The Hampshire Family Historian | Volume 51 No.1 | June 2024

Member’s article

The Hampshire ‘Captain Swing’ Rioters

In July of last year viewers of the popular genealogical TV series Who Do You think You Are? (WDYTYA) were probably as surprised as the programme’s subject, actor Lesley Manville (star of The Crown) to hear the story of Manville’s forbear Aaron Harding who, at the age of 41, was charged with ‘feloniously with force’ demolishing the Poor House in Selborne. Why on earth would anyone want to demolish a Poor House? Especially in that well-known Gilbert White beauty spot of Selborne in East Hampshire. As the story unfolded Manville was taken back to the complicated events of Autumn 1830 when not just Selborne but almost the whole of rural Southern England was in the grip of the Captain Swing Riots. And as the social unrest and its consequences were described Manville also began to grasp what a rich area of study was being opened up for genealogists. In a story which starts in the villages of Hampshire but reaches out, for many, to remote areas of Australia (and then back again) the Swing Riots of 1830 offer up endless perspectives for followers of family history. It is a field that the Captain Swing Riots Bicentenary Commemoration (in Hampshire), under the auspices of The English Project, is now delighted to share with the Hampshire Genealogical Society in the expectation that the discoveries will be as fascinating as those made by Lesley Manville and the WDYTYA team. What were the Captain Swing Riots?

Starting from Kent and then rolling across the southern counties to culminate in Hampshire and Wiltshire, threats of violence against farmers, the gentry and the clergy gripped the nation’s attention from late August through to Christmas 1830. The explanation was simple. After a decade of ‘agricultural distress’ in which wages had not kept up with the cost of living rural labourers were at the end of their tether. An indication of their plight can be seen in a petition written to the King by ‘the inhabitants of Barton Stacey, Bullington and Wonston’ in the Summer of 1830. “To the King’s most excellent Majesty,” they declared, “We humbly implore your Majesty to cast an eye of pity on the misery and wretchedness that at this moment pervades every part of the country and of which your Majesty’s petitioners have had their full share. That many of us have not food sufficient to satisfy our hunger, nor clothes to hide the nakedness of ourselves our wives and children, nor fuel wherewith to warm us... To our great sorrow and disappointment we find oppression daily press heavier and heavier upon our shoulders til at length we are driven to the brink of despair.” It was from that despair that a few weeks later outrages under the name of Captain Swing started to appear in the shape of letters threatening rick burning, the destruction of threshing machines (and worse) if the privileged classes did not curb their ways and open their purses. In fact, there was no such person as Captain

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