There were factory-owners who prided themselves upon the conditions in which their workforce spent their long days of up to thirteen hours. Among these were men like Richard Arkwright, a former barber’s apprentice who invented a carding machine and spinning frame and built the first factory to contain water-driven machinery in 1777; Josiah Wedgwood, the potter, whose workmen lived under his firm paternalistic care in a village near Burslem which he had constructed for them near his mansion, Etruria Hall; and Robert Owen, the son of a saddler and ironmonger, the conduct of whose 1300 workers at New Lanark Mills was marked by ‘silent monitors’, labels of different colours indicating the various grades of good and bad behaviour.
Visitors to factories such as these were impressed by the numbers of men employed, and by the regimented manner in which they performed their work. Louis Simond described a visit in 1810 to a manufactory in Birmingham in which ‘no mark of ill-humour’ was discernible. ‘These people [who were earning between sixteen and sixty shillings a week], are well broken to taxation,’ he wrote. ‘They complain indeed, but it is just as they complain of their climate, from habit, or as we see children continue crying, long after they have forgotten the cause of their tears.’
The manufactories are mostly of hardware and glass, and are less unhealthy, although more dirty, than those of Manchester and Glasgow, which require heat and confined air, and clog the lungs with floating particles of cotton. By means of late improvements, the smoke of innumerable coal fires is consumed, and the atmosphere much clearer than formerly.
In one place, 500 persons were employed in making plated ware of all sorts, toys and trinkets. We saw there patent carriage steps, flying down and folding up of themselves, as the door opens or shuts; chairs in walking-sticks, pocket-umbrellas, extraordinary cheese-toasters, and a multitude of other wonderful inventions. In another place, 300 men produce 10,000 gun barrels in a month. We saw a part of the process – enormous hammers, wielded by a steam-engine, of the power of 12c horses, crushing in an instant red hot iron bars.27
In nearly all factories discipline was harsh. In many the men were expected: to work in silence except perhaps when required to sing a song in praise of the virtues of their employer. While bonuses were occasionally awarded, punishments were imposed for insubordination. At Wedgwood’s works – where the master admitted he would have thrashed his men ‘right heartily’ if he could for presuming to take their traditional time off to go to Burslem Wakes – a: worker who answered an overseer back was immediately dismissed, and one 1 who ‘conveyed ales or liquor into the manufactory’ was fined 2s. At Marshal’s flax-spinning mill at Leeds all employees from managers and overseers to oilers, spreaders, spinners and reelers had their precise duties allocated to them and if they were found ‘a yard out of their ground’ or in transgression of any rule, they were ‘instantly turned off as unfit for their situation’. Monitors ensured that men did not arrive late for work or leave early, that was to say, in Ambrose Crowley’s iron foundry, after five o’clock in the morning or before eight o’clock at night.
J. L. and Barbara Hammond cited the fines imposed upon spinners in one Manchester workshop where the temperature rose to 84 degrees Fahrenheit:
s. d.
Any spinner found with his window open
1. 0
Any spinner found dirty at his work
1. 0
Any spinner found washing himself
1. 0
Any spinner leaving his oil can out of its place
1. 0
Any spinner putting his gas out too soon
1. 0
Any spinner spinning with gaslight too long in the morning
2. 0
Any spinner heard whistling
1. 0
Any spinner being five minutes after last bell rings
1. 0
Any spinner being sick and cannot find another must pay for steam per day
6. 0
Any spinner found in another’s wheel-gate
1. 0
Any spinner neglecting to send his sweepings three mornings in the week
1. 0
Any spinner having waste on his spindles
1. 028
43 Clothworkers and Machine-breakers
Although Louis Simond thought the workers in the manufactory he visited in Birmingham were content enough, there was, in fact, widespread and growing discontent both in town and country. In the first year of the century it was remarked that the common people were ‘very rough and savage in their Dispositions, being of levelling Principles, and refractory to Government, insolent, and tumultuous’. They were consumed with envy, another observer contested, railing at their betters, ‘misconstruing their most commendable Actions’ and loudly complaining that the ‘good Things of the World are chiefly enjoy’d by those who do not deserve them’.1 These were to remain familiar complaints for many years during which outbreaks of violent disorder were constantly expected by those who had most to lose and whose fears were exacerbated by the threats they received. One characteristic threat was addressed in 1762 to a Lancashire justice of the peace who was held to be one of those responsible for the high price of bread:
This his to asquaint you that We poor of Rosendale Rochdale Oldham Saddleworth Ashton have all mutaly and firmly agreed by Word and Covinent and Oath to Fight and Stand by Each Other as long as Life doth last for We may as well be all hanged as starved to Death and to see ower Children weep for Bread and none to give Them nor no liklyness of ever mending … If You dont amaidatley put a Stopp and let hus feel it the next Saturday We will murder You all that We have down in Ower List and Wee will all bring a Faggot and burn down Your Houses and make Your Wifes Widdows and Your Children Fatherless. Take care.2
Other similar letters were addressed to employers and to landlords. One such was received in 1787 by the clothiers of Newbury who were told:
You Gentlemen are Agreed to Beat down the Price of the Weavers. Work is already so Low They Cannot get A livelywood like Almost any Other Trade … Youre Lives As Well as Our are Not Insured One Moment … Prepare your selves for A Good Bonfire at Both Ends At Each Your Dwellings … I May as well Dey with a Houlter As Be Starved to Death …3
A landlord intent upon closing a common in 1799 was warned that should he commit that ‘bloudy act’ it would not be in his power to say he was safe from the hands of his enemies. ‘For Whe like birds of pray will prively Lye in wait and spil the bloud of the aforesaid Charicters whose names and plaices of abode are as putrified sores in our nostrils.’4
The objectives of all these protesters were strictly limited, and those who wished to turn such violent upheavals as the Jacobite rebellions into national revolutions were disappointed. The disturbances, nevertheless, were frequent and serious enough. There were riots over enclosures and over the price and unfair distribution of corn, over enclosures and turnpike tolls, new machinery and taxes, over the activities of recruiting officers and press gangs and excise officials and gamekeepers. There were riots during heated labour disputes, hotly contested elections and balloting for the newly organized militia which was likely to bear more heavily upon the poor than upon the rich.
The London mob was particularly unruly; and in 1780 during the Gordon Riots – named after Lord George Gordon, leader of the Protestant Association – an estimated 850 people lost their lives and the damage to property was incalculable. The trouble started with a march by some 50,000 people to demonstrate their opposition to the repeal of anti-Roman Catholic legislation. But the organizers soon lost control of the crowd. Some demonstrators broke away to plunder and burn Roman Catholic chapels; and by the evening of 5 June the mob, no longer confining attacks to Catholics, had begun a campaign of general destruction, directed particularly against Irish property and Irishmen who were condemned as wage-cutting blacklegs. Prisons were destroyed, distilleries pillaged, the houses of magistrates and lawyers attacked. Assaults were made on Downing Street and on the Bank of England which was defended by
militiamen and by clerks who melted down inkwells for bullets. After four days of tumult troops at length restored order. Gordon was acquitted of high treason, but twenty-one ringleaders were hanged. ‘Such a time of terror,’ Samuel Johnson told Mrs Thrale, ‘you have been fortunate in not seeing.’5
Outside London the forest regions of the country were considered to be exceptionally dangerous and turbulent. Quarrels between landlords, as well as royal officials, and local people, who were being deprived of their traditional common rights and the resources of the forest, often erupted into violence. Cannock Chase in Staffordshire, Cranborne Chase in Dorset, the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, Kingswood Forest near Bristol, the Forest of Selwood in Somerset and the forests of the south-east were all said to be filled with poachers and malcontents, coiners, deer-stealers, fugitive criminals, highwaymen, rough country folk and pests of society abandoned to idleness, vice and profligacy. The vicinity of Wychwood Forest in Oxfordshire, according to Arthur Young, was ‘filled with poachers, deer-stealers, thieves and pilferers of every kind: offences of almost every description abound so much that the offenders are a terror to all quiet and well-disposed persons; and Oxford gaol would be uninhabited, were it not for this fertile source of crimes’.6
In nearly all areas food riots were common. In the years 1756–7 alone there were over 100 disturbances in thirty different counties. One market day in May 1757 in Taunton angry housewives forced the farmers to bring down the price of wheat from 8s 6d to 6s 6d a bushel; and there were similar incidents at Yeovil and Salisbury, in Staffordshire and at Bewdley in Worcestershire where the market was put ‘in a great Confusion by the Assembling of a Number of Women who cut open some Bags of Wheat’ and insisted on their being sold at the price they had fetched in Kidderminster a few days before. At Exeter in April 1757, when the townsmen heard that the farmers had agreed to hold out for 15s a bushel for wheat, they ‘sent their Wives in great numbers to Market, resolving to give no more than 6s per Bushel, and, if they would not sell it at that Price, to take it by Force’.
And such Wives, as did not stand by this Agreement, were to be well flogg’d by their Comrades. Having thus determined, they marched to the Corn-Market, and harangued the Farmers in such a Manner, that they lowered their Price to 8s 6d. The Bakers came; and would have carried all off at that Price, but the Amazonians swore, that they would carry the first man who attempted it before the Mayor; upon which the Farmers swore they would bring no more to Market; and the sanguine Females threatened the Farmers, that, if they did not, they would come and take it by Force out of their Ricks. The Farmers submitted.7
The rioters were rarely intent upon theft and as a general rule conscientiously ensured that the farmers were paid what was considered a fair price.
The Price of Wheat was raised so high in the Market at Barnstable [so Jackson’s Oxford Journal reported in July 1766], that the Poor, who are in great Distress, joined in a Body, and compelled the Farmers to sell it at Five Shillings per Bushel. Some of the Farmers refusing to take the Money, the Poor were honest enough to tie it up carefully for them in their Sacks. And as soon as they had taken it at a low Price sufficient to supply their Necessities, they dispersed, leaving the Farmers to make what Price they could of other People.8
There were frequent riots, too, during industrial disputes when employers tried to reduce wages or increase work, or when a worker agreed to accept a lower rate than his fellows. There were riots, for instance, at Frome in Somerset in 1726 when weavers were threatened with a reduction in wages and an increase in work. Large numbers of them, styling themselves regulators, broke into the houses of their masters, ‘and where their Demands were complied with, and smooth Words given, they did no harm, but where there was any hesitation, or what they call uncivil Treatment, the Windows paid for it’. A few years later other weavers near Bristol attacked ‘one of their Fraternity for working under Price’, ducked him in the river and beat him so severely that he lost an eye.9
Such incidents were common. So were attempts by workers to combine together to frustrate what they took to be the unfair designs of their masters and the selfish behaviour of their fellows. Framework knitters in Nottinghamshire, journeymen tailors in Norwich, button-makers in Cheshire, miners in Durham, building workers in Manchester, needle-makers and nailers in the west Midlands and Birmingham and shipwrights as well as stay-makers in London were among the numerous workers who at one time or another in the century acted collectively in industrial disputes. The government reacted sharply to restrict these labour combinations and to make combination itself illegal. A whole series of Acts were passed against them: by 1799 there were nearly fifty. And then there came the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 which made illegal the association of two or more people for the purpose of obtaining wage increases or improving working conditions. Offenders against the Acts would be sentenced to three months’ imprisonment by a single magistrate.10
Although the first was intended to prevent combinations of masters as well as workers, these Acts marked a further stage in the increasingly hostile relationship between employers and workers. Soon after the middle of the century, the economist, the Rev. Josiah Tucker, the son of a farmer, complained that in the woollen districts of the Cotswolds, Wiltshire and Somerset – as indeed elsewhere – those who worked for a master clothier, who might employ 1000 people, looked upon him not only as their paymaster but also ‘sometimes as their Tyrant’.
Besides, as the Master is placed so high above the Condition of the Journeyman [Tucker continued], both their Conditions approach much nearer to that of a Planter and Slave in our American colonies, than might be expected in such a Country as England. The Master, for Example, however well-disposed in himself, is naturally tempted by his Situation to be proud and over-bearing, to consider his People as the Scum of the Earth, whom he has a Right to squeeze whenever he can; because they ought to be kept low, and not to rise up in Competition with their Superiors. The Journeymen on the contrary, are equally tempted by their Situation, to envy the high Station, and superior Fortunes of their Masters, and to envy them the more, in Proportion as they find themselves deprived of the Hopes of advancing themselves to the same Degree by any Stretch of Industry, or superior Skill. Hence their Self-Love takes a wrong Turn, destructive to themselves, and others. They think it no Crime to get as much Wages, and to do as little for it as they possibly can, to lie and cheat, and do any other bad Thing; provided it is only against their Master, whom they look upon as their common Enemy, with whom no Faith is to be kept.11
Towards the end of the century such attitudes became more and more common, the prejudices against increasingly successful associations of workers and trade clubs more pronounced, and class distinctions more divisive. When the nineteenth century began, inflation and the economic consequences of the war with revolutionary France were exacerbating the general discontent and providing opportunities for the ideas of the radicals and Tom Paine to gain ground. Despite temporary setbacks the economy was expanding fast, yet most poor people were receiving little benefit from this expansion. ‘In visiting the labouring families of my parish,’ wrote the Rev. David Davies, the rector of Barkham, Berkshire, in 1795, ‘I could not but observe with concern their mean and distressed condition … Yet I could not impute the wretchedness I saw either to sloth or wastefulness.’ Five years later nearly 30 per cent of the population was being paid poor relief. And by 1812 the annual expenditure on poor rates had grown from about 2 million pounds in 1780 to 8 million.12
By then the relationship between employers and employed in many industries had been worsened by the introduction of new machinery. There had been several isolated attacks upon machinery before the Combination Acts were passed: in Lancashire in the 1750s spinners attacked the jennies invented by James Hargreaves; in the 1770s in Nottinghamshire hosiers smashed scores of Arkwright’s stocking-frames; and at Birkacre in 1776 ‘a most riotous and outrageous mob … armed in warlike manner … destroyed most of the machinery [o
f a carding factory] and afterwards set fire to and consumed the whole Buildings, and Every Thing therein contained’.13 After the passing of the Combination Acts such attacks upon machinery, and the destruction of tools and workshops, became more frequent and more destructive. The workers from three trades in particular felt vulnerable to the introduction of modern machinery, and it was among them that the violence to be known as Luddism erupted in its terrifying fury.
Clothworkers from the West Riding, cotton-weavers from south Lancashire, and framework knitters from the midland counties of Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire were all skilled tradesmen who took pride in their work and jealously guarded the traditional privileges to which their expertise entitled them. This was especially true of the Yorkshire clothworkers who considered themselves superior to other workers in the district. They earned as much as thirty shillings a week – almost three times the average wage in the Yorkshire clothing trade. Now, however, their pride was being undermined by the growing interest in two cloth-dressing machines: the gig-mill, used to raise the nap on woollens, and the shearing frame, a new invention that trimmed away the superfluous nap. The gig-mill was not a modern invention. It had been known for centuries, but in Yorkshire – with the exception of a few villages outside the main centres of trade – the clothworkers had so far successfully resisted its introduction; in Leeds not a single employer had dared set one up in his factory.
Not all the clothworkers were blindly prejudiced against gig-mills and shearing frames. Indeed, most of them were prepared to come to terms with machinery provided it did not throw them out of work without compensation. Practical suggestions were made for a tax on machine-worked cloth, the proceeds to be paid to unemployed croppers until new work was found for them. Many small employers were willing to negotiate on these terms and, in the meantime, contributed generously to the ‘sick clubs’ and ‘institutions’ which their workers founded as an alternative to the trade unions which the law denied them.
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