ABSTRACT
To many people, especially those ‘outside’, the rural world of the twenty or so years after 1850 presented a picture of stability and harmony unequalled in recent history. The repression of Swing and the other protests of the 1830s were not only a physical act but an ideological one. At one level those who protested before the 1850s acted within an understood framework of what Thompson has called ‘moral economy’. The protests, of the 1830s especially, sought not to overturn the social order, rather to put it back the right way up. The repression of the 1830s, the county police but above all the Poor Law marked the end of an era in the popular memory of the rural poor. Along with enclosure, changes in employment patterns, especially the decline of living-in in the south and east, and falling living standards, they isolated and demoralized the poor.
