Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Swing Riots were a widespread uprising by agricultural workers in Southern and Eastern England in 1830, protesting the introduction of threshing machines, low wages, and the tithe system. They became the largest movement of social unrest in nineteenth-century England. The first threshing machine was destroyed on the night of the 28th of August 1830 at Lower Hardres in Kent.
Captain Swing was a fictitious figurehead whose name was used to sign threatening letters sent to farmers, magistrates, parsons, and Poor Law guardians during the riots. The Times first mentioned the name on the 21st of October 1830. The name is thought to derive from the swinging stick of the hand-threshing flail.
The historian J. F. C. Harrison attributed the riots overwhelmingly to fifty years of progressive impoverishment of the agricultural workforce leading up to 1830. Key causes included the enclosure of roughly six million acres of common land between 1770 and 1830, the replacement of annual labour contracts with weekly cash-only terms, the burden of church tithes, and the introduction of horse-powered threshing machines following the poor harvests of 1828 and 1829.
Nearly 2,000 protesters were brought to trial in 1830-1831. Of those, 252 were sentenced to death, though only 19 were actually hanged; 644 were imprisoned and 481 were transported to penal colonies in Australia. Many of those transported had their sentences remitted in 1835.
The Swing Riots contributed to demand for political reform, helping to bring about the Great Reform Act 1832, which extended voting rights in England. Before that Act, only about three per cent of the English population could vote. The riots also preceded the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, which ended outdoor cash relief and established a network of workhouses.
The riots began in East Kent in the summer of 1830 and by early December had spread through the whole of southern England and East Anglia. They followed pre-existing road networks through Surrey, Sussex, Middlesex, and Hampshire before moving into the Home Counties, the Midlands, and East Anglia. A 2021 study found the information spread through personal and trade networks, with local organisers playing a central role.