One representative of the Church was distinguished from most of the country gentlemen and clergymen of the time by his treatment of one of these wandering mobs. Cobbett’s letter to the Hampshire parsons, published in the Political Register, 15th January 1831, contains an account of the conduct of Bishop Sumner, the Bishop of Winchester. ‘I have, at last, found a Bishop of the Law Church to praise. The facts are these: the Bishop, in coming from Winchester to his palace at Farnham, was met about a mile before he got to the latter place, by a band of sturdy beggars, whom some call robbers. They stopped his carriage, and asked for some money, which he gave them. But he did not prosecute them: he had not a man of them called to account for his conduct, but, the next day, set twenty-four labourers to constant work, opened his Castle to the distressed of all ages, and supplied all with food and other necessaries who stood in need of them. This was becoming a Christian teacher.’ Perhaps the bishop remembered the lines from Dryden’s Tales from Chaucer, describing the spirit in which the good parson regarded the poor:
‘Who, should they steal for want of his relief,
He judged himself accomplice with the thief.’
There was an exhibition of free speaking at Hungerford, where the magistrates sat in the Town Hall to receive deputations from various mobs, in connection with the demand for higher wages. The magistrates had made their peace with the Hungerford mob, when a deputation from the Kintbury mob arrived, led by William Oakley, a young carpenter of twenty-five. Oakley addressed the magistrates in language which they had never heard before in their lives and were never likely to hear again. ‘You have not such d——d flats to deal with now, as you had before; we will have 2s. a day till Lady Day, and 2s. 6d. afterwards for labourers and 3s. 6d. for tradesmen. And as we are here we will have £5 before we leave the place or we will smash it.... You gentlemen have been living long enough on the good things, now is our time and we will have them. You gentlemen would not speak to us now, only you are afraid and intimidated.’ The magistrates acceded to the demands of the Kintbury mob and also gave them the £5, after which they gave the Hungerford mob £5, because they had behaved well, and it would be unjust to treat them worse than their Kintbury neighbours. Mr. Page, Deputy-Lieutenant for Berks, sent Lord Melbourne some tales about this same Kintbury mob, which was described by Mr. Pearse, M.P., as a set of ‘desperate savages.’ ‘I beg to add some anecdotes of the mob yesterday to illustrate the nature of its component parts. They took £2 from Mr. Cherry a magistrate and broke his Machine. Afterwards another party came and demanded One Pound——when the two parties had again formed into one, they passed by Mr. Cherry’s door and said they had taken one pound too much, which they offered to return to him which it is said he refused—they had before understood that Mrs. Cherry was unwell and therefore came only in small parties. A poor woman passed them selling rabbitts, some few of the mob took some by force, the ringleader ordered them to be restored. At a farmer’s where they had been regaled with bread cheese and beer one of them stole an umbrella: the ringleader hearing of it, as they were passing the canal threw him into it and gave him a good ducking.’[442]
In the early days of the rising in Hampshire, Wiltshire and Berkshire, there was a good deal of sympathy with the labourers. The farmers in many cases made no objection to the destruction of their threshing machines. One gentleman of Market Lavington went so far as to say that ‘nearly all the Wiltshire Farmers were willing to destroy or set aside their machines.’ ‘My Lord,’ wrote Mr. Williams, J.P., from Marlborough, ‘you will perhaps be surprised to hear that the greatest number of the threshing machines destroyed have been put out for the Purpose by the Owners themselves.’ The Duke of Buckingham complained that in the district round Avington ‘the farmers have not the Spirit and in some instances not the Wish to put down’ disturbances.[443] At a meeting in Winchester, convened by the Mayor to preserve the peace (reported in the Hampshire Chronicle of 22nd November), Dr. Newbolt, a clergyman and magistrate, described his own dealings with one of the mobs. The mob said they wanted 12s. a week wages: this he said was a reasonable demand. He acted as mediator between the labourers and farmers, and as a result of his efforts the farmers agreed to these terms, and the labourers returned to work, abandoning their project of a descent on Winchester. The Mayor of Winchester also declared that the wages demanded were not unreasonable, and he laid stress on the fact that the object of the meeting was not to appoint special constables to come into conflict with the people, but merely to preserve the peace. Next week Dr. Newbolt put an advertisement into the Hampshire Chronicle, acknowledging the vote of thanks that had been passed to him, and reaffirming his belief that conciliation was the right policy.[444] At Overton, in Hampshire, Henry Hunt acted as mediator between the farmers and a hungry and menacing mob. Such was the fear of the farmers that they gave him unlimited power to make promises on their behalf: he promised the labourers that their wages should be raised from 9s. to 12s., with house rent in addition, and they dispersed in delight.
Fortune had so far smiled upon the rising, and there was some hope of success. If the spirit that animated the farmers, and in Kent many of the landowners, had lasted, the winter of 1830 might have ended in an improvement of wages and a reduction of rents and tithes throughout the south of England. In places where the decline of the labourer had been watched for years without pity or dismay, magistrates were now calling meetings to consider his circumstances, and the Home Office Papers show that some, at any rate, of the country gentlemen were aware of the desperate condition of the poor. Unhappily the day of conciliatory measures was a brief one. Two facts frightened the upper classes into brutality: one was the spread of the rising, the other the scarcity of troops.[445] As the movement spread, the alarm of the authorities inspired a different policy, and even those landowners who recognised that the labourers were miserable, thought that they were in the presence of a rising that would sweep them away unless they could suppress it at once by drastic means. They pictured the labourers as Huns and the mysterious Swing as a second Attila, and this panic they contrived to communicate to the other classes of society.
Conciliatory methods consequently ceased; the upper classes substituted action for diplomacy, and the movement rapidly collapsed. Little resistance was offered, and the terrible hosts of armed and desperate men melted down into groups of weak and ill-fed labourers, armed with sticks and stones. On 26th November the Times could report that seventy persons had been apprehended near Newbury, and that ‘about 60 of the most forward half-starved fellows’ had been taken into custody some two miles from Southampton. Already the housing of the Berkshire prisoners was becoming a problem, the gaols at Reading and Abingdon being overcrowded: by the end of the month the Newbury Mansion House and Workhouse had been converted into prisons. This energy had been stimulated by a circular letter issued on 24th November, in which Lord Melbourne urged the lord-lieutenants and the magistrates to use firmness and vigour in quelling disturbances, and virtually promised them immunity for illegal acts done in discharge of their duty. A village here and there continued to give the magistrates some uneasiness, for example, Broughton in Hants, ‘an open village in an open country ... where there is no Gentleman to overawe them,’[446] but these were exceptions. The day of risings was over, and from this time forward, arson was the only weapon of discontent. At Charlton in Wilts, where ‘the magistrates had talked of 12s. and the farmers had given 10s.,’ a certain Mr. Polhill, who had lowered the wages one Saturday to 9s., found his premises in flame. ‘The poor,’ remarked a neighbouring magistrate, ‘naturally consider that they will be beaten down again to 7s.’[447] By 4th December the Times correspondent in Wiltshire and Hampshire could report that quiet was restored, that the peasantry were cowed, and that men who had been prominent in the mobs were being picked out and arrested every day. He gave an amusing account of the trials of a special correspondent, and of the difficulties of obtaining information. ‘The circular of Lord Melbourne which encourages the magistrates to seize suspected persons, and promises them impunity if the motives are good (such is the construction of the circular in these parts), and which the magistrates are determined to act upon, renders inquiries unsafe, and I have received a few good natured hints on this head. Gentlemen in gigs and post chaises are peculiar objects of jealousy. A cigar, which is no slight comfort in this humid atmosphere, is regarded on the road as a species of pyrotechnical tube; and even an eye glass is in danger of being metamorphosed into a newly invented air gun, with which these gentlemen ignite stacks and barns as they pass. An innocent enquiry of whose house or farm is that? is, under existing circumstances, an overt act of incendiarism.’
In such a state of feeling, it was not surprising that labourers were bundled into prison for sour looks or discontented conversation. A zealous magistrate wrote to the Home Office on 13th December after a fire near Maidenhead, to say that he had committed a certain Greenaway to prison on the following evidence: ‘Dr. Vansittart, Rector of Shottesbrook, gave a sermon a short time before the fire took place, recommending a quiet conduct to his Parishioners. Greenaway said openly in the churchyard, we have been quiet too long. His temper is bad, always discontented and churlish, frequently changing his Master from finding great difficulty in maintaining a large family from the Wages of labour.’
Meanwhile the rising had spread westward to Dorset and Gloucestershire, and northward to Bucks. In Dorsetshire and Gloucestershire, the disturbances were much like those in Wiltshire. In Bucks, in addition to the usual agricultural rising, with the breaking of threshing machines and the demand for higher wages, there were riots in High Wycombe, and considerable destruction of paper-making machinery by the unemployed. Where special grievances existed in a village, the labourers took advantage of the rising to seek redress for them. Thus at Walden in Bucks, in addition to demanding 2s. a day wages with 6d. for each child and a reduction of tithes, they made a special point of the improper distribution of parish gifts. ‘Another person said that buns used to be thrown from the church steeple and beer given away in the churchyard, and a sermon preached on the bun day. Witness (the parson) told them that the custom had ceased before he came to the parish, but that he always preached a sermon on St. George’s day, and two on Sundays, one of which was a volunteer. He told them that he had consulted the Archdeacon on the claim set up for the distribution of buns, and that the Archdeacon was of opinion that no such claim could be maintained.’
At Benson or Bensington, in Oxfordshire, the labourers, after destroying some threshing machines, made a demonstration against a proposal for enclosure. Mr. Newton, a large proprietor, had just made one of many unsuccessful attempts to obtain an Enclosure Act for the parish. Some thousand persons assembled in the churchyard expecting that Mr. Newton would try to fix the notice on the church door, but as he did not venture to appear, they proceeded to his house, and made him promise never again to attempt to obtain an Enclosure Act.[448]