The Swing Riots had many immediate causes. Historian J. F. C. Harrison believed that they were overwhelmingly the result of the progressive impoverishment and dispossession of the English agricultural workforce over the previous fifty years, leading up to 1830. In parliament Lord Carnarvon had said that the English labourer was reduced to a plight more abject than that of any race in Europe, with their employers no longer able to feed and employ them. A 2020 study found that the presence of threshing machines caused greater rioting, and that severity of the riots was lowest in areas with abundant employment alternatives (and highest in areas with few alternative employment opportunities).