The rioting began as early as August on the Kent-Surrey border and spread slowly eastwards, with rick-burning and the smashing of the threshing machines that labourers said robbed men of work. In at least one parish the house of the Overseer was also burnt down. Much of the burning and smashing was done at night by gangs with blackened faces, a form of disguise used by smugglers. In early November the disturbances began in East Sussex and with increasing speed spread westwards, leaping from point to point like a forest fire, right across Southern England and up into the South Midlands and East Anglia. The practice sprang up among the rioters of sending threatening letters to farmers signed “Captain Swing”, which is why later historians dubbed the rioting, turbulent assemblies, smashing and burning that engulfed half of agrarian England over a period of weeks, the “Swing Riots”.

Brede, six miles north of Hastings, was the scene of the first riots in East Sussex. It was a parish of much the same size and problems as Chiddingly, sixteen miles away, with a population in 1831 o 1046 people, compared with Chiddingly’s 902. Its Poor Law expenditure in 1816 had been lower than Chiddingly’s – £1003 to about £1650 – but by 1821 the Chiddingly Vestry had clamped down tightly to about £1300 whereas in Brede the figure had risen to £1745. Then, as in Chiddingly, it neither rose nor fell greatly during the 1820s.

Perhaps it was this higher Poor Law figure that made Brede’s farmers so determined to reduce their tithe burden that they actually encouraged their labourers to demonstrate in large numbers, although as the profits from hop-growing coming into the parish in 1832 were reckoned at £20,000, the growers themselves can scarcely have been impoverished. At any rate, it seems they promised the labourers a rise to 2s. 3d. a day if they would help to bring pressure on the Rector, Mr. Hele, a son-in-law of the Bishop of Norwich, to accept a reduction in tithes for 1830 from £715 to £400; and early in November a tumultuous meeting took place close to the parsonage. When next day the rector met the farmers in the local inn to discuss tithes payments, hundreds of shouting labourers gathered outside. Mr. Hele would not budge from his demand for full payment, saying he refused to negotiate under duress, and returned to the parsonage.

On the evening of November 4^th, some fifty paupers met in Thomas Noakes’s house because, as one has been quoted as saying: “We know that the farmers cannot pay the increased wages but they have agreed to it, and we shall now join together to get rid of tithes and taxes to enable them to do so.” Next morning, at an open-air meeting, a large crowd elected a deputation of four men – Thomas Noakes (who was later reported wounded in a smuggling affray), David Noakes senior, Thomas Henley and Joseph Bryant – to meet eight farmers in “The Red Lion”. This meeting produced the following resolution, subscribed to by farmers as well as paupers: