Category: Counter-Heritage

It was the most perfect equinoctial evening,
But with the six o’clock sun in drivers’ eyes,
I decided to walk rather than cycle – for a change,
And chose to walk to Rodborough Church,
Rather than straight up the hill to the common;

I sauntered along Spillmans to reach the church gate,
Where, placed carefully within the clambering ivy,
Was a lost shopping list, a middle class preparation
For a dinner party: precisely categorized calligraphy,
Upper case black ink, detailing the requirements:
APPLES BANANAS TOMATOES AVOCADOS CORIANDER LIMES CELERY SALAD
EGGS BAGELS BREAD WRAPS
COLD CHICKEN MINCE SAUSAGES BACON SMOKED SALMON
YOGHURTS SOUR CREAM then four items I couldn’t read shrouded by the branches and leaves of the ivy (Why didn’t I move the branch? I dunno. I think it’s because it felt as though I were regarding an exhibit in a gallery or museum, or perhaps it was the memory of a Christian upbringing …)
MAGAZINES
KiDNEY BEANS
TINNED TOMS
NACHOS
APRICOTS
then another couple of ivy covered items
FROZEN PEAS

Someone had scrawled across this notelet in blue biro,
Poshy doshy – a young hand, condemnatory and judgmental,
Turning the world of class and deference upside down
In an inter-textual, meta-textual sort of way;
It was though Life itself had become the writer
In this churchyard of embedded narratives;

I felt compelled to record this postmodernist happenstance –
So penned these lines, sitting on a gravestone,
In the evening sunshine, imagining
That I would place the scrap of exercise paper
Next to the shopping list in the ivy;

But when I turned the church’s shadowed corner,
I came across this notice:
This is NOT a rubbish bin. Please take all flower wrappings, pots, wreaths and your graveyard rubbish home with you. Thank you

As Louis Armstrong put it in High Society:
‘End of story.’

THE SPECKLED MONSTER
Born in 1749, Edward Jenner lived
In that time of calendrical change:
A Julian age of Pope and happenstance
(Where African slaves were mocked
For their
Creole medicine and smallpox cures),
And a Gregorian world of
Science, Revolution, Reason and Experimentation
(Of Tyburn Tree skullduggery,
Where even necrophiliac surgeons
Would baulk at payment for smallpox victims),
And walking the enclosed hedgerows, he would
Have heard the shouts and cries:
Pockmarked mechanics and labourers,
Whose right to roam was balked by the new hedges and fences,
Together with the retort of property’s muskets:

Indigent Berkeley labourers,
Forced to poach, where spring guns lay ready
To kill Tom Till, and leave a wife and two children
In a parish of poverty and sorrow:
Even the castle chaplain thought
‘Colonel Berkeley had run the matter of game so hard’.

So it was, that some twenty Berkeley Vale men
Swore revenge, taking a solemn oath
‘Not to peach on each other, so help me God’.
A bloody battle ensued, with death and wounding,
But the cudgel-wielding colonel exacted feudal revenge,
For the jury’s tearful ‘Guilty’ verdict meant transportation,
And execution for two poachers:
‘Launched into the presence of that
Being whose laws they had so impiously outraged’,
As the Gloucester Mercury put it;
Doctor Jenner saw it quite differently:
‘My intention is to quit this place, rendered dreary by the scene …
About to be acted on the horrid platform tomorrow.
They certainly did not go out with the intention to commit murder.’
Colonel Berkeley was reviled, but obdurate to the end,
He hung a painting of the battle in his breakfast room.

But, a careful student of farm and field,
Doctor Edward Jenner saw how the smallpox
Killed one in ten in town and village,
And saw how it disfigured survivors
With blindness and itinerant beggary,
And he studied the epidemic
Of King George’s first strange madness year,
And he listened to the farmyard yarns
Of the protective power of cow-pox, and these
Rustic milkmaid tales convinced this thinker,
That vaccination, as he would call it,
Could save the nation’s health; and in the years
When the “Rights of Man” spread its virus
Through the common swinish multitude
(To the alarm of Pitt’s body politic),
Edward Jenner listened to Sarah Nelmes:
‘My cow Blossom has recently had the cowpox, sir’,
Examined the rash on her hand,
Took cowpox from the dairy,
And gave it to the 8 year old James Phipps,
Who gained, as this iconoclast forecast,
Resistance to the ubiquitous smallpox;
Now, two centuries after such success:

“It now becomes too manifest to admit of controversy, that the annihilation of the Small Pox, the most dreadful scourge of the human species, must be the final result of this practice.”
[Edward Jenner, 1801, on Vaccination (with cowpox)]

Smallpox is secreted in arsenals,
A scientific threat of germ warfare;
How this country doctor and poet,
How this coiner of neologisms,
Would have despised a term like germ warfare:
The Speckled Monster.

We associate Fascism with late nineteenth century ideology,
And twentieth century practice in Europe and South America:
The cult of the leader; control of the media; control of the economy;
The cult of war; of racism; of the survival of the fittest; of the military;
Of masculinity; of femininity; of the corporate state; of the nation state –
And a sort of grainy, generalised One Nation, One People, One Leader sort of thing,
Be it Falangist, Poujadist, Peronist, Allende, Greece, Brazil, Panama,
Hitler, Mussolini, Portugal, et al,
And so on and so on and so on and on and on and on.

Another characteristic of the fascist state is the use of plebiscites and referendums,
State control of the media makes it easy to control the minds of the populace
(Hitler used three),
And didn’t Goebbels say that if you’re going to tell a lie, then tell a big one,
And if you tell it often enough then the people will end up believing it.
When the Daily Mail and Daily Express tried to control Stanley Baldwin
(Just before Hitler destroyed Weimar democracy),
He commented in his characteristically masculine pipe smoking way:
‘What the proprietorship of these newspapers is aiming at is power, but power without responsibility, the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.’
And now we have had Farage’s Breaking Point poster,
And Arron Banks, multimillionaire UKIP funder, saying,
‘Facts don’t work’, and that’s it. The Remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.’
What else?
A Leave.eu Facebook video, visited over a million and a half times,
‘Are you concerned about the amount of crime committed in the UK by foreign nationals?
Isn’t it time to take back control?’
(With mood music suggested by a hypnotist, btw.)
What else?
The 500% increase in hate crimes,
‘The genie let out of the bottle’,
Farage’s comments since the referendum,
About the ordinary decent people fighting a successful war
Against the banks and multinationals
(What’s his ‘job’ again?),
Then his rant at the European Parliament
(He is becoming increasingly bellicose and histrionic, is he not?
Those hand movements, when interviewed,
A subliminal gestural reminder of the Third Reich)),
While Le Pen simpered in admiration:
‘Look how beautiful history is.’

I thought of John Heartfield’s late-Weimar agit-prop,
Showing big business originally pulling Hitler’s strings –
And how we might now have a 21st century variant on the old model of fascism:
One where a liberal-democratic free press all pull the same strings,
All at the same time, all in the same right wing direction,
At the behest of the proprietorship:
A 21st century mass media fascism –
And just as Herbert Marcuse wrote of ‘One Dimensional Man’,
Where liberal-capitalist society gives the illusion of freedom,
So as to maintain and manipulate overall control –
The late 20th century example being ‘Penguin Marxism’,
So we have social media hefts today …

In the twentieth century, fascism used referendums to legitimise decisions:
Fascism was the cause of the referendums;
But what if fascism can now be the consequence of a referendum?
What if Farangism – like Hitler – takes control of the strings?
When negotiations for access to the single market end the street dream,
The street dream of ‘controlling our borders’,
When ‘Stop Immigration, Start Repatriation’
Doesn’t happen,
When anger erupts on the streets …

It won’t be ‘The first time as tragedy,
The second time, as farce’,
It will be a catastrophe –
Farage might have resigned as leader of UKIP,
Farage might have seemed to have gone,
But Faragism is still strong:

A poll shows 16% of Brexiteers supporting repatriation.

I think we are witnessing a peculiarly English/British form of Fascism –
We have the civilised classical Johnsonian face,
The Govian exhortation to ignore the ‘experts’,
The atavistic appeal to emotion,
Farage and his decent, ordinary people
Fighting without bullets against the multinationals,
For a bright new dawn where tomorrow belongs to him,
Together with: ‘F*** Off, Europe, We’re voting out’,
From some England football fans at the Euros;
Meanwhile, the Daily Mail seems back in the 1930s,
When it supported Oswald Mosley and the Blackshirts;
Once more, it feels as though the toffs
Are mobilising and diverting the masses,
With carefully fostered nationalism
And carefully calibrated xenophobia;
We have seen how dragon’s teeth have been sown
For over a generation by Conservatives, New Labour,
Liberal Democrats and a relentlessly right wing press:
Now the vilification of ‘socialism’ brings its harvest of hatred:
If the working class has been informed that it mustn’t vote socialist,
Then it votes nationalist and Brexit:

So much for the Third Way.

What next?

Two pieces – firstly a performance piece for Stroud Valley Arts and An Evening with Elvis; secondly a more discursive piece for the page.

A tale of why I loathe Ye Archers
By William Shakespeare

Archers!
Vile Archers!
Noisome effusion of middle England on the airwaves,
Pestilential vapour of Ambridge enclave,
Coddling of the mind so that even a monarchy
Doth seem less imposition and ivy-clad parasite,
But rather more Merrie Englande of fair pageant and heritage –
For if the citizens of this fair land do believe in the fairy tales and fictions
Of Ambridge and Borsetshire,
Then how couldst they reject a monarchy’s addiction?

Our very rulers do tell us that this imagined ruralia
Is ‘the nation’s favourite radio drama’
And ‘the soundtrack of our lives for over six decades’,
But tis infantilising and embarrassing and deceiving:
Forsooth, it once killed off a character because, in real life,
She argued for trade union representation and Equity wage rates,
But it allowed the real Dan and Doris Archer
To go round jollily opening Tory summer fetes,
Forsooth, tis the aural cousin of the Daily Mail,
The Daily Telegraph and the Countryside Alliance:
Our land is now more reactionary than it was before the birth
Of this accursed invention:
Who in their left mind can possibly deny that these two events are causally linked?
There will be no improvement in our real lives
Until we get rid of this excruciating piece of fiction –
Or, until, ye fellow minstrels and troubadours,
My comrades and cooperatives of this fair audience
Verily decide to write our own scripts:
If the tale of Helen’s plight can raise £75,000 for Refuge,
Then verily just think of how we could take control of our whole land and nation
If we take control of The Archers,
And occupy Ambridge.
Ye subjects of the airwaves!
Arise from your slumbers and become free citizens!
Become thee, the scriptwriters!
My esteemed and wondrous audience,
Seize thee the quill!
Overturn the Ambridge Village Fete!
‘Expropriate the expropriators’:
Listeners of Radio 4 unite.
Ye have nothing to lose but your chains on the airwaves of your minds.

Why I Hate The Archers

I hate The Archers
Because the very name is feudal and militaristic:
The massed ranks firing their longbows under the tutelage of King and barons,
This sceptred isle,
An illusion of equality created by a nationalist, Shakespearian trope,
Nomenclature as false consciousness;
I hate The Archers
Because the programme came along in 1951,
When the toffs began to fight back against the new welfare state and nationalisation,
With the familiar complaints about red tape, bureaucrats, loss of competitiveness,
Loss of tradition, loss of individuality, loss of self-reliantly standing on your own two feet:
The Archers’ conception and birth lies firmly within this ideological context –
A deeply reactionary programme that leads the most sane left-wing people
To completely suspend all disbelief, and talk about these characters
And their petty fictional lives ad nauseam and all the time and at the drop of a hat;
I hate The Archers
Because the programme has now risen beyond satire in this deeply reactionary modern age
(With Cameron and country suppers and Chipping Norton and Rebekah Brooks, dogs and horses),
Even though it was parodied, fifty years ago by Tony Hancock,
Guying a nation held in thrall to a fictional world of ruralia –
as though it were a more authentic time and place than the real world,
It’s no wonder then that we have a monarchy when adults believe country fairy tales,
Programmes like The Archers just soften up the populace for the real thing,
It’s like subliminal Goebbels on the BBC.
And I hate the way Middle England reimagines itself in a knowing sort of way,
With a nudge and a wink that we don’t really believe in the cartography of Ambridge:
Borsetshire, Fawcett Magna, Loxley Barrett, Penny Hassett, Manderton Cross et al …
I know Thomas Hardy did the same with Wessex,
But his were tales of the harshness, struggle, and futility of life,
The unrelenting exploitation of poor rural workers, men, women, boys and girls,
As opposed to the cosy fictions of what the BBC calls,
‘The nation’s favourite radio drama’;
It’s infantilising and embarrassing:
Who cares about how Phil Archer proposed to Jill?
Why would anyone in their left mind want to remember
When ‘Jennifer Aldridge learned of Brian’s affair with Siobhan and met their son Ruairi’;
Or recall ‘When Walter Gabriel’s monster marrow, grown for the
Annual Flower and Produce Show, exploded over Tom Forrest’;
Or ruminate over ‘when the Grundys were evicted from their family home, Grange Farm’.
BBC Books tell us that the programme
‘has been the soundtrack of our lives for over six decades’;
It has revered and has been revered by the monarchy,
It killed off a key character because she was pro trade union and Equity,
While Dan and Doris Archer went round jollily opening Tory summer fetes,
It is the aural cousin of the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Countryside Alliance:
Our political, economic and social capitalist system is now more reactionary
Than it was before the Archers’ birth:
Who in their left mind can possibly deny that these two events are causally linked?
There will be no improvement in our real lives until we get rid of this excruciating piece of fiction,
Or until we write our own scripts:
If the tale of Rob and Helen and the story of Helen’s plight can raise £73,000 for Refuge,
Then just think of how we can take control of our nation if we take control of The Archers,
Become the scriptwriters!
Revolutionise the Ambridge Village Fete!
‘Expropriate the expropriators’,
Listeners of Radio 4 unite.
You have nothing to lose but your chains on the airwaves.

When the weather’s against you, you have to explore inside the house:
Psychokitchenography/Mythokitchenography

When you stay in a converted barn worth a million pounds,
A weathered old long red brick structure: The Threshing Barn
(‘Sleeps 12. Large barn conversion, on the edge of the village
overlooking open countryside and Horton Tower,
fitted to a high standard in a contemporary style.
The house has 6 large bedrooms and 4 bathrooms.’),
And your extended family drive out in their cars
To share National Trust membership cards,
You choose to stay to wander the lanes in the high Easter wind,
Passing a newly thatched cottage:
‘R. Hayward and Sons -Thatchers since 1780’ –
And it’s easy, when you return to the empty house,
To imagine the discussions in the winnowing dust
Of the hard, harsh winter of 1830,
Right there in the kitchen where you sit writing these lines,
Listening to the rhythmic thrash of the flails,
Watching the drift of the choking chaff,
Eavesdropping the muffled talk of threshing machines,
The burning of hayricks, the messages passed along the village lanes:

‘Who will write a letter like they have all over Wiltshire?’
‘Let’s ask for eight shillings a week,
And no damn threshing machines to come here.
We can sign it Captain Swing, like the other villages do.’
‘And if farmer won’t pay us, then we’ll damn well burn down his hayricks.’

But other voices speak of the gallows, the gaol, the squire,
The yeomanry, transportation, Van Diemen’s Land …

They eat their bread and cheese,
Smoke their pipes, burn the letter,
And pledge their selves to secrecy.

But

‘Who hath not seen thee oft amid they store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.’

Phil Smith’s On Walking … and Stalking Sebald Axminster: Triarchy Press (2014):

‘Multiplicity is the key mythogeographical principle, the principle of multiplicitous narratives and many histories, disrupting the established narratives not only to introduce subaltern ones, but … to invent our own’.

Uley and Michinhampton Common 1795

(1795 was a key year of national unrest, high food prices, decline in ‘deference’ and anonymous threatening letters)

O remember ye poor in distress by ye high prs of provision if not the consiquens will be fatall to a great many in all parishis round a bout here how do ye think a man can support a famly by a quarter flour for a shillin and here is a man in this parish do say the poore was never beter of as they be now a fatel blow for him and his hous and all his property we have redy 5000 sworn to be true to the last & we have 510000 of ball redy and can have pouder at a word & every think fitin for ye purpose no King but a constitution down down down o fatall dow high caps & proud hats for ever dow down we all.

One of three notes sent to the gentlefolk of Uley in July 1795 – a parish that had seen incendiarism against the houses of master clothiers.

The response was to eventually provide subsidized bread – but the quality was found wanting, and so this message was sent two months later, in mid-September:

The distress of the industerous people through the dearness of provisions calls aloud for an immediate consultation therefore a meeting is desired next Munday morning 21int by nine o clock in the morning on Hampton coman to consult what steps to take for an immediate alteration. Be pld to let more know it further. With it make no delay or else we all must starve immediately.

The response was to put troops on standby – 300 people met on Minchinhampton Common on the afternoon of that day and another, smaller crowd gathered on 5th October.

The next local ruling class response was some detective work in Uley to ascertain who was the author of the anonymous letters – they decided it was an ‘obscure’ local tailor. The JP, the Reverend Baker, and fellow magistrates, thought a warning would suffice, but two other differently lettered, seditious, anonymous notes threatened violence: ‘expect to loase yr heads without any ado’.

In consequence, the magistrates decided to ask the Secretary of State, the Duke of Portland, for advice.

His response?

‘The person in question is in so low a situation of life … that I am inclined to think it may perhaps be the best way of preventing disturbances in future to let him know that the Magistrates are well informed of his attempts & that they have it in contemplation to proceed against him, which may possibly induce him to quit the country …’

E.P.Thompson in his chapter The Crime of Anonymity in Albion’s Fatal Tree shows how this sort of dialogue between the ruling class and the lower orders was part and parcel of the so-called Age of Deference. Gloucestershire was no exception – and just think! How many anonymous threatening letters might have been destroyed at source, or have disappeared, or remained unwritten for lack of materials or courage – or just blew away, or lost legibility, provenance and import in a night of rain?

So just as with Stroud Scarlet and slavery, we might need to go beyond the available evidence:

So how do we create a counter-narrative?
That is,
“A performative counter-narrative, what we might call a ‘guerrilla memory’”,
Or “Lieux de memoire, sites of history, torn away from the moment of history” (Pierre Nora),
Memorialisation that moves beyond ‘obsessional empiricism’
and ‘the fetishisation of surviving historical documents and sources’,
To a counter-heritage, a counter-memorialisation.

O remember ye poor in distress by ye high prs of provision if not the consiquens will be fatall to a great many in all parishis round a bout here how do ye think a man can support a famly by a quarter flour for a shillin and here is a man in this parish do say the poore was never beter of as they be now a fatel blow for him and his hous and all his property we have redy 5000 sworn to be true to the last & we have 510000 of ball redy and can have pouder at a word & every think fitin for ye purpose no King but a constitution down down down o fatall dow high caps & proud hats for ever dow down we all.

How a Cotswold Village Memorialises Itself: Uley

In 1795, anonymous threatening letters were left for gentlemen of the parish,
Sufficiently disturbing for the local JPs to contact London for advice,
And sufficiently noteworthy for inclusion in national historical studies,
So, having done the reading, I decided to hop on the number 35 bus,
The timetable giving me a clear hour’s run before the return to Stroud,
In an attempt to take a few photos of how Uley presents its history
To itself, its residents, plus tourists and visitors.

The Uley Millennium Green notice boards
For People and Nature, And Breathing Spaces,
Make no mention.

There is a brass plaque in The Street:
Uley Community Stores
Officially opened by HRH The Prince of Wales
On the 22nd February 2013;

There is a detailed large map of Uley and Owlpen,
But again, no mention of 1795;

The church has several grand 18th century gravestones,
Master clothiers remembered,
But, alas, no ‘Village-Hampdens’:
‘Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.’

When you stay at a posh gastro-pub like the Red Lion,
Just by the River Avon at East Chisenbury, near Pewsey,
With a prehistoric, Saxon, medieval and tranquil landscape all around,
It’s hard to remember that you are deep in Captain Swing land:
‘ In taking my leave of this beautiful vale I have to express my deep shame, as an Englishman, at beholding the general extreme poverty of those that cause this vale to produce such quantities of food and rainment. This is, I verily believe it, the worst used labouring people upon the face of the earth. Dogs and hogs and horses are treated with more civility; and as to food and lodging, how gladly would the labourers change with them!”
Sunday November 21st 1830, is when it all kicked off,
With 200 labourers demanding higher wages
And an end ‘To them damned threshing machines’;
Sir Edward Poore met the labourers at Manningham:
“I am satisfied that your wages ought to be raised and I will do my utmost to obtain for you a more adequate compensation for your labour”,
And he tossed them a sovereign and believed order had been restored.
But a sense that the old moral economy would prevail over new and base capitalism,
Encouraged the rioters, and in a long chat with Augustus Hare, the rector of Alton Barnes,
They said that a magistrate had informed them that they would be breaking no laws
If they were to smash the threshing machines with their hammers and iron bars.
So they marched from the wharf at Honey Street,
Allington, All Cannings, Patney, Maningham Abbots and Woodborough,
Until some 250 men met at the Rose and Crown at Little Woodborough,
Had their customary bread, cheese and beer,
Then smashed machinery (threshing, chaff-cutting and haymaking machines)
At farms in Woodborough, demanding money from farmers
(John Clift at Church Farm offered two half-crowns –
It needed another ten shillings before they dispersed),
They then traversed the bridge over the canal at Honey Street,
And so to Alton Barnes and Manor Farm, next to the church.
The tenant (Robert Pile) had been to Marlborough, with the yeomanry,
Putting down riots at Rockley,
But returned to use pistol and shotgun against the labourers as they tried to wreck machinery;
He was attacked, in turn: “God damn your blood, you tried to shoot me, and now I’ll do for you”.
The rioters dispersed after attacking the house and receiving a ten pound note;
They moved on to Stanton St. Bernard, then back to the Rose & Crown,
Where the yeomanry captured 28, before taking them to prison in Devizes
(En route an attempt was made to rescue the prisoners at Chirton),
Two sentences of death (Charles Davis and Laban Stone) were handed out,
Commuted to transportation;
The yeomanry remained on alert,
But the new poor law would soon do its work,
And the labourers were rendered docile for a generation,
Until ‘Hodge’ listened to Joseph Arch
And a trade union was born.

November 24th 1830 — About two o’clock we were summoned by two half drunken men who professed to be „sent on‟. They came to the door and asked for money, “any trifle‟, announcing that two hundred were coming at their heels. After failing of their errand, they went down to Pile’s House opposite, whither I followed them. He was gone to Marlborough, and there was none but the women in the house. As the only chance, I had the church bells rung, but none of the labourers came; perhaps they were too far off, and did not hear. About ten minutes after the troop arrived. The machine had been taken to pieces, but that did not satisfy them; they must break it. And breaking it they were, when Pile dashed in on horseback, and fired … they dragged him down, and have nearly killed him. Then they burst into the house and broke everything to pieces, and for sometime I expected they would serve us in the same way; so irritated were they, and so mad with drink. Indeed they talked of coming back tonight and burning down all his ricks and barns … The Yeomanry were here by six and I have just heard that they have surprised several of the rioters in the public house at Woodborough. (Letter of Augustus Hare)
November 25th 1830 — We have had no further alarm beyond the many reports, of which, if we believed one half, one could not have much rest…… Troops are at Devizes and Marlborough. We have our own special constables, patrols and fire engines and I trust are in a better state of preparation than we were. Poor Mr. Pile is not out of danger, I fear, though I hope he will do well. A large fireball was found in his field the morning after the attack. We hear of five great fires over the hills towards Calne, and at Salisbury dreadful work is going on. Our ring leaders are chiefly taken and we had the pleasure of seeing some of them go past with the cavalry yesterday morning. All the villages round about us seemed to have contributed their fair share of men, and I fear there are some very bad ones amongst them. Our village had not one, and only two were from Great Alton (Alton Priors), but of course they all rejoice secretly at what is being done to bring them greater wages. At the same time some of them are frightened to death, and the wives come crying about their husbands, they are sure they will get their heads broken. At all hours people are coming – farmers to consult about what should be done, and with fresh stories. In short, we live in a strange nervous state; and if we do not make an example, and that speedily, of some of the worst, there will be no end to these outrages …
The greater part of our rioters are men who earn from twelve to twenty shillings a week at the wharf and spend it all in the beer shops. (Letter of Maria Hare)
November 26th 1830 — The activity of the magistrates and yeomanry have struck a panic which will, I trust, spare us any further alarm. Yesterday a Bow Street Officer came to get information. He came out of Kent and says his own impression is certainly that the fires proceed from the people of the country. He hoped to have got a good clue to one of our incendiaries. The chiefs of our ring leaders are in custody and Augustus went this morning with Mr. Miller to identify some of the prisoners. He was doubtful about one, till the man put an end to his hesitation by saying, “You, Sir, can witness I was not breaking the machine, for I was talking to you.” I have written so confusedly before that I think you will have no clear idea of my share of the day, so I will tell you what I saw. On the approach of the troop, as they came over the bridge, Augustus said to me “Go home and keep in the house” and so amid the cook’s entreaties that “master would come home too”, which I knew was in vain, we betook ourselves to the house, locked and bolted the doors and windows, and had just retreated upstairs when a thundering knock came at the front door. Finding my plan of concealment would not do, I presented myself at the drawing room window and held a parley with them. “They wanted to do no harm”. “What have you got those clubs and hammers for, then?” I refused money and went away, but the continued knocking, and threats of breaking doors and windows, soon made me pull out some shillings and throw to them, with which they went away content. Meanwhile I saw in the churchyard all the women and children collected; leaning over the wall of Mr. Pile’s yard I could distinguish Augustus and one or two others; and in the farm yard and all round it were a mob, with shouts, hammering the machines to pieces. I suppose this had gone on for about twenty minutes or half an hour when we (the cook and myself, for the other servants were all gone nearer the scene of the action) heard a tremendous gallop, and in an instant saw Mr. Pile riding furiously amongst the mob, who gave way directly, and had he kept his ground there, all had been well. There was a confusion, and all I could distinguish was that the farmyard was cleared; a report of a gun came from the ricks behind the barns, there was a great scream set up, loud shouts, and to my horror I saw Augustus and those with his rush into the field amongst them. However, the alarm for him was not long; after a few minutes I distinguished him leaving the crowd, and making his way to the house, and never did my legs carry me more willingly than as I flew down the stairs to open him the door. When I again got to my station the mob were all come round and advancing upon the Pile’s house, and the noise was terrible of breaking their windows and doors. As they had vowed vengeance against Augustus for having brought the gun out of the house, he kept out of sight, whilst I sent away the few who came for money, and who were easily contented. After they had completed their destruction at Mr. Pile’s, which was not till the poor mangled victim was brought downstairs again, and had given them £10, we had the satisfaction of seeing them file away across the fields to Great Alton. In about half an hour they returned to break the Crowe’s machine which we had put in the field, and then we saw no more of them; but as they went off to Stanton, declaring of their intention of returning at night, it was an amazing relief when Mr. G. and some other men arrived, who said they had just left Devizes, and heard the troops ordered “on Alton‟. And so ended our siege, which it must be owned was as little resisted as ever enemy was; but the best labourers were all at a distance, and those near, far too frightened to give any help. (Maria Hare)
December 10th 1830 — The odd thing about the riots is, that this is not a year of scarcity. There has been no hard winter and no uncommon pressure of any sort to raise this outcry. And when one sees half of the discontented, are men who spend their money at the beer shops, and who might get ample if they chose, it hardens one against sympathy with their distress, and inclines one to think the lenity and indulgence granted in return for their proceedings, not the best judged. (Maria Hare)

http://www.wiltshire-opc.org.uk/Items/Wilsford/Wilsford%20(Pewsey)%20-%20Charles%20Davis%20Swing%20Riot%20Captain%201798-1831.pdf
http://www.wiltshire-opc.org.uk/Items/Woodborough/Woodborough%20-%20Swing%20Riots%201830.pdf
http://www.wiltshire-opc.org.uk/Items/Alton/Alton%20Barnes%20-%20Swing%20Riots%201830.pdf