Editing Captain Swing (section)

==Labourers' war==
[[William Cobbett]] was a political activist who supported the working man.{{sfn|Brandon|2010|p=37}} He rode around Kent and Sussex and spoke to agricultural workers about their problems. He then used this as source material for his journal the [[Political Register]]. He learned that many agricultural labourers were badly paid, or unemployed  and half starved. The financial support for a  laid off agricultural worker was less than that paid to support a criminal in prison.  Cobbett realised that Parishes were trying to avoid having to provide support to the poor with many parishes sending labouring people to the United States to save the costs of supporting them as paupers.{{sfn|Brandon|2010|p=42}} Cobbett  had predicted that there would be problems with the agricultural workers and when rural disturbances started in Kent and spread to Sussex during August 1830, Cobbett described it as the "Labourers' war".{{sfn|Brandon|2010|p=51}}

The main causes of the disturbances were due to an excess of labour, predominantly by men who had been involved in the Napoleonic wars, returning home. Also by itinerant Irish labourers prepared to work for next to nothing undercutting the local agricultural workers.{{sfn|Griffin|2010|pages= 149-180}}  This coincided with a fall in  agricultural prices. During the ensuing depression farmers were not able to pay their agricultural workers a sustainable wage. Farmers also stopped the custom of allowing their workers to take leftover crops after the corn harvest, that would help them through the winter.{{efn|A custom known as [[gleaning]]}} This was compounded by the church tithes and the [[enclosure]] of common land.{{sfn|Brandon|2010|p=51}} 

Added to this farmers began to introduce  [[threshing machines]]{{efn|name=threshing| During the Napoleonic wars, there was a shortage of farm labour, threshing machines were installed  to plug the shortfall of labour. Historians have posited that when there was no longer a shortage of labour the cost and unreliability of the threshing machines did not actually make them cost effective.{{sfn|Macdonald|1975|pp= 63-77 }}}} that displaced workers.{{sfn|Harrison|1989|pp=249-253}}  The displaced workers had no means to feed or clothe their families during the winter. A resident of Lewes in Sussex,  [[Gideon Mantell]]  the English obstetrician, geologist and palaeontologist noted in his diary of 1830:

{{quote|It is all bad, our peasantry are in a state of ignorance and slavery: almost starving without the knowledge to attempt obtaining redress without violence, without violating laws, which are made to oppress the poor and protect the rich.|source={{harvnb|Brandon|2010|pp=53-54}}|title=Quoted in Discovering Sussex}}

Popular protests by farm workers occurred across agricultural areas of southern England.{{sfn|Charlesworth|1983|p=151}} The main targets for protesting crowds were landowners/ landlords, whose [[threshing machine]]s they destroyed or dismantled, and whom they petitioned for a rise in wages. {{sfn|Hobsbawm|Rudé|1973|loc=Ch. 10|ref=Hobs}}

The protests were notable for their discipline, a tradition of popular protest that went back to the eighteenth century.  The act of marching towards an offending farmer's homestead served not only to maintain group discipline, but also to warn the wider community that  they were regimented and determined.{{sfn|Griffin|2010||pp=149–180}}
Often they sought to enlist local parish officials and occasionally magistrates to raise levels of poor relief as well. Throughout England, 2,000 protesters were brought to trial in 1830–1831; 252 were sentenced to death (though only 19 were actually hanged), 644 were imprisoned, and 481 were [[penal transportation|transported to penal colonies]] in Australia.{{sfn|Harrison|1989|pp=249-253}}{{sfn|Douglas|2002|p=297}}