The “Swing Riots” generally lasted a month or more and affected thirty-four counties before they were suppressed by soldiers and special constables, or settled by meetings such as that of the Chiddingly Vestry. Nationally, 1,976 people were brought to trial on charges varying from arson to destruction to riotous assembly. In Sussex fifty-five men were tried of whom eighteen were acquitted, sixteen jailed, fifteen sentenced to transportation to Van Diemen’s Land (as Tasmania was then known) and three sentenced to death. Of the latter only J. Bufford was executed; the other two were reprieved and transported. In 1848 an American writer, H. Colman, described English country labourers – “the bold peasantry, a country’s pride” of 18^th century writers – as “Servile, broken-spirited and severely straitened in their means of living” unlike the “civil, cleanly, industrious, frugal and better-dressed” French. After rioting had failed, only servility under the Poor Law remained for the labourers until Joseph Arch founded the National Union of Agricultural Workers in the 1870s.