ABSTRACT
Any explanation of the timing of the outbreaks and the geography of farmworkers' protests must begin with a consideration of the differing fates of the landless class in southern and eastern England and their equally landless counterparts in the rest of lowland Britain. The overt protests were one of the first signs of the growing strength of the emergent community of agricultural labourers in the face of farmers trying to hold back wages in a period of unprecedented rises in food prices. The French wars from 1793–1815, with the attendant boom in economic activity and the dramatic onset of the post-war agricultural depression, were to be all important in shaping the southern and eastern labourers' consciousness of their new position in the social order. The disturbances in East Anglia in 1816 have been regarded by historians as the first concerted series of collective protests by agricultural labourers acting alone.
