I

As historical documents go it is neither fulsome nor terribly prepossessing, even though it sits in the National Archive, within the Home Office files of correspondence with the county authorities. Originally attached to a letter, but now separated, it is a single-page (undated), list of six certain victims of incendiary attacks that had recently taken place ‘in the neighbourhood of Sevenoaks and Brasted’.Footnote ¹ Now known to have been written in the autumn of 1830, it details some of the very earliest manifestations of what would later become known as the ‘Captain Swing’ disturbances and is the title (‘The Sevenoaks Fires’) of a short, discrete section in Carl Griffin's major revisionist history of Swing, The Rural War.Footnote ² It and all the other documents in the Home Office files have been extensively poured over by historians for many decades, most notably by Eric Hobsbawm and George Rudé in their magisterial Captain Swing, the ‘seismic impact’ of which went on to spawn a large and very revealing subset of the social history (including popular protest and even popular culture) of England in the earlier nineteenth century.Footnote ³

However, as avowed exponents of ‘history from below’, Hobsbawm and Rudé (and many of their successors) have been keen to examine the evidence only from the point of view of the perpetrators. They have investigated in particular what it might tell us about the economic and social conditions of contemporary farm labourers; if and when they became politicised during this period and whether or not the extensive campaigns of riots, burnings and machine breakings improved their lot, in the shorter or longer terms. Almost completely ignored in the now very extensive historiography of Swing has been the impact the disturbances had on their higher-status targets. This is not a new issue. Over twenty years ago, Adrian Randall and Edwina Newman identified that elite targets were missing from studies of nineteenth-century rural protest and such studies make little sense without them. One danger of such an uneven approach is that ‘it risks producing a history of power without victims’.Footnote ⁴

This article firstly therefore heeds Katrina Navickas's call to ‘understand more clearly how the “history from below” interacted with the “history from above”’, which essentially means studying ‘the interaction between local elites and authorities with agricultural rioters and other participants in subaltern activity’. Secondly, since the Sevenoaks area saw the first collective iterations of the arson movement that subsequently spread like a Mexican Wave across southern England (making it yet more surprising that the Fires have been almost entirely ignored by historians thus far), it looks in detail at five specific victims (including four of those named in the Home Office list) of incendiary attacks, or letters threatening arson, around the town between June and September 1830.Footnote ⁵

So, paying ‘close attention to the local’, since this is ‘clearly essential if we wish to understand the social politics’ of Swing, it considers how farmers (and the local authorities) responded to incendiarism (and the threat of incendiarism) in and around the broader Sevenoaks area then.Footnote ⁶ It seeks to do so, moreover, within an overarching framework of risk, since this provides an entirely new historiographical perspective on both the Sevenoaks Fires and Swing more generally. So it examines why those particular victims, as opposed to many other potential candidates, were targeted in the first place, what strategies they and the authorities adopted to mitigate the violent antipathy of local labourers and what that implied for social relations in the town thereafter. Finally, this approach will be extended to suggest how risk may have underpinned competing conceptions of social welfare provision among the town's elite, post-Swing.

II

Griffin provides an introduction to the conceptual framework of risk within the context of social movement theory or the ‘forging of these collectivities’, which in turn shaped the form and outcome of Swing and is based on work by Ulrich Beck and others.Footnote ⁷ I wish to broaden this approach, whereby a central driver of the entire historical process is the wish to remove, or at least to mitigate to a greater or lesser extent, the risks borne by an historical actor, or group of actors. Or it is the related imperative to transfer, or share, all or some of those risks onto, or with, another individual or group (willing or unwilling), who may or may not prove better able to bear them. This is done knowing that in some circumstances – such as Swing – catastrophic risk experienced by one social group could provoke them into protesting precisely by transferring those perils elsewhere.Footnote ⁸ This imperative was significantly sharpened in times of crisis and, if all else failed, transferring risk in symbolic form, through what Julius Ruff calls ‘physically assertive performances of opposition’ could be almost as satisfying, psychologically and emotionally, as doing so more tangibly.Footnote ⁹

Applying risk to the circumstances prevailing before and during the Sevenoaks Fires, it hardly bears repeating that, for the labouring poor in the early nineteenth century, life was always very hard and even securing what George Eliot called the most ‘primitive wants’ (food, clothing, fuel and shelter) was always an uncertain, or risky, process.Footnote ¹⁰ But by summer 1830 those risks were no longer chronic, but utterly catastrophic, as starvation loomed for many. In those circumstances protesting their lot, even if it meant breaking the law, became an increasingly viable option. To locate the Sevenoaks Fires (and, by extension, later Swing disturbances) squarely in terms of risk, therefore, early nineteenth-century punishments for arson were draconian and included transportation for life and the death penalty.Footnote ¹¹ But when the need to protest the desperate conditions under which they were struggling became acute; when some fairly easy targets were available; and when there seemed a good chance of avoiding capture, labourers might consider those risks well worth running. And attacks became further sanctioned when those targets had used their social, political or economic power to alter, to their own financial or other advantage, longstanding customary arrangements, especially if that resulted in the further immiseration of the bottom rungs of the local community. As Peter Jones rightly says, ‘the moral economy was very much alive in 1830’, so much so that ‘the customary precedents to which crowds appealed’ provided both the ethical legitimacy for the risks the Swing labourers took and – extending his argument – served as a de-risking strategy, too, in such a way that may reopen (or perhaps extend) the ancient historiographical area of overt versus covert protest.Footnote ¹²

This is because any public appeal to custom in the early nineteenth century was, firstly, itself an overt form of protest, since it effectively bound the entire community into that request, whether some members of it liked it or not. Secondly, such a strategy had an important de-risking element to it too, since the authorities would have found it difficult to punish every single member of that community merely for demanding what many – and not only the poor – believed was rightfully theirs. Furthermore, if those overt appeals to custom were overridden or ignored, that justified labourers taking the law into own hands such that almost any form of covert action, even incendiarism, became morally permissible, especially if it sought to fire property such as hayricks, rather than people in farmhouses. We need also to remember that ‘no act of Swing violence caused lasting physical injury’ since its perpetrators were – in a sense – acting on behalf of the entire community to enforce its perceived historic rights.Footnote ¹³ But covert activity had to work in terms of risk, too, so for example any protestor in the business of burning ricks also needed to ensure that he (or she) avoided detection and capture.

Applying this to Swing if, as Jones says, one of its defining characteristics was how ‘farmers . . . were coerced . . . into a symbolic relationship with labourers and the local poor’, then those arson attacks and threatening letters represented early examples of attempts to force farmers to change their public tunes.Footnote ¹⁴ Their apparent determination to place themselves outside the framework of custom, in other words, made them (or perhaps just a few of them, since even a single victim could and did represent many) fair game for attack. But this immediately requires us to confront the counter-intuitive nature of Swing asking, as Griffin does, what ‘economic “logic”’ lay behind hungry labourers ‘firing the means and results of production’ that they needed to live on. The answer, however, was much more than simple intimidation in the hope of gaining wage increases, as he believes. Its far greater significance lay in risk transfer.Footnote ¹⁵ This was because, simultaneously and symbolically, such coercion in the short term sought to bring those farmers into a more equal relationship with their labourers by depriving them of some of the most important assets (farm buildings, machinery and crops) that divided rural entrepreneur from wage earner. William Cobbett called this process bringing ‘people to their senses’.Footnote ¹⁶

III

The historiographical hare Hobsbawm and Rudé set running in 1969 shows little sign of pausing for breath. After the somewhat bad tempered ‘Wells-Charlesworth’, overt-covert debate, historians moved away from meta-narratives based on class and a growing political consciousness of Swing's perpetrators to focus far more on what were ‘quintessentially local events’ with a ‘diverse and distinctive array of protests’Footnote ¹⁷ However, more recently that gap appears to be narrowing, since Griffin cautions that the drawback of the locality/micro-historical approach to Swing is that it ‘tends to replace one form of exceptionalism with another’ and – considering rural labour relations more generally – labourers’ ‘shared experience transcended the confines of the parish and locality’.Footnote ¹⁸ Tom Scriven's recent study of Swing's aftermath in Dorset echoes this, to the extent that ‘historians should be wary of drawing a distinction between localised forms of protest and organised mass-movements of labour’.Footnote ¹⁹ Calling it a ‘new protest history’, Navickas summarises this tendency by asking for Swing to be treated ‘not as a coherent unified movement, but as a complex, multi–faceted series of outbreaks of rural agitation’.Footnote ²⁰ Perhaps the most fruitful way to synthesise the two is in Jones's conception of ‘history from within’ or a ‘meta-movement’, whereby events in one place could have a ‘marginal impact on other localities and other moments of impact’.Footnote ²¹

Digging deeper, we also need to contextualise Swing – and other protests, such as those following the introduction of the New Poor Law – within parish social relations more generally, as we seek explanations for both the motives behind labourers’ attacks and their spread. Historians differ greatly in their accounts of why this happened, however. Roger Wells believes such protests were examples of ‘rural politicisation’, which heralded or reinforced the ‘emergence of a distinct working class movement in the south’, in parishes such as Sutton Scotney, Hampshire and Burwash, Sussex, the latter politicised as a ‘centre of support for William Cobbett’.Footnote ²² Jones, by complete contrast, pours scorn on the idea of such ‘movements’, suggesting instead that protestors had a ‘multitude of ends’, ‘defined by ‘an intense localism’. Even in southern parishes in 1830, he believes ‘the cultural and physical distance between labourers and . . . farmers, tradesmen, even landowners was closer that it is often assumed’. The central ‘organising principle’ behind Swing, moreover, was the paternalistic moral economy, as labourers aimed to ‘reinforce the direct relationship between employer and employed’ as they sought to return to the ‘”social compact” of the countryside’ within ‘the complex web of local social relations that took its most visible and concrete form at the vestry table’.Footnote ²³ Finally, standing somewhere in the middle is Griffin, who considers that while ‘the parish itself . . . defined labouring struggles’ and those struggles were ‘an expression of a deeply-entrenched working class culture’; the forms of parish politics that resulted there also demonstrated ‘great parallels and connections with the burgeoning reform and radical movements . . . It was, in essence, local though experiences elsewhere were also important.’Footnote ²⁴

IV

This study of how the victims of the Sevenoaks fires responded, and the dynamics of parish social relations it uncovers, will be carried out using the wide set of sources that are now available. These include what might be called the ‘traditional’ Swing material of the Home Office files, Parliamentary Papers, parish records, personal memoirs and newspapers, although the recent extensive digitisation of the latter means it is now much easier to pursue individuals, over time, through their pages than before. But they may also be examined alongside other, more novel sources, such as sermons, family history databases, estate records, tithe apportionments, census data, print culture, fire insurance records, poll books and, especially, information from agricultural and incendiary association meetings. In addition, the serendipitous recent discovery of the two-volume diary of Sevenoaks artist William Knight (1811–78), which is extant between 1832 and 1836, gives us the only personal, often eyewitness account of many of the important events of those years in the Sevenoaks area, including several spectacular incendiary attacks and the town's enthusiastic response to the passage of the Reform Bill. The diary is in family hands. Together these sources allow us to pursue far more detailed investigations of the individual victims, which in turn give us a much fuller picture of the impact and consequences of Swing – across all social classes – in a particular district than has hitherto been attempted.

V

The five victims of the Sevenoaks fires and letters examined here were all male farmers, although the extent of their holdings ranged widely. Given the welcome new historiographical focus on seeing ‘space for women’ within Swing (although much more as perpetrators than as victims, thus far), it is disappointing that too little may be learned about the two female targets of the Sevenoaks Fires to draw helpful conclusions.Footnote ²⁵ Elizabeth Minet of Brasted (1772–1831), ‘a lady of fortune’ who suffered an incendiary attack in August 1830, was previously married to John Lewis Minet, of the major Huguenot landowning family. We know little else of importance about her.Footnote ²⁶ The other, Frances Hubble (1782–1859), seems to have been a most interesting character, a single mother who was also a capable farmer, of 138 acres, at Ide Hill and who was clearly much better off than her ‘poor widow’ sobriquet would indicate.Footnote ²⁷ By 1841 she had taken on a second holding, which she ran with the assistance of her two children (both of whom were young teenagers in 1830) and four live-in farmhands; the 1845 tithe map shows she then occupied 242 acres – over 100 acres more than she was farming in 1830.Footnote ²⁸ She received a threatening letter in September, but since she lived cheek by jowl with serial victim Jonathan Thompson, it may be that it was intended for him.

The five men were Thomas Mosyer (1772–1855), who farmed in Orpington (a total of 373 acres in 1843) and Eynsford. He suffered an incendiary attack in June, as did Samuel Love (d. 1836) from Shoreham, whose holdings along the Darenth Valley totalled nearly 900 acres. The following month Amos Swaisland (1782–1840), whose Bradbourne and Warrenhouse farms spread over the parishes of Sevenoaks and Otford, was attacked. Thompson's Hendon Farm comprised 476 acres and extended over three parishes.Footnote ²⁹ The exceptional victim was draper William Morphew (1796–1857), who was the only one of the five to receive a threatening letter, that September. Unusually, too, he was a trader with a smallholding of just eleven acres, rather than a substantial farmer, and lived in central Sevenoaks, not a rural hinterland. He was therefore an example of someone with a ‘dual occupation’, whereby many Wealden craftsmen and ‘retailers also farmed in a small way’.Footnote ³⁰

VI

In October 1830, correspondent ‘M’ believed that the perpetrators of the Kentish arson attacks wanted ‘to revenge themselves on certain individuals who were obnoxious to them’.Footnote ³¹ An important reason why those five farmers, as opposed to many others in the area, were targeted was – if the historiography is to be believed – active participation in parish affairs in general and acting in some overseer capacity in particular. So ‘Parish officers were subjected to the greatest abuse and were most likely to feel Swing's full wrath’. The assistant overseer, in particular, was ‘generally an unfeeling man’ and their perceived obliviousness to the labourers’ plight meant they often ‘provoked massive resentment’. A good local example of the punishments meted out took place at Wrotham in November 1830 when, to cries of ‘bread or blood’, a mob several hundred strong seized overseer Keer ‘and dragged him about in a cart’. This action both symbolically stripped him of his power over them and made him look ridiculous in the eyes of local society.Footnote ³²

But that was not the rule with the Sevenoaks targets. There is no evidence that Thompson, who was attacked most frequently, played any part whatsoever in parish government. Swaisland did serve as an overseer and Morphew was churchwarden at Sevenoaks. However, substantial farmers were expected to assume responsibilities such as these within their parishes and only a tiny percentage of those officials became targets. The Otford overseers’ accounts books for 1829–31, for example, show that the larger farmers of that very rural parish took turn and turn about to serve as churchwardens, overseers and vestry members. Isaac Jordan (1783–1844) farmed 166 acres, was overseer in 1829 and was attacked the following year (and subsequently). But Joseph Parrish, who farmed over 100 acres in 1828, was churchwarden and overseer combined in 1830 and was completely untouched by Swing.Footnote ³³

When we look more carefully, however, at prevailing social relations in the Sevenoaks area, office was less important than attitude. The position held was, in other words, less significant than its holder's perceived disposition to the local poor. This is because the evidence suggests that, far from being friendly or understanding toward them, Swaisland, Thompson and perhaps Morphew used the economic conditions of the early 1830s either to avoid their customary obligations to poor labourers – or actively to exploit them instead.

The minutes of the Brasted vestry meeting for 24^th June 1830, held ‘for the purpose of making a Rate for the Relief of the Poor’, record that Thompson there appealed against the rate assessment for his farm (into which parish his holding extended) and the meeting decided that ‘his lands in Brasted shall be revalued’, such that it ‘will place them on an equality with the other lands in the parish book’.Footnote ³⁴ This looks suspiciously as if Thompson was – when many of his and other farm workers in the parish were going short of food – deliberately trying to weasel out of his customary responsibility to pay his rightful share of the parish poor rate and may well account for the spate of fires at Hendon through the autumn. This was almost bound to have caused deep and long-lasting resentment among the labourers of West Kent, in a similar way that those in Elham and elsewhere regarded farmers’ use of threshing machines as devices ‘to absolve themselves of age-old responsibilities to the poor’.Footnote ³⁵ Thompson's low view of local labourers, the concomitant breakdown in social relations and the serious risk transfer issues that plagued him as a result were neatly conflated in a letter he wrote to the Poor Law Commissioners in September 1835 – or a few days after another dramatic arson attack in Sundridge, that against Lord Templemore at Coombe Bank. The occasion was the disinclination of labourer families to supply female domestic servants to local farmers, but he went on to complain about ‘paupers who have relief at present’ even though they have ‘relations who can keep them if they are made to’. This contempt (for how poor families were using the ‘makeshift economy’ to avoid wage dependence on the local elite) was heartily reciprocated by the local workforce, such that he had to plead with the Board to ‘keep my name from the ears of the paupers’ since the country ‘is in a state of excitement which would most probably be the means of causing me some very heavy losses’ – or yet more fired buildings. Both parties in Sundridge, it is clear, totally despised each other.Footnote ³⁶

Unlike Thompson, Swaisland was active in local government across several parishes. He was a member of the select vestry of St Nicholas, Sevenoaks from 1825 and served as churchwarden from 1826 to 1831 (sharing the task with Morphew in his last year in post). Significantly, perhaps, the churchwardens accounts from the date he assumed the position record the incumbents’ names in large, flowing script an inch or more high, this style of print culture indicating perhaps that Swaisland was then keen publicly to emphasise and promote his newly elevated position within the town's administrative hierarchy. It may not have contributed to his popularity.Footnote ³⁷

The attack on Bradbourne Farm in July 1830 might well have been sparked by Swaisland's idiosyncratic approach to poor relief, which is illustrated in the Sevenoaks overseers’ account books the following month. Under the revenue account, or ‘Rec'd by Earnings of the Workhouse people’ is the entry ‘Rec'd for 7 Bushells of Potatoes of Mr Swaisland’, followed by similar receipts for gooseberries, currants and turnips, totalling £2 13s 8d. Since this represents cash received, it would appear that Swaisland was employing workhouse residents on his farm during the harvest.Footnote ³⁸ Their objections may well have stemmed from him not paying them a cash wage for their labour in his fields, but passing the money to the overseers instead. The accounts do not record them receiving any ‘pence money’, or ‘a small gratuity’ for their efforts (as they had on other occasions) either, as was often customary and their response to this disrespect perhaps echoed those later labourers at Brede, who did ‘not mind being poor, if they could be used with civility’.Footnote ³⁹

There is nothing in the evidence to suggest why draper Morphew was threatened in 1830. But an incident two years later shows that he too was not averse to using his political connections in ways that could seriously affect his social standing within the town. Longstanding customary practice was for the ‘sacrament gifts’ donated at Sevenoaks parish church (worth £80–£90 a year) to be spent on clothing the poor of the area; the cash was divided equally between the four drapers in the town for that purpose. But in 1832 Morphew (who already supplied the town's overseers with fabrics), by dint of his office as churchwarden and contrary to law, secured from the rector, Thomas Curteis, the exclusive right to do so. This ‘caused great dissatisfaction among the poor, inasmuch as they justly thought that, had a division taken place, it would have excited competition’. The fact that Curteis and Morphew were both Tories (they both voted for Sir William Geary in 1835) only increased local annoyance.Footnote ⁴⁰

Another important West Kent source little mined by Swing historians so far is newspaper reports of the meetings of the various agricultural associations active in the area. An example was the Kent Agricultural Association, which was founded in the early nineteenth century and its nearly 100 members similarly comprised the local elite of ‘Noblemen, Gentlemen, Clergymen, and Landowners and Occupiers’.Footnote ⁴¹ It sought to act as a pressure group or lobby for the farming interest and its uncompromising objective, pre-Swing, was ‘to counteract the efforts of those delusive theorists who, under the plea of advocating the doctrine of Free Trade, are desirous of effecting the abolition of the Corn Laws, the principle of which has hitherto been considered essential to the protection of Agriculture, and under the operation of which this country has attained its present power and prosperity’.Footnote ⁴²

Associations are significant because they too illustrate that farmers did not need to be members of vestries, or parish officers, to hold and publicly disseminate opinions about the administration of poor relief unpopular enough, perhaps, to make them targets for violence. Love and Mosyer both seem to have been in this category. Love was active in at least three local agricultural associations by the mid 1830s. He hosted the Holmesdale Agricultural Association's (founded 1832, subscription 10s a year, motto: ‘Live and Let Live’) ploughing match in October 1834 and, at the dinner that evening, called for the establishment of ‘an association among the landlords of the country for the encouragement and improvement of agriculture’, which would ‘unite more closely’ the interests of landlords, tenants, servants and labourers, thereby ‘affording higher cultivation and more abundant production’. This would in turn require more labour and – climaxing with his overarching financial incentive – thus ‘diminishing the parochial burthens of the farmers’.Footnote ⁴³ At the West Kent Association AGM the following year he, together with Swaisland, proposed a motion complaining that charging the expenses of the Union Workhouses under the new Poor Law Bill to the ratepayers of the district in which those workhouses were located was ‘Unfair in its principle’ and called on the Association to petition both Houses of Parliament to change the law.Footnote ⁴⁴

This was a man probably unsympathetic to the condition of the poor in the area, or at least someone publicly very active in demanding they be cared for with as much ‘economy’, as the contemporary term was, as possible. And while the public (that is, media) personae of the associations could be changed, local labourers were not so easily swayed, perhaps, and may have retained long memories of farmers whom they thought were unwilling to empathise with their earlier distress. Although Love died in 1836, his son (also Samuel) seems to have shared his father's attitude to the local needy. In 1837 he was chairman of the Sevenoaks Union. That year also, charity land ‘to the use of the poor in the parish of Shoreham’ had apparently been appropriated such that it was ‘now under the direction of Samuel Love’.Footnote ⁴⁵ In 1839 he too suffered a repeat attack, for he made an application to the Sevenoaks Incendiary Association ‘for expenses for prosecuting the person suspected of firing his barn’ at Shoreham. The boy he prosecuted was found not guilty, however.Footnote ⁴⁶

Mosyer was also active within the Kent Agricultural Association even before the Sevenoaks Fires began. He served on its committee between 1829 and 1834 but otherwise adopted a much lower profile than Swaisland or Love, being content for example merely to judge a few ploughing competitions. However, the Orpington vestry minutes for October 1830 highlighted the ‘so great’ advantages the parish had ‘drawn from the plan of employing the superabundant able bodied poor’ over the past year.Footnote ⁴⁷ But the Orpington poor may well have taken a somewhat different view of a plan that was, in all probability, so popular with the vestry because it reduced the poor rate by imposing harsh working conditions upon its recipients. As the churchwarden who signed off the minutes, Mosyer would have been (or was perceived to have been) closely associated with, or even the driving force behind, the whole initiative. This may well have made him the prime local target in the eyes of the incendiarists, leading to his stacks being fired in June 1830. He too suffered a repeat attack – a common experience that united him with Love and Thompson – in October 1834 when ‘a large row of stabling, two barns and a cowshed’ were destroyed by a fire that was ‘generally believed to have been the act of an incendiary’. A boy accused of that crime was acquitted, too.Footnote ⁴⁸

The broader attitudes toward poor relief and the poor generally exhibited by these four farmers and Morphew, were by no means typical across Sevenoaks in 1830, however. At Knole, by contrast, a ‘List of Tradesmen, Gentlemen and Labourers’ employed on the estate included twelve ‘Parish Unemployed’ men. Since their names, marital status and children were set out in exactly the same format as the employed labourers, gardeners, and ‘superannuated tradesmen’, that print culture suggests they were better treated than were their counterparts at Bradbourne and Hendon Farms. In addition, the poor of Sevenoaks were also allowed to gather another primitive want, ‘a seasonable supply of fuel at a time when it is so much needed’ from Knole Park that autumn, which may account for the estate being entirely untouched by Swing.Footnote ⁴⁹

This all may indicate that, firstly, social relations in and around Sevenoaks were coming under increasing strain in this period, which is not entirely surprising given the perils impacting on the poor at the time. Secondly and more significantly, members of the local elite were, whether they realised it or not, being considered increasingly accountable for their views and actions concerning poor relief by labourers (and perhaps others) than they had been before the Fires. Those who remained oblivious to this important trend, as these five victims seem to have done, risked being the targets of potentially serious and costly attacks.

VII

The Sevenoaks Fires and letters clearly, as Griffin says, ‘generated considerable alarm’ among the elite.Footnote ⁵⁰ So what mitigation strategies could they employ to counter them? Punitive measures were an obvious first step. But one of Swing's unintended consequences was how it highlighted just how weak the policing of Britain was then, so much so that it was an important factor in the eventual creation of provincial police forces, although the Kent county force was not established until the relatively late date of 1857.Footnote ⁵¹ In the absence of a Constabulary some idiosyncratic, even eccentric, solutions to fire risk management were propounded. So in late 1832 Francis Barnett wrote to Earl Amherst with a recommendation ‘on how to prevent incendiarism’. He advocated that ‘those men out of work might be employed in watching the stacks and buildings of the farmers in their respective parishes.’ Sundridge (Thompson's home parish), had ‘1260 inhabitants, and 650 poor’; ‘planting those men who are out of employ, and especially those who are of reputedly bad character, to watch the stacks, making them penally responsible, during the time of their watch . . . you will not only save the stacks they are watching, but also others’. How effective this solution would have been is open to serious question – and there is no evidence Amherst or anyone else put it into practice.Footnote ⁵²

The social and economic elite of West Kent had, however, already adopted a more direct approach to risk mitigation, based on the stick.Footnote ⁵³ At a ‘very numerous meeting’ in September 1830 they formed an ‘Association for the Detecting of Incendiaries in Sevenoaks’, which offered cash rewards ‘for the detecting of offenders and of defraying the expenses to be incurred in the protection of Property from Fire’. These were later set at £100 for evidence leading to a conviction for arson and £10 for a threatening letter.Footnote ⁵⁴ The list of members was a roll call of the elite of the town, Swing's victims and their neighbours, who must have felt similarly vulnerable, so it included Amherst, Curteis, Swaisland, Love, Thompson and many others. In the light of the succession of subsequent fires in the neighbourhood (and the payouts that resulted) it is significant that Barnett was prompted to offer his alternative strategy (however bizarre) two years later, that the Association had effectively to be refounded in December 1832 and that it had to call on its members to top up its funds again in 1833 and 1840.Footnote ⁵⁵ Therefore, the direct approach was not working effectively and other tactics were needed.

Agricultural Associations by contrast represented, quite literally, the carrot. Local elites (for Amherst, Curteis and future constituency MP William Geary all attended the Holmesdale Association dinner in 1834, for example) clearly believed their prime function was to encourage local labourers into docility, thus reducing social tensions, so they put a great deal of time and effort into their activities. Swing was undoubtedly the catalyst, for as early as October 1830 the Kentish Association had undergone something of a makeover, or image-change. The aggressive pressure group had been replaced by something apparently far more benign, since it now claimed the objectives of ‘promoting and encouraging servants and labourers employed in agriculture’, which appears to be at least an attempt to understand and reduce the quotidian risks run by those servants. The tangible benefits it provided were competition prizes worth up to £3, the equivalent of over a month's wages for many agricultural labourers, for the best four horse plough, for example. Further encouragement came from the winners’ names being published in the local press. This indicates, however, less ‘a rapid intensification of paternalism’ and more a change of direction – away from an overt anti-Free Trade agenda, where labourers were ignored (economic paternalism), towards a seemingly less harsh approach to employee relations (social paternalism).Footnote ⁵⁶

One cannot but think that the imperative for this apparent change of emphasis, if not heart, was the disturbances a few months earlier, and the Association's urgent need to present itself as caring about labourer distress in the area so as to avoid the risk transfer of further fires. If so, it also represents another example of the heightened accountability of the elite. However, the apparent generosity of the Association here was undermined somewhat by its Smilesian avant la lettre approach, which may be seen in what two further £3 prizes were offered for. One went to the labourer ‘who has brought up the largest family, and has had no Parochial relief’, another to ‘the labourer who has worked on the same farm . . . the greatest number of years, and not having at any time been discharged from his situation’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Nor did these efforts necessarily succeed in removing farmer accountability and reducing social tensions, for in November 1832 Jordan was attacked again. Knight witnessed ‘A fire this evening at Otford. 2 stacks of barley belonging to Jordan consumed.’Footnote ⁵⁸ There was a limit to how far local labourers would be pushed around and by then, emboldened by Swing, they had the confidence to take matters into their own hands. Local social relations had evened up, if only slightly, and temporarily. But how did local elites respond?

Other ways of providing labourers with the primitive wants they needed such that they were encouraged not to rebel was charitable giving (which had long been part of the makeshift economy), such as that offered by the Knole estate, and allotments (which were a much more recent device). In 1817, 200 of the poorest in Tonbridge, Hildenborough and Tunbridge Wells were receiving weekly bread doles from Lampards charity, which had been established in 1593, but there is no particular evidence that it was increased in the Sevenoaks area during and especially following Swing.Footnote ⁵⁹ Jeremy Burchardt believes Swing was ‘the immediate cause of the dramatic upsurge in the number of allotments’ provided after 1830. These became better organised through The Labourers’ Friend Society and its West Kent branch delivered its second annual report in 1837, despite it apparently being regarded with ‘extreme indifference . . . by the public at large’. Branches were operating in Hadlow, Ightham and Plaxtol that year; at the latter four acres had been bought and turned into allotments, although local apathy and the slow take up suggests that they were by no means a quick-fix solution to the risks of Swing.Footnote ⁶⁰

Another variety of carrot was persuasion. One example was in how the Anglican clerical elite, no doubt with the full approval of their secular counterparts, sought to encourage the obedience (or at least the tacit acceptance of the status quo ante Swing) of the lower orders from the pulpit. Analysing which parts of the Bible ministers chose to expound, when and why are often revealing exercises. West Kent in the aftermath of Swing is no exception, since they clearly believed that worrying social tensions were bubbling just under the surface and needed to be assuaged. So in a sermon entitled ‘An Exhortation to the Poor’, delivered at Tonbridge parish church in November 1831, incumbent Thomas Knox addressed the risk factors facing the poor head-on. So he optimistically urged his parishioners to overcome dire poverty by saving even the tiniest morsels of what they had and to use savings banks as best they could. Such institutions were themselves risky homes for spare cash, however, and many of his listeners would have remembered the chaos that resulted from the ignominious collapse of the Tonbridge New Bank in 1816, after trading for just two years.Footnote ⁶¹

But Knox also had a risk transfer agenda, too, for he also desired – in a clear nod to Swing – that no man should never show ‘ill-behaviour to his lawful superiors, or joining in any riot, tumult or public commotion’.Footnote ⁶² His neighbour at Southborough, John Tucker, in a sermon on 1 Peter 2: 13–15 delivered sometime before July 1833, showed that he had a more jaundiced view of the quality of the authorities, for he was ‘fully aware that there are great and manifold abuses in our government’. Nevertheless, he too urged the poor never to rebel, so ‘however harshly dealt with, however tyrannical and corrupt the government, in no case resist it’.Footnote ⁶³

Another possible risk aversion strategy for elite victims was flight, which was adopted by Swaisland. The various vestry records, including rate assessments, show that he sold his holdings in Sevenoaks and took 330 acres at St Edith's farm, Kemsing immediately after the Sevenoaks fires, for an advertisement for the ‘Very Desirable’ Bradbourne Farm appeared in the Maidstone Journal just one month after he was attacked. He also moved churches, ceasing being churchwarden at St Nicholas after the 1830–1 parish year and taking on the same role at Kemsing from 1832 to 1838, although he had previously been parish overseer there from 1829–31.Footnote ⁶⁴ Swaisland did take part in local agricultural associations, but not until 1832, by which time he had moved out of harm's way, he hoped, serving, for example, on the Kentish Association committee (together with Mosyer) in September 1832. But since there no is evidence to suggest that he was attacked again, his strategy appears to have worked.Footnote ⁶⁵

The final and perhaps most obvious risk mitigation strategy was fire insurance. Thompson was covered by 1828 and in September 1830, sensibly, he took out a further policy.Footnote ⁶⁶ But by November the County Fire Office reported that his various premises had been fired ten times during the previous three months.Footnote ⁶⁷ This represented a large-scale dismantling of social relationships and revealed a pent-up fury, by his assailants, of an extraordinary intensity. In 1832 all his rebuilt outbuildings (but not his dwelling house, again indicating that his property, not his person, was the protestors’ main target) were burnt again. Such losses were unsustainable and, by then, uninsurable. As early as September 1830 the Fire of London Insurance Company resolved that a £2,000 policy taken out on farming stock in Brasted and Sundridge ‘be not restored’. Other companies, such as the Hand in Hand and Phoenix, were either declining to write fire business in the county altogether or were charging much higher premiums.Footnote ⁶⁸ Even though he tried ‘every precaution . . . to prevent the destruction of [his] property’, Thompson's claims history would, eventually, have made his premises uninsurable. Worse was to follow.Footnote ⁶⁹ He sought to imitate Swaisland by fleeing elsewhere, but he failed to sell in 1833 and in 1837 offered the farm again, now ‘in a good state of cultivation’ with over ‘£2,000 expended in judicial improvements in the premises and on the land’. This was the last throw of Thompson's dice, one might suppose. But in March 1838 he was still there, reduced to offering his old ‘agricultural implements for sale’, including wagons, ploughs and a dung cart. The coup de grace came three years later when his freehold villa residence at Ide Hill was auctioned at Westerham ‘[b]y direction of the Assignee under a Fiat in Bankruptcy against Jonathan Thompson.’ The Tithe apportionment for Sundridge for 1841 reveals that ‘Himself and others’ (that is, his family), were reduced to occupying a house, cottage garden and pasture on a total holding of just three acres.Footnote ⁷⁰ Thompson's chosen risk mitigation strategies, insurance then flight, failed completely and he was utterly ruined by Swing.

In his admittedly rare case, the risk factors he faced became, finally, almost as unmanageable and as catastrophic to his lifestyle and his social status as those faced by local agricultural labourers. However, the comparison breaks down in that he was never driven to break the law as they were and he never had to face, as they did, the direst consequences of a guilty Swing verdict – transportation or execution. However, those workers had, atypically and for a short period, grown in confidence such that they succeeded in transferring the risks they faced, both actual and semiotic, from themselves to a substantial (but much disliked) local farmer. This confidence may most clearly be seen in how, in November 1832, he was casually mugged on the way home from Sevenoaks, four or five men relieving him of the substantial sum of £8, saying as they did so that ‘this is better than burning your stacks’.Footnote ⁷¹

VIII

What else could the victims do to prevent any repetitions, besides joining the (somewhat ineffective) Incendiary Association? Even though he received but a single threatening letter, William Morphew appears to have been considerably scarred, psychologically, by that experience. This may be seen in how many of his subsequent activities in the town reflected a probable desire to counter the risks posed to him. In terms of maintaining law and order he was quartermaster of the Sevenoaks Yeomen Cavalry by December 1831. To combat the consequences of incendiarism he remained in post as the Sevenoaks agent for the Guardian Fire and Life insurance company and, most conclusively, by 1842 he was treasurer of the ultimate risk mitigation organisation available, the Sevenoaks Fire-Engine Association. He too was very active within local agricultural associations, which might have stemmed from a desire to reduce any residual ill feeling from local labourers. From 1832 to 1835 he sat on the committee of the Holmesdale Association, together with Mosyer, Swaisland and Love, becoming its treasurer in 1834 and being toasted for his efforts at the same dinner Love spoke at in 1834. Unlike the Shoreham farmer, however, he used that platform to praise farm workers, not bury them, insisting that ‘all are indebted for their industry and skill in cultivating the land, that mainspring of England's prosperity’.Footnote ⁷² Morphew's life, post-Swing, seemed almost geared to reduce risk and the fact that he was never targeted again might suggest that his strategy worked.

But Morphew was never far from risk, no matter how hard he tried, nor the possible risk transfer consequences. In 1833 nonconformist Nicholas Chatfield refused to pay a church rate. When Morphew, as churchwarden, summoned him for non-payment, Chatfield refused Morphew and a constable attempted to distrain two of his pigs as payment. But local residents intervened to support Chatfield and, in the ensuing struggle, the constable ended up on all fours in the mud grasping one of the animals and looking ridiculous. A large crowd hissed at both representatives of law and order. When the pig was auctioned, ‘hundreds of working people’ assembled and Chatfield addressed the gathering, allegedly 700 strong, on why he refused to pay the rate. The churchwardens had earlier been heavily criticised for their profligacy, such as spending £4 4s on a single visitation dinner. Chatfield and two other men – Zechariah Baker (a shopkeeper) and James Parrish (a shoemaker) – were charged with obstruction and assault but were acquitted within minutes at Maidstone Assizes, to the approval of another large crowd. Nevertheless, they were still liable for court fees, for which a public subscription was raised to defray them.Footnote ⁷³

Assessing the incident in risk terms, therefore, presented with what they saw as an unfair rate demand the noncomformist, artisanal defendants were not only confident enough to challenge it publicly, but with the aid of the crowd, succeeded in transferring that risk back onto the Anglican political elite of the town. Events such as these also had significant consequences for the social relations between both the members of that elite and subaltern individuals and groups. Morphew's defeat, or humiliation, coupled with other unpopular actions of his (such as over the sacrament gifts) compromised his standing within the town generally, much as the unfeeling attitudes of farmers such as Thompson alienated a single group, agricultural labourers. Social relations had fractured significantly. And as Thompson was forced into bankruptcy, so too eventually was Morphew, although we do not know if his unpopularity was the main cause. But there was no disguising the glee with which a competitor draper advertised his purchase ‘at a very large discount’ of Morphew's ‘very valuable and well selected stock’ in 1846.Footnote ⁷⁴

Local ‘landscape artist and teacher of drawing’ William Knight weighed in heavily and revealingly on Chatfield's behalf, suggesting that many middle-class Sevenoaks residents, too, were unimpressed with Morphew's performance.Footnote ⁷⁵ He suggested Baker might lay ‘information against Morphew for having served the parish of Sevenoaks with goods while churchwarden’, which looks suspiciously like a reference to the sacrament gifts incident and which might not have redounded to Morphew's credit. Knight offered for that purpose a bill Morphew had formerly submitted to Knight's father, presumably when the latter was a parish overseer between 1831 and 1833. Knight's diary also shows that Baker and Parrish travelled ‘to London to consult a lawyer’ in order to begin an action against Morphew and the constable for having ‘overstepped the line of their duty’.Footnote ⁷⁶ This indicates that the defendants had both the confidence (the counterpart of elite accountability) and the financial wherewithal to challenge those representatives of the town's political elite in court. It also illustrates the extent to which the latter had become much more accountable for their conduct in three key ways – in the newspapers, in law and to a substantial part of polite local society, as typified by Knight. This new-found confidence among some of the lower orders of the town, at least partly one suspects the result of Swing, eventually collided with the greater accountability of the elite and goes some way to explaining the soured social and – increasingly – political relations within Sevenoaks.

This was because yet another important dimension of the pig incident was the source of the legal introduction. It came from Otford miller Joseph Bradly who was – with all the defendants and Knight himself – a leading light in the nascent political reform movement in 1830s Sevenoaks. Unlike Brede and Sutton Scotney, however, the town was by no means a ‘pre-Swing foothold’ or hotbed of popular rural radicalism, for such ideas had little purchase before 1830.Footnote ⁷⁷ Probably the major radical figure in pre-Swing West Kent was, ironically, a rich member of the nobility, the third Earl Stanhope. His seat at Chevening was listed (but not he by name) as one of the places to which the London Corresponding Society had sent letters, together with Sevenoaks and Tunbridge Wells, in the 1790s.Footnote ⁷⁸ Such was the area's presumed absence of revolutionary potential, moreover, that Cobbett, even though he knew the area from his Rural Rides of the early 1820s and ‘began to prophesy a major rural rebellion’ in the south shortly afterwards, he was, like many other radicals of the period, taken completely by surprise by the Sevenoaks Fires.Footnote ⁷⁹ The fact, for example, that the Political Register advertisement for his lecture tour of Kent in late July 1830, the overt aim of which was to ‘see how the lads come on there’ makes no reference to the Sevenoaks Fires, which were already raging strongly, indicates that his finger was not quite so firm on the rural pulse as he and some historians would have us believe. His subsequent cursory reference to the West Kent burnings during his October tour also suggests that – together with Hunt and Carlisle and despite his earlier prediction – he had been caught off-guard by them and the tour was a belated attempt to play catch-up. In fact, echoing Wells's assertion that ‘the politics of Swing are obscure’, there is no compelling evidence of political agitation around Sevenoaks in summer 1830. One man was arrested at Oxted for having made ‘remarkable observations relative to the fires’. But the magistrate considered him insane and committed him to prison.Footnote ⁸⁰

Post-Swing, however, the town threw off its political torpor, at least briefly. The passage of the Reform Bill was wildly celebrated in July 1832, Knight recording ‘[e]very house in Sevenoaks illuminated, transparencies in many of the windows’ and that the newly-formed Political Union ‘marched several times through the town in procession’. Pig incident victor Parrish was a leading light in the Union, for during the court case he revealed that throughout the Reform illuminations he and all its ‘members . . . exerted themselves to keep the peace’. Later that month Knight ‘[l]ent [his] schoolroom to some of the working class for the purpose of forming a Political Union’, which could conceivably have been a new, rival group given the middle-class agenda of Parrish's organisation, but there is no direct evidence for that.Footnote ⁸¹ The Sevenoaks Political Union petitioned against the removal of trial by jury in Ireland in March 1833 and would have been represented when 3,000 people met at Wrotham to form the West Kent Political Union that July. The following year the Sevenoaks Union was led by Bradly.Footnote ⁸² In late 1834, a meeting that he chaired and was ‘well and respectably attended’, was held on the occasion of the ‘abrupt dismissal’ of the cabinet. Various resolutions were passed demanding reform of the House of Lords, an extension of the franchise ‘at least to all householders’, ‘reform of the established church’, and reduced taxation.Footnote ⁸³

All this indicates the social class and religious beliefs of the audience – middle-class taxpayers of one kind or another and a sizeable presence of dissenters. The political activity it spawned was heavily bolstered by the nonconformist conscience, for Chatfield, Parrish, Baker and Bradly were all active in the anti-tithe movement, helping for example to frame a parliamentary petition for the Total Abolition of Tithes in February 1833, so their resistance to Morphew's church rate was perhaps just the most obvious and confrontational aspect of that.Footnote ⁸⁴ Although there is no evidence Knight was a dissenter (he regularly attended Chevening parish church, for example) he did note in his diary a few days afterwards that a ‘petition for “abolition of tithes” lay in the [St Nicholas] vestry for signatures’ and we might wonder what Curteis and Morphew made of that. His anti-Toryism – seen in his support for the Reform Act celebrations, for example – prompted his willingness to help the defendants against Morphew. His position at the heart of this political/religious network is also shown in how he read Cobbett, socialised with Baker and corresponded with Chatfield after he had emigrated to America.Footnote ⁸⁵ There is little evidence, however, that reform-minded men in Sevenoaks (unlike those in Tonbridge and Tunbridge Wells) turned towards Chartism in the late 1830s, when the town seems to have resumed its political quiescence.Footnote ⁸⁶ This may be seen in microcosm in how, by August 1833, the schoolroom Knight had offered for a working men's Political Union a year earlier was instead the meeting place of a ‘Society for Friendly Reformation’, debating such pressing issues as ‘Whether man is happier in a civilised or an uncivilised state.’Footnote ⁸⁷

This information is important for it helps to locate the Sevenoaks Fires within the deeper context of the wider ‘movement’ or ‘meta-movement’ of Swing generally. There was no discernible political motive for those incendiary attacks, as there was a few weeks later in many other towns across southern England. And Sevenoaks had no immediate equivalent of shoemaker Richard Price who, in the aftermath of the protests in Yalding in November 1830, iterated the political demand that ‘the tithes must be lowered in order that the poor might live by their labour’.Footnote ⁸⁸ The striking disparity between the events in Sevenoaks in summer 1830 and those in Yalding that autumn may be explained in risk terms, or rather by its corollary, choice.

The Fires were, straightforwardly, about protesting risk. As Griffin says, ‘Swing presented poor rural workers with an opportunity to rise, giving them an outlet to both make claims and to collectively release tension.’Footnote ⁸⁹ But once that had been done, and those workers could see the impact actual or potential risk transfer had on many of their social superiors, their focus broadened significantly, as Swing waxed into a meta-movement. Emboldened labourers, or more often perhaps those (like Price) agitating on their behalf, could start to dream of a different society, one in which even those on the lower social rungs could exercise some choice, at least, in who wielded power and authority over them. The most obvious way that that choice or, perhaps better, pluralism could be implemented and secured was by extending the franchise and making polls secret, so in November 1830 a ‘popular meeting’ at Maidstone demanded ‘Reform in the Commons . . . vote by ballot in 2 years’.Footnote ⁹⁰ That ambition was a far cry from the limited aspirations of those burning Mrs Minet's stacks, who apparently desired only ‘some potatoes’ for ‘there is a nice fire to cook them by’. It shows just how far Swing had travelled in a very short space of time.Footnote ⁹¹

IX

Filling the lacunae of both the Sevenoaks Fires and the lack of focus on the victims and framing the entire episode in terms of risk, and risk transfer, also begins to lift the lid on what impact the Sevenoaks Fires had on parish relations in the area. Its victims tended to be those who made public statements indicating a disregard (or worse) for the hungry or otherwise gained a reputation for harshness towards them. And when the risks those labourers faced became so severe that they felt fully justified in invoking the moral economy and protesting violently against them, arson or threats of arson followed as they sought to transfer those risks back on to those who had shown the least sympathy for their plight. This demonstrates both a growing confidence in the minds of the poor and, commensurately, an increased accountability on the part of the elite, as elite individuals realised that they could be challenged either violently (Thompson, by fire) or peacefully (Morphew, in court). They also appear to have been deemed far more responsible for their actions, at the bar of public opinion, than they had before the protests began. Social relations across the area were placed under huge strain as a result. But the evidence does not indicate – as Wells and Griffin have shown took place elsewhere in southern England, as Swing developed – that political agitation was the cause of the Sevenoaks Fires. Conversely, Swing was the major cause of the very brief political flowering that took place in the area, in local Political Union(s) for example, in the early 1830s.

Risk transfer was an uncomfortable experience for both its victims and any of their elite neighbours who feared they might be next in line for an arson attack. In the short term, as insurance cover became harder to obtain, they responded with a variety of tactical expedients, from sermons encouraging their labourers not to rebel to offering prizes for good behaviour through agricultural associations to (normally) vain attempts to bring them to justice through the incendiary association. Swaisland simply fled; Thompson wished he could have done so and Morphew joined every risk mitigation organisation going to try to obviate any displeasure local labourers felt towards him.

Approaching the Fires from a risk perspective also suggests that Swing might – to reopen another ancient historiographical debate – have been more ‘successful’ than some historians have given it credit for. Scriven, for example, seems to define success as little more than the length of time labourers maintained ‘improved wages, relief and extra employment’ or prevented threshing machines from operating.Footnote ⁹² The risk perspective, on the other hand, reveals that social relations were certainly strained by the Fires Swing. But risk transfer illustrates in addition that, for a brief period perhaps, they had been evened up somewhat, too, as the rich began to fear the poor almost as much as the poor feared many of the town's elite, Thompson being an obvious example.

That was not necessarily to the liking of the Sevenoaks authorities, however, so in the medium to longer term they responded in more forthright and determined ways. Swing created a ‘political climate . . . that made possible the wholesale reform of the poor laws’ based on how ‘the poor were seen less as individuals deserving of support than as impersonal objects to be managed and governed’ – or a straightforward risk mitigation exercise, in other words.Footnote ⁹³ But studying the introduction of the New Poor Law, locally, in risk terms also reveals an important extra dimension to the debate, that of competing conceptions of social welfare provision among the town's elite. The poor had their own view of the matter, too. Those conceptions boiled down to which was the more pressing task – removing the risk to the labourer of going hungry, or minimising any consequential destruction (that is, risk transfer) danger to his employer?

In the former camp was Reverand Curteis, together with (the fourth) Earl Stanhope and West Kent MP T. L. Hodges, the latter a ‘notable [parliamentary] exception’ in opposing the new legislation.Footnote ⁹⁴ Curteis argued that the New Poor Law ‘tended to degrade and deteriorate the condition of the poor, both physically and morally’. The ‘influx of labourers from Ireland’ had reduced the opportunity provided by the harvest to pay for the primitive wants of ‘his rent, his clothing . . . his fuel’ such that the labourer is no longer ‘deaf to invitations to insurrection or tumult’. Curteis's solution to both risk and risk transfer was unambiguously paternalistic, for he called on the ‘nobility and gentry to take a higher stand’ to remove the risks to the labourer. This would, as a direct result, encourage ‘the peace of society and the welfare of its members’.Footnote ⁹⁵

In the latter camp was a prominent member of that nobility, Lord Templemore (1797–1837), the ‘local “architect” of the Sevenoaks Union’.Footnote ⁹⁶ In December 1834 he was unable to meet the Duke of Richmond (his brother in law and another enthusiast of the new legislation) as he was attending ‘a very important meeting at Sevenoaks of landed proprietors on the subject of putting this district under the New Poor Law Commissioners’.Footnote ⁹⁷ That new law, fervently endorsed by Templemore, tore up the old paternalistic conceptions of Curteis and others. It was based instead on the apparently contradictory combination of ‘self help and a free labour ‘market’, or laissez-faire economics on the one hand and dirigiste, state-controlled operation on the other. For a central board controlled all poor law administration, magistrates could no longer override local decisions and Guardians were prevented from providing most forms of outdoor relief.Footnote ⁹⁸ A striking local example of the harshness of the resulting regime was how the former landlord of the Black Boy pub in Sevenoaks, when reduced to the workhouse, was not even allowed to receive an apple from his solicitor when he visited him.Footnote ⁹⁹

Templemore was as keen as Curteis was to remove risk from the lives of poor labourers, but his conception rested on offering them only a minimal, and much resented, subsistence living in the workhouse – a Bastile of last resort, as it were. As Sevenoaks Guardian Samuel Bligh wrote to the Poor Law Commissioners in October 1834 ‘if they were really necessitous they had no reason to complain, being well fed and clothed’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ It was expected that such a harsh regime would impel them into gainful employment or, if not, provide them with at least a guarantee against starvation. Either would reduce the incidence of violent protests against local elites, it was thought. But privileging risk transfer in this way shows that Templemore had clearly discounted the possibility, even probability, of violent labourer agency in response to the concomitant loss of dignity and self-respect the New Poor Law demanded, especially when his seat presented such a high profile, vulnerable and very obvious target. He had a far rosier view of social relations than was warranted by the recent history of the area, in other words, and of the risk transfer dangers they posed to him and his property assets. Ultimately, one of the main reasons why parish relations in Sevenoaks deteriorated so badly around the time of the Fires was precisely because the general conception of risk, espoused by Templemore, Bligh and others, was so different to that of local labourers. They, by contrast, considered the best way to obtain their primitive wants – and to overcome many other risks – was steady, reasonably well paid work throughout the year.

As one ‘irrevocably associated with the new system’, Templemore was just as liable as Thompson had been to attack.Footnote ¹⁰¹ So twice within a year or so, in September 1835 and 1836, fires blazed at Coombe Bank, the first of which was directly attributed to his ‘activity in administering the new Poor Law’. This was confirmed by Knight, who not only wrote that ‘He is very much disliked by the poor’ but also delighted in witnessing the great conflagration through an artist's eyes, such that ‘the smoke strongly lighted up just where it left the blaze – and gradually lost in the darkness – as it rolled off in majestic clouds to the south – had a fine effect’.Footnote ¹⁰² He for one clearly had no issue with the greater accountability of the elite to other social groupings in Sevenoaks, nor with how parish relations could sour when that elite forgot or ignored it.