Shake it up?

I read somewhere that int he 19th century brewers would agitate their casks of barleywine in order to get more fermentation going. The old ale never really showed the level of active fermentation that one would expect from a beer that size; it has fermented but didn't really seem to have fermented enough to me. So I bunged it up with a solid bung and shook the heck out of it today. What do you know: bubbles in the airlock (once I replaced the solid bung.) I'm not sure that this activity will persists, but I hope so. Anyway, the theory behind all this seems like a reasonable one to me: yeast that would be fermenting can floculate prematurely because of yeast in the neighborhood that are at the floculation stage. Shaking releases some of this healthy yeast.

I'll let you know whether the airlock starts moving at a renewed rate or not.