William Cobbett was a political activist who supported the working man. He rode around Kent and Sussex and spoke to agricultural workers about their problems. He then used this as source material for his journal the
Political Register. He learned that many agricultural labourers were badly paid, or unemployed and half starved. The financial support for a laid off agricultural worker was less than that paid to support a criminal in prison. Cobbett realised that Parishes were trying to avoid having to provide support to the poor with many parishes sending labouring people to the United States to save the costs of supporting them as paupers. Cobbett had predicted that there would be problems with the agricultural workers and when rural disturbances started in Kent and spread to Sussex during August 1830, Cobbett described it as the "Labourers' war". The main causes of the disturbances were due to an excess of labour, predominantly by men who had been involved in the Napoleonic wars, returning home. Also by itinerant Irish labourers prepared to work for next to nothing undercutting the local agricultural workers. This coincided with a fall in agricultural prices. During the ensuing depression farmers were not able to pay their agricultural workers a sustainable wage. Farmers also stopped the custom of allowing their workers to take leftover crops after the corn harvest, that would help them through the winter. This was compounded by the church tithes and the
enclosure of common land. Added to this farmers began to introduce
threshing machines that displaced workers. The displaced workers had no means to feed or clothe their families during the winter. A resident of Lewes in Sussex,
Gideon Mantell the English obstetrician, geologist and palaeontologist noted in his diary of 1830: Popular protests by farm workers occurred across agricultural areas of southern England. The main targets for protesting crowds were landowners/ landlords, whose
threshing machines they destroyed or dismantled, and whom they petitioned for a rise in wages. The protests were notable for their discipline, a tradition of popular protest that went back to the eighteenth century. The act of marching towards an offending farmer's homestead served not only to maintain group discipline, but also to warn the wider community that they were regimented and determined. Often they sought to enlist local parish officials and occasionally magistrates to raise levels of poor relief as well. Throughout England, 2,000 protesters were brought to trial in 1830–1831; 252 were sentenced to death (though only 19 were actually hanged), 644 were imprisoned, and 481 were
transported to penal colonies in Australia. ==Origin of the name==