"Captain Swing" was a name that was appended to several threatening letters during the rural Swing Riots of 1830, when labourers rioted over the introduction of new threshing machines and the loss of their livelihoods. The name was made-up and it came to symbolise the anger of the poor labourers in rural England who wanted a return to the pre-machine days when human labour was used. Labourers' war William Cobbett was a political activist who supported the working man. He rode around Kent and Sussex and spoke to agricultural workers about their problems. He then used this as source material for his journal the Political Register. He learned that many agricultural labourers were badly paid, or unemployed and half starved. The financial support for a laid off agricultural worker was less than that paid to support a criminal in prison. Cobbett realised that Parishes were trying to avoid having to provide support to the poor with many parishes sending labouring people to the United States to save the costs of supporting them as paupers. Cobbett had predicted that there would be problems with the agricultural workers and when rural disturbances started in Kent and spread to Sussex during August 1830, Cobbett described it as the "Labourers' war". The main causes of the disturbances were due to an excess of labour, predominantly by men who had been involved in the Napoleonic wars, returning home. Also by itinerant Irish labourers prepared to work for next to nothing undercutting the local agricultural workers. This coincided with a fall in agricultural prices. During the ensuing depression farmers were not able to pay their agricultural workers a sustainable wage. Farmers also stopped the custom of allowing their workers to take left over crops after the corn harvest, that would help them through the winter. This was compounded by the church tithes and the enclosure of common land. Added to this farmers began to introduce threshing machines that displaced workers. The displaced workers had no means to feed or clothe their families during the winter. A resident of Lewes in Sussex, Gideon Mantell the English obstetrician, geologist and palaeontologist noted in his diary of 1830: Popular protests by farm workers occurred across agricultural areas of southern England. The main targets for protesting crowds were landowners/ landlords, whose threshing machines they destroyed or dismantled, and whom they petitioned for a rise in wages. The protests were notable