The richer and more powerful employers were decidedly less sympathetic, however. So, too, were the authorities in London where Parliament, perturbed by the growing unrest in the country, removed by a series of enactments all the protection and privileges that the clothworker had previously enjoyed. He now could do nothing but face the gig-mill and the shearing frame with implacable enmity. When various Yorkshire employers took advantage of their workers’ weakened position to install the machinery, violence could no longer be averted.
In the Midlands, meanwhile, the framework knitters (or stockingers, as they were also called) were edging toward violence in much the same way. Their main grievance was not so much machinery as their employers’ attempts to save money by cutting down on labour and the quality of goods.
Framework knitters had never been well paid, but they took pride in their traditions and skill. They made gloves and shirts, cravats and pantaloons, as well as stockings, and they were deeply offended by the shoddy articles, disreputable to their trade, that now resulted from slapdash techniques and the use of unskilled labour.
They had other grievances as well. Most of them still worked at home, paying rent to the master hosiers not only for their cottages but also for their looms; and their rents were being constantly and arbitrarily increased. Moreover, specialists were now often paid at rates appropriate to unskilled men.
Following the example of the Yorkshire clothworkers, the framework knitters at first tried to protect their interests by constitutional means, but when these attempts failed the stockingers also felt forced to resort to violence.14
By the end of 1811 it was clear that the consequent outbreaks of violence were carefully planned and deliberate; they were no longer the work of shouting mobs urged on by rabble-rousers but of disciplined gangs led by masked men whose orders were implicitly obeyed. ‘The rioters appear suddenly in armed parties, under regular commanders,’ a provincial newspaper reported. ‘The chief commander, be he whomsoever he may, is styled General Ludd.’
The name was soon familiar throughout the country. It appeared as a signature at the bottom of inflammatory handbills and at the end of dire warnings to employers whose machinery had been marked for destruction. It appeared in ballads and in broad-sheets. While nurses of middle-class children frightened their charges with it, conjuring up visions of a terrifying ogre, the children of the poor were taught to venerate it and to remember it in their prayers. ‘The dread name Ludd’ was invoked at night in taverns and alehouses; it was mentioned with fear and apprehension at the dinner tables of the rich. Men said that to disobey an order given on its authority was to risk immediate death.
Those who knew the real Ned Ludd could only be astonished by his sudden rise to fame, for he was a simpleton living in an obscure village in Leicestershire, where he was the natural butt of heartless children. One day, provoked beyond endurance by his tormentors, he chased one of the children into a nearby cottage. He lost track of the child there, but he did find two knitting frames and vented his anger on them instead. Thereafter in that district poor Ned Ludd was automatically blamed whenever frames were smashed. Within ten years the convenient scapegoat had become a legend, and straw effigies of ‘the renowned General Ludd’ were carried in procession through the northern and midland villages, accompanied by the standard-bearers waving red flags. Under the name of Luddites, the machine-breakers became members of an underground revolutionary movement with a definite, if unsystematic, programme of action.
They were certainly not indiscriminate in their destruction. The workshops and knitting frames of good and honest employers were left untouched. ‘In one house last night,’ runs a typical newspaper report about the marauders, ‘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.’ It soon became common for hosiers to protect their machinery by posting notices that read: ‘This frame is making full-fashioned work at the full price.’ But no frame was completely safe until the Luddites had given it their sanction.
Calling themselves ‘inspectors from the committee’, groups of Luddites would visit a village and summon the workers to the local inn. After collecting money for men already thrown out of work because their frames had been broken, the ‘inspectors’ designated the frames to be destroyed in the future. These orders were invariably obeyed, for the Luddites were known to be as merciless as they were just. Anyone breaking their rules was sure to be severely punished, even hanged.
By the beginning of February 1812, the Luddites’ campaign in the Midlands was gradually coming to a halt. They had achieved a considerable measure of success: most employers had been forced to increase their men’s wages, dismiss unapprenticed boys and women, and improve the quality of goods. But the attacks also ceased because great numbers of troops had moved into the area, and the government had introduced a Bill that would make frame-breaking a capital offence.
No sooner had the authorities appeared to have gained control over the situation in the Midlands, however, than Luddism broke out with even greater virulence in Yorkshire and Lancashire. Workers there were urged in the name of ‘General Ludd, Commander of the Army of Redressers’, to ‘follow the noble example of the brave citizens of Paris who in sight of 30,000 tyrant redcoats brought a tyrant to the ground’. Employers received letters threatening murder unless their ‘detestable’ shearing machines were pulled down.
Many employees did pull down their machines, and the shops of those who declined to do so were attacked at night by gangs of workers with blackened faces. Men wielding huge iron hammers known as ‘Enochs’ – after the firm of blacksmiths who made them – smashed doors, shattered shearing frames, and demolished gig-mills. As in Nottinghamshire, the Luddites operated with military discipline, marching towards their objective in silent ranks, ten abreast. And ‘as soon as the work of destruction was completed’, the Leeds Mercury informed its readers, ‘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.’
In one attack on the premises of a Stockport manufacturer who had installed a steam loom, the demonstrators were led by two men dressed as women and calling themselves General Ludd’s wives; in another subsequent attack on a mill at Middleton they armed themselves with muskets and carried out a military assault in which several of them were killed and many wounded.
By the spring of 1812, scarcely any smaller manufacturers in Yorkshire were still using machinery, and the Luddites felt that the time had come to march against the big mills whose owners had hired guards. There were two mills in particular that the Luddites were determined to destroy, William Horsfall’s mill near Huddersfield and William Cartwright’s at Rawfolds in Liversedge. They decided to attack Cartwright’s mill first.
With the help of troops, Cartwright, who never left his mill, barricaded it against attack and placed a vat of concentrated sulphuric acid at the top of the stairs to tip on the heads of any Luddites who might succeed in breaking down the door. He successfully drove off the attack, wounding several of the armed workers, two of them mortally. One of these two was John Booth, nineteen years old, a harness-maker’s apprentice and the son of a former cropper who was a clergyman in the neighbourhood. As he lay dying amidst the fumes of the aqua fortis that had been applied to the stump of his amputated leg, a pugnacious High Tory parson hovered over him in the hope that he might confess the names of his accomplices. He refused to speak, however, until he knew he was dying, and then he motioned to Robertson to come closer. ‘Can you keep a secret?’ he whispered. With eager expectation Robertson replied that he could. ‘So can I,’ gasped Booth, closed his eyes, and died.15
Cartwright’s successful defence of his mill marked a turning point in the history of Yorkshire Luddism. Thereafter, no other mill was assaulted in force; and Cartwright himself became a hero to the authorities, to army officers, Tory squ
ires, magistrates and parsons alike. The clothworkers, of course, detested him more than ever. He received some grudging approval when a soldier who had refused to fire on the Luddites, and who was sentenced to receive 300 lashes outside his mill, was unbound after twenty-five at Cartwright’s request. But this leniency scarcely softened the hatred he aroused during his subsequent relentless pursuit of those Luddites who had survived the attack on his mill.
Despite the thoroughness of this pursuit, however, not a single man was arrested. Thousands of troops patrolled the West Riding; scores of spies were employed; whole villages of working people, who must have known at least some of the men involved, were rigorously questioned. But there was a conspiracy of total silence. As two London magistrates who had been sent north reported to the Home Office: ‘Almost every creature of the lower order, both in town and country, are on the Luddites’ side.’
Thus supported and protected, the Luddites now decided to take action against the other big mill-owner whom they had marked down for punishment, William Horsfall, a man who was hated even more than Cartwright and who had been heard to proclaim his ardent desire to ‘ride up to his saddle girths’ in Luddite blood. But Horsf all’s mill was so well protected by soldiers and by cannon mounted on the roof, that its owner was attacked instead. He was mortally wounded by a fusillade of musket balls as he rode home from Huddersfield one morning in 1812.
Soon afterwards those responsible for the murder were apprehended and taken to York gaol, together with numerous other suspected Luddites and their supporters. Among these were hatters and shoemakers as well as clothworkers, cardmakers and coalminers, tailors, butchers, watermen, carpet weavers and apprentices. The youngest was a boy of fifteen, the oldest nearly seventy. Many were illiterate; a few had criminal records; the greater number were honest men who had never been in trouble before. As the Leeds Mercury reported of those accused of the worst crimes, ‘they were young men on whose countenances nature had not imprinted the features of assassins’.
Several of them were sentenced to imprisonment in a penal colony, seventeen to be hanged, including five men of good character who, on the flimsiest evidence, were convicted of having taken part in the assault on Cartwright’s mill. On being asked if he thought that so many men should be hanged on one beam, the judge is said to have pondered the question at some length before delivering the whimsical reply, ‘Why, no, Sir, I consider they would hang more comfortably on two.’
For a time it had seemed that the Luddites might provoke a national revolution. Horsf all’s murder had been preceded by a powerful Luddite assault at Westhoughton, where a steam-powered mill had been invaded and its power looms demolished; it had been followed a fortnight later by the murder of the prime minister, Spencer Perceval, by John Bellingham, a mentally deranged commercial agent ruined by the war, who was acclaimed by the Luddites as a hero. In Lancashire people openly expressed their joy at his deed; in London, huge crowds applauded him; in Nottingham, mobs paraded through the town ‘with drums beating and flags flying in triumph’; in Yorkshire, notices offering rewards for the Prince Regent’s head, now that the prime minister had been disposed of, were posted on the walls.
The vice-lieutenant of Yorkshire declared his belief that England was taking the ‘direct road to an open insurrection’. Had there been some national leadership or even national policy with which the Luddites could have identified themselves, this open insurrection, which the government constantly dreaded, might well have broken out. But what little reliable evidence exists suggests that Luddism was essentially a spontaneous movement: its local leaders had little connection with one another and no settled policies of long-term reform. In the districts where they operated, the Luddites retained their hold on the working communities long after the days of machine-breaking were over, but by the summer of 1812 the crisis of Luddism was past. There were isolated instances of machine-smashing and rioting well on into the autumn, and as late as 1817 a large factory at Loughborough in Leicestershire was attacked by masked men armed with blunderbusses, their leaders shouting, ‘Ludds, do your duty well!’ This was the final demonstration of the Luddites’ declining power, and afterwards James Towle, the last of the Luddite heroes, was executed.16
Yet for years the spirit of the Luddites lingered on. Those who survived the gallows or escaped transportation handed down Luddite legends, sang Luddite songs, and carefully preserved Luddite secrets. They were proud of their part in an underground movement that was considered to be an important stage in the development of the working class, far more significant than the outbursts of violence that gave Luddism its subsequent notoriety. Machinery was, after all, only part of a general factory system the Luddites had vainly strived to destroy. As E. P. Thompson has pointed out, Luddism erupted at a time when the old paternalist legislation that had to some extent protected the worker from the unscrupulous manufacturer and unjust employer was being swept away; when the ‘shadowy image of a benevolent corporate state’ – in which artisans occupied a lowly but nevertheless respected position in society – was being rapidly dispersed. Artisans and journeymen felt themselves ‘thrust beyond the pale of the constitution’ and robbed of those few rights they had previously enjoyed.17
‘As a body of ingenious artisans employed on materials of great value,’ the experienced silk-workers of Derby protested to the master hosiers, ‘we conceive ourselves entitled to a higher station in society.’ Instead of that, they – and tens of thousands of skilled workers in other trades – were to be given over to what they considered little better than slavery in vast, depressing factories where their identities would be lost, where they and their children would be exploited and oppressed, confined for all their working lives in demeaning and incessant labour.18
44 Rick-burnersy Paupers and Chartists
A century after Daniel Defoe published his Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, William Cobbett, the essayist who had recently started a seed-farm at Kensington, embarked upon a journey through the southern counties similar to the one that Defoe had undertaken. Much of what he saw distressed and angered him. On 11 October 182a he arrived at Weyhill on the day of the sheep fair which he had first attended forty-six years before. In those days the sheep sellers carried home about £300,000; now they were lucky to make £70,000. ‘The countenance of the farmers were descriptive of their ruinous state,’ Cobbett wrote. ‘I never in all my life, beheld a more mournful scene. There is a horse-fair upon another part of the Down; and there I saw horses keeping pace in depression with the sheep … Met with a farmer who said he must be ruined, unless another “good war” should come! This is no uncommon notion. They saw high prices with war, and they thought that the War [the war against Napoleon’s France] was the cause.’
On the last day of that month Cobbett rode through Windsor Forest, ‘that is to say upon as bleak, as barren, and as villainous a heath as ever man set his eyes on’. ‘Here are new enclosures without end,’ he continued. ‘And there are new houses too, here and there, over the whole of this execrable tract of country … But farm-houses have been growing fewer and fewer; and it is manifest to every man who has eyes to see with, that the villages are regularly wasting away … In all the really agricultural villages and parts of the kingdom, there is a shocking decay, a great dilapidation and constant falling down of houses … The labourers’ houses disappear also.’
‘The villages are all in a state of decay,’ he wrote when further south in Hampshire. ‘The farm-buildings dropping down, bit by bit … If this infernal system could go on for forty years longer, it would make all the labourers as much slaves as the negroes are.’ Their wages, in these years of agrarian depression between the days of subsistence farming under the traditional open-field system and the prosperous times yet to come, were pitiably low. In Wiltshire, Cobbett came upon thirty or more men digging a field of about twelve acres. They were being paid ad a day which was ‘as cheap as ploughing’. ‘But if married, how are their miserable families to live on
4s 6d a week?’ Cobbett asked. ‘And if single they must and will have more by poaching, or by taking without leave.’
Charity was no solution, Cobbett insisted. One Sunday a little girl of whom he asked the way was wearing a camlet gown, white apron and plaid cloak and was carrying a book in her hand. She told him that Lady Baring of Grange Park had given her the clothes and had taught her to read and to sing hymns and spiritual songs. Later that morning he saw ‘not less than a dozen girls clad in the same way’. ‘It is impossible not to believe that this is done with a good motive,’ he commented. ‘But it is possible not to believe that it is productive of good. It must create hypocrites, and hypocrisy is the great sin of the age.’
In the valley of the Avon, Cobbett was shocked by the impoverishment of the countryside: ‘It is manifest that the population of the valley was, at one time, many times what it is now; for, in the first place, what were the twenty-nine churches built for? The population of the twenty-nine parishes is now but little more than half of that of the single parish of Kensington; and there are several of the churches bigger than the church of Kensington … These twenty-nine churches would now not only hold all the inhabitants, men, women and children, but all the household goods, and tools, and implements of the whole of them, farmers and all … The villages down this Valley of Avon, and, indeed, it was the same in every part of this county, used to have great employment for the women and children in the carding and spinning of wool for the making of broad-cloth. This was a very general employment for the women and girls; but it is now wholly gone.’
In Somerset he found that the ‘poor creatures of Frome’ had had to pawn all their things, ‘all their best clothes, their blankets and sheets; their looms; any little piece of furniture they had’. And yet here were ‘new houses in abundance, half finished; new gingerbread “places of worship”, as they are called; great swaggering inns; parcels of swaggering fellows going about, with vulgarity imprinted upon their countenances, but with good clothes upon their backs’. ‘Of all the mean, all the cowardly, reptiles that ever crawled on the face of the earth,’ Cobbett wrote in another bitterly indignant passage after riding into Worcestershire, ‘the English landowners are the most mean and the most cowardly; for, while they support the churches in their several parishes, while they see their own parsons pocket the tithes and the glebe-rents, while they see the population drawn away from their parishes to the wens [the towns], they suffer themselves and their neighbours to be taxed, to build new churches for the monopolizers and tax-eaters in those wens! Never was there in this world a set of reptiles so base as this. Stupid as many of them are, they must clearly see the flagrant injustice of making depopulated parishes pay for the aggrandizement of those who have caused the depopulation.’1
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