Family & Community Historical Research Society

Swing Riots Research Project

The study examined the three year period of social history focusing upon unrest amongst ordinary men and women in the pre-trade union countryside of England and Wales. In British history, this period was in fact the last mass rising of agricultural workers protesting against their pay and conditions

FACHRS new publication "Swing Unmasked" has been described by Professor Michael Drake as a major research achievement in publishing since the thirty-year old research of  Hobsbawm and Rudé’s  (Captain Swing, Hobsbawm, E. J. and Rude, George,  1975, Norton and Company, Inc., 384 pp. New York). The FACHRS research increased by 67 percent, the identified instances or occurrences of prosecuted "swing-riot" offences. The result has been the discovery that Swing covered a much larger geographical area with outbreaks of violence on a scale far wider than earlier researchers had concluded.