WHATEVER else successful lawyers may be able to do, a way with words is undoubtedly high on the list of essential skills. This was demonstrated in a masterly way by judge Baron Sir John Vaughan nearly two centuries ago in the Great Hall, Winchester, during one of the largest and most significant trials ever held in the city.
This was a Special Assize organized in great haste, at the behest of the Lord-Lieutenant of the day, erstwhile Prime Minister the Duke of Wellington. It was held to try hundreds of agricultural workers caught up in the Swing Riots of autumn 1830. They affected many communities in the county, with large mobs smashing threshing machines and intimidating and robbing the better-off.
Unlike authorities in Kent, which had given rioters a few days in prison, Wellington wanted to hold a show trial that served severe sentences. In scarcely a month he had ensured that the assize had been set up and was running. It started in December 18 and continued throughout the festive season, with only a short break on Christmas Day.
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As well as Baron Vaughan, two other senior judges presided in the Great Hall, Sir Edward Hall Alderson and Sir James Parke, described as “not a particularly distinguished barrister”. Wellington also sat on the bench and a Grand Jury was sworn in. It was drawn from the ranks of county grandees, MPs and magistrates, including Sir Thomas Baring from Stratton Park, Sir William Heathcote from Hursley, Sir Henry Tichborne and 20 others.
The court room was crammed with family members, witnesses and magistrates from many of the 70 places in the county that had seen rioting. Starting in the Havant area, it had spread rapidly - to Droxford, Hamble, Whitchurch, Laverstoke, Freefolk and elsewhere, especially to Sutton Scotney and along the Dever Valler. There were also particularly violent protests in the northeast of the county, with destruction of the poor-houses at Selborne and Headley
Vaughan was a so-called “inferior baron” of one of the most powerful courts in the land, the Exchequer of Pleas. His words ring out with a sense of unmerciful authority and still have the capacity to raise hairs on the back of the neck, as many in a packed audience in St Paul’s church, Fulflood, may have discovered recently.
The event was held during Heritage Open Days, organised by the English Project as part of the “Captain Swing” Bicentenary Commemoration, chaired by Professor Bill Lucas and coordinated by Hyde 900 founder Edward Fennell. Speeches from the trial were re-enacted in wig and gown by practising barristers, Rose Burns and Christopher Wing.
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He roamed over the facts, that the riots “were said to have originated from the distress of the lower orders”, which he suggested had been “greatly exaggerated”. Trying to mitigate the problems of poverty was better than rioting, he said, but offered no solutions other than exercising “that bond of mutual kindness which ought to unite the various classes of society”.
Even those prisoners who could follow what he was saying might hardly have agreed with the rosy picture he painted of relationships between the various factions in the Hampshire countryside –landowners, farmers, clergy and labourers.
The impetus for the riots had been the advent of the threshing machine, invented by Scotsman Andrew Meikle, which had taken work from labourers during the autumn and winter months. But Vaughan called this a “limited and erroneous view”, arguing that it was more efficient than manual threshing and would reduce the cost of corn.
Using a well-rehearsed legal ploy – the strategy of reductio ad absurdum – he mocked the rioters’ logic as implying that farmers should abandon “the use of the flail, the spade, the hoe, [and] the axe”.
The speech as a whole was an impressive exercise in legal rhetoric. A distinguished lawyer in his 60s, he can be imagined crafting it by candlelight in his Winchester lodging, probably in the deanery in the cathedral close. He must have been especially pleased with the phrase “punishment of the guilty, treading close upon the heel of the offence”, though perhaps it was a standard item in his judicial toolkit.
At the end of the trial, 101 men received death sentences – though only three were eventually hanged – and 117 were transported, to New South Wales or Van Diemen’s Land. In his sentencing Vaughan was particularly severe with Robert Holdaway, the ringleader sentenced to death – later commuted to transportation – for attacking the workhouse at Selborne, breaking furniture, pulling down the roof and turning out the residents. He and the mob did the same at nearby Headley, with no regard for “the condition of the poor children who were sick in bed”.
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The story has been told in One Monday in November by local historian John Owen Smith (available from Amazon or wordsmith@johnowensmith.co.uk), who cites historians John and Barbara Hammond: "If these riots had succeeded, the day when the Headley workhouse was thrown down would be remembered...as the day of the taking of the Bastille."
Vaughan also singled out Micheldever labourer, Henry Cook and pointed out that his first offence of robbery was sufficient by itself to ensure that his “life was justly forfeited to the state”, but worse was his assault on William Bingham Baring (a nephew of one of the jurors, Sir Thomas Baring).
Evidence at the trial had claimed that when Bingham Baring tried to arrest a fellow rioter, Cook, egged on by others with a cry of " Go to work”, had attacked him with a sledgehammer … of which the head weighed six pounds and of which the handle was two feet long”.
Even though Bingham Baring had attempted to take a sympathetic view of Cook’s behaviour, the judge was clear that he had to hang. Ever since, his fate has been the lead story in local remembrance of the events (Chronicle, October 10).
Also involved in the “Captain Swing” Bicentenary Commemoration will be local group !nVerse, creating programmes of music and poetry inspired by the riots. It is led by Jon Whitfield, with Vanessa Martin on piano, Colin Eglin on guitar and cello and Jon Shurlock on clarinet and Northumbrian pipes
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