THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH WORKING CLASS

The grievances of the stockingers were complex, and a full understanding of them demands a minute attention to the details of the trade.¹ Not only plain and fancy hose, but also gloves, braces, mitts, spider-net blouses, pantaloons, cravats, and miscellaneous articles were manufactured in the Midlands; and Leicester, where much fine work was done, was not as badly hit in the Luddite years as Nottingham. But all grievances turned upon the various means by which the least scrupulous hosiers were seeking to economize labour and cheapen production. In some villages ‘truck’ was so widespread that it had almost displaced payment in wages. Payment for work depended upon complicated piece-rates which turned, in lace, upon the fineness of count in the lace; the men complained that they were consistently underpaid, as for work of coarser quality, and that the masters refused to employ an instrument called the ‘rack’ which measured the count. The stockingers had to deduct from their inadequate wages out-payments for seaming, needles, oil, the fetching and carrying of work, etc. Unscrupulous middlemen, or interlopers, called ‘bag hosiers’ visited the villages persuading stockingers who were underemployed, or who wished to save themselves the waste of time involved in taking their work to the large hosiers’ warehouses in Nottingham, to do work below the accepted rates. But most serious of all were the grievances as to ‘cut-ups’ and ‘colting’.

‘There is no new machinery in Nottingham, or its neighbourhood, against which the workmen direct their vengeance,’ so wrote the middle-class Radical paper, the Nottingham Review:

Cut-up stockings (and other articles) were manufactured from large pieces of knitted material, woven on a wide loom, which was then cut up into the required shape, the articles then being sewn at the seam.¹ The articles were cheap, and – in comparison with the traditional stocking-frame – they could be mass-produced. But they were bitterly disliked in the trade for a number of reasons. The men, and many of the masters also, argued that the product was much inferior and that the seams came apart. To the inexpert eye they resembled the real article, and therefore could undercut hose made ‘in a tradesmanlike manner’ – and this at a time when the collapse of the South American market and the general stagnation induced by the Orders in Council had led to a falling demand. Further, the poor quality of the ‘cut-ups’ offended the craftsman’s pride in his work, and led to the products of the trade generally falling into disrepute. Moreover, this grievance led directly into the grievance as to ‘colting’, or the employment of unskilled labour or of too many apprentices. Cheap techniques of production encouraged the influx of cheap and unskilled labour. Frame-work-knitting was being debased into a ‘dishonourable’ trade.

Just as in the case of the croppers, the framework-knitters felt that every statute which might have afforded them protection was abrogated or ignored, while every attempt to enforce their rights by trade union action was illegal. Although some of the hosiers, before 1811, also wished to see the suppression of ‘cut-ups’ and ‘colting’, class alignments hardened month by month, and the goodwill which had formerly existed between those employers who were political reformers and their journeymen was dissipated. However, there is good reason to suppose that in 1811–12 some of the hosiers who paid customary rates and did not manufacture ‘cut-ups’ actively sympathized with the Luddites’ aims, if not with their methods. For Luddism in Nottingham, as in Yorkshire, was highly selective. Those frames only were broken which manufactured under-price or ‘cut-up’ work; when goods were slashed, in the loom or when seized from the carrier’s cart, the ‘cut-ups’ were destroyed while those with proper selvedges were left undamaged. The distinction was clearly made in the song, General Ludd’s Triumph:

Indeed, the framework-knitters claimed a constitutional sanction even for frame-breaking. Under the Charter granted by Charles II there was a clause empowering the Framework-Knitters’ Company to appoint deputies to examine goods, and to cut to pieces those badly or deceitfully manufactured. These powers the Luddites now assumed as rights. In reply to magisterial proclamations against their activities, they issued a counter DECLARATION, be-spattered with ‘Whereases’ and ‘Whenevers’, declaring both their intention and their right to ‘break and destroy all manner of frames whatsoever that make the following spurious articles and all frames whatsoever that do not pay the regular price heretofore agreed to by the Masters and Workmen’. A list of the offensive frames and practices was subjoined.²

The aim of the Nottingham Committee was to promote a Bill giving parliamentary relief to the stockingers. From certain committees there came the suggestion of a petition for a minimum wage Bill. These proposals the Nottingham Committee resisted:

Clearly, Henson and his colleagues had taken measure of the opposition. If they were to secure the advance of wages which they wanted (the Nottingham Committee argued) it must be more detailed legislation preventing indirect abatements:

Much of this history belongs to the aftermath of Luddism. But the history of the abortive Bill to regulate framework-knitting throws into relief the predicament of trade unionists in the Luddite years. Although we do not possess documents which enable us to read the thoughts of the leaders of the weavers and croppers so clearly, they must have encountered very similar experiences in their fruitless and expensive recourse to Parliament between 1800 and 1812. We have already followed in some detail the history of the Lancashire cotton-weavers. But it must be noted that Luddism in Lancashire arose out of a crisis between paternalism and laissez faire exactly parallel to those in the hosiery and woollen industries. As late as 1800 and 1803 the weavers, after intensive agitation, had been able to secure at least a formal measure of protection in the Cotton Arbitration Acts. The weavers were already in correspondence with the cotton-weavers of Glasgow, and (in the view of Colonel Fletcher of Bolton) their agitation ‘originates in the Jacobin Societies and is intended as a means to keep the minds of the Weavers in a continual Ferment…’¹ The victory of the Arbitration Acts proved illusory. While magistrates were given fresh powers to mediate and to enforce a minimum wage,

Moreover, it is sometimes forgotten how rapid the abrogation of paternalist legislation was. As late as 1773 the important Spitalfields Act was introduced, which remained in force with modifications for fifty years, under which the silk-weavers secured – what other weavers and stockingers strove in vain to secure – a legal minimum wage.¹ The ineffective cotton Arbitration Acts (1800–1803) at least served to keep alive the notion of protection. Thereafter, in the space of ten years, almost the entire paternalist code was swept away. Between 1803 and 1808 the regulations covering the woollen trade were suspended. In 1809 they were repealed. In 1813 the apprenticeship clauses of 5 Eliz. c.4, were repealed. In 1814 those clauses empowering magistrates to enforce a minimum wage followed. (The clause under which it was an offence to leave work unfinished, however, remained.) In 1814 the apprenticeship restrictions in the cutlery industry were set aside by the Sheffield Cutlers’ Bill. During the same ten years workers, penalized under the Combination Acts for any direct trade union action, increasingly had recourse to the courts in attempts to enforce obsolescent legislation. Thus, there were actions by the woollen workers on gig-mills and apprenticeship, by stockingers on ‘colting’ and ‘truck’, by cotton-weavers on apprenticeship and minimum wage enforcement, and more than a dozen cases fought by the London trades (coach-makers, lock-makers, machine-makers, and others) between 1809 and 1813 on similar issues.¹ The great majority of these cases were unsuccessful. The few which succeeded exhausted the funds of the unions and brought derisory damages. Finally, these years also see the dispersal of the last customary or legal controls over price-fixing in the open market, and the failure to reactivate the common law with respect to forestalling and regrating.

We have to imagine the bitter experiences of Henson and Large, in their expensive attendance on Parliament, multiplied one hundredfold. The workers understood quite well what was happening. They were caught squarely between two fires. On the one hand, they faced the fire of established order. By no means all the country magistrates, nor even the Lords-Lieutenant of counties, were doctrinaire supporters of laissez faire. On occasions, these men felt real misgivings as to intervening against the journeymen, and even strong dislike of the methods of the large masters. But at the moment when the men’s grievances were loudly and effectively voiced, at that moment also they threatened the values of order. The old-fashioned squire might sympathize with a famished stockinger who appeared as a passive plaintiff at his door. He had no sympathy at all with secret committees, demonstrations in the streets, strikes, or the destruction of property.

On the other hand, the men faced the fire of their employers, who gained every day fresh reinforcements from the disciples of laissez faire. The Corn Laws of 1815 were to reveal how far the aristocracy and gentry were from real assent to these doctrines. But the war-time Ministry found it convenient to accept the arguments of ‘free competition’, in so far as they militated against working-class, rather than landed, interests, out of sheer counter-revolutionary opportunism. Indeed, Sidmouth, when moving the repeal of wage-arbitration in 1813, scarcely thought the matter worthy of argument:

If such men as the croppers’ and framework-knitters’ delegates met with rebuffs from the Ministers, they received no comfort from Radicals like Hume, or even Burdett. They were opposed at one side by the values of order, at the other side by the values of economic freedom. In between a mass of confused M.P.s, some of whom felt, perhaps, an obscure sense of guilt at the injustice being done, took the easiest way out: ‘they ran out of the House when our business came on like wild fire’.

Byron, in his famous speech in the Lords opposing the Bill to make frame-breaking a capital felony, was not indulging in hyperbole: ‘When a proposal is made to emancipate or relieve, you hesitate, you deliberate for years, you temporize and tamper with the minds of men; but a death-bill must be passed off hand, without a thought of the consequences.’ The workers felt that the bonds, however ideal, which bound them to the rest of the community in reciprocal obligations and duties, were being snapped one after another. They were being thrust beyond the pale of the constitution. The grievance was felt most bitterly by those who, like the weavers and stockingers felt that their status as artisans was being undermined. In 1811 the Plain Silk Hands of Derby appealed to the master-hosiers:

‘When we consider,’ declared a committee of the Lancashire weavers in 1811, ‘that the Legislature has already interfered in matters of less moment – has enacted laws for regulating the price of corn, for fixing the assize of bread,… for augmenting the salaries of Judges and Clergymen… this Committee are utterly at a loss to conceive on what fair ground Legislative interference can be improper under circumstances so necessitous’:

In the first place, then, we must see Luddism in this context. The journeymen and artisans felt themselves to be robbed of constitutional rights, and this was a deeply felt conviction. Ned Ludd was the ‘Redresser’ or ‘Grand Executioner’, defending (‘by unanimous vote of the Trade’) rights too deeply established ‘by Custom and Law’ for them to be set aside by a few masters or even by Parliament:

But, in the second place, we should not over-state the isolation into which the stockingers or croppers had been forced. Throughout the Luddite ‘outrages’, the machine-breakers had the backing of public opinion in the Midlands and the West Riding. The large employers, and the factory system generally, stirred up profound hostility among thousands of small masters. In 1795 the small master-clothiers of the West Riding were actively canvassing support for a Bill ‘for restoring and preserving entire the late system of carrying on the Cloth manufacturing…’

The gap in status between a ‘servant’, a hired wage-labourer subject to the orders and discipline of the master, and an artisan, who might ‘come and go’ as he pleased, was wide enough for men to shed blood rather than allow themselves to be pushed from one side to the other. And, in the value-system of the community, those who resisted degradation were in the right. In 1797 the first steam-mill was built in Bradford to the accompaniment of menacing and hooting crowds. The ‘little makers’ of the West Riding saw in the many-chimneyed progeny of Arkwright, across the Pennines, the death-warrant of their own domestic industry. The small masters who supported the ‘Institution’ or ‘Clothier’s Community’, between 1802 and 1806, had at their backs a general theory of moral economy.

It is easy to forget how evil a reputation the new cotton-mills had acquired. They were centres of exploitation, monstrous prisons in which children were confined, centres of immorality and of industrial conflict;² above all, they reduced the industrious artisan to ‘a dependant State.’ A way of life was at stake for the community, and, hence, we must see the croppers’ opposition to particular machines as being very much more than a particular group of skilled workers defending their own livelihood. These machines symbolized the encroachment of the factory system. So strongly were the moral presuppositions of some clothiers engaged, that we know of cases where they deliberately suppressed labour-saving inventions, while Richard Oastler’s father, in 1800, sold up a prospering business rather than employ machinery which he regarded as ‘a means of oppression on the part of the rich and of corresponding degradation and misery to the poor’.¹ It was this feeling, among clothiers, master cloth-dressers, artisans and labourers of all descriptions, and even some professional men, which gave a sanction to the Luddites and afforded them protection. General Grey, commanding the troops in the West Riding in 1812, commented with dismay upon:

These feelings existed also in the Midlands, where no important improvements in machinery were at issue. The master-stockingers, tradesmen, artisans, and even some of the hosiers were wholly on the framework-knitters’ side, most certainly during their appeal to Parliament in 1812. The Bill making frame-breaking a capital offence was deprecated even by those hosiers whose interests it was supposed to defend. And, in this light, the conventional picture of the Luddism of these years as a blind opposition to machinery as such becomes less and less tenable. What was at issue was the ‘freedom’ of the capitalist to destroy the customs of the trade, whether by new machinery, by the factory-system, or by unrestricted competition, beating-down wages, undercutting his rivals, and undermining standards of craftsmanship. We are so accustomed to the notion that it was both inevitable and ‘progressive’ that trade should have been freed in the early nineteenth century from ‘restrictive practices’, that it requires an effort of imagination to understand that the ‘free’ factory-owner or large hosier or cotton-manufacturer, who built his fortune by these means, was regarded not only with jealousy but as a man engaging in immoral and illegal practices. The tradition of the just price and the fair wage lived longer among ‘the lower orders’ than is sometimes supposed. They saw laissez faire, not as freedom, but as ‘foul Imposition’. They could see no natural law by which one man, or a few men, could engage in practices which brought manifest injury to their fellows.

From this aspect, then, Luddism can be seen as a violent eruption of feeling against unrestrained industrial capitalism, harking back to an obsolescent paternalist code, and sanctioned by traditions of the working community. But at this point the term ‘reactionary’ comes too easily to some lips. For despite all the homilies addressed to the Luddites (then and subsequently) as to the beneficial consequences of new machinery or of ‘free’ enterprise, – arguments which, in any case, the Luddites were intelligent enough to weigh in their minds for themselves – the machine-breakers, and not the tract-writers, made the most realistic assessment of the short-term effects. The croppers provide the clearest example of a skill that was simply extinguished:

Their labour was replaced by that of unskilled men and juveniles. According to an account in 1841:

This was a sad end to an honourable craft. The later history of the stockingers and cotton-weavers provides scarcely more evidence for the ‘progressive’ view of the advantages of the breakdown of custom and of ‘restrictive practices’. We have already examined in sufficient detail the destruction of the weaver’s livelihood. If there is any episode of the Industrial Revolution more harrowing than that of the hand-loom weaver, it is that of the stockinger. By 1819, according to Felkin, very many of them had been reduced to 4s. to 7s. a week for sixteen to eighteen hours daily labour; only emigration to the Cape of Good Hope afforded a means of escape. There was some recovery in the early 1820s, with the introduction of machine-lace (the twist-net or bobbin-net ‘fever’), which brought a new influx into the trade, followed by continuing deterioration. ‘We’ve a bit of a spurt now and then,’ one of them told Thomas Cooper in 1840: ‘But we soon go back again to starvation.’ (4s. 6d. was then quoted as an ‘average’ wage when in employment.) Between the frame-rent, on one side, and a multiplicity of forms of petty exploitation – wage-cutting, ‘docking’ or fining, truck – on the other, ‘the poor framework-knitter was worn down, till you might have known him by his peculiar air of misery and dejection, if you had met him a hundred miles from Leicester’. And this had been effected by ‘free competition’ alone, without the introduction of any machinery involving steam or water-power.¹

Even if we make allowances for the cheapening of the product, it is impossible to designate as ‘progressive’, in any meaningful sense, processes which brought about the degradation, for twenty or thirty years ahead, of the workers employed in the industry. And, viewed from this aspect, we may see Luddism as a moment of transitional conflict. On the one hand, it looked backward to old customs and paternalist legislation which could never be revived; on the other hand, it tried to revive ancient rights in order to establish new precedents. At different times their demands included a legal minimum wage; the control of the ‘sweating’ of women or juveniles; arbitration; the engagement by the masters to find work for skilled men made redundant by machinery; the prohibition of shoddy work; the right to open trade union combination. All these demands looked forwards, as much as backwards; and they contained within them a shadowy image, not so much of a paternalist, but of a democratic community, in which industrial growth should be regulated according to ethical priorities and the pursuit of profit be subordinated to human needs.

Thus we must see the years 1811–13 as a watershed, whose streams run in one direction back to Tudor times, in another forward to the factory legislation of the next hundred years. The Luddites were some of the last guildsmen, and at the same time some of the first to launch the agitations which lead on to the 10 Hour Movement. In both directions lay an alternative political economy and morality to that of laissez faire. During the critical decades of the Industrial Revolution, working people suffered total exposure to one of the most humanly degrading dogmas in history – that of irresponsible and unlicensed competition – and generations of outworkers died under this exposure. It was Marx who saw, in the passage of the 10 Hour Bill (1847), evidence that for ‘the first time… in broad daylight the political economy of the middle class succumbed to the political economy of the working class’.¹ The men who attacked Cartwright’s mill at Rawfolds were announcing this alternative political economy, albeit in a confused midnight encounter.

V. THE SHERWOOD LADS

Luddism lingers in the popular mind as an uncouth, spontaneous affair of illiterate handworkers, blindly resisting machinery. But machine-breaking has a far longer history. The destruction of materials, looms, threshing-machines, the flooding of pits or damage to pit-head gear, or the robbing or firing of houses or property of unpopular employers – these, and other forms of violent direct action, were employed in the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, while ‘rattening’ was still endemic in parts of the Sheffield cutlery industry in the 1860s. Such methods were sometimes aimed at machinery held to be obnoxious as such. More often they were a means of enforcing customary conditions, intimidating blacklegs, ‘illegal’ men, or masters, or were (often effective) ancillary means to strike or other ‘trade union’ action.²

Although related to this tradition, the Luddite movement must be distinguished from it, first, by its high degree of organization, second, by the political context within which it flourished. These differences may be summed up in a single characteristic: while finding its origin in particular industrial grievances, Luddism was a quasi-insurrectionary movement, which continually trembled on the edge of ulterior revolutionary objectives. This is not to say that it was a wholly conscious revolutionary movement; on the other hand, it had a tendency towards becoming such a movement, and it is this tendency which is most often understated.

The Luddism of Lancashire revealed the highest political content, as well as the greatest spontaneity and confusion. The Luddism of Nottinghamshire was the most highly organized and disciplined, and the most strictly confined to industrial objectives. The Luddism of Yorkshire moved from industrial to ulterior objectives. Before analysing these differences, we must present a brief narrative.

The main disturbances commenced in Nottingham, in March 1811. A large demonstration of stockingers, ‘clamouring for work and a more liberal price’ was dispersed by the military. That night sixty stocking-frames were broken at the large village of Arnold by rioters who took no precautions to disguise themselves and who were cheered on by the crowd. For several weeks disturbances continued, mainly at night, throughout the hosiery villages of north-west Nottinghamshire. Although special constables and troops patrolled the villages, no arrests could be made.

Although frame-breaking had extended more widely than at any time for perhaps thirty years, this first outbreak of March and April created no sensation. Riots of one kind or another were endemic in the manufacturing districts, and aroused little comment. But early in November 1811, Luddism appeared in a much more disciplined form. Frame-breaking was no longer the work of ‘rioters’ but of smaller, disciplined bands, who moved rapidly from village to village at night. From Nottinghamshire it spread to parts of Leicestershire and Derbyshire, and continued without intermission until February 1812. On 10 November there was a serious conflict at Bulwell, where a hosier named Hollingsworth defended his premises. Shots were exchanged, and one of the Luddites (a stockinger from Arnold named John Westley) was killed; but after retreating with his body the Luddites returned, beat down the doors and broke up the frames. Three days later a very large force of Luddites, armed with muskets, pistols, axes and hammers, destroyed seventy frames at a large hosier’s workshop in Sutton-in-Ashfield. Night after night, for more than three months, the attacks continued, sometimes in two or three widely separated villages on the same night.

By the end of December the Nottingham correspondent of the Leeds Mercury declared: ‘the Insurrectional state to which this country has been reduced for the last month has no parallel in history, since the troubled days of Charles the First’. No degree of activity by the magistrates or by large reinforcements of military deterred the Luddites. Every attack revealed planning and method:

They broke only the frames of such as have reduced the price of the men’s wages; those who have not lowered the price, have their frames untouched; in one house, last night, they broke four frames out of six; the other two which belonged to masters who had not lowered their wages, they did not meddle with.

The Luddites were masked or disguised; had sentinels and couriers; ‘they communicated with each other by means of a watchword, and the firing of a pistol, or gun, is generally the signal of danger, or of a retreat’:

The rioters appear suddenly, in armed parties, under regular commanders; the chief of whom, be he whomsoever he may, is styled General Ludd, and his orders are as implicitly obeyed as if he had received his authority from the hands of a Monarch.

It was generally believed that the Luddites acted under a solemn oath, and that disobedience to the General’s orders was punished with death.¹

At the same time, raids for arms and the general collection of money for Luddite funds became more general. A letter from Ashover described the authority with which the Luddites acted:

Two men came to this place who called themselves inspectors from the committee; they went to every stockinger’s house and discharged them from working under such prices as they gave them a list of…. They summoned all the stockingers, about 12 or 14 in number of master men to a public house with as much consequence as if they had had a mandate from the Prince Regent. When they got them hither, all I can learn at present, was for the purpose of collecting money from them for the support of those families who were deprived of getting their bread by having their frames broken. Where they found a frame worked by a person who had not served a regular apprenticeship, or by a woman, they discharged them from working, and if they promised to do so, they stuck a paper upon the frame with these words written upon it – ‘Let this frame stand, the colts removed’.²

At the village of Pentridge (to become notorious in another context five years later) ‘after passing through the village, and examining the frames, and their holders, as to the work they made and the prices they received, they retired without doing any mischief…’ From motives of sympathy or in self-defence, those hosiers who were conforming to the conditions demanded by the stockingers affixed printed bills to their frames: ‘THIS FRAME IS MAKING FULL FASHIONED WORK, AT THE FULL PRICE.’¹

The extraordinary success of the Luddites gave to them a high morale:

Now by force unsubdued, and by threats undismay’d
Death itself can’t his ardour repress
The presence of Armies can’t make him afraid
Nor impede his career of success
Whilst the news of his conquests is spread far and near
How his Enemies take the alarm
His courage, his fortitude, strikes them with fear
For they dread his Omnipotent Arm….

And when in the work of destruction employed
He himself to no method confines,
By fire and by water he gets them destroyed
For the Elements aid his designs.
Whether guarded by Soldiers along the Highway
Or closely secured in the room,
He shivers them up both by night and by day,
And nothing can soften their doom.2

Not only did they openly offer a ‘reward’ to anyone giving information as to persons who disclosed their secrets, they also issued threats against pseudo-Luddites who collected funds or robbed isolated farms under pretences. The ‘General’s’ discipline is well illustrated by a letter to an ‘Unknown Stranger’, which accompanied some articles which had been stolen during an attack at Clifton (Notts.), with the request that the articles should be ‘Restored to their respective owners’:

… it is with extream Regrat that I inform you hau thay Came into my hans when I came out with my men their weir sum joind us that I Never had ad with me before and it wear these Villinds that plundred but ass we wear going out of Clifton one of my Men came and told me that he Believd that those Men ad got some thinck that they had no Buisiness with I theirfore gave horders that thay should be searchd…

The letter ended more grimly:

… we were gust agoen to have hang’d one of the Villends when we weir informed that Solders weir at hand we thot it Right to Retreat. N.B. The Men that had the things weir entire strangers to my horders or they Never dworst not have tuch’d one thinck, but they have been punished for their vileny for one of them have been hang’d for 3 Menet and then Let down agane I ham a friend to the pore and Distrest and a enemy to the oppressors thron.

GENERAL LUDD ¹

In the first week of February 1812, this – the major phase of Midlands Luddism – died away. There were three reasons. First, the Luddites were partially successful – the majority of hosiers had agreed to pay better prices, and wages had generally risen by as much as 2s. a week. Second, there were now several thousand troops in the area, supplemented by special constables and local watch parties. Third, the Bill to make frame-breaking a capital offence was now before Parliament, and (as we have seen) Luddism gave way suddenly to constitutional agitation – so suddenly that it is impossible not to believe that the new Committee was not at least partly under former Luddite direction.² But just at the moment that Nottingham Luddism became inactive, Luddism in Lancashire and Yorkshire was triggered off by its example.

In Yorkshire the reports from Nottingham had been eagerly followed by the croppers, and according to tradition the accounts in the Leeds Mercury had been read aloud in the workshops. The first intimation of active Luddism came in mid-January, when a party of men with blackened faces was surprised on Leeds Bridge. Thereafter Luddism appeared, already full-grown, modelled upon the Nottingham discipline and tactics, but accompanied by a greater number of emphatic threatening letters which may, or may not, have stemmed from a central source. In January one of the only Leeds gig-mills was set on fire; by February, nightly attacks were being made in the Huddersfield and Spen Valley districts, where the greatest number of gig-mills and shearing-frames were to be found. After one successful attack,

As soon as the work of destruction was completed, the Leader drew up his men, called over the roll, each man answering to a particular number instead of his name; they then fired off their pistols… gave a shout, and marched off in regular military order.

Nothing was destroyed apart from the obnoxious machinery:

… one of the party having asked the Leader what they should do with one of the Proprietors, he replied not hurt a hair of his head; but that should they be under the necessity of visiting him again, they could not show him any mercy.¹

There seem to have been different Luddite ‘commands’ in the West Riding, centred on Leeds, Halifax, Huddersfield and the small clothing villages of the Spen Valley, whose delegates (from Cleckheaton, Heckmondwike, Gomersal, Birstall, Mir-field, Brighouse, Elland and ‘more distant places’) are supposed to have met together in February, and to have sent delegates to a further meeting a week or two later at Halifax.² A leaflet was distributed in Leeds, in very much more insurrectionary terms than anything attributed to the Nottingham Luddites:

To all Croppers, Weavers &c. & Public at large.

Generous Countrymen,

You are requested to come forward with Arms and help the Redressers to redress their Wrongs and shake off the hateful Yoke of a Silly Old Man, and his Son more silly and their Rogueish Ministers, all Nobles and Tyrants must be brought down. Come let us follow the Noble Example of the brave Citizens of Paris who in Sight of 30,000 Tyrant Redcoats brought A Tyrant to the Ground. by so doing you will be best aiming at your own Interest. Above 40,000 Heroes are ready to break out, to crush the old Government & establish a new one.

Apply to General Ludd Commander of the Army of Redressers.¹

A Mr Smith, a Huddersfield manufacturer, received a letter even more chilling:

Information has just been given in that you are a holder of those detestable Shearing Frames, and I was desired by my Men to write to you and give you fair Warning to pull them down…. You will take Notice that if they are not taken down by the end of next week, I will detach one of my Lieutenants with at least 300 Men to destroy them and furthermore take Notice that if you give us the Trouble of coming so far we will increase your misfortune by burning your Buildings down to Ashes and if you have Impudence to fire upon any of my Men, they have orders to murder you, & burn all your Housing, you will have the Goodness to your Neighbours to inform them that the same fate awaits them if their Frames are not speedily taken down…

Mr Smith and his ‘Brethren in Sin’ were then informed that ‘there were 2,782 Sworn Heroes bound in a Bond of Necessity’ in the Army of Huddersfield alone, nearly double sworn Men in Leeds’:

By the latest letters from our Correspondents we learn that the Manufacturers in the following Places are going to rise and join us in redressing their Wrongs Viz. Manchester, Wakefield, Halifax, Bradford, Sheffield, Oldham, Rochdale and all the Cotton Country where the brave Mr Hanson will lead them on to Victory, the Weavers in Glasgow and many parts of Scotland will join us the Papists in Ireland are rising to a Man, so that they are likely to find the Soldiers something else to do than Idle in Huddersfield and then Woe be to the places now guarded by them…²

Ten days later (20 March 1812) the most active magistrate in the Huddersfield district was himself the recipient of a threatening letter, purporting to come from the ‘Solicitor to General Ludd’ at Sherwood Forest, Nottingham, and to carry the judgement of the ‘Ludds Court at Nottingham’.¹ The successes in Yorkshire, following upon those in the Midlands, the impotence of the military, and the hostility of public opinion, were too much for the smaller manufacturers – especially when they were recipients of such hair-raising mail. Many of them simply capitulated, destroying or storing their own shearing-frames. According to tradition, the Luddites drilled frequently at night: ‘musket men, ten abreast, stood first, then those armed with pistols… pikes and hatchets the third, and an unarmed gang were drawn up in the rear’.² But the pride of place, in popular legend, went to the hammermen, who wielded enormous iron sledges called ‘Enochs’, to break open doors and smash the frames. These frames (as well as hammers) were made by Enoch Taylor, of Marsden, a blacksmith turned machine-maker, and the Luddite cry was: ‘Enoch made them, Enoch shall break them.’ The assaults were celebrated in the cropper’s song, to be rendered in ‘true ballad patterer’s style’:

And night by night when all is still,
And the moon is hid behind the hill,
We forward march to do our will
With hatchet, pike and gun!
Oh, the cropper lads for me,
Who with lusty stroke
The shear frames broke,
The cropper lads for me!

Great Enoch still shall lead the van

Stop him who dare! stop him who can!

Press forward every gallant man

With hatchet, pike, and gun!

Oh, the cropper lads for me…³

The major phase of Yorkshire Luddism came to a crisis in mid-April, after only six or seven weeks effective existence. As the number of small manufacturers still using the offensive machines diminished, so it became evident that the Luddites must either rest on these successes or attempt the destruction of the few substantial mills still holding out. They chose the second course. In the last week of March two mills near Leeds were successfully attacked; on 9 April Joseph Foster’s ‘extensive’ cloth manufactory at Horbury, near Wakefield, was sacked and fired, after an attack by a contingent of up to 300 Luddites, probably assembled from several commands.¹ It was now generally expected that an attack would be made on one of two substantial establishments, whose owners had made themselves notorious for their determination to defy the Luddites. William Horsfall, of Ottiwells near Huddersfield, was choleric and impatient to meet an attack; his men were armed, and he had a cannon mounted in his mill, with embrasures to cover the line of attack; he had boasted that he wished to ‘ride up to his saddle-girths’ in Luddite blood, and his hatred was so obsessional that even the children taunted him in the streets with shouts of ‘I’m General Ludd!’ William Cartwright, of Rawfolds in the Spen Valley, was quieter but no less determined; he had soldiers and armed workmen in his premises (where he himself slept) every night, sentinels, and (should his outer defences be broken) barricades of spiked rollers on his stairs and a tub of oil of vitriol at the top. According to tradition, the Luddites drew lots to decide which mill should be their first objective. The choice fell on Rawfolds.

The attack upon Rawfolds has become legendary. Perhaps 150 Luddites took part (it was said that more had been expected, and that the Leeds or Halifax contingents failed to arrive in time). Led by George Mellor, a young cropper from a small finishing shop at Longroyd Bridge near Huddersfield, the Luddites exchanged a brisk fire with the embattled defenders for twenty minutes. Under cover of this fire, a small party of hammermen and men with hatchets made repeated attempts to break down the heavy doors of the mill. This party suffered serious casualties, at least five being wounded, two of whom – mortally wounded – were left behind when the Luddites suddenly retreated. It is said that their commander, Mellor, was the last to be left on the field, and that he could not help the wounded men since he was helping to carry another (his own cousin) to safety. The ground around the mill was littered with muskets, axes, pikes and metal implements.

A thousand details of this attack and of its aftermath entered into the folklore both of the masters and of the populace. And at this point we should pause to enquire why, as well as looking further at the resources of the authorities, the political context of April and May 1812, and at contemporaneous events in Lancashire.

One part of the background is faithfully given to us in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley. The mill-owner, Gérard Moore (modelled on Cartwright), is rightly shown as belonging to the half-Whig, half-Radical, middle class, whose organ was the Leeds Mercury – indifferent or hostile to the war, eager to have all restrictions upon trade removed, bitterly critical of Minsterial policies and especially of the Orders in Council. The military parson, Helstone (closely modelled on the Reverend Hammond Roberson), is a rabid ‘Church-and-King’ Tory, regarding the Leeds Mercury as mischievous and the mill-owners as disaffected and as the authors of their own discomforts. All this is authentic. Charlotte Brontë’s Jacobin-Whig squire, Mr Yorke, divided between his class allegiance and his sympathy for popular grievances, may also have an original in more than one J.P. who remained strangely inactive during the Luddite outbreaks.

Shirley’s limitations, of course, are in the treatment of the Luddites and their sympathisers. But the novel remains a true expression of the middle-class myth. During 1812 traditional class antagonisms were thrown into the crucible of Luddism; mill-owner and squire entered the year in bitter hostility to each other; as the Luddites succeeded in intimidating one manufacturer after another, the contempt of the Robersons grew. Then Cartwright, by his defiant action at Rawfolds, earned the admiration and gratitude of the military officers and the Tory squirearchy. In the north, for a few weeks, he was a hero to be named alongside Wellington. The gunfire at Rawfolds signalled a profound emotional reconciliation between the large mill-owners and the authorities. Economic interest had triumphed, and the ultimate loyalty of the manufacturers when faced with working-class Jacobinism was displayed in one dramatic incident.

But what brought emotional reconciliation to the propertied classes brought profounder antagonism between them and the working classes. The folk-traditions of the Rawfolds attack emphasized the heroism of the Luddites and the callousness of the defenders. Folklore thrives on incident, on the particular hazards and interplay of character. After the retreat, Cartwright was alleged to have refused water or aid to the two mortally wounded men, unless they divulged Luddite secrets. Hammond Roberson is supposed to have behaved to them more like an inquisitor than a clergyman. Hundreds thronged the street outside the inn where the men lay dying. Stains of aqua fortis (perhaps used for cauterization) were found on their bedding, and it was believed that they had been tortured to give information. Roberson is supposed to have hung over the bedside of one of them, John Booth, the nineteen-year-old son of an Anglican clergyman, waiting for a dying confession. At the moment of death, young Booth signalled to Roberson ‘Can you keep a secret?’ ‘Yes, yes,’ replied the eager Roberson, ‘I can.’ ‘So can I,’ replied Booth, and shortly after he died.

A letter intercepted by the authorities, from a Nottingham working man, living in Yorkshire (and perhaps a Luddite refugee) to his family at home, gives us the immediate reaction:

There as an engagment been betwixt the Luds & the Army which the Luds was defeated which was oing to Halifax Luds not coming up as they was apointed there was 16 men stormed the Plaice which they had two killed there wounded men was carried of and none of them as been taken since which the two men was buried on Thursday last at Othersfield [Huddersfield] which the Corps was put in a Dark room with six mold Candles which the friends of the Luds followed them every man in Morning with a silk apron edged with Black which the Ministers refused to Burie them but the Luds insisted on them being Buried in the Church which are too have a grand Stone he lived fore and twenty hours after he was taken he was the con of a Church parson which many visited him but He refused to in vulge anything.¹

In the days following the attack there was no lack of incident to excite popular imagination: there were many stories of narrow escapes from the military, of wounded men hidden in barns. More than one of the small party of soldiers at Cartwright’s mill had shown a marked lack of enthusiasm for duty, and one of them refused to fire his musket during the entire twenty minutes of the affair, ‘because I might hit some of my brothers’. The unfortunate soldier (from the Cumberland Militia) was court martialled and sentenced to receive 300 lashes – a probable death sentence. The punishment was administered at Rawfolds, and Cartwright was able to regain a portion of public favour by securing the remission of the greater part of the sentence.

He regained little. In the middle-class myth, Cartwright and Roberson were not only the heroes of the day, but the relentless pursuers of ‘evil designing men’, mysterious emissaries and agitators from remote parts, who were the instigators of disorders. ‘The leaders he did not know,’ Charlotte Brontë wrote of Gérard Moore:

They were strangers: emissaries from the large towns. Most of these were not members of the operative class: they were chiefly ‘downdraughts,’ bankrupts, men always in debt and often in drink – men who had nothing to lose, and much – in the way of character, cash, and cleanliness – to gain. These persons Moore hunted like any sleuthhound; and well he liked the occupation… he liked it better than making cloth.

In popular folklore, however, Cartwright and Roberson were simply the ‘bloodhounds’. The community closed against them in an extraordinary way. Until the attack on Rawfolds, the Yorkshire Luddites (like those in the Midlands) had confined themselves strictly to frame-breaking. Not they, but Cartwright, had let the first blood. For months, despite the presence of 4,000 troops in the West Riding and the widespread employment of spies, not one of the Rawfolds attackers was clearly identified. Thousands must have known one or another of the participants. Traditions speak of Dissenting Ministers and surgeons who refused to pass on information, small clothiers who sheltered their own Luddite workmen, soldiers who ignored evidence. In whole parishes the ‘Watch and Ward’ Act was inoperative. Luddite ballads went the rounds:

You Heroes of England who wish to have a trade

Be true to each other and be not afraid

Tho’ Bayonet is fixed they can do no good

As long as we keep up the Rules of General Ludd.¹

Even the assassination (27 April) of William Horsfall of Otti-well occasioned less revulsion of feeling than might have been expected. The same crisis which had brought the ‘Church-and-King’ men and the Leeds Mercury, Roberson and Cartwright, together, had also cemented popular feeling against the magistrates and the large employers alike.²

Moreover, in April and May 1812, Luddism was the focus for a more diffused (and confused) insurrectionary tension. A part of this arose from the general economic crisis of 1811–12, the growing unpopularity of the war, and the agitation against the Orders in Council. The mutual blockades of Britain and France, and the severance of American trade, had given rise to extreme difficulties in many sections of manufacturing industry – in Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool, the textile districts – between 1807 and 1812. Poor harvests added their toll of food shortage and soaring prices. Manufacturers attributed all grievances to the continuation of the war, and specifically to the Orders in Council which placed much of Europe in a state of blockade. It is significant that Luddism broke out in those industries where the large employers had alienated public support by taking advantage of this period of economic extremity to introduce new practices or machines; whereas in those centres – Sheffield, Birmingham and to some extent Manchester – where the whole industry was partially paralysed, and the employers themselves had initiated demonstrations and petitions against the Orders in Council (under the leadership of Brougham and, in Birmingham, young Thomas Attwood) working-class discontent remained largely within ‘constitutional’ forms.¹

In fact, by 1812, the old squirearchy was scarcely able to control the manufacturing districts, unless it had the support of the large employers. But, paradoxically, where the employers were hostile to the administration, the problems of order were less. Luddism illustrates this whole problem of order. In the summer of 1812 there were no fewer than 12,000 troops in the disturbed counties, a greater force than Wellington had under his command in the Peninsula. For months at a time these considerable forces were singularly ineffective. This may partly have been due to the fact that many of the common soldiers sympathized with the population, so that the authorities were under the necessity of continually moving them from one district to another for fear of ‘disaffection’ spreading in their ranks. It was also due to the superb security and communications of the Luddites, who moved silently through well-known terrain while the cavalry trotted noisily from village to village. In the West Riding, whose hills were crossed and re-crossed with bridle-paths and old pack-horse tracks, the Luddites moved with immunity. The movements of the cavalry were ‘well-known, and the clash of their swords, the tramp of their horses’ feet were to be heard at a long distance at night, it was easy for the Luddites to steal away behind hedges, crouch in plantations, or take by-roads…’² The objectives of the Luddites were in a multitude of dispersed villages and scattered mills. These villages were virtually unpoliced, and the military were reluctant to billet soldiers in fives and sixes in dangerous isolation. The mounted magistrate, who understood little of the industry and of the people, was almost helpless. Only the mill-owner or manufacturer, whose premises and wage-book commanded the village, was able to exert control. Hence, where the employers had lost the allegiance of their workers, the entire structure of order was endangered, and could only be repaired by supplementing their authority as at Rawfolds, where not Roberson but Cartwright was in command. But in those districts, like Sheffield and Birmingham, where the manufacturers and workers were still bound to each other by a common sense of grievance against authority, the danger of actual disorder was kept under the masters’ control.

Thus Luddism not only brought magistrate and mill-owner together, it also made inevitable concessions by the administration to the manufacturing interest. And these concessions were received with triumph, with the repeal of the Orders in Council in June 1812.¹ Luddism perhaps hastened this event as much as the constitutional agitation of Attwood and Brougham. But repeal took place against an even more threatening background, for by this time serious disorders in Lancashire had been added to the Luddism of Yorkshire and the Midlands.

It is difficult to know how far the unrest in Lancashire may be described as authentic Luddism. It was made up in part of spontaneous rioting, in part of illegal but ‘constitutional’ agitation for political reform, in part of incidents fabricated by provocateurs, and in part of genuine insurrectionary preparations. Between February and April 1812 ‘secret committees’ of at least two kinds were in being in a number of Lancashire towns. First, there were the committees of the weavers, whose undercover organization had been for several years agitating and petitioning for a minimum wage. Such committees were reported to be in being early in April in Manchester, Stockport, Bolton, Failsworth, Saddleworth, Ashton-under-Lyne, Oldham, Stalybridge, Droylesden, Preston, Lancaster, Hendle, Newton, Drilsdale, Hollinwood, Willington and Eccles.² Second, in the Manchester-Stockport district and perhaps elsewhere, there was an incipient secret trades council (or ‘Committee of Trades’) comprising ‘the Spinners, Taylors, Shoemakers, Bricklayers, Fustian-Cutters, Joiners and many other Trades’. Such a committee was already in existence in 1799, when the Combination Act was first passed, and no doubt in Manchester the trade unionists consulted formally or informally whenever occasion arose.

On 20 March the warehouse of William Ratcliffe, one of the first manufacturers to use the power-loom, was attacked at Stockport. In April events followed fast upon each other. On 8 April there was a somewhat exuberant riot at the Manchester Exchange. The occasion was, at least indirectly, political. For years it had been supposed that the Prince Regent was a supporter of the Whigs and even of political reform; and he had, for his own factional purposes, encouraged the Foxite opposition in the early years of the war. The expectation had grown that when the restrictions upon his powers came to an end, early in 1812, a ‘Peace and Reform’ Ministry might be formed, in which Lords Grey and Grenville would take a leading part. However, the Prince Regent had done no more than offer ‘some of those persons with whom the early habits of my public life were formed’ places in a Coalition, upon terms which he knew beforehand were unacceptable. In the ensuing reshuffle, an even more unpopular administration took office under Perceval, with Castlereagh as Foreign Secretary and Sidmouth (for the first time) as Home Secretary. Popular hopes were dashed more widely than is supposed. There is even a suggestion that this disappointment was the direct occasion for the commencement of Yorkshire Luddism.¹ In Manchester the Church-and-King party seriously misjudged public feeling, and called a public meeting at the Exchange to send a congratulatory address to the Regent for keeping his father’s Ministers in office. Reformers placarded Manchester with an appeal to the public to attend the meeting and defeat the address. The Tories backed down, and attempted to cancel the meeting. But great crowds thronged around the Exchange and many of them, mainly weavers, then went to St Anne’s Square, where they held their own meeting. Meanwhile, some youngsters broke into the news-room; windows were broken and furniture overturned, and finally a general riot ensued. It was not an important event, but ‘indicated a turn in the current of popular opinion. Previously to that time “Church-and-King” was the favourite cry, and hunting “Jacobins” safe sport…’ One old reformer later recalled: ‘But we had no Church-and-King mobs after that!’¹

In the next fortnight there were much more serious riots, in Manchester, Oldham, Ashton, Rochdale, Stockport and Macclesfield. In the main these were food riots, of exceptional violence and extent, with the aim of forcing down the prices of potatoes and bread. At the same time, there were confused reports as to the active instigation and organization of the rioters by ‘Luddites’ or ‘Jacobin’ agitators. At Stockport two men in women’s clothes, calling themselves ‘General Ludd’s wives’, headed the insurgents. Threatening letters were received, not only by the owners of steam looms, but also by the owners of improved cloth-dressing machinery:

In justice to humanity We think it our Bounin Duty to give you this Notice that is if you do Not Cause those Dressing Machines to be Remov’d Within the Bounds of Seven Days… your factory and all that it Contains Will and Shall Surely Be Set on fire… it is Not our Desire to Do you the Least Injury But We are fully Determin’d to Destroy Both Dressing Machines and Steam Looms Let Who Will be the Owners…²

(This letter, however, was signed not by Ludd but by ‘General Justice’.) On 20 April a major affray took place at Middleton, where Daniel Burton’s power-loom mill was attacked by several thousands. The mill was assailed with volley upon volley of stones, and its defenders replied with musket-fire, killing three and wounding some more. On the next morning the threatening crowds assembled in ever greater strength, and were joined at mid-day by –

a body of men, consisting of from one to two hundred, some of them armed with muskets with fixed bayonets, and others with colliers’ picks, [who] marched into the village in procession, and joined the rioters. At the head of this armed banditti a Man of Straw was carried, representing the renowned General Ludd whose standard-bearer waved a sort of red flag…¹

The mill proving impregnable, the rioters burned the mill-owner’s house. They were then met by the military, at whose hands at least seven were killed and many more wounded.

This was the climax of Lancashire Luddism, so far as direct attacks on machinery are concerned. It was evidently very much more than a movement of weavers – among the dead were a baker, two weavers, a glazier, and a joiner, while colliers from Holmfield were prominent in the second day’s attack. It was also, in terms of casualties, the most serious Luddite affray in the entire country. On 24 April, however, there was a somewhat mysterious sequel – the burning of Wray and Duncroff’s mill at Westhoughton. The mystery in this case is not that the mill was attacked – it was an obvious target for destruction. Not only was it the subject of repeated threats, but more than one attempt had been made to attack it, at the instigation of a ‘secret committee’ in Bolton which was largely directed by agents provocateurs employed directly by Colonel Fletcher. The puzzling feature is that, after these provocations had come to very little, a successful attack was then made, independently (as it seems) of the agency of spies.²

This episode of Luddism is so full of duplicity that the mind can scarcely follow its tortuous involutions. But the assumption (derived from the Bolton events) that Lancashire Luddism was little more than a provocation superimposed by Colonel Fletcher and Joseph Nadin upon the hunger of the weavers, cannot be sustained. It is true that the overt acts of the Lancashire men show little of that organization and discipline which marked events in Nottingham and the West Riding. On the other hand, the destruction of power-looms raised problems of a different order from that of stocking– or shearing-frames. The power-loom was a costly machine, only recently introduced, employed only in a very few steam-powered mills, and not to be found scattered in small workshops over the countryside. Thus midnight guerrilla tactics were of little avail in Lancashire: each attack must be on the scale of the Rawfolds or Burton’s affair, with the probability of a direct encounter with the Army. This scarcely made sense, even in limited tactical terms. At the same time, the people of Lancashire had lived, for several decades, alongside the steam mill in spinning. There must have been very many (and probably a majority) of weavers who doubted the efficacy of resistance to the new machines as such; and this is confirmed by reports as to serious divergences within the weavers’ own ‘secret committees’. Hence Lancashire Luddism passed through its machine-breaking phase in a matter of three or four weeks. But it is exactly at the moment when attacks on mills came to an end that reports of oath-taking, arming, and drilling became most widespread. Attacks upon power-looms gave way, in May and June, to more serious insurrectionary preparations. Despite savage sentences upon the rioters of April at the Lancashire and Cheshire Assizes at the end of May 1812,¹ disturbances continued until the autumn. In mid-June one of the best-informed Lancashire informants wrote that ‘bodies of 100 and upwards of the Luddites have entered houses night after night and made seizures of arms’. The raids were accompanied by signals by gun, rocket, and ‘blue-lights’ which revealed (in the view of one officer) ‘a most extraordinary degree of concert and organization’. For weeks whole districts on the Lancashire-Yorkshire border were virtually under martial law. And one military command, in particular, established a reign of terror, with arbitrary arrests, searches, brutal questionings, and threats, for which we must turn to Irish history in search of a comparison.²

It was in the early summer that Luddism reached its crisis-point. In the week of the Middleton and Westhoughton affairs, there were also alarming signals from many parts of the country. Serious food riots took place in Bristol, Carlisle, Leeds, Sheffield, Barnsley; in Cornwall the miners struck and marched to the market towns demanding reductions in the price of food; there were disturbances at Plymouth and Falmouth. In several of these places, the food riots displayed more than usual premeditation as a political or civic action to enforce a popular maximum, and at Sheffield, where a militiaarms magazine was broken into, the two principal ring-leaders were alleged to be – not starving unemployed, who formed the bulk of the demonstrators – but ‘the two most ingenious mechanics in the town’, in receipt of wages of four and a half guineas per week.¹ On 27 April, in the West Riding, William Horsfall was assassinated. On 11 May the Prime Minister, Perceval, was assassinated in the House of Commons. For a day the country was in turmoil. Popular elation was undisguised. At Bolton (Colonel Fletcher complained) ‘the Mob expressed Joy’ at the news. In the Potteries a witness heard the news when –

A man came running down the street, leaping into the air, waving his hat round his head, and shouting with frantic joy, ‘Perceval is shot,, hurrah! Perceval is shot, hurrah!’

The crowd in Nottingham celebrated, and ‘paraded the town with drums beating and flags flying in triumph’. In London itself crowds gathered outside the House of Commons as the news seeped out, and as the assassin, John Bellingham, was taken away there were repeated shouts of applause from the ignorant or depraved part of the crowd’. The news that Bellingham was probably deranged, and had acted from motives of private grievance, was received almost with disappointment; it had been hoped that another, and more successful, Despard had arisen. When Bellingham went to the scaffold, people cried out ‘God bless him’, and Coleridge heard them add: ‘This is but the beginning.’ It was thought inopportune to give Perceval a public funeral.²

Sheer insurrectionary fury has rarely been more widespread in English history. For some weeks notices had been chalked on West Riding doors and walls, offering 100 guineas for the Prince Regent’s head.¹ In mid-May the Regent and his private secretary received scores of threatening letters, one of which signed ‘Vox Populi’, commenced: ‘Provisions Cheaper – Bread or Blood – Tell your Master he is a Damn’d Unfeeling Scoundrel…’² But so far as Yorkshiremen were concerned, the Prince Regent was far away, whereas the mill-owners and magistrates were close at hand. After the defeat at Rawfolds, West Riding Luddism entered a more desperate phase. It had always been more military in its discipline than Nottinghamshire Luddism, and very much more surrounded with secrecy and oaths, since it had come into being at the very moment that frame-breaking had been made a capital offence. The decision to assassinate Horsfall was probably taken by George Mellor himself, the commander of the local district, rather than by any Yorkshire delegate meeting. According to tradition, young Booth, the clergyman’s son, was his particular friend and protégé, and he was distracted by his death. Benjamin Walker, the accomplice who turned King’s evidence, declared that Mellor and his fellow croppers in John Wood’s shop at Longroyd Bridge ‘conversed about… the men killed at Cartwright’s’:

They said it was a hard matter. Mellor said the method of breaking up the shears must be given up, and instead of it the masters must be shot. That was the most I heard said; they said they had lost two men, and must kill the masters.

To rejoice at the death of a distant Prime Minister was one thing. The assassination, in cold blood from behind a wall, of a man who rode regularly past, and who – for all his unpopularity – ‘belonged’ in the community was another. It is much too strong a term to suggest that there was a violent revulsion of feeling. Hundreds must have suspected who the assassins were, and yet for months no disclosures were made. It is more true that there was a revulsion of feeling among those who had been passive sympathizers or on-lookers before, while at the same time there was a hardening of feeling at both extremes. ‘There is not an inhabitant in this Neighbourhood that I know of,’ the Rev. Hammond Roberson wrote to Cartwright three days after Horsfall’s death,

that is at all alive to the situation of the country, or rather perhaps that is able and that dares to take any decisive part in directing the operations of the Military besides myself. Were it possible for me to devote my whole time to the military I would do my best.¹

On their side, the Luddites began to lose members, and resorted to threats to restore their flagging discipline. The attacks on shearing-frames ended (although there were now few firms still defiant), and gave way to widespread raids for arms and money. These raids, like those in Lancashire, continued through May, June, July, August and September, although one or two groups of house-breakers masquerading as Luddites confused the picture. Accounts of these raids are comparable with a partisan operation in enemy-occupied territory. A magistrate described, in July 1812, one raid in the village of Clifton (Yorks), and commented upon:

… the precision, intrepidity, & dispatch with which an armed banditti regularly searched a populous village – a mile in length, for arms, and took away six or seven without attempting to touch any other property, firing repeatedly into houses & at individuals who attempted the least resistance, with a promptitude & apparent discipline that no regular troops could exceed…²

Yorkshire Luddism petered out amidst arrests, betrayals, threats, and disillusion. Once again, the story was handed down in folklore, as well as disclosed in the trials at York in January 1813. Spies, drafted in from other districts, made several discoveries. A group of Painites, including a hatter, John Baines, were arrested at Halifax on the charge of administering Luddite oaths. Then Benjamin Walker, a workmate and accomplice of Mellor’s, betrayed the secrets of Horsfall’s assassination. Other Luddites turned informer to save their own lives. Some of the men who took part in the Rawfolds affair were tracked down; there were other arrests at Barnsley and Holmfirth. In October Joseph Radcliffe, the magistrate most active in tracking the Luddites down, received a final threat: ‘I most assuredly will make myself another Bellingham and I have the pellit made that shall be sent in your Hart’s Blood if I should do it in the house of God.’¹ By November the net was closed. At the York Special Commission in January 1813, Mellor and two colleagues were found guilty of the assassination of Horsfall, and they were at once executed, while the other trials were still in progress. Fifteen others were capitally convicted, one only being commuted to transportation for life, for their part in the Rawfolds attack or in arms raids. Six others, including the old Halifax democrat, Baines, were sentenced to transportation for seven years for administering illegal oaths. Had their offence been committed at the end of July 1812, instead of at the beginning, it would have carried the death-penalty.

Meanwhile, Nottingham and the hosiery districts had been quiet throughout the spring and summer of 1812, in which the Framework-Knitters’ Committee had been attempting to secure the passage of their Bill in Parliament. Not one of the leaders of the movement of 1811–12 was ever, with any certainty, convicted. Despite the apparent peace of 1812–13, pressure upon the masters to comply with the stockingers’ terms was maintained by anonymous letters and threats of renewed action:

George Rowbottom this is to inform you [ran one such letter, of April 1812] that their is not a man in the town of Arnold Bullwell Hucknall nor Basford that takes work out unless it is full price full fashion and proper price and size and this is to give you Notice that if you bring or give any more work out without its is full fashion full price and proper size you shall work this frame² with a rope round your neck…

There was then a minor recrudescence of Luddism in November and December 1812, but for two years the hosiery workers appear to have placed their faith in the action of their union. Then a few scattered attacks resumed (in 1814), and it seems that some of the hosiery houses actually attempted to provoke frame-breaking in order to gain a pretext for acting against the union.¹ When the union had been broken up, and two of its officers arrested; attacks became more widespread. In September 1814 a Basford stockinger, James Towle, was arrested for his part in one of the attacks, but at the Spring Assizes (1815) he was acquitted. From the summer of 1816 until the first months of 1817 there was a last phase of Midlands Luddism, which reached an intensity not known since 1811. The most sensational attack was at the considerable factory of Heathcote and Boden, Loughborough, whose guards were overpowered by masked men with blunderbusses, and whose costly lace machines were destroyed to shouts of: ‘Ludds, do your duty well. It’s a Waterloo job, by God.’ More than £6,000 worth of damage was done in this one attack. James Towle was once again arrested; this time he was convicted, and, in mid-November, executed. For a month or two attacks continued. According to one account, Towle’s brother led a gang which was eager to show ‘Jem that they could do something without him’. According to other accounts, this final phase of Luddism was the work of one or two almost ‘professional’ gangs, who were called in and paid by lodges of the now-underground union. In a confession on the morning of his execution, Jem Towle declared that he had never taken any oath of secrecy, nor heard of any being made use of:

They have no particular fund of money, but when any job is intended, or money wanted for any purpose, it is collected among the stockingers or lace-hands who happen to be in work at the time…. They have no depot of arms. Many of the gang have a pistol or two concealed in their houses…. When any job is intended, three or four of the principal people go about to collect hands for it among those whom they know to be well inclined to Ludding.

But Towle’s confession may have been designed to throw his questioners off the scent. Early in 1817 other members of his gang were detected, and in April 1817 six were executed at Leicester and two more sentenced to transportation. One of the condemned men, Thomas Savage, in depositions in the fortnight before execution, declared that in these last phases ‘Ludding and Politicks were closely connected.’ He alleged that there was a colony of refugee Luddites in Calais.¹ He sought to implicate Gravener Henson (whom he accused of being ‘equal to the perpetration of anything that ever Robespierre committed’), as the ‘Headman of the whole’. But his colourful and suspect account did not in fact connect Henson himself at any point with machine-breaking; the accusations were that Henson was the initiator of ultra-Radical agitation among the stockingers which culminated in the Hampden Club movement of the winter of 1816–17, and that he had looked forward to a republican revolution and ‘spoke of attacking the barracks at Nottingham’. Whether true or false, Henson was not at liberty to reveal his sympathies when the Pentridge ‘rising’ of June took place. For, in the same week that Savage had made his accusations, Sidmouth had been informed by a Nottingham correspondent that Henson (‘a sensible fellow and very fond of talking’) had taken the London mail with the intention of presenting a petition to save the lives of the condemned men. In London he was arrested, and, under the suspension of Habeas Corpus, held for some months. But long before this time the Luddite movement, as we have defined it here, had come to an end.²

VI. BY ORDER OF THE TRADE

‘Such marchings and counter-marchings!’, Byron exclaimed in the House of Lords:

From Nottingham to Bullwell, from Bullwell to Banford, from Banford to Mansfield! and when at length the detachments arrived at their destination, in all ‘the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious war’, they came just in time to witness the mischief which had been done… and return to their quarters amidst the derision of old women, and the hootings of children.

No doubt some of the local leaders of Luddism were among those who were brought to the scaffold; certainly, both evidence and folk-tradition show that George Mellor and Jem Towle were Luddite ‘captains’. But to this day Luddism refuses to give up all its secrets. Who were the ‘real’ instigators? Were there any, or was the movement sparked off spontaneously in one district after another by example? What kind of committees existed in the different districts? Was there any regular communication between them? How far were secret oaths actually administered? What ulterior political or revolutionary aims were held among the Luddites?

To all these questions, only the most tentative answer can be given. It should be said, however, that the answers which are generally accepted are not consonant with some of the evidence. The two most important studies of Luddism are those of the Hammonds and of Darvall. The Skilled Labourer is a fine book; but the chapters on Luddism read at times like a brief prepared on behalf of the Whig opposition, and intended to discredit the exaggerated claims made by the authorities as to the conspiratorial and revolutionary aspects of the movement. The rôle of spies and of agents provocateurs is emphasized to the point where it is suggested that there was no authentic insurrectionary underground and no evidence of delegates passing between the counties. Of oath-taking, the Hammonds declare that ‘on the most liberal interpretation, there is no evidence to show that the oath was widespread, or that it was ever administered except in districts where spies were busy at work’.¹ Authentic Luddism (it is implied) was without ulterior aims, and was either a matter of spontaneous riot (Lancashire) or an action with strictly limited industrial objectives (Nottingham and Yorkshire).

F. O. Darvall, in his Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England, follows most of the Hammonds’ judgements. ‘There is no evidence whatever,’ he declares flatly,

of any political motives on the part of the Luddites. There is not one single instance in which it can be proved that a Luddite attack was directed towards anything deeper than disputes between masters and men, between workmen and their employers. There was not a single Luddite… against whom a charge of treason was advanced, or could lie. There is no sign, despite the great efforts of the spies to prove such motives, that the Luddites, or indeed any but a few unimportant, unrepresentative, irresponsible agitators, had any large or political designs.

‘Despite the most careful search no large dumps of arms, such as the spies talked about, were found. No connexion could be traced between the disaffected in one district and those in others…’ The secret committees in the Lancashire towns were a ‘fungoid growth’, controlled by spies or by men who made ‘petty sedition their source of income’. And of the larger Luddite attacks, ‘it does not appear than there was any more organization in these large mobs than there is in the crowd which carries through a spontaneous college “rag” ’. There is ‘nothing whatever other than the uncorroborated testimony of spies to prove the Luddites ever took any secret or illegal oath at all’.¹

Caught up in the minutiae of day-to-day reports – phlegmatic officers here, panic-stricken magistrates there, incredibly tortuous stories of espionage in another place – it is possible to doubt the reality of Luddism altogether. But if we stand back from the minutiae for a moment, we shall see that the conclusions of these authorities are as unlikely as the most sensational conspiracy-theory of Luddism. Anyone who has conducted a raffle or organized a darts tournament knows that scores of men cannot be assembled at night, from several districts, at a given point, disguised and armed with muskets, hammers, and hatchets; formed into line; mustered by number; marched several miles to a successful attack, to the accompaniment of signal lights and rockets – and all with the organization of a spontaneous college ‘rag’. Anyone who knows the geography of the Midlands and north will find it difficult to believe that the Luddites of three adjoining counties had no contact with each other. It requires an exercise of mental agility to segregate Luddism in our minds, as a purely ‘industrial’ movement, totally unconnected with ‘politics’, at a time when disaffected Irish were coming in hundreds into Lancashire, and when people celebrated the assassination of the Prime Minister with triumph in the streets. In short, such views of Luddism can be sustained only by a special pleading which exaggerates the stupidity, rancour, and provocative rôle of the authorities to the point of absurdity; or by an academic failure of imagination, which compartmentalizes and disregards the whole weight of popular tradition.

The fact is, there are no sources of evidence as to Luddism’s organization which are not in some degree ‘tainted’ As the Hammonds and Darvall point out, we know only of delegates or of oaths from rumour; or from the stories of ‘spies’; or from the magistracy and military; or from confessions of men, condemned to death or in fear of condemnation, and anxious to save their lives. The same is true of Luddism’s ulterior aims. But what other kind of evidence could there be? Every prisoner automatically becomes subject to duress, every informer at once becomes a ‘spy’.

We may take oaths as an example. If there is little evidence of oaths being taken by Midland Luddites, there may be a reason for this. The main phase of Midland frame-breaking ended in February 1812. It was only in that month that frame-breaking became a capital felony. Yorkshire and Lancashire Luddism commenced in the knowledge that detection meant death: it is therefore likely that some oath of secrecy will have been taken (as both spies and popular tradition insisted). In July 1812 oath-taking, for felonious purposes, was also made a capital offence. Rumour has it that in Yorkshire oaths continued to be administered until the end of the year. But when Luddism recommenced in the Midlands in 1814 to 1816 it is again likely that the small groups engaged will not have wanted to add the extra capital risk involved in the additional offence.

Two of the batches of prisoners tried at the York Assizes in January 1813 were convicted for administering oaths. One case – that of Baines and the Halifax democrats – is highly suspicious. They were convicted on the evidence of two professional spies, of notoriously bad character, drafted in especially from Manchester for the purpose, and there is good reason to believe that the case was a ‘frame-up’. Both the Hammonds and Darvall imply that the other case – that of a weaver at Barnsley – was equally suspect, and the work of a professional ‘spy’.¹ But this is not quite the case. The informer, Thomas Broughton, was a Barnsley weaver and a freemason, who volunteered information for reasons which are unclear, and who swore a deposition before two Sheffield magistrates in August 1812. According to this, he had joined a ‘secret committee’ of five Barnsley weavers earlier in the year. They had ‘twisted-in’ 200 in Barnsley, mainly weavers, but including two publicans, a hatter and a gardener. (No Irishmen were admitted.) His duties were to attend meetings, collect money, and correspond with other committees. Barnsley (where no Luddism took place) was regarded as a new and weak centre, the main strength being in Sheffield and Leeds. Great boasts were made in Luddite circles, of 8,000 ‘twisted-in’ in Sheffield, 7,000 in Leeds, 450 in Holmfirth. Delegates were sent to meetings in Manchester, Stockport and Ashton. In Halifax the Luddites met ‘as dissenters under the cloak of Religion’. Many of the Luddites were also members of the militia. ‘The Luddites have in view ultimately to overturn the System of Government, by Revolutionizing the Country.’ Broughton himself had attended a delegate meeting at Ashton, where another delegate told him the first signal would be an attack on the Houses of Parliament. If the revolution succeeded, Major Cartwright and Burdett were expected to join it. He had received 10s. 10d., as expenses for acting as delegate.²

Like many other such depositions, it is next to impossible to sort out truth and falsehood from this. But two points can be made. The first is that Broughton appears to have been a bona fide informer; that is, a man who had been an authentic Luddite and had turned traitor. The second is that in the case brought forward at York on Broughton’s evidence – against John Eadon, one of the Barnsley Committee – not one word of this deposition was cited. The prosecution sought only to bring evidence to prove the administering of an illegal oath:

I of my own free will and A Coard declare and solemnly sware that I will never reveal to aney…. Person or Persons aney thing that may lead to discovery of the same Either in or by word sign or action as may lead to aney Discovery under the Penalty of being sent out of this World by the first Brother that May Meet me further more I do sware that I will Punish by death aney trater or trators should there aney arise up amongst us I will persue with unseaceing vengeance, should he fly to the verge of Statude. I will be gust true sober and faithful in all my dealings with all my Brothers So help GOD to keep this my Oath Invoilated Amen.¹

On the face of it, the oath has an authentic ring.² But the point here is to examine a little further the motives of authority. Britain’s rulers were callous and indifferent to the working people; but Britain was not a ‘police-state’. There were magistrates and officers – the Rev. Hammond Roberson or Colonel Fletcher of Bolton – whose hatred of Luddism was obsessional, and who, like Nadin, the notorious Deputy Constable of Manchester, would stop short at no violence or trick to secure a conviction. And yet there was still another kind of public opinion to contend with. Earl Fitzwilliam, the Whig Lord-Lieutenant of the West Riding, was a man of temperate disposition who was later to lose his Lieutenancy as a result of his public protest about Peterloo and who is unlikely to have licensed actual provocations. The judge, in several Luddite cases in the Midlands, Mr Justice Bayley, was strongly assailed for his leniency. In a more important case in Manchester, in the summer of 1812, the jury refused to convict thirty-eight Radical reformers whom Nadin had tried to ‘frame’ for Luddite oath-administration. Law officers were well aware that conviction was not automatic.³

In these years, moreover, the Government was hated by the working people and actively disliked by many of the middle class. Even if, on the basis of such depositions as that of Broughton, the law officers had advised that a prosecution for treason might be instituted, it was not in the interests of the authorities to proceed in this manner. Suspicion that they were acting mainly out of political motives would have inflamed public opinion. It was their business to limit prosecution to overt criminal acts: frame-breaking and night attacks, the robbery of arms, oath-taking. Such depositions as those of Broughton were, anyway, poor material for the law courts, especially when the Defence might engage the services of counsel such as Brougham. They rested upon unconfirmed reports of revolutionary rhetoric; meetings with delegates from other districts who generally were unnamed or acted under a pseudonym; obvious exaggerations and highly improbable suggestions – such as the claims that Cartwright, Whitbread, or Burdett would lead the revolution.

In fact, a most curious tussle took place between the local authorities and the Home Office, notably in Yorkshire in the summer and autumn of 1812. ‘Mr Lloyd, a very active attorney at Stockport, employed by Government to get information by sending spies around the country’ (as one Yorkshire J.P. noted in a letter to Fitzwillam),¹ was acting under the direct protection of the Home Secretary, seeking to piece together watertight cases, by methods which some country J.P.s might have deplored, and by actually kidnapping and carrying across the Pennines into secret protective custody his key witnesses.²

One may suggest a certain divergence in approach. On the one hand, the Home Office (now under Sidmouth) was already following policies which led on to the post-war provocations of Oliver, Edwards and Castle. Sidmouth, Lloyd, Nadin, wanted many arrests, sensational trials and executions, to strike terror into the hearts of Luddites and reformers, and they had very little scruple as to whether their victims were ‘genuine’ Luddites or not, nor as to the means employed in manufacturing evidence. On the other hand, men like Fitzwilliam and Radcliffe were no less eager to destroy Luddism, but they were more scrupulous as to means and determined to apprehend the real offenders – for example, the assassins of Horsfall and the men who attacked Cartwright’s mill. In the event, the main cases brought to trial (with the exception of the Manchester thirty-eight) were ones which offered secure ‘examples of detection, conviction and punishment’ for particular offences, and in which larger charges of political sedition were kept well in the background. Even in the case of the Halifax democrats, while it is certain that political motives lay behind it,¹ the prosecution was at pains to accuse the prisoners on account of their opinions only indirectly, and to rest its case on the proof of the overt act of the administering of an oath to a certain person on a certain occasion. Thus, if it is asked why no charge of treason was advanced, the answer is that such a charge would have been unpopular, doubtful in law, and might (as in the Manchester case) have resulted in an acquittal.

Nor did the authorities wish to institute wholesale trials for oath-taking. They desired simply to bring it to an end.² And to do this, they wished to make an example, through trial and transportation, of the most favourable cases. For different reasons, examples were made of the Halifax and Barnsley men. To suppose that authority was motivated by a lust to pursue every possible case to the end is to mistake the nature of power. At York, the ‘injured laws’ and the values of order were appeased once it was certain that Horsfall’s murderers were condemned, that several men were to be transported for oath-taking, and that fourteen others should go to the scaffold for robbery of arms and night attacks. To go further would have been to torment public opinion beyond endurance, until every J.P. and mill-owner of the north spent his life amidst execrations. At this point, the book was closed and a proclamation of amnesty issued. Surely there had been revenge enough?

Thus we cannot argue as to Luddism’s organization from the cases brought to trial nor from the evidence adduced by the prosecution. Indeed, the authorities generally acted upon evidence or strong suspicions which never appeared at the trials.¹ They were, in fact, in possession of a great deal of evidence as to secret meetings, drilling, oaths and the passage of delegates, some of its shadowy, some of it disreputable, most of it of little value in a court of law. This included scores of anonymous letters, as well as letters and depositions from informers, some of them highly circumstantial, such as one describing the Luddite system of pass-words:

You must raise your right Hand over your right Eye – if there be another Luddite in Company he will raise his left Hand over his left Eye – then you must raise the forefinger of your right Hand to the right Side of your Mouth – the other will raise the little finger of his left Hand to the left Side of his Mouth & will say, What are you? The answer, Determined. He will say, What for? Your answer, Free Liberty.²

It is right to say that such statements are worthless as proof in a court of law. But, if we follow the Hammonds and Darvall, in discounting all this evidence,³ we end in a ridiculous position. We must suppose that the authorities through their agents actually created conspiratorial organizations and then instituted new capital offences (such as that for oath-taking) which existed only in the imagination or as a result of the provocations of their own spies. Moreover, this whole line of argument betrays a failure to imagine Luddism in the context of the local community. In Nottingham and the West Riding in particular, the strength of the Luddites was in small industrial villages where every man was known to his neighbours and bound in the same close kinship-network. The sanction of an oath would have been terrible enough to a superstitious-minded people; but the sanction of the community was even stronger. Luddite leaders were popular in their own villages, like George Howarth a weaver who was probably a member of a Yorksire secret committee – of ‘fresh complexion, and stout made; a great singer in company; conversation vulgar, like a country man…’¹ The authorities had extreme difficulty in persuading any witness to come forward and name a neighbour. In part, this was the result of the fear of Luddite reprisals. But, even more, to act the part of informer was a breach of the moral economy, entailing a sentence of outlawry from the community. Even the local magistrates could not view Benjamin Walker, the accomplice who turned King’s evidence against Mellor, in any other light than as a Judas. On the eve of his execution, Mellor declared: ‘That he would rather be in the situation he was then placed, dreadful as it was, than have to answer for the crime of their accuser, and that he would not change situations with him, even for his liberty and two thousand pounds.’ The situation of those Luddites who saved their lives by giving evidence to the authorities was almost more pitiful than that of the condemned men. Walker, who was visited by a Quaker after the executions at York, was found with a ‘countenance… pale and ghastly, and his joints, as it were, so unloosened as if they were scarcely able to support his body’. In fact he never received the £2,000 blood-money which was his due; he continued with a miserable vagabond existence, and in the end was reduced to beggary. Two Nottingham Luddites who turned informer went in fear of their lives, and begged from the Crown their passages to Canada. Others suspected of informing were simply ostracized; one York-shireman refused to continue to live with his wife, who had by stupid indiscretions given evidence which led to the execution of one of the Rawfolds assault-party. On a similar occasion, several years later, two Yorkshire informers were ostracized by the community until the end of their lives; if they entered a room or public house, the assembled company would immediately cease talking, or would rise to leave.¹

We have to imagine the solidarity of the community, the extreme isolation of the authorities. It is this which elevated Cartwright and Roberson to the stature of heroes, in the eyes of Charlotte Brontë, who had herself experienced the same isolation in Haworth parsonage during the Chartist agitations. When Rawfolds was attacked, despite the gunfire no one in the local village stirred to its relief. Only after the Luddites had retired did the three or four local men appear who were willing to declare themselves on the side of the besieged: the Rev. Hammond Roberson, Mr Cockhill (a large master-dyer), Mr Dixon (the manager of a chemical works), a local bon vivant named Clough. They were quickly surrounded by a muttering crowd, whose sympathies were very clearly on the side of the wounded Luddites.² Moreover, both trials and funerals were made the occasion for demonstrations of public sympathy, which sometimes took the form of intimidation, sometimes of religious fervour. The trials of accused Luddites at Nottingham took place amidst threats, demonstrations, and on one occasion in a packed court-room which was supposed to contain armed men.³ The foreman of a jury which convicted several men for complicity in Luddite attacks, in Nottingham in March 1812, was pursued to Worksop:

Sir,

by genaral Ludds Express Express Commands I am come to Worksop to enquire of your Character towards our cause and I am sorry to say I find it correspond with your conduct you latly shewed towards us. Remember, the time is fast approaching When men of your stamp Will be brought to Repentance, you may be called upon soon. Remember – your a marked man,

Yours for General Ludd,

a true Man.¹

Despite the fact that the Yorkshire trials took place at York, more than thirty miles from the trouble-centres, the authorities drafted in additional military forces and feared an attempted rescue. Even their opponents admired the fortitude of the condemned men. Mellor and his two companions refused to make any confession. So also did the fourteen who died a few days later. ‘If any of these unfortunate men possessed any secret,’ wrote the Leeds Mercury, ‘they suffered it to die with them. Their discoveries were meager in the extreme.’² (According to tradition, the presiding judge had allowed himself a little levity on this occasion. Asked whether the fourteen condemned should hang on a single beam, he replied, after a little thought, ‘Well, no sir. I consider they would hang more comfortably on two.’) The seven who were first brought to execution, in the presence of great crowds, came to the scaffold singing the Methodist hymn:

Behold the Saviour of Mankind,

Nail’d to the shameful tree;

How vast the love that him inclin’d,

To bleed and die for me.

Hark: how he groans! while nature shakes,

And earth’s strong pillars bend;

The temple’s veil in sunder breaks,

The solid marbles rend.

‘Tis done! the precious ransom’s paid,

‘Receive my soul’, he cries;

See where he bows his sacred head,

He bows his head and dies.¹

In all three counties we have an impression of active moral sanction given by the community to all Luddite activities short of actual assassination. The authorities themselves lamented that:

Encouragement was given by the doubts cast on the moral turpitude of these crimes; and evil was raised to its height by the religious fanaticism which unhappily exists in an excessive degree in those populous districts.²

Just as the popular myth portrayed all informers as Judases, so Charlotte Brontë followed the middle-class myth when she caricatured in Moses Barraclough, a ‘Ranting’ preacher and ‘a joined Methody’, a hypocritical Luddite instigator; and when she gave to the attempted assassin of Gérard Moore an Old Testament tongue: ‘When the wicked perisheth, there is shouting; as the whirl-wind passeth, so is the wicked no more…’³ The evidence on this is as untidy as usual. Two or three of those executed at York were certainly Methodists. But while many had been nurtured in a Methodist culture (or in its Ranting and Southcottian fringes), even in the condemned cell their ministers – who were exceedingly anxious to exculpate Methodism from complicity – had no power over them. The fervour of the Old Testament had become assimilated to a class solidarity which not even Jabez Bunting could penetrate.

The Luddite funerals illustrate this well. The funeral of John Westley, the Luddite killed in an affray in November 1811, was made the occasion for a demonstration of popular sympathy in Nottingham. ‘The corpse was preceded by a number of the deceased’s former club mates, bearing black wands, decked with knots of crape.’

The scene was truly awful. The High Sheriff, the Under-Sheriff, and about half a dozen Magistrates were on the spot, attended by a posse of Constables and about thirty mounted dragoons… before the body was removed the Riot Act was read in several parts of the town.¹

The two men who died from their wounds at Rawfolds were attended with the same sympathy. A massive public funeral was prevented at Huddersfield only because the authorities buried Booth quietly in advance of the expected time. Hartley was buried at Halifax, followed by hundreds of mourners, their arms bandaged with white crape. His friends claimed for him a Methodist burial, and when Bunting refused to read the service there were angry scenes. On the following Sunday great crowds assembled for a memorial service. Jonathan Saville, a crippled local preacher, recalled that it was ‘the largest congregation that ever assembled in Halifax Chapel’:

… the people came from far and wide to show their sorrow for the deceased. They filled the Chapel to overflowing; hundreds stood on the outside, unable to get in, and constables walked before the doors to keep the peace. The preacher who was planned for that afternoon had gone to Huddersfield, probably to get out of the way…

Bunting again refused to preach, and ordered Saville to deputize. The cripple preached on the contrast in the death of a believer and an infidel:

At that time, perhaps more than ever, infidelity was busy amongst the lower classes… I exclaimed, ‘Infidel, die hard! never strike the black flag when Death confronts you!’ It seemed to have great effect…

The effect, however, was scarcely as Saville intended, and he was stoned on his way from the chapel. ‘Vengeance for the Blood of the Innocent’ was chalked on walls and doors. For weeks after this occasion, Bunting (who also received threatening letters) was afforded an armed guard when he went to country appointments. Similar trouble developed at Holmfirth, and at Greetland (near Halifax) when the Methodist minister refused burial to men executed at York.¹ And the same public demonstrations attended the funeral of James Towle in Nottingham in November 1816, when a clerical magistrate, Dr Wylde, forbade the reading of the Burial Service. Despite this, 3,000 attended the ceremony, and, according to a spy’s report:

A School master, I was told, gave out the Hymns that were sung from his House to and at the Grave by Six young women…. There was a Starr or Cross upon the Coffin lid, which excited much conjecture, what it could be for. Some said it was because he had died game, others because he had been hung, and some damned Dr Wylde for not allowing the Funeral Service to be read. Badder said… it did not signify to Jem, for he wanted no Parsons about him.²

No account of Luddism is satisfactory which is confined to a limited industrial interpretation, or which dismisses its insurrectionary undertones with talk of a few ‘hotheads’. Even in Nottingham, where Luddism showed greatest discipline in pursuing industrial objectives, the connexion between frame-breaking and political sedition was assumed on every side, since not only the framework-knitters but the ‘lower orders’ generally shared complicity with the Luddites in their contest with hosiers, military, and magistrates. In Lancashire – while the backbone of the organization was made up of weavers – colliers, cotton-spinners, and tradesmen of all kinds shared in the disturbances. In the West Riding, although the objectives of attack were gig-mills and shearing-frames, not only croppers but ‘numbers of weavers, tailors, shoemakers, and representatives of almost every handicraft’ were associated with the Luddites. John Booth, the parson’s son killed in the Rawfolds attack, was apprenticed to a harness-maker.³ The prisoners brought up for trial before the Special Commission at York included 28 croppers, 8 labourers, 4 weavers, 3 shoemakers, 3 coal-miners, 3 cotton-spinners, 2 tailors, 2 clothiers, and a butcher, cardmaker, carpenter, carpet-weaver, hatter, hawker, shopkeeper, stonemason, waterman and a woollen-spinner.¹

We may now hazard an explanation for the course of Luddism. It commenced (1811) in Nottingham as a form of direct ‘trade union’ enforcement, endorsed by the working community. As such it at once incurred outlawry, and its very situation drove it in a more insurrectionary direction. By the winter of 1811–12 it is likely that ‘delegates’, whether official or unofficial, did travel to other parts of the north.² Yorkshire Luddism (February 1812) commenced in a more insurrectionary temper. On the one hand, the long-rankling grievances of the croppers were blow into flame by the Nottingham example. On the other hand, small groups of democrats or Painites saw in Luddism a more general revolutionary opportunity. The two impulses can be seen in passages from two Luddite letters, both sent in March 1812. The first, probably emanating from Huddersfield, voices the particular grievances of the croppers:

N.B… the General… orders me to inform you how the Cloth Dressers in the Huddersfield District as spent Seven Thousand Pounds in petition Government to put the Laws in force to stop the Shearing Frames and Gig Mills to no purpose so they are trying this method now, and he is informed how you are affraid it will be carried on to another purpose but you need not be apprehensive of that, for as soon as ye Obnoxious machienery is Stop’d or Distroy’d the General and his Brave Army will be disbanded, and Return to their Employment, like other Liege Subjects.³

The other letter, posted a week or so earlier, is the most unlikely of letters from a ‘Liege Subject’. It suggests that disappointment in the failure of the Prince Regent to form a peace and reform ministry (the occasion for the later riot at the Manchester Exchange) was the trigger for Yorkshire Luddism:

The immediate Cause of us beginning when we did was that Rascally letter of the Prince Regents to Lords Grey & Grenville, which left us no hopes of any Change for the better, & by his falling in with that Damn’d set of Rogues, Percival & Co to whom we attribute all the Miseries of our Country. But we hope for assistance from the French Emperor in shaking off the Yoke of the Rottenest, Wickedest and most Tyranious Government that ever existed, then down come the Hanover Tyrants, and all our Tyrants from the greatest to the smallest, and we will be governed by a just Republic, and may the Almighty hasten those happy Times is the wish and Prayer of Millions in this Land…¹

If we accept both letters as authentic, then it would suggest that Yorkshire Luddism commenced with divided counsels. If so, the insurrectionary temper became dominant as one event followed another. Some weight must be placed upon the verbal tradition, collected by Frank Peel, according to which Baines, the old Halifax hatter, was indeed at the centre of a group of ‘Tom Painers’ who formed ‘a democratic or republican club’ meeting at the St Crispin’s Inn, Halifax. Here an important meeting of Luddite delegates took place in March, and Baines welcomed their movement from the Chair:

For thirty years I have struggled to rouse the people against this evil, and… have suffered much for my opinions in body and estate. I am now nearing the end of my pilgrimage, but I will die as I have lived; my last few days shall be devoted to the people’s cause. I hail your rising against your oppressors, and hope it may go on until there is not a tyrant to conquer. I have waited long for the dawn of the coming day, and it may be, old as I am, I shall yet see the glorious triumph of democracy.

According to the same tradition, a Nottingham delegate named Weightman also spoke: ‘Our council is in daily communication with the societies in all the centres of disaffection, and urge a general rising in May.’¹

There are reasons to suppose that, not the words, but the general tendency of this account, is true. The authorities were clearly determined to secure a conviction against Baines, despite the very shaky evidence of their spies. One witness alleged that Baines had said that he ‘was not in the habit of having anything to do with any people, but what were acquainted with the two words Aristocracy and Democracy’; while the Judge regarded it as an aggravation of his offence that he had boasted that ‘his eyes had been opened for three and twenty years’.² Whether this was just a case of ‘framing’ the local Radicals, or whether they did indeed have connexions with Luddism is another matter. But light is thrown upon this in the reports of the key Lancashire informer, ‘B’, in March and April 1812. ‘B’ claimed to have been visited by a delegate named Walsh from Leeds, and (in April) to have received a letter describing Luddite successes from one Mann, of the same city.³ Walsh told him that in the Leeds secret committee, ‘none of the old Jacks [i.e. Jacobins] are allowed to act, as they have been suspected of late years’:

Some of the old Jacks wished to act, but the old Committee had acted so wildly that neither prudence nor success was obtained, so not one is allowed to be on the Committee, but lye in the background.

The Yorkshire organization (Walsh told ‘B’) was conducted by a ‘Committee of Trades’, whose meetings were held with extreme secrecy in Leeds:

Committees never hold their meetings in a public house, but in private houses, or when the weather would admit even in the Fields at night, and not as the old business was done to let all the Town know of it.¹

It may be that while the ‘old Jacks’ were kept in the background in Leeds, in Halifax the Luddites were less circumspect. And it is consonant with such evidence as exists to suggest that Luddism in Yorkshire took a more generalized insurrectionary form after the failure of the Rawfolds attack. Without doubt by April there was some secret West Riding delegate system in operation. After Rawfolds, the Luddite organization shifted its emphasis to general revolutionary preparations. The months of April to September are months of frequent arms-raids, collections of money, and rumours of oath-taking. Lead (for bullets) disappeared like snow on a warm day; ‘pumps and water-spouts are constantly disappearing’;² even dyeing vats and guttering disappeared. The conspiracy extended to areas like Sheffield and Barnsley where there were neither croppers, gig-mills, nor shearing-frames. The Luddites were inspired by ‘crude notions about upsetting the Government itself, when their organization had spread itself throughout the land, and they had collected sufficient arms’.³

If Yorkshire Luddism moved outwards from the grievances of the croppers to more general revolutionary aims, there was no single theme binding together the Lancashire discontents. Food riots, inflammatory chalking, sub rosa agitation for political reform, secret trade union committees, arms raids, attacks on power-looms, and provocations by spies took place simultaneously, sometimes spontaneously, and often with no direct organizational connexion with each other. The chapter on ‘Lancashire Luddism’ is the least satisfactory chapter in The Skilled Labourer. Some of its statements are plainly false, such as the statement that all disturbances in Lancashire and Cheshire had come to an end by the beginning of May 1812. Others – such as the prodigious influence attributed to a few spies from Bolton and ‘B’ of Manchester – are based on speculation and special pleading, disguised as narrative. The conclusions are little short of ridiculous. We are asked to believe that seventy-one companies of infantry, twenty-seven troops of Horse Guards and Dragoons, as well as thousands of special constables (1,500 in the Salford Hundred alone) were on active duty in Lancashire in May 1812 because ‘Old S’, ‘Young S’ and ‘B’ had made their employers’ blood run cold with stories of insurrection, and because some spontaneous food riots had taken place.

What is most noticeable in the Hammonds’ handling of the sources is a marked disposition to commence their research with the assumption that any bona fide insurrectionary schemes on the part of working men were either highly improbable or, alternatively, wrong, and undeserving of sympathy, and therefore to be attributed to a lunatic, irresponsible fringe. But it is difficult to see why, in 1812, this should be assumed. With a year’s intermission, war had continued for almost twenty years. The people had few civil and no trade union liberties. They were not gifted with historical clairvoyance, so that they might be comforted by the knowledge that in twenty years (when many of them would be dead) the middle class would secure the vote. In 1812 the weavers had experienced a disastrous decline in their status and living standards. People were so hungry that they were willing to risk their lives upsetting a barrow of potatoes. In these conditions, it might appear more surprising if men had not plotted revolutionary uprisings than if they had; and it would seem highly unlikely that such conditions would nourish a crop of gradualist constitutional reformers, acting within a Constitution which did not admit their political existence.

At the least, one might suppose that a democratic culture would approach the predicament of such men with caution and humility. In fact, this has scarcely been the case. Several of the historians who pioneered the study of this period (the Hammonds, the Webbs and Graham Wallas) were men and women of Fabian persuasion, who looked back upon the ‘early history of the Labour Movement’ in the light of the subsequent Reform Acts, and the growth of T.U.C. and Labour Party. Since Luddites or food rioters do not appear as satisfactory ‘fore-runners’ of ‘the Labour Movement’ they merited neither sympathy nor close attention. And this bias was supplemented, from another direction, by the more conservative bias of the orthodox academic tradition. Hence ‘history’ has dealt fairly with the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and fulsomely with Francis Place; but the hundreds of men and women executed or transported for oath-taking, Jacobin conspiracy, Luddism, the Pentridge and Grange Moor risings, food and enclosure and turnpike riots, the Ely riots and the Labourers’ Revolt of 1830, and a score of minor affrays, have been forgotten by all but a few specialists, or, if they are remembered, they are thought to be simpletons or men tainted with criminal folly.

But for those who live through it, history is neither ‘early’ nor ‘late’. ‘Forerunners’ are also the inheritors of another past. Men must be judged in their own context; and in this context we may see such men as George Mellor, Jem Towle, and Jeremiah Brandreth as men of heroic stature.

Moreover, bias has its way of working into the very minutiae of historical research. This is particularly relevant in the matter of Lancashire Luddism. There is only one reason for believing that the various depositions in the Home Office papers as to its revolutionary features are false, and this is the assumption that any such evidence is bound to be false. Once this is assumed, the Hammonds embark upon the seas of historical fiction. Thus, the most regular Lancashire informant, in Luddite and post-war years, was an individual designated as ‘B’. This ‘B’ had possibly been employed as an informer since 1801 or 1802,¹ and he was in the confidence of Manchester ultra-Radicals. His name was Bent, and he was a small trader, described in 1812 as ‘a buyer and seller of cotton waste’.² As a man of comparative affluence, he was frequently nominated as Treasurer to different secret committees – an admirable listening-post for a spy. On the face of it, he was well-placed to provide inside information.

In The Skilled Labour ‘B’ appears frequently, in the rôle of a sensationalist and a provocateur:

The Home Office Papers contain numbers of illiterate communications from him, full of lurid hints of the approaching outbursts of the lower orders, encouraged by mysterious beings in high stations. The general rising, with the number of thousands who have taken the oath in different parts of the country, is his constant theme.

The Lancashire Luddite oath (declare the Hammonds), ‘it is not unreasonable to suppose… originated in “B.”s fertile brain’. When confronted with evidence that a delegate from Manchester visited a secret committee of the Stockport weavers, and sought to involve them in revolutionary preparations, the Hammonds find the convenient explanation:

Now nobody who has read through the Home Office Papers for this period can fail to recognize in the report of what the Manchester delegate said, the voice of ‘B’….

Upon this hypothesis (supported by the assumption of superior knowledge which few readers will care to question) the fiction of provocation is elaborated. But a few pages later, when it suits these same authors to give credence to another part of ‘B’s reports, they blandly inform the reader: ‘That Bent ever seriously tried to induce any of his colleagues to work for violent measures is unlikely, as otherwise men of the stamp of John Knight would not have continued to trust him…’ In short ‘B’s reports are bent in any way which happens to suit the legend of the moment.¹

One may suggest that the Home Office papers may be read differently. Bent was not a provocateur, he was a plain informer, and he limited his own activities to what was necessary to secure the continued confidence of his fellow Radicals. He appears to have been a somewhat stupid but observant man, a not unusual combination. Hence his evidence can only be trusted when he describes events in which he participated himself, whereas in his reports of ulterior aims or of organization in the rest of the country he passed on the boasts of some of the more sanguine agitators. The suggestion that Bent was the Manchester delegate who involved the Stockport committee in conspiratorial plans will not stand up to examination.¹

In fact, if we cease following the false scent of provocation, it is possible to piece together a more coherent account of the inner history of Lancashire Luddism, using very much the same sources as employed by the Hammonds. First, we must recall that Jacobinism had struck deeper roots in Lancashire than in any other manufacturing district, and it had been given a particularly revolutionary tone by the Irish immigration. In Lancashire, almost alone, there is an unbroken thread of open anti-war and reform agitation, from the 1790s, through the ‘United Englishmen’, to the time of Luddism. In 1808 this agitation was reported, not only from Manchester, but from Royton, Bolton and Blackburn. ‘Is it not time,’ questioned some Bolton weavers, when announcing their intention to demonstrate every Sunday for two months on Charters Moss above the town,

to drag the British Constitution from its lurking hole, and to expose it in its original and naked purity, to show each individual the laws of his forefathers.²

Year by year, the weavers’ fruitless agitation for a minimum wage had driven them in the direction of political agitation, whether of a revolutionary or constitutionalist character.

In the second place, when Luddism commenced in 1811–12, illegal trade unionism was already strongly rooted in Lancashire. We have already noted the degree of organization and consultation of the artisan trades and of the cotton-spinners in Manchester. The weavers’ organization, also, was probably extensive and firmly based. In towns and even in some villages in Lancashire there were more or less representative ‘secret committees’ of weavers, accustomed to consulting with each other on applications to Parliament, petitions, the raising of funds, etc.¹

Thus when Luddism came to Lancashire it did not move into any vacuum. There were already, in Manchester and the larger centres, artisan unions, secret committees of the weavers, and some old and new groups of Painite Radicals, with an ebullient Irish fringe. Lancashire was a rich field for spies and provocateurs, not because there was so little, but because there was so much afoot. And the reports are contradictory, not because all the informers were lying, but because there were contradictions in the movement. In a district which was, relatively, as politically sophisticated as Lancashire, there were bound to be divided counsels as to the value of machine-breaking. This conflict in the workers’ councils caused much friction between February and the end of April 1812. Thus it would seem that at some time in February the policy of Luddism proper was endorsed by delegate meetings of the weavers, representing secret committees in several towns. According to the deposition of one Yarwood, who was himself a sub-delegate of the Stockport secret committee, the weavers were enrolled (and ‘twisted in’ with oaths) into an organization whose aims were the destruction of steam looms, the collection of money for arms, and the repulsion of force by force. Subscriptions of 1d. a week were collected, and a full-time organizer was actually employed for a month or two, in John Buckley Booth, a former ‘dissenting minister’.² But at this point Yarwood’s statement becomes vague. It seems that other trades, notably the spinners, tailors and shoemakers, had representatives on the secret committees of Manchester and of Stockport, and that many others than weavers were ‘twisted in’ But the actual plans of the committees were not known to Yarwood, who was secretary only to a district of the Stockport organization, and who delivered his money and received his instructions from John Buckley Booth.

It is clear, however, from Yarwood’s account, as well as others, that the committees were divided. As early as 5 April the Manchester committee refused to ‘Lud’:

Nothing but Discord reigned amongst them that night. Not money sufficient was produced by the Districts to pay what trifle of liquor had been had by the Secret Committee.

It was necessary to raise the money required to send delegates to Bolton and Stockport ‘to inform them that Manchester would not act in concert’ by borrowing it (at Yarwood’s suggestion) from ‘Mr Bent… whom I had seen with the Secret Committee at the Prince Regent’s Arms.’ The riots of mid-April would appear, in most cases, to have been spontaneous affairs, not prompted (or even supported) by the secret committees. By the end of April the Manchester trades (notably the spinners and tailors) refused to pay further money, as a result of which the Manchester delegates (including Bent) were excluded from an important delegate meeting at Failsworth on 4 May.

From this time forward, there appear to have been two simultaneous (and perhaps overlapping) forms of organization in Lancashire. On the one hand, one part of the movement concentrated upon renewing the agitation for peace and parliamentary reform. Bent reported a delegate meeting held to prepare a petition for this purpose on 18 May, attended by representatives from several towns in both Lancashire and Yorkshire: as usual, he managed to get himself nominated as Treasurer. This was the agitation with which John Knight and the ‘thirty-eight’ were associated, who were arrested by Nadin in Manchester in June (as a result of Bent’s information) and charged with administering oaths. On the other hand, another part of the movement was certainly engaged in insurrectionary preparations. As early as 28 March Bent claimed to have had a meeting with Irish conspirators, ‘dangerously daring fellows, and no less than four of them had been in the Rebellion in Ireland’. In April he claimed that an Irish delegate had actually visited him, having passed through Dublin, Belfast and Glasgow, and intending to continue his journey to Derby, Birmingham and London. He claimed to have been an officer in the rebellion, called himself Patrick Cannovan, and was ‘about forty, a genteel appearance, well-drest in black with Hessian boots’. Bent’s next visitor was a Birmingham delegate, who passed through Manchester on his way to Glasgow via Preston and Carlisle. A further delegate visited one of the committee in mid-May, from Newcastle in the Potteries, bringing the news that several thousands were sworn in and armed in his district, but that London was ‘very backward… it is not carried on with that spirit as could be expected’. Those in the conspiracy in London were ‘chiefly Spitalfields Weavers and Taylors’, or ‘Knights of the Needle’.

There is no inherent improbability in these stories of an underground, whose main channel of communication was by way of Irish refugees of ’98. It is mistaken, however, to attempt to divide the picture too sharply into constitutional reformers here and insurrectionary Irish there. It is equally possible that the more sophisticated political reformers regarded themselves as being more serious revolutionaries than the machine-breakers.¹ ‘The Executive,’ Bent wrote early in May,

recommends the people to be peaceable, and not to disturb the peace on any account – those people who do are not of those who are twisted in…

‘The fact is,’ wrote an anonymous Jacobin from Lancashire on 6 May, signing himself ‘Tom Paine’,

that there is a regular, general, progressive organization of the people going forward. They may be called Hamdenites, Sidneyites, or Paineites. It has fallen to my lot to unite thousands. WE – for I speake in the name of multitudes – I say we deny and disavow all, or any connexion with machine-breakers, burners of factories, extorters of money, plunderers of private property or assassins. We know that every machine for the abridgement of human labour is a blessing to the great family of which we are a part. We mean to begin at the Source of our grievances as it is of no use to petition, we mean to demand and command a redress of our grievances…

One may suggest that by May 1812 Luddism in both Lancashire and Yorkshire had largely given way to revolutionary organization, which was effecting contact, through the medium of Irish emigrés and old Jacobins, with many centres (Sheffield, Barnsley, Birmingham, the Potteries, Glasgow) where no Luddite outbreaks took place. Of Luddism proper, only the name of the General survived. Rough hand-blocked cards, as well as tallies and secret signs and pass-words, were used to secure admission to meetings.¹ An even more tantalizing piece of evidence consists of papers claimed to have been picked up on the road shortly after the Luddite attack on Foster’s mill at Horbury, near Wakefield. These consist of two long addresses, in flowery libertarian rhetoric, together with a ‘Constitution’ and ‘Oath’ which are identical with those discovered upon an associate of Despard, and cited in evidence at his trial.² Unless we suppose some deliberate ‘plant’ (and there is no reason to suppose this), this points unmistakably towards some link between the underground of 1802 and that of 1812.³

The evidence as to some kind of underground of this sort comes, in fact, from so many different sources that if it is all to be discounted we must fall back upon some hypothesis which would strain credibility a great deal further – such as the existence of a veritable factory of falsehoods, turning out complementary fantasies, for the sole purpose of deluding the authorities. Thus a quite different informer, a weaver designated ‘R.W.’, told his local J.P. early in June that a Lancashire delegate meeting had been held in Stockport, attended by men from Nottingham, Derby and Huddersfield. These delegates blamed –

the hastiness of the People here in beginning the Riots before the time appointed, and before they were sufficiently numerous and furnished with arms.

Pike manufacture was reportedly going ahead in Sheffield, a relatively simple matter in a town with so many small workshops and forges. The rising was now spoken of as planned for the end of September or early October. A midnight meeting was addressed by a ‘man of genteel appearance’ in a field near Didsbury. There was ‘not a word on mills or machinery’, but an appeal for a general, instead of a ‘partial’, rising. He was a speaker ‘as fit to stand up either in the pulpit or at the bar as any man in the kingdom’.¹

But it is at the point where we encounter rumours of national organization and ‘genteel’ leaders that we must be most cautious. Obviously, the genuine agitators sought to bolster the morale of their followers with large promises as to national support or even personalities (Cartwright, Burdett, Cochrane, Whitbread, Colonel Wardle and others) who were expected to aid the revolution. But whatever shadowy links the weavers’ union, the ‘Knights of the Needle’, or travelling Irish delegates provided, it is certain that Luddism was a movement without national leadership or centre, and with scarcely any national objectives beyond common distress and the desire to overturn the Government. Above all, the talk (which such men as Bent passed on) of a ‘Grand Committee’ in London was wholly illusory, and showed a misunderstanding among the provincial revolutionaries as to their true predicament.

General Maitland was probably right when he declared that there was ‘no real bottom’ to Luddism, and that:

at present the whole of these Revolutionary Movements are limited to the lowest orders of the people generally; to the places where they show themselves; and that no concert exists, nor no plan is laid, further than is manifested in the open acts of violence that are daily committed.²

We may accept this judgement, provided that we attend closely to what is being said. Less well informed observers than Maitland frightened themselves because they could not conceive of a ‘Revolutionary Movement’ which did not have some inner knot of ‘evil, designing men’, some aristocratic or middle-class leaders, who were secretly inspiring the whole. When no such conspirators could be found, opinion swung to the opposite extreme: if there were no directors, then there could have been no revolutionary movement at all. It was inconceivable that croppers, stockingers and weavers should attempt to overthrow authority on their own.¹ ‘There was, it seems, no evidence to prove a setting on; no evidence to prove a plot.’ So Cobbett commented on the Report of the Secret Committee of the House of Commons in 1812. ‘And this is the circumstance that will most puzzle the ministry. They can find no agitators. It is a movement of the people’s own.’²

It was a movement, however, which could engage for a few months 12,000 troops, and which led the Vice-Lieutenant of the West Riding, in June 1812, to declare that the country was taking the ‘direct Road to an open Insurrection’:

… except for the very spots which were occupied by Soldiers, the Country was virtually in the possession of the lawless… the disaffected outnumbering by many Degrees the peaceable Inhabitants.³

From one aspect, Luddism may be seen as the nearest thing to a ‘peasant’s revolt’ of industrial workers; instead of sacking the châteaux, the most immediate object which symbolized their oppression – the gig-mill or power-loom mill – was attacked. Coming at the close of twenty years in which the printing-press and the public meeting had been virtually silent, the Luddites knew of no national leadership which they could trust, no national policy with which they could identify their own agitation. Hence it was always strongest in the local community and most coherent when engaged in limited industrial actions.

Even while attacking these symbols of exploitation and of the factory system they became aware of larger objectives. and pockets of ‘Tom Painers’ existed who could direct them towards ulterior aims. But here the tight organization which served to destroy a mill or stocking-frames was no longer of such service; there was no Old Sarum in their community which they could pull down, and the Houses of Parliament were beyond their reach. Undoubtedly the Luddites of different districts reached out to each other; and undoubtedly, in Yorkshire and Nottingham, some kind of district leadership, known only to a few of the ‘Captains’ like Towle and Mellor, was established. But if, as is likely, the accounts of delegate meetings at Ashton, Stockport and Halifax are true, it was here that Luddism was at its weakest – most open to penetration by spies, and most given to frothy talk about insurrections with the aid of the French, Irish or Scots. Only in mid-summer 1812 does it appear that a serious conspiratorial organization was coming into existence, which had detached itself from limited industrial grievances and was extending into new districts. By August (in Captain Raynes’ view) the Luddites must either ‘make a desperate effort to rise in a body’, or else the movement must collapse.¹ Two causes brought it to an end. First, the repeal of the Orders in Council, and a rapid improvement in trade. Second, the increasing pressure of the authorities: more troops, more spies, more arrests, and the executions at Chester and Lancaster.

From another aspect we may see the Luddite movement as transitional. We must see through the machine-breaking to the motives of the men who wielded the great hammers. As ‘a movement of the people’s own’, one is struck not so much by its backwardness as by its growing maturity. Far from being ‘primitive’ it exhibited, in Nottingham and Yorkshire, discipline, and self-restraint of a high order. One can see Luddism as a manifestation of a working-class culture of greater independence and complexity than any known to the eighteenth century. The twenty years of the illegal tradition before 1811 are years of a richness at which we can only guess; in particular in the trade union movement, new experiments, growing experience and literacy, greater political awareness, are evident on every side. Luddism grew out of this culture – the world of the benefit society, the secret ceremony and oath, the quasi-legal petition to Parliament, the craftsmen’s meeting at the house of call – with seeming inevitability. It was a transitional phase when the waters of self-confident trade unionism, dammed up by the Combination Acts, strove to break through and become a manifest and open presence. It was also a transitional moment between Despard and the ‘Black Lamp’ on one hand, and Peterloo on the other. ‘I am otherized to say,’ wrote a (probably unauthorized ¹) ‘Secretary to General Ludd’ from Nottingham to Huddersfield on 1 May 1812,

that it is the opinion of our general and men that as long as that blackgard drunken whoreing fellow called Prince Regent and his servants have anything to do with government that nothing but distress will befall us there [their] foot-stooles. I am further desired to say that it is expected that you will remember that you are mad [made] of the same stuf as Gorg Guelps Juner and corn and wine are sent for you as well as him.

In the three counties, the agitation for parliamentary reform commenced at exactly the point where Luddism was defeated. In Halifax, even before the trial of Baines, one of the first Unions for Parliamentary Reform was founded. ‘I have heard you are a Pettitioning for a Parliamentary Reform,’ George Mellor wrote to a friend, while awaiting trial in York Castle:

‘I wish these names to be given as follows…’ The names of thirty-nine fellow prisoners were enclosed. (‘Remember,’ he added, ‘a Soul is of more value than Work or Gold.’) And, if we follow the logic through to its conclusion, we may credit the exacerbated comment of a Derbyshire magistrate in 1817:

The Luddites are now principally engaged in politics and poaching. They are the principal leaders in the Hampden Clubs which are now formed in almost every village in the angle between Leicester, Derby and Newark.¹

Nottingham	2,629
– – County	2,078
Leicester	1,100
– – County	2,057
Derby	239
– – County	1,809
Tewkesbury	281
Godalming	114
London	92