In the English Summer of 2006, my eldest son Matthew was working, as part of his Kiwi OE ('Overseas Experience) on a farm at Draughton, Northamptonshire. The farm covered about 2,000 acres with nary a hedge in sight. Matt loved driving and maintaining the enormous tractors that were employed on the farm - a throwback no doubt to his early introduction to farming in Cheshire as a young boy.
Draughton appears to be a dying village. There are very few locals and it is too far from major towns to be commutable. However, it still has a lovely old church. Its companion Northamptonshire village Weston Favell has met a completely different fate. It has been completely enveloped by the city of Northampton.
Matt was living in a small 2-up, 2-down cottage with another Kiwi 'temporary hand' in Draughton when Jane and I visited him with Sam & Theo. He was working hard, enjoying the local pub - and from the state of the larder - living mainly on Mars Bars. The combines were bringing in massive amounts of wheat and Matt and his Kiwi mate had arranged to use some of it as a sports surface by surfing it.
Quite what William Clarke (Matt's great x 7 grandfather) would have made of that is a matter of no small conjecture!
BACKGROUND – THE ‘SWING’ RIOTS
By Dr Marjorie Bloy
In 1830 the rural workers of the arable south and east of England rose in the Swing riots. They demanded higher wages and an end to the threshing machine which destroyed their winter employment. They reinforced their demands with rick-burning, the destruction of the threshing machines and cattle-maiming among other things.
The 18th Century agricultural revolution, especially enclosure, completely upset traditional rural society. There was a shift from the self sufficient, open field villages to farms rented by tenant farmers employing labourers. Hiring was on a casual basis and no payment was given if no work was done. After enclosure it became more common for labourers to be paid by the day or week or by results, and to be employed for short periods for harvesting, hedging, ditching, threshing, and so on.
After 1815 the labourers' struggle became a crisis because the boom turned into an acute and prolonged recession. The rural labour market was swamped by demobilised servicemen. The Speenhamland System only gave relief and guaranteed a minimum wage, so labourers had no protection. There was no security because of short contracts and money wages.
The problem of pauperism was worst in the 'Swing' counties of Sussex, Hampshire, Suffolk, Norfolk, Berkshire, Wiltshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire, Devon, Dorset, Huntingdonshire, Gloucestershire, Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire and Kent.
The economic historian Sir John Clapham commented that "the coincidence of the area in which wages were most systematically augmented from the rates with the area of maximum enclosure is striking." In the so-called "Swing" counties, enclosure had taken place on a grand scale.
In the 1820s high poor rates led to increasing attempts to cut relief. Between 1815 and 1820 Poor Law expenditure was 12/10d per capita; by 1830 it was 9/9d. Reductions were made by making the Poor Law a deterrent and by stopping people asking for relief. This created a hatred of the Poor Law but it is also noticeable that between 1824 and 1830, rural crime rates increased by 30% - mainly poaching and food thefts.
Pauperism, desperation and discontent were almost universal in agricultural areas. East Anglia was likely to be explosive because this area pioneered the 'new' farming of the Agricultural Revolution and the status of the labourers had been completely transformed into short-contract wage-earners. Although arson was not a normal method of rural agitation, it became common in East Anglia along with poaching
The ‘Swing’ riots took place in 1830. They constituted a serious revolt against poverty and dispossession. The rioters used a range of methods including machine breaking; arson; threatening letters; wages meetings; attacks on Justices of the Peace and overseers of the poor; riotous assembly; publishing and distributing handbills and posters; and 'robbery'. The riots began in Kent and persisted there the longest.
Machine breaking was a new feature of rural unrest. Many threshing machines were smashed in this "rural war" on Saturday nights after the inns had closed: about one hundred threshers were smashed in east Kent between 28 August and the end of October, by gangs of between twenty and fifty breakers. There does not seem to have been any political grievance because the men demanded only higher wages. They wanted a minimum of
2/3d per day in winter (13/6d weekly)
2/6d per day in summer (15/- weekly)
The average wage in the Swing counties was only 8/4d per week. The labourers also asked for a reduction of rents and tithes.
The 'Swing' riots were the first large-scale demonstration of agricultural labourers' strength, although outbreaks were localised. Agitation continued, especially after the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act. There were no agricultural trade unions because jobs and therefore homes were at stake. The 'Swing' riots did influence the passing of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act and the 1836 Tithe Commutation Act, but wages and conditions did not improve.
Average wages for farm labourers rose from 8/11d per week in 1795 to 9/6d per week in 1850, but real wages (i.e. how far the money went) declined. Agricultural labourers continued to be the worst paid, worst fed and worst housed of all the working communities
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