A HISTORY OF SURREY 



taken towards forming the militia till the next session of Parliament. 1 

 By that time the character of the war and the character of the nation 

 had been transformed by the appearance of a man, William Pitt. Two 

 regiments of militia were embodied in Surrey without complaint and 

 performed their service of marching up and down the southern counties. 

 Some twenty years later the one regiment which had been retained in 

 Surrey was on active service in the Gordon Riots in London. In the 

 subsequent French wars there were ultimately five regiments of militia 

 in Surrey with headquarters at Kingston, Guildford, Croydon, Putney 

 and Clapham, besides volunteers. 



The period of the great French war passed with no notable politi- 

 cal event in the county. One at least notorious if not eminent political 

 person emerged from it. William Cobbett was a native of west Surrey, 

 and it is not impossible that his frequent presence in the neighbourhood 

 of his old home had something to do with the spread of the Radicalism 

 of that age in the southern counties. These counties, including Surrey, 

 were at all events one scene of its violent manifestation, and once more, 

 in the nineteenth century, Surrey saw the beginning of something 

 approaching popular insurrection. It belongs to social history rather 

 than to political to tell of the agricultural distress which accompanied 

 the French Revolutionary War, and which became still more acute after 

 the peace of 1815, and which was intensified by an unwise administra- 

 tion of absurd Poor Laws. The people of Surrey, in common with 

 those of all agricultural districts, were poor, miserable and degraded. 

 Riots and outrages, such as we associate with the worst districts of 

 Ireland in bad times, were common within thirty miles of London. 



Matters reached a crisis in the autumn of 1830. The Revolution 

 of July had been successful in France. Revolution had broken out 

 in Belgium. George IV. was just dead and the ministry of the 

 Duke of Wellington was tottering. The summer had been wet and 

 the harvest in the south disastrous. Wages were falling, the 5*. 

 a week sometimes paid was being replaced by 4*. 6d. or even, it 

 was said, by 3^. wages which were of course supplemented by 

 out-door relief. There was a spirit of political unrest and of savage 

 discontent at social evils directed against all employers ; against old yeo- 

 men farmers because they were ruined men and could not pay good 

 wages, against gentlemen farmers because they bought out the old men 

 and were strangers and innovators, above all against those who used 

 threshing machines, whence the flail, the old mainstay of the poor in 

 winter, was displaced. Letters signed ' Swing,' or ' Captain Swing,' 

 threatened employers, overseers and tithe owners with condign vengeance 

 unless they made reductions of rent and tithes and increase of wages 

 and allowances. Nor were the threats empty. Ricks and farm build- 

 ings blazed, machines were smashed, and riotous crowds extorted their 

 terms from isolated farmers under threats of violence. Parliament had 

 met on November 2, and about simultaneously the south-eastern counties 



1 Walpole, Memoirs of the Reign of George II. III. p. 40-2. 

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