Swing Riots

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello and Welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V.
Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. A few years ago, we
did an episode on the Rebecca Riots, which started in
Wales in eighteen thirty nine, and at the time I

(00:24):
had been looking for something that had some parallels to
the Ludite 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.

(00:47):
We had already covered the Luodites, though, all the way
back in twenty thirteen, so I couldn't just do that again.
I was looking for something else, and the Rebecca 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

(01:08):
I particularly enjoy. The Rebecca Riots are most remembered for
attacks on tollgates, 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

(01:34):
came up while I was researching the Rebecca Riots, and
that was the Swing Riots that 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.

(01:55):
When I discovered the mention of the Swing Riots, it
was too late to change topic, so I decided to
put that on the list for later. In the eighteen
twenties and thirties, 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.

(02:18):
A person's crop was theirs, but outside of growing season,
other people could access and use that same land, including
as grazing land for their animals. Livestock were also fed
hey that grew in communal meadows. The process of enclosing
land with fences and hedges and putting it under private

(02:39):
control started in the twelfth century and went through a
couple of major waves. One of those waves started around
seventeen fifty and continued through the mid nineteenth century. About
six million acres of common land in England were enclosed
between seventeen seventy and eighteen thirty, and by the end

(02:59):
of the nineteen century almost all of the arable land
was enclosed. 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

(03:21):
was now in control of that land. So in addition
to losing their livelihoods, people became a lot more dependent
upon landowner's goodwill or the lack of it. Also, during
the Napoleonic Wars, which stretched from eighteen oh three to
eighteen fifteen, agricultural workers had been able to earn higher
wages because so many men were away at war. Once

(03:46):
the war was over and surviving soldiers and sailors returned home,
there was an over supply of workers and wages dropped.
The end of the war also led to fears of
a collapse in green prices as trade was real established
across Europe. In eighteen fifteen, Parliament passed a corn Law
to regulate corn imports and try to protect landowners and

(04:09):
farmers from falling prices, but ordinary workers saw this as
making grain more expensive for them to buy, especially since
eighteen sixteen 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 until those laws were repealed in eighteen forty six.

(04:33):
Attitudes about the poor were also changing in the UK
in the early decades of the nineteenth 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

(04:56):
idea of workhouses dates back to at least the mid
seven teenth century. In England, the Act to Amend the
Law for the Relief of the Poor passed in eighteen nineteen,
provided for the expansion of workhouses and the building of
new ones. It also empowered and required the select Vestries,
or the people who managed each parish, to quote, inquire into,

(05:20):
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,

(05:42):
extravagant or profligate poor. So by eighteen thirty 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. This was also
connected to the tithe. People were expected to donate ten

(06:04):
percent of their income to their local parish, and that
could be done with an inkind 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

(06:27):
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 in lieu of tithing part of the dairy production,
since fresh milk couldn't be stored in the way that

(06:48):
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 eighteen twenty nine and eighteen thirty. English

(07:09):
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. So threshing is the process of separating the
edible part of a grain from its stock and husk.

(07:31):
This was a late fall in 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 fifty percent of a farm

(07:53):
laborer's winter income, and of course in the winter there
were not many other ways for a farmer to make
more money. The first threshing machines were developed in the
eighteenth century. Michael Menzies of Edinburgh invented a machine for
threshing grain in seventeen thirty two and patented it in
seventeen thirty four. In seventeen seventy eight, Andrew Meekil of

(08:15):
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 eighteen teens. These machines were
vastly more efficient than human threshers, so as more landowners

(08:40):
started buying them, people were just out of a job.
It did not take long for people to start making
threats over threshing machines. In seventeen ninety one, 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

(09:02):
will talk about how threats against threshing machines really started
to grow after a sponsor break. Machine breaking as a
form of protest in Britain stretches back to at least
the seventeenth century. Some of the earliest examples were in

(09:25):
the textile industry. For example, in sixteen seventy five, there
was a four day long uprising in the Spittlefields area
of London in which weavers broke apart newly developed looms
that were described as being able to do the work
of twenty men. In seventeen seventy nine, three hundred knitting

(09:46):
frames belonging to Samuel Nead were destroyed after he gave
evidence against knitters who were petitioning Parliament for better working conditions.
The Ludite Uprising of the eighteen teens was, of course
another examp of this machine braking a big driver. In
a lot of these protests was people being put out
of work by more efficient machinery or skilled workers being

(10:10):
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

(10:32):
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 for all labor
for a long time. People either perceived that the quality
of these machine made goods was worse or that was

(10:53):
definitively true, but that drop in quality was one of
the issues in the Luddite uprising. There were also pro
tests in agricultural communities in response to mechanization. In eighteen sixteen,
in part because of the unusually cold, wet weather and
its effects on agriculture, there were multiple disconnected protests targeting

(11:13):
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 fields with
a lot less effort than you could do them by hand.
This happened alongside food riots in more urban areas, and

(11:35):
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 eighteen thirty. Farmers
in Kent had petitioned for a postponement of attacks on
hops in eighteen twenty nine and they had been denied.
There were also political changes going on at a national

(11:57):
and international level. King George the Fourth died in June
of eighteen thirty and he was followed by William the
Fourth in July of eighteen thirty. A revolution in France
led to the overthrow of Charles the tenth, which helped
inspire revolutionary ideals among artisans and workers in England. The
first documented attack on a threshing machine took place at

(12:21):
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 twenty fourth, the
group of about twenty men started destroying all the threshing

(12:43):
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 quote, you are to notice that
if you don't put away your threshing against Monday next
you shall have a swing. Swing meant that they would

(13:07):
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
Lud became something of a mythical leader of the demonstrators,
Captain Swing wasn't really the persona of a leader, just

(13:30):
the author of menacing notes and documents demanding the end
of threshing machines or other concessions. Another thing that happened
in October was that journalist and political commentator William Cobbitt
took a lecture tour through Kent and Sussex, and Cobbitt's
story as a whole saga, he could definitely be his

(13:51):
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
meeting His father ran a pub, and when he was

(14:12):
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 about the harsh conditions
that soldiers were subjected to. He also tried to have
some of the officers who helped create those conditions court martialed,
and in seventeen ninety two, when it became clear that

(14:33):
this was not going to go Cobbot's way, he and
his wife Nancy Ann, fled to France and then to
the United States, where he taught English to French emigrants.
Cobbott'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

(14:54):
a lot about that. He called the political philosopher Thomas Payne,
author of Common Sense and the Right of Man, sometimes
also called the father of the American Revolution quote, a
man famous for nothing but his blasphemy and his hatred
of England. Cobbot was generally anti revolution, anti republican, and

(15:14):
anti democratic reforms in England. He had to go back
to England in eighteen hundred after doctor Benjamin Rush successfully
sued him for libel for things that he had printed
in his newspaper Porcupine's Gazette. Back in England, Cobbat continued
to write articles against democratic reforms and for things like

(15:35):
the enclosure of common lands. But Cobbitt's attitude started to
change after he bought a farm in Hampshire in eighteen
oh five and he toured the area and he saw
how many farm workers were living in just desperate poverty.
He wrote a book about what he witnessed across southern England,
called Rural Rides, and described himself as deceived in his

(15:59):
earlier view us. 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 eighteen o nine, and
after representing himself in court, he was convicted. He was

(16:19):
sentenced to two years in Newgate Prison, and he went bankrupt.
Cobbit'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 antisemitic, although some of these
views did evolve over time. He was also motivated by
the thought of returning to a romanticized idea of England,

(16:41):
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 it 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

(17:05):
and rural life. In his eighteen sixteen 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 extent cannot possibly do
the Journeyman any harm, but on the contrary that he
must be injured by the destruction of machinery. After Cobbett

(17:30):
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 eighteen sixteen, 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

(17:51):
things he had written, but he was able to return
in eighteen nineteen. He brought with him the remains of
Thomas Payne. He had become I'm an admirer of Paine's work,
much different from his earlier thoughts on the man, and
after learning that Pain had been buried in a plain
field on his farm, Cobbitt wanted to give him a
hero's burial back in England. That ever, actually happened, though,

(18:15):
and Pain's remains were scattered. It's not clear where many
of them wound up. This brings us back to the
Swing Riots. In eighteen twenty eight, Cobbitt had started writing
that an agricultural uprising was on the way if things
did not change, and his October eighteen thirty. Lecture tour
was seen as inflaming tensions in rural England as authorities

(18:39):
started arresting and prosecuting demonstrators. They also focused on Cobbot
and whether his speeches could be classified as libel or sedition.
One man who was later convicted of arson, was reprieved
after saying that he had been motivated by a speech
Cobbitt gave in the town of Battle on October sixteenth.
The diets continued to spread through October and November of

(19:03):
eighteen thirty. 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

(19:25):
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 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

(19:45):
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 ties, but without doing any
machine breaking. There were also strikes, food riots, and demonstrations

(20:07):
at churches and other places that offered relief to the poor.
In some places, people attacked and threatened Irish farm workers
and tried to drive them out of the area. 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

(20:31):
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 Cobbet's involvement. Yeoman cavalry units
were dispashed to try to deal with the unrest. On
November twenty fifth, what was probably the most violent incident
of the riots took place at the estate of John Bennett,

(20:54):
known as Pit House. Bennett was an MP and a magistrate,
and he had previously given evidence against the 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

(21:18):
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 twenty five were arrested. We'll
talk about how the riots came to an end after
a sponsor break. In addition to his lecture tour, William

(21:45):
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 eighteen thirty 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

(22:07):
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 need not say that it

(22:29):
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

(22:50):
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
that that higher means a sufficiency not only for the

(23:12):
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,

(23:32):
forbidden to touch the flower, 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 also to the laws and customs

(23:53):
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

(24:15):
tax paying 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 know work. Many of those people paid pensions to

(24:37):
their daughters and sisters from that money, which Cobbat 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

(24:58):
a few hundred pounds a year. Cobbatt 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 eighteen thirty, Hobbitt published a piece in
the Political Register under the heading of Rural War. That

(25:19):
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 in a warning to France.
They were addressed to the editor of La Revolucion in Paris.
He wrote, quote, as the working people have gone on
getting poorer and poorer, they have become more and more immoral.

(25:41):
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

(26:02):
been made more 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

(26:23):
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

(26:44):
other property, as he had done back in eighteen nineteen.
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

(27:05):
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 Assizes in March of eighteen

(27:28):
thirty one, but authorities did not want to wait that long.
On November twenty third 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

(27:50):
December eighteenth, eighteen thirty and January fourteenth, eighteen thirty one
cases were tried before special commissions across southern and eastern
arth England. During these proceedings, two hundred and fifty two
people were condemned to death, although ultimately only nineteen of
those were hanged. Either four hundred eighty one or five

(28:12):
hundred and five people were transported to Australia both of
those numbers appear in multiple places in the research, and
almost six hundred and fifty people went to prison. The
people who face trial weren't just farm workers. They also
included blacksmiths, cobblers, carpenters, wheelwrights, and various other workers and artisans.

(28:35):
Between the start of the Swing Riots in eighteen thirty
and the end of these legal proceedings in eighteen thirty one,
there were at least three thousand incidents. They took place
across most of southern and eastern England and in parts
of central England. This makes the Swing Riots one of
the largest popular uprisings in England since the Peasant's Revolt

(28:56):
of thirteen eighty one, 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
Cobbitt kept writing about this rural war at least until

(29:16):
eighteen thirty four. In terms of the Swing Riots impact,
the day to day lives of farm workers 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 eighteen thirty four required that people
who were sent to workhouses be clothed and fed, and

(29:37):
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 eighteen thirty two. Correlation between the districts that saw

(30:02):
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 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

(30:26):
farmers and shopkeepers, as well as householders who paid a
yearly rental of at least ten pounds, but under this
Act only men had the right to vote, and a
lot of the poorest farm workers still did not qualify.
The creation of new districts allowed William Cobbett to become
a member of Parliament. He was elected to represent Oldham,

(30:48):
which was created under the Act, in the House of Commons.
He strongly objected to the eighteen thirty four Poor Law,
and after it passed, he openly 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

(31:08):
reform that passed in eighteen thirty two was more limited
than what Cobbat 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

(31:31):
Crown had dispossessed poor people in England, and he was
bankrupt when he died of influenza in eighteen thirty five.
I find him very interesting. He is interesting, kind of
a pill. Yeah, 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

(31:53):
is from Rachel. Rachel wrote, Hi, Tracy and Holly, very
long time listener, fourth time writer, 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

(32:16):
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 Hill and the
steps brought back memories of taking my boys to at
American History vacation in two thousand 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

(32:38):
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 three hundred and thirty
four steps, not all at once, as there are stops.

(33:00):
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 town home, the steps are not a problem.
I probably get that many done before noon. It's not
a to hour 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

(33:23):
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

(33:47):
does the whole Freedom Trail, Yeah, because I think it's
something like two point seven 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

(34:08):
people often wind up. Wait, does it sound harder to
you too? 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 an Uh, it's inconsistent
if you're out in nature and you know it. Yeah,

(34:30):
like you know, I mean, city streets can also be inconsistent.
They're gonna be paving problems, et cetera. But to me,
that's sure. 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 two point

(34:51):
seven 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

(35:15):
not surprise me either, 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

(35:37):
just be like, no, I'm clicking you, and they would
just back and forth with that. For a long time.
I thought they were going to come away bald. Sometimes
aw 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

(35:57):
send us a note or a history podcast that iHeartRadio
dot com. If you would like to see the show
notes where we have all the research for our episodes,
us at our website, which is missinhistory dot com, and
you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app
or wherever else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff

(36:20):
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Stuff You Missed in History Class News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

Stuff You Should Know

Betrayal Weekly

Dateline NBC

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Swing Riots