significant, not least because the Swing riots are usually associated with the arable flatlands of southern England rather than the rugged hills and industrial ports of Cumberland. Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé noted only briefly in their classic study, Captain Swing, that Cumberland and the other northern counties were 'affected by rick-burning'.² Hobsbawm and Rudé 's work inspired numerous studies of rural disturbances in Kent, Sussex, and other 'Swing' counties in southern England, but few north of Derbyshire. 'Swing Unmasked', the innovatory project involving family and community historians, found over fifty incidents (broadly defined) in northern England, but these have not been examined in detail.³ Superficially, therefore, the Carlisle example could simply be used to shift historians' focus on Swing northwards. Northern inhabitants responded forcefully to political and social unrest in 1830 by creating their own Captain Swing. The Carlisle riots were followed a few days later by another stack fire at nearby Dalston; at least a dozen other major fires or disturbances occurred in Yorkshire between 1830 and 1834.⁴ However, it cannot be denied that the

Fig. 1.

'An Original Portrait of Captain Swing', published by Orlando Hodgson, London, 1830.

upsurge of incendiarism and agricultural machine-breaking in the early 1830s, which historians have conveniently condensed into the metonym of 'Swing', was predominantly a southern phenomenon. The unconnected reports of arson and threatening letters in northern England pale into insignificance beside the over 3,000 Swing-related incidents reported in the southern counties.⁵ Many of the Yorkshire cases, moreover, were proven to be products of private grievances, often fostered by recently dismissed servants of the attacked.⁶

So the occurrence of the Carlisle riots, while illustrating that Swing had some influence beyond the Trent, is not the main point of this essay. Rather, this study reveals a need to rethink the more general meaning and significance of Swing. Swing in the North complicates previous grand narratives of popular unrest in the 1830s. The Hammonds in 1911 dubbed the Swing riots the 'last labourers' revolt'. Hobsbawm and Rudé later argued that the southern agitation originated in a plebeian reaction against severe rural distress exacerbated by capitalist landowners seeking to maximize profit by installing labour-saving machinery.⁷ A decade on, in 1980, Roger Wells emphasized political radicalism among the causes of the disturbances, while Andrew Charlesworth believed that the system of communications centred on London was crucial to the spread of the movement. All essentially framed Swing as a vehicle for nascent class-consciousness among dispossessed agricultural labourers moulded by the orations of the radical writer William Cobbett.⁸ Once the dust clouds generated by Marxism had settled, however, no 'agricultural proletariat' could be seen among the disorganized and shadowy incendiaries and machine-breakers of the 1830s. The search for class floundered and set back the history of Swing.

E. P. Thompson criticized Captain Swing for viewing 'the riots through a slight haze and at a great distance'.⁹ Hobsbawm and Rudé cagily acknowledged in their second edition that in...