Swing Riots

The Swing Riots took place in eastern and southern England in the years between the Luddite uprising and the Rebecca Riots. One of the hallmarks of the riots was the destruction of threshing machines – but that’s just part of the story.

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  We've all tumbled down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose, and it leaves us more anxious than informed. Our feeds are full of wellness trends, but how do we know what's real, what's exaggerated, and what's just wrong? Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association breaks it all down. Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends, not to cancel them, but to understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. So listen to Health vs. Hype wherever you get your podcasts. The Old Gays are back with Silver Linings, their lovable podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Vive Healthcare. Robert, Mick, Bill, and Jessa strut back

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  Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And I'm Holly Frey. A few years ago, we did an episode on the Rebecca Riots, which started in Wales in 1839. And at the time, I had been looking for something that had some parallels to the Luddite uprising that started in central England a couple of decades before that. That was because the idea of workers smashing the machines that were replacing their jobs and cranking out inferior product, that just felt like it had some relevance in the moment that we were living in. We had already covered the Luddites, though, all the way back in 2013, so I couldn't just do that again. I was looking for something else. And the Rebecca

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  Riots were not quite the same thing, but they did grow out of some of the same context. There were some similar themes there, including difficult economic conditions, these things were growing out of, and also smashing stuff. The smashing stuff I particularly enjoy. The Rebecca Riots are most remembered for attacks on toll gates, where people had to pay money to use the roads, while the Luddite uprising became infamous because people were smashing the stocking frames that were being used in the textile industry. Of course, that is only a small part of each of those things. So another uprising came up while I was researching the Rebecca Riots, and that was the Swing Riots that

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  took place primarily in eastern and southern England in the years in between the Luddite uprising and the Rebecca Riots. One of the hallmarks of the Swing Riots was the destruction of threshing machines. But again, that is just one part of the story. When I discovered the mention of the Swing Riots, it was too late to change topics, so I decided to put that on the list for later. In the 1820s and 30s, farmers in rural England were struggling for a lot of reasons. One was enclosure. Historically, much of the arable land in England was considered to be common land. A person's crop was theirs, but outside of growing season, other people

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  could access and use that same land, including as grazing land for their animals. Livestock were also fed hay that grew in communal meadows. The process of enclosing land with fences and hedges and putting it under private control started in the 12th century and went through a couple of major waves. One of those waves started around 1750 and continued through the mid-19th century. About 6 million acres of common land in England were enclosed between 1770 and 1830. And by the end of the 19th century, almost all of the arable land was enclosed.

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  During this process, some people who lost access to land moved to cities and towns to look for work. But other people just lost their livelihoods, and they got no compensation. They really didn't have any other options other than trying to find a job, working for somebody who was now in control of that land. So in addition to losing their livelihoods, people became a lot more dependent upon landowners' goodwill or the lack of it. Also, during the Napoleonic Wars, which stretched from 1803 to 1815, agricultural workers had been able to earn higher wages because so many men were away at war. Once

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  the war was over and surviving soldiers and sailors returned home, there was an oversupply of workers and wages dropped. The end of the war also led to fears of a collapse in grain prices as trade was reestablished across Europe. In 1815, Parliament passed a corn law to regulate corn imports and try to protect landowners and farmers from falling prices. But ordinary workers saw this as making grain more expensive for them to buy, especially since 1816 was the year without a summer, which we have talked about on the show before. Protests and riots against the corn laws overlapped with the Swing Riots and continued

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  until those laws were repealed in 1846. Attitudes about the poor were also changing in the UK in the early decades of the 19th century. The costs of relief for poor people had really surged during the Napoleonic Wars, and politicians and political economists started really focusing on how to bring those costs down. And one tool to try to do that was the workhouse. Although the idea of workhouses dates back to at least the mid-17th century in England, the Act to amend the law for the relief of the poor, passed in 1819, provided for the expansion of workhouses and the building of new ones. It also empowered and required

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  the select vestries, or the people who managed each parish, to, quote, "inquire into and determine upon the proper objects of relief and the nature and amount of the relief to be given, and in each case to take into consideration the character and conduct of the poor person to be relieved." The select vestries were also, quote, "at liberty to distinguish in the relief to be granted between the deserving and the idle, extravagant, or profligate poor." So by 1830, most parishes in England had at least one workhouse, and a deserving poor person could often get cash relief, while someone deemed undeserving would be sent to the workhouse.

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  This was also connected to the tithe. People were expected to donate 10% of their income to their local parish, and that could be done with an in-kind donation of produce or of some other good that they grew or farmed or made. A lot of people could not afford the tithe in light of everything that we've just talked about. And beyond that, this whole practice was starting to seem out of date to people, considering the way English society and the English economy were changing. Working people protested against the tithe and against efforts to reform the tithe in a way that would make it more expensive for them. One of these proposed reforms was a change to cash payments that could be made

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  in lieu of tithing part of the dairy production, since fresh milk couldn't be stored in the way that some other agricultural products could. The amount of these payments hadn't changed in centuries, and the Church wanted to bring them in line with their current value. But farmers, of course, did not want to pay more. On top of all of that, which was already a lot, the harvest was particularly poor in 1829 and 1830. English agricultural laborers also faced increased competition for jobs as workers moved to England from Ireland. And the thing that became emblematic of the Swing Riots, human threshers were being replaced by machines.

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  So threshing is the process of separating the edible part of a grain from its stalk and husk. This was a late fall and winter activity after the grain had been harvested and allowed to dry. Before the development of threshing machines, this was an intensely manual process. Laborers, mostly men, would beat bundles of grain with a flail to separate the grain. Manual threshing was hard work, but it could provide up to 50% of a farm laborer's winter income. And of course, in the winter, there were not many other ways for a farmer to make money. The first threshing machines were developed in the 18th century. Michael Menzies of Edinburgh

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  invented a machine for threshing grain in 1732 and patented it in 1734. In 1778, Andrew Meekele of Scotland invented a machine that might have been based on that earlier design. These initial attempts to make threshing machines did not work all that well, but threshing machines driven by water or horses started to become more reliable and more cost effective in the 18 teens. These machines were vastly more efficient than human threshers. So as more landowners started buying them, people were just out of a job. It did not take long for people to start making threats over threshing machines.

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  In 1791, a farmer in Wimbledon named Patterson was threatened with arson after installing a threshing machine, although it isn't fully clear whether the threat was against the machine or against the farmer. We will talk about how threats against threshing machines really started to grow after a sponsor break.

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  We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeartMedia's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy-nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.

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  Machine breaking, as a form of protest in Britain, stretches back to at least the 17th century. Some of the earliest examples were in the textile industry. For example, in 1675, there was a four-day-long uprising in the Spitalfields area of London in which weavers broke apart newly-developed looms that were described as being able to do the work of 20 men. In 1779, 300 knitting frames belonging to Samuel Nead were destroyed after he gave evidence against knitters who were petitioning Parliament for better working conditions. The Luddite uprising of the 18 teens was, of course, another example of this machine breaking.

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  A big driver in a lot of these protests was people being put out of work by more efficient machinery, or skilled workers being replaced by machine operators who didn't need the same level of training and expertise. There was often an argument that in the long term, these innovations would increase productivity and bring down prices, which would make the goods more affordable, which would increase demand, which would lead to more jobs. Sometimes that was more or less true, but that didn't really help people in the short term. Sometimes the quality of machine-made goods was also an issue. This is also something to put in the context of a country that has worked on a guild system

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  for all labor for a long time. People either perceived that the quality of these machine-made goods was worse, or that was definitively true. But that drop in quality was one of the issues in the Luddite uprising. There were also protests in agricultural communities in response to mechanization. In 1816, in part because of the unusually cold, wet weather and its effects on agriculture, there were multiple disconnected protests targeting agricultural equipment. Threshing tackle was destroyed near Colchester, and in South Suffolk, people broke threshing machines and mole plows, which were used to dig underground drainage channels through

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  fields with a lot less effort than you could do them by hand. This happened alongside food riots in more urban areas, and sometimes this is all known as the bread or blood protests for a banner that was carried by some of the demonstrators. The swing riots started in 1830. Farmers in Kent had petitioned for a postponement of attacks on hops in 1829, and they had been denied. There were also political changes going on at a national and international level. King George IV died in June of 1830, and he was followed by William IV. In July of 1830, a revolution in France led to the overthrow of Charles X, which helped

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  inspire revolutionary ideals among artisans and workers in England. The first documented attack on a threshing machine took place at Wingmore in the Elam Valley area of East Kent a month later. So for some time leading up to this, workers and artisans in the area had been warning local landowners that if they did not stop using threshing machines- Those machines would be destroyed. On August 24th, a group of about 20 men started destroying all the threshing machines that were still in use. This went on for weeks with more people joining the mob and that mob moved all over Kent. In October, two people near Dover received a letter that read,

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  quote, "You are to notice that if you don't put away your threshing machine against Monday next, you shall have a swing." Swing meant that they would swing from the gallows or be hanged. The letters were signed Swing, which took on multiple layers of meaning. The threat of hanging, the swing of a flail in threshing, and Captain Swing. Unlike the Luddite uprising, in which Ned Ludd became something of a mythical leader of the demonstrators, Captain Swing wasn't really the persona of a leader, just the author of menacing notes and documents demanding the end of threshing machines or other concessions.

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  Another thing that happened in October was that journalist and political commentator William Cobbett took a lecture tour through Kent and Sussex. And Cobbett's story is a whole saga. He could definitely be his own episode. I just kept finding more things about him that kind of needed to go in here or that I wanted to put in here, but didn't really fit. So we are just giving enough sense of like, why he became such a big part of this whole thing. He was the son of a farmer and a publican, meaning his father ran a pub. And when he was young, he worked as a gardener and a plowboy. He joined the army and then after being discharged, he wrote a pamphlet called The Soldier's Friend

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  about the harsh conditions that soldiers were subjected to. He also tried to have some of the officers who helped create those conditions court marshaled. And in 1792, when it became clear that this was not going to go Cobbett's way, he and his wife Nancy Ann fled to France and then to the United States where he taught English to French immigrants. Cobbett's opinions at this point probably don't line up with what you might expect based on what Tracy just said. He was fiercely against the French Revolution and he wrote a lot about that. He called the political philosopher Thomas Paine, author of Common Sense and the Rights of Man, sometimes also called the father of the American Revolution, quote, "A man famous

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  for nothing but his blasphemy and his hatred of England." Cobbett was generally anti-revolution, anti-republican, and anti-democratic reforms in England. He had to go back to England in 1800 after Dr. Benjamin Rush successfully sued him for libel for things that he had printed in his newspaper, Porcupine's Gazette. Back in England, Cobbett continued to write articles against democratic reforms and for things like the enclosure of common lands. But Cobbett's attitude started to change after he bought a farm in Hampshire in 1805 and he toured the area and he saw how many farmworkers were living in just desperate

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  poverty. He wrote a book about what he witnessed across southern England called Rural Rides and described himself as deceived in his earlier views. He became a really outspoken advocate for parliamentary reform, which is what he thought was necessary to address these issues. He faced a seditious libel charge for his writing on these subjects in 1809 and after representing himself in court, he was convicted. He was sentenced to two years in Newgate Prison and he went bankrupt. Cobbett's advocacy could be a mixed bag, not just on these issues, but on a range of others. Some of his writing is racist and anti-Semitic, although some of these views did evolve over

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  time. He was also motivated by the thought of returning to a romanticized idea of England, more like what he nostalgically remembered from his childhood. He had an idyllic picture in his mind of how things used to be, an authentically English countryside of the past, but that was something that had just never really existed. He also didn't always have the same perspective on other workers who also faced hardship outside that world of agriculture and rural life. In his 1816 Letter to the Luddites, he made a very strident defense of machinery, saying, quote, "I think then that it is quite clear that the existence of machinery to its present

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  extent cannot possibly do the journeyman any harm, but on the contrary, that he must be injured by the destruction of machinery." After Cobbett was released from prison and got his finances back in order, he was able to buy another farm and later a much bigger one. In 1816, he established a periodical called The Political Register in which he advocated for parliamentary reform. Not long after that, he had to flee the country again, under the threat of arrest for some of the things he had written, but he was able to return in 1819. He brought with him the remains of Thomas Paine. He had become an admirer of Paine's work, much different from his earlier thoughts on the man.

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  And after learning that Paine had been buried in a plain field on his farm, Cobbett wanted to give him a hero's burial back in England. That never actually happened though, and Paine's remains were scattered. It's not clear where many of them wound up. This brings us back to the swing riots. In 1828, Cobbett had started writing that an agricultural uprising was on the way if things did not change. And his October 1830 lecture tour was seen as inflaming tensions in rural England. As authorities started arresting and prosecuting demonstrators, they also focused on Cobbett and whether his speeches could be classified as libel or sedition.

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  One man who was later convicted of arson was reprieved after saying that he had been motivated by a speech Cobbett gave in the town of Battle on October 16th. The swing riots continued to spread through October and November of 1830. Demonstrators broke threshing machines, they set fire to haystacks, and sometimes they slaughtered livestock. Often, this was not a matter of just showing up, smashing things and setting fires and then moving on. Demonstrators would try to negotiate with landowners or clergy or other authority figures first. Some farmers destroyed their own threshing machines with the hope that the demonstrators would leave them alone, or they would make concessions to the mob, like they would offer

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  aid to the poor or promise better wages, or say they would get the clergy to return everyone's tithes. Sometimes these promises worked, but sometimes this did not work out. And then also sometimes after one mob had left, another one arrived and everything just started over. In some parts of England, mobs attacked businesses, demanded food or money from landowners, or demanded that the church return their tithe, but without doing any machine breaking. There were also strikes, food riots, and demonstrations at churches and other places that offered relief to the poor. In some places, people attacked and threatened Irish farmworkers and tried to drive them out of the area.

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  All of this is considered part of the swing riots, even if nobody broke any threshing machines or made any reference to Captain Swing. Meanwhile, landowners and business owners contacted the home office and other authorities for help. And the administration of Prime Minister Charles Gray took steps to both put down the uprising and investigate Cobbett's involvement. Yeoman cavalry units were dispatched to try to deal with the unrest. On November 25th, what was probably the most violent incident of the riots took place at the estate of John Bennett, known as Pitt House. Bennett was an MP and a magistrate, and he had previously given evidence against the

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  workers of the parish before the Poor Law Committee. Bennett had two threshing machines, which the mob destroyed after arming themselves with tools that they got at a nearby blacksmith. They also threw stones at Bennett and his steward. The yeomanry was dispatched to try to restore order, leading to a skirmish in which one demonstrator, John Harding, was killed and many others were injured. At least 25 were arrested. We'll talk about how the riots came to an end after a sponsor break.

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  YouTube Premium takes something you already love, which is YouTube, and makes it even better. The content, the creators, the feeling of finding exactly what you're into for every mood and moment of your day. Premium transforms that experience into a more supercharged, enhanced way to enjoy YouTube. A YouTube Premium subscription gives you access to exclusive YouTube features and benefits, including, but not limited to, ad-free, uninterrupted videos, background play, which lets you keep listening even when your screen is locked. I know when I have a YouTube video playing and I'm walking around the kitchen and I instinctively turn the screen off, having the video stop is annoying. And downloading your videos so you can watch them anywhere, even without a Wi-Fi connection.

• 29:11Speaker 03

  Whenever I'm traveling, if I'm going to be away from Wi-Fi for a while, I love having things that are loaded up and ready to go, so I don't have to worry about it. Smart Downloads also automatically downloads videos by your favorite creators. So even if you forget to download things ahead of time, Premium has you covered. So if you like YouTube, you will love Premium. Sign up now for your free trial. Terms and conditions apply.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  We've all done it, tumble down an internet rabbit hole trying to self-diagnose. And sometimes doing our own research can leave us more anxious than informed. Your feed is packed with wellness trends telling you to cold plunge, protein max, detox, track your sleep. But what's actually real? What's exaggerated? What's just wrong? That's exactly what Health vs. Hype from the American Medical Association and iHeart Media's Ruby Studio is here to find out. Each episode, Emmy nominated science communicator Trace Dominguez, who's racked up billions of views across PBS, Discovery Channel, and YouTube, talks to doctors, influencers, and real people trying these trends.

• 30:22Speaker 03

  Not to cancel them, not to hype them more, but to actually understand them. Because when it comes to your health, who you listen to matters. Start asking better questions and listen to Health vs. Hype on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with Vive Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So, listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy

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  In addition to his lecture tour, William Cobbett wrote about the issues that were affecting rural workers and the swing riots in his periodical, Two Penny Trash, which was a smaller, cheaper version of The Political Register. In November of 1830, he published To the Working People of England, in which he described the ongoing destruction and arson as things that reasonable people would see as an abominable crime. But he went on to say that the question had to be asked of what would lead hundreds of people to carry out such crimes. He wrote, quote, "I know this cause, or rather, these causes. I know also that there is an effectual remedy of this great and melancholy evil, and I

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  need not say that it is my duty to state them both with perfect frankness, a duty which I shall perform as briefly and with as much clearness as I am able. The great and general cause is the extreme poverty of the working people, or, in other words, the starving state in which they are. That Bible, which they have been taught to read as the means of saving their souls, tells them, from one end to the other, that their bodies are also not to be left to perish for want, while the land abounds with plenty, and that plenty arising too from their own labor. It tells them, and they know it, that the laborer is worthy of his hire, and they know

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  that that hire means a sufficiency not only for the man who works, but for his wife and children, and of clothes and fuel and lodging too, as well as of victuals and drink. Can God, who commanded that even the ox should not be muzzled as he trod out the corn, be pleased to see men who have tilled the land, sowed the corn, and reaped it and housed it, forbidden to touch the flour, and condemned to eat roots or herbage, not sufficient to keep a pig in good plight? Every line of holy writ tells them that this cannot be the will of God, while tradition, while all the sayings of their forefathers tell them that such a state of things is contrary

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  also to the laws and customs of their native country." He went on to say that everyone in the country used to brew and drink their own beer, but now almost no one did, other than the one or two people who were given the malt to do it. And he said that people used to eat a variety of food, including meat, and now everyone was reduced to just subsisting mostly on potatoes. He described taxpaying workers of the country as half-starved, while the people who lived on those taxes were, quote, "wallowing in luxury and splendor." From there, he went on, at length, about how many people in Britain had lucrative sinecures, where they were paid lots of money to do little to no work.

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  Many of those people paid pensions to their daughters and sisters from that money, which Cobbett thought was lucky for those women, but, quote, "what justice is there in taking away our bread and giving it to his daughters while we are reduced to grains and potatoes?" He named a lot of names, multiple men who were getting big payments, and their female relatives who were getting a few hundred pounds a year. Cobbett listed a series of remedies, including the abolition of laws and taxes that he thought were penalizing rural workers, until Parliament could be reformed. In December of 1830, Cobbett published a piece in The Political Register under the heading of "Rural War."

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  That was a phrase that he used a lot in his writing about these issues. This piece included two letters, quote, "on the state of England and a warning to France." They were addressed to the editor of La Revolution in Paris. He wrote, quote, "As the working people have gone on getting poorer and poorer, they have become more and more immoral. And indeed, it has been proved by witnesses before the Committee of the House of Commons that in innumerable instances, men have committed crimes for the purposes of getting into jail, because the felons in the jails are better fed and better clad than the honest working people. As the working people have become poor, the laws relating to them have been made more

• 37:03Speaker 03

  and more severe, and the Poor Law, that famous law of Elizabeth, which was the greatest glory of England for ages, has by degrees been so much mutilated and nullified that at last it is so far from being a protection to the working people, that it has by its perversions been made the means of reducing them to a state of wretchedness not to be described." It is probably unsurprising that, once again, William Cobbett faced charges for all of this. He was accused of seditious libel and put on trial for inciting violence and disorder and, quote, "the burning and destruction of corn, grain, machines, and other property."

• 37:46Speaker 03

  As he had done back in 1819, he represented himself. But this time, the case ended in a hung jury, so he didn't wind up going back to prison or having to flee the country. Some of the first demonstrators who faced charges during the swing riots got relatively light sentences. They spent just a few days in jail. But as this popular uprising grew and spread, authorities became a lot more concerned about putting it down. Among other things, the July Revolution in France raised a lot of fears that something similar might happen in England. Typically, cases would have been heard, based on when all of this happened, at the Lent

• 38:27Speaker 03

  of Sizes in March of 1831, but authorities did not want to wait that long. On November 23rd, Home Secretary William Lamb, Second Viscount Melbourne, offered a reward for helping to arrest people who were involved in the swing riots and give testimony against them. He also created special commissions to prosecute the accused. Between December 18th, 1830, and January 14th, 1831, cases were tried before special commissions across southern and eastern England. During these proceedings, 252 people were condemned to death, although ultimately only 19 of those were hanged.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  Either 481 or 505 people were transported to Australia, both of those numbers appear in multiple places in the research, and almost 650 people went to prison. The people who faced trial weren't just farmworkers. They also included blacksmiths, cobblers, carpenters, wheelwrights, and various other workers and artisans. Between the start of the swing riots in 1830 and the end of these legal proceedings in 1831, there were at least 3,000 incidents. They took place across most of southern and eastern England and in parts of central England.

• 39:51Speaker 03

  This makes the swing riots one of the largest popular uprisings in England since the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, which is also known as Wat Tyler's Rebellion. We covered that rebellion on the show before. And these incidents did not immediately stop with the trials and convictions. There were more scattered incidents that continued. And Cobbett kept writing about this rural war at least until 1834. In terms of the swing riots impact, the day to day lives of farmworkers really didn't change all that much. Some of the landowners who did promise to make changes didn't keep those promises. A new poor law passed in 1834 required that people who were sent to

• 40:35Speaker 03

  workhouses be clothed and fed, and for children in workhouses to be educated. But this law further expanded the use of workhouses, leading to the Victorian era workhouses that were depicted in the works of people like Charles Dickens. But the swing riots are seen as a factor in Parliament's passage of the Great Reform Act of 1832. There's a correlation between the districts that saw uprisings and demonstrations during the riots and the districts that voted for pro-reform members of Parliament. This act got rid of a lot of the rotten boroughs, which were represented in Parliament but

• 41:16Speaker 03

  did not actually have many people living there. It also created new boroughs, and it made more people eligible to vote. This included small landowners, tenant farmers, and shopkeepers, as well as householders who paid a yearly rental of at least 10 pounds. But under this act, only men had the right to vote, and a lot of the poorest farmworkers still did not qualify. The creation of new districts allowed William Cobbett to become a member of Parliament. He was elected to represent Oldham, which was created under the Act in the House of Commons. He strongly objected to the 1834 poor law, and after it passed, he openly

• 41:58Speaker 03

  called for a popular uprising, something he had explicitly denounced earlier in his life and only somewhat hinted at during the swing riots. The parliamentary reform that passed in 1832 was more limited than what Cobbett had advocated for, but he was still devastated that a reformed Parliament, which he had been so sure was needed to improve things in rural England, had instead voted to penalize poverty even further. His later writing included a number of books that explored the way the Crown had dispossessed poor people in England, and he was bankrupt when he died of influenza in 1835. I find him very interesting.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  He is interesting, kind of a pill. Yeah, he's, he's a lot of things. There are layers. We'll talk about that more on Friday, I'm sure. I have some listener mail to wrap this up, and this is from Rachel. Rachel wrote, "Hi, Tracy and Holly. Very longtime listener, fourth time writer. The behind the scenes about the Bunker Hill monument and Elizabeth Blackwell struck a chord with me. I will be making my first visit to London this fall to see the Bayeux Tapestry and whatever else I can manage to enjoy in two weeks. Yes, I already have tickets to see the Tapestry. When Tracy told us about the Blackwell exhibit at Oxford, I looked it up and was disappointed that it will be over before my trip. The discussion about Bunker

• 43:24Speaker 03

  Hill and the steps brought back memories of taking my boys to an American history vacation in 2000 and doing the Freedom Trail in Boston. When we got to Bunker Hill, they still had enough energy to climb to the top. I had a knee problem that made stairs painful, so I took the time to rest. Now, the problem is long gone. I guess I should try to go back and climb to the top of the monument." Back to my London trip. I have reserved a place for a tour of Big Ben, and they tell you multiple times that you have to be able to walk up 334 steps. Not all at once, as there are stops. They are also very careful to tell you that you must be able to tolerate the noise of the bells and walk through narrow passageways. Since I live in a three-story

• 44:08Speaker 03

  town home, the steps are not a problem. I probably get that many done before noon. It's not a tour many people take, and I'm looking forward to being one of them. No pet photos, but I did read this article in the New York Times, and that made me think of you both. Thanks for keeping me company at the gym and the kitchen, Rachel." Thank you for this email, Rachel. There are a lot of things. So, number one, so many cool things to do in Oxford, even though that exhibit will not be there by the time of your trip. So if you have time to make it out to Oxford, there's a jillion great things to do. I'm also impressed by anybody who, who does the whole Freedom Trail. Yeah.

• 44:50Speaker 03

  Because I, I think it's something like 2.7 miles, maybe, which does not sound that long to me, because I go on like five to seven mile hikes with some regularity. But walking that long on city streets feels a little different, and people often wind up- Wait, does it sound harder to you? It sounds harder, because it's not nice, soft, giving ground. It's, it's hard pavement under my feet. Total opposite. Yeah. This is fascinating. Well, because it's, it's inconsistent. If you're out in nature, and you know exactly, like, you know, I mean, city streets can also be inconsistent. There can be paving problems, et cetera. But to me, that's- Sure.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  Like, when I was running regularly, I would always rather run a sidewalk than on a trail. Yeah. I know a lot of people start the Freedom Trail and wind up kind of clocking out because they sort of realize this feels a lot farther than I thought it was going to, based on it being 2.7 miles or however exactly long it is. So, the article that was sent is an article in the New York Times that is headlined, "Your Cat Is Being Nice? Think Again. A New Study Finds That Sometimes Cats Groom Each Other Specifically to Be Annoying." And this finding does not surprise me- Me either.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  Because I will for sure watch my cats, like, start out with a nice little bath, and it looks like they're being kind of cuddly, but one of them is slowly transitioning that into antagonizing her sister. Yeah. I mean, when we had both of our Siamese, they engaged in what we called competitive grooming, where it would just be like, "No, I'm licking you," and they would just back and forth with that for a long time. I thought they were gonna come away bald sometimes. Oh. I can imagine exactly what that looks like. So, thank you, Rachel, for this email and for sending that article. I had not seen that. If you would like to send

• 46:58Speaker 03

  us a note, we're at [email protected]. If you would like to see the show notes, where we have all the research for our episodes, that's at our website, which is missinhistory.com. And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app or wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts.

• 47:20Speaker 03

  Stuff You Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 47:34Speaker 03

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