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Illustration of Captain Swing from 1830

Welcome to this website where you can find out more about the Captain Swing Riots in Hampshire and our ambitious plans to commemorate them in the coming years.

The Captain Swing Riots 1830 Bicentenary Commemoration

Look out for our forthcoming events

The Captain Swing Riots were a brief but highly significant moment of social and political crisis across the whole of southern rural England – not least in Hampshire. It brought to the fore the deep economical and social divisions within society and also showed how riot and violence can metastasise, often via language, radically changing people’s lives in tragic ways. (Examples of which are still highly relevant today).​

Despite their significance the Captain Swing Riots have been largely ‘written out’ of the county’s history. This is an embarrassing gap in our collective knowledge which needs to be remedied.

Our purpose, then, is to provide a hub of information and activity for everything connected with the riotous events of 1830 – from the causes through to the riots themselves, the subsequent trials and above all the key participants. We intend either to include the information here or, very often, connect you to other sources.

This is both a work in progress and a collaborative endeavour. Many local history groups and individual local historians are already very active in following up their particular parish stories or field of activity and we invite them to share their research with us to provide a creative commons in which existing research can be explored.​

In due course, we hope this website will become the ‘go-to’ place for anyone interested in Captain Swing-related matters. Meanwhile we also ask for patience as we develop the site.

The Bicentenary Commemoration

In this area of the website we will bring together as much material as possible related to the people and the places involved in the Captain Swing Riots in Hampshire.

The History of the Captain Swing Riots

The Bicentennial Commemoration project will raise the profile and promote public understanding of the Swing Riots by making information about them widely accessible.

 

Invitation to get involved

The BICENTENARY COMMEMORATION Project hopes to

encourage activities in many different shapes and sizes. These will range from lectures to local history groups, to exhibitions and expositions, and all kinds of performances which are inspired by the events of the Captain Swing era. Local research will be critical to its success.

 

And then in 2030, the actual Bicentenary Year, we hope to host a high quality dramatised re-enactment and re-imagining of the CAPTAIN SWING story - including the Winchester Grand Assize of December 1830 - along with ambitious exhibitions in and around the County

So we are looking for partners to contribute to the website or to co-host events with us.

 

If this appeals to you then please contact:

edward.fennell@yahoo.co.uk

 

We look forward to you joining us in this fascinating and worthwhile endeavour.

The Captain Swing Bicentenary Committee

Hampshire Machine Breakers

Hampshire Machine Breakers by Jill Chambers

In this area we will be exploring the people and places that were significant in the Captain Swing riots.

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