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

Member’s article

which was condemned by the judge at the subsequent trial as being both futile and counter-productive to the interests of working people. Meanwhile, going back to the Lesley Manville story, the Selborne poor house became a target for the men of East Hampshire because it was perceived as the manifestation of a welfare system which was both brutal and inhumane. Aaron Harding, Manville’s three times great grandfather was to be charged for ‘having on 22nd of November, at Selborne. with divers other persons, riotously assembled together , and feloniously with force began to demolish a certain house of the visitors and guardians of the parish of Selborne. Warrant dated December 4 1830.’ At the subsequent Grand Assize held in the Great hall in Winchester Harding was to be sentenced to death but this was to be commuted to transportation to life – giving rise thereby to the Australian dimension of the WDYTYA documentary. The Reckoning Harding was not alone at the trial. While elsewhere across the south the Swing rioters were tried in little local courts, in Hampshire the approach was quite different. The response by the authorities in the county was led by the Duke of Wellington and his approach was, you might say, on a military scale both in the way he called out the militia and the army to deter and hunt down the rioters and in the subsequent judicial process. In an unprecedented action 300 rioters were brought together in Winchester gaol to face

trial in a Grand Assize in the Great Hall over the Christmas period 1830. A group of top judges was hurried down from London and for ten days Winchester was swarming with the families of the accused, magistrates, jurors and an enormous number of the county gentry. Even the media descended in force from the capital only to be shocked by the price of food and accommodation in the Cathedral City. (Not much change there then). It is this group of three hundred men which forms the target demographic for our joint project with the Hampshire Genealogical Society. Fortunately we are not starting from scratch. The basic details of the accused, where they came from and what happened to them is contained in the authoritative Hampshire Machine Breakers by Jill Chambers (copies in the Hampshire Record Office and elsewhere in libraries around the County). This gives an excellent start to the investigation. Moreover, various history groups around the county have often undertaken their own genealogical research into their local rioters. The exciting dimension, of course is that there is a substantial Australian dimension to this story. Although by the end of the 1830s almost all of those convicted had received pardons quite a few decided not to return to England but to remain in Australia. The reality was that the prospects for the skilled labouring classes were significantly better there than in their homeland. (In a small number of cases they were then joined by their wives from Hampshire).

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