THE Hampshire countryside was in such turmoil as agricultural workers went on the rampage that one land-owner was forced to read the Riot Act.

Provoked by low wages, the hatred of threshing machines, which were blamed for throwing men out of work, together with harsh and degrading methods of poor relief, a tide of violence swept through the county in the autumn of 1830.

The Swing Riots were so serious that the Army stationed in Southampton, was ordered to remove the locks on 500 muskets and send them to Portswood for safe-keeping.

According to the history books, Southampton had been thrown into a “state of continual excitement by various and frequently exaggerated reports of outrages committed by incendiaries and acts of violence by assemblies of farm-labourers in the neighbourhood.”

In the November of that year a mob of 500 farm-workers, many armed with bludgeons and hatchets, is reported to have gathered and smashed all the threshing machines in and around Fair Oak, before marching to Southampton.

As the protesters marched through Moorgreen and West End, they threatened local people and extorted money. At the country home of Dr Godden Jones, in Swaythling, the men demanded if he had any threshing machines.

“Jones, a magistrate and a brave man, ordered them to disperse and when they refused read the Riot Act,” recalls a history book. The crowd then went on to the Portswood home of Major-General Gubbins and smashed a threshing machine found on his farm.

“After that they turned back and met Jones once more, who seized the ringleaders, Abraham Childs from Alresford,” says the historic account. “A scuffle followed, during which Childs escaped and one of the mob struck Jones in the mouth, where upon the infuriated fired a pistol at him but missed.

Next the mob visited a farmer called Tribe, who was known to possess a threshing machine, but finding that he had prudently destroyed it himself they extorted one guinea (£1.05p) from him and went on towards Stoneham Park, the seat of John Fleming.”

The heir to the 18th century Southampton MP of the same name, Fleming was both a prominent Tory and a benevolent landowner who paid his labourers well.

On hearing of the outbreak of violence he had collected his men and led them out to meet the rioters, of whom he took 45 into custody.

The Swing Riots had many immediate causes, but were overwhelmingly the result of the progressive impoverishment and dispossession of the English agricultural workforce over the previous 50 years, leading up to 1830.

In parliament Lord Carnarvon had said that the English labourer was reduced to a plight more abject than that of any race in Europe, with their employers no longer able to feed and employ them.

The”Swing Riots” were derived from the name that was often appended to the threatening letters sent to farmers, magistrates, parsons, and others, the fictitious Captain Swing, who was regarded as the mythical figurehead of the movement.

The Swing Riots added to the strong social, political and agricultural unrest throughout Britain in the 1830s, encouraging a wider demand for political reform, culminating in the introduction of the Reform Act of 1832 and also to the Poor Law Amendment Act of two years later ending “outdoor relief” in cash or kind, and setting up a chain of workhouses across the country, to which the poor had to go if they wanted help.