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

Member’s article

– 1830 Onwards A joint project between the HGS and the Captain Swing Bicentenary Commemoration

Swing. This fantasy figure was first adopted near Canterbury as a kind of brand by the rioters to enhance the sense of mystery around the threatening letters which were issued in his name. Soon rioters elsewhere picked up on the practice. Captain Swing, it seemed, was everywhere! Strikingly there was even one such Swing letter sent to the Duke of Wellington, the Lord Lieutenant of Hampshire, in mid-November demanding political change. In short, once the campaign of intimidation and violence got under way all sorts of issues became attached to it it as part of a generalised clamour among the labouring classes that conditions needed radical change. The aspirations of the Rioters ranged from better wages to an abandonment of the job destroying mechanised methods embodied by the newfangled threshing machines. Invented in Scotland but arriving in the South of England in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, this version of new technology was stripping men of valued traditional work in the Autumn season. After ‘riotous assembly’ the attempted destruction of threshing machines became one of the most common charges faced by the rioters. How the Riots Expanded As the febrile Autumnal atmosphere created by Captain Swing spread county-by-county through the rural South thousands of men became involved. According to witnesses, groups of maybe 200-300 people would gather together to march across a swathe of the countryside stopping along the way to target large, comfortable houses and farms to lodge

their demands. Targets were chosen with some care. Hence in the Dever valley on Friday 19th November a large body of men from Wonston, Hunton, Micheldever, Stratton, Barton Stacey, Chilbolton and Longparish gathered in Sutton Scotney and then dispersed towards their agreed objectives. One group headed first, for example, to Barrow Farm near Micheldever where the farmer was persuaded to agree to raise wages while, in the background, his threshing machine was being broken. And so it went on for that group throughout the day, crossing to Weston where, again, the threshing machine was broken and money extracted. By the late afternoon they were in the Northington area where they ran into one of the great land owning families of the county – the Barings. The subsequent brawl resulted in William Bingham Baring having his hat knocked off. It was to prove a lethal moment. Two months later the young man held responsible for the attack - Henry Cook from Micheldever - was to be executed in the yard of Winchester Gaol (now the Wetherspoons pub in Jewry Street). It was to go down in local history and is commemorated now in St.Mary’s church in the village. But the Baring attack was just one in a number of extraordinary events. In Upper Clatford, for example, the Taskers agricultural engineering factory was pulled down as a way of stopping the use of threshing machines at source. Again, hundreds of men were apparently involved in that act of destruction

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