Captain Swing
Captain Swing is an enjoyable collaboration between E. J. Hobsbawm and George Rude that depicts the social history of the English agricultural wage-laborers' uprising of 1830. According to Hobsbawm and Rude, historiography of the laborers' rising of 1830 is negligible. Most of what is known by the general public comes from J. L. And Barbara Hammond's The Village Laborer published in 1911. They consider this an exceedingly valuable work, but state that the Hammonds oversimplified events in order to dramatize them. They placed too much emphasis on enclosure, oversimplified both the nature and prevalence of the "Speenhamland System" of poor relief, and neglected the range and scope of the uprising. Hobsbawm and Rude do not claim to present any new data, and believe that the Hammonds will still be read for enjoyment, but believe that by asking different questions, they can shed new light on the social history of the movement. Therefore, this book tries to "describe and analyze the most impressive episode in the English farm-labourers' long and doomed struggle against poverty and degradation." In the nineteenth century, England had no peasantry to speak of in the sense that other nations did. Where families who owned or occ
Of these, the most ambitious was the destruction of threshing machines, but poaching was most indicative of increasing social tensions in the villages. The winter of 1829 had been particularly hard. Hobsbawm and Rude, in this collaborative effort, made use of an enormous amount of primary and secondary source material yet managed to produce an eminently readable work which looks at the rebellion from a social, rather than purely economic, point of view. Unfortunately, they only had five forms of protest or self-defense available to them. In spite of the severe living conditions suffered by the laborers and their informal support from many of those against whom they rebelled, the rioters were punished severely. While some might claim that the failure of the revolt plunged the laboring class into dumb acquiescence, Hobsbawm and Rude argue that it woke the farmers and nobility to the inner strength of their hitherto silent workers. Spreading from county to county, the universal demand was for a living wage and an end to rural unemployment. Threshing machines took away the standard winter labor, creating high unemployment at the worst time of year and generating an almost universal hatred of them among laborers. Local correspondents almost universally attributed the riots of 1830 to unemployment and harsh treatment of laborers. upied their own small plot of land and cultivated it themselves, apart from work on their lord's farms, farmed most of Europe, England's "peasants" were agricultural wage-laborers. They merely demanded the restoration of their meager rights within it. Other forms of revolt included arson, threatening letters (signed by "Captain Swing"), inflammatory handbills and posters, robbery, wages meetings, and assaults on overseers, parsons, and landlords. Further, enclosure eliminated the common lands whose use had helped the very poor to live.
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