[In the following excerpt, Bailey describes the industrial unrest that took place in several regions in the early nineteenth century and examines the responses to the troubles by manufacturers, the government, newspapers, writers, and the workers themselves.]

Colonel Ralph Fletcher, a magistrate of Bolton, Lancashire, was among the first to voice his conviction that the Nottinghamshire machine-breakers had set a dangerous example to northern manufacturing districts where machinery was held at least partly responsible for the economic distress of workers.¹ The literate among aggrieved Yorkshiremen were reading almost daily accounts of fresh Midland outrages in the pages of the Leeds Mercury and other newspapers, as well as reports that the hosiery masters were in some cases ready to give way to the knitters' demands. Between November 1811 and January 1812 inclusive, Midland hosiery workers smashed an average of around 175 frames per month. F. O. Darvall says that an average of two hundred frames per month were broken between November and February.² This appears to be a slight exaggeration but, at any rate, the number of smashed frames represents about 2 per cent of all those estimated to have been in operation in the three Midland counties at the time. Scarcely a day went by during January when there were not reports of more machine-breaking in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire. No doubt commercial travellers, too, brought up-to-the-minute accounts of new developments. It is more than probable that the news provided inspiration to disaffected workers in the woollen and cotton industries.

The mill-owners, hard hit by the effects of Napoleon's Continental System and the British government's Orders in Council, especially after the American Non-Intercourse Act, cut working hours and reduced wages. Many workers were unemployed and food prices were high. At the beginning of 1812 one-fifth of the population of Lancashire was said to be in need of charitable relief. The depression of trade passed down through the social system to the remaining hand-workers in the woollen and cotton industries. The handloom weavers in the north, like the ‘poor stockingers’ of the Midlands, were among the lowest paid workers in the industrial population. The Yorkshire croppers had at one time been among the most prosperous of textile hand-workers, but they too were falling prey to merciless market forces. They were fighting a losing battle against natural progress. In 1806 there had been only five gig-mills working in the north of England. Within a decade, the number rose, in spite of all opposition, to seventy-two. The number of shearing frames increased in the same period from about a hundred to well over a thousand.³

Weavers in Scotland fought long legal battles for a minimum wage, and won. But frustrated Lancashire workers soon adopted Luddite methods, though with less organisation and single-minded determination than was shown by the Midlanders and the Yorkshiremen. In the last weeks of 1811 and the first weeks of 1812 rumours began to circulate about links between the Midland rioters and disgruntled workers in the north. A stocking salesman from Nottingham, a Mr Williamson, was reported to have met a committee of workers in Manchester in November.⁴ Colonel Fletcher reported information from a ‘respectable channel’ that delegates from Nottingham had been administering oaths to workers in Bolton.⁵ Frank Peel stated that a Nottingham Luddite, George Weightman, came to Yorkshire and spoke to croppers at the Shears Inn near Heckmondwike. There is absolutely no evidence to support this claim, but according to one J. Mayer, writing from Manchester: ‘Already we have plenty of Nottingham, Carlisle and Glasgow delegates, who are holding private meetings every night and instigating ours to riot and confusion.’⁶

There were also suspicions of conspiratorial meetings between Luddite ‘delegates’ from Nottingham and weavers in Stockport, where threatening letters were received by mill owners who had power-looms on their premises. Peter Marsland, a Stockport manufacturer who had made some technical improvements to the steam-loom, which was perceived as a threat to the employment of weavers, reported in February an attempt to burn down his mill.

No such contacts have been proven beyond reasonable doubt, the allegations coming almost exclusively from paid spies and criminal informants. It is difficult to be certain who originated a geographical error which has become self-perpetuating. F. O. Darvall, the historian of popular uprisings in the period, refers to the main area of knitting-frame destruction as north-west Nottinghamshire.⁷ E. P. Thompson is among others (including George Rudé) who have repeated this mistake,⁸ and he says elsewhere: ‘Anyone who knows the geography of the Midlands and the north will find it difficult to believe that the Luddites of three adjoining counties had no contact with each other.’⁹ He means, presumably, Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire, but the sentence is misleading. The area of the chief Midland county infected by Luddism was actually south-west Nottinghamshire. The northern limit of violence against stocking- and lace-frames was around Mansfield. The error is by no means trivial. ‘North-west Nottinghamshire’ suggests physical adjacency with Yorkshire, whereas in fact there was a geographical gap of around 40 miles, as the crow flies, between the northern extremity of machine-breaking in the Midlands and the southern limit in the north of England. Forty miles was a more significant distance in those days than it seems now, and the distance between Nottingham and Manchester—70 miles—even more so. Machine-breaking did not affect north-west Nottinghamshire or the mining and steel region around Sheffield, Rotherham and Barnsley, now South Yorkshire. The effective gap was between the Mansfield area of Nottinghamshire and what is now the southern area of West Yorkshire around Holmfirth.

Northern Luddism took place in a separate region, as well as in a different industry. This fact makes more debatable any probability of a sympathetic and organisational link between the two. (The known links between the Yorkshire shearmen and those in the West Country are a different matter. Though the distance between them was greater, they were working in the same industry and shared precisely the same problems.) The framework-knitters worked in relative isolation in a widely scattered and largely rural cottage industry. Concerned wholly with their own problems, they had little to gain by urging similar action on a small group of workers in a completely different industry in another part of the country.

The Stockport and Manchester areas were already hotbeds of social and industrial unrest, and food riots were common there. The workers who embraced Luddite tactics were not confined to the weavers whose livelihoods were threatened by the introduction of power-looms. There was undoubtedly a stronger Jacobin presence in Lancashire than in either Yorkshire or the Midlands, reinforced by a large community of immigrants from Ireland. Several correspondents in 1808, during disturbances that affected Manchester, Stockport, Bolton, Blackburn, Rochdale, and other towns, had advised Lord Hawkesbury, Home Secretary in the Duke of Portland's administration (and subsequently Earl of Liverpool), that Irish weavers, in the words of the magistrate R. A. Farington, were ‘the foremost and most turbulent in all the proceedings’.¹⁰ The Irish, agitating for full Catholic emancipation, and more prone than the English to form illegal combinations and join secret societies, were identified with Jacobinism, and ‘Jacobins’ were the bogeymen implicated in all civil disturbances at the time, as ‘Communists’ have been in the twentieth century.

The high degree of secrecy maintained by workers and their families throughout the troubled region made it well-nigh impossible for the authorities to find out exactly what was going on, and to decide how best to deal with the situation. The difficulty of obtaining information was a constant refrain in communications with the government. ‘The grand difficulty’, the Duke of Newcastle told Mr Ryder,

is the almost impossibility of obtaining information respecting the movements and intentions of the rioters; everything is so well organised amongst them, and their measures are conducted with so much secrecy, added to which, that no one dares to impeach for fear of his life, that it is scarcely possible to detect them.

Revd R. Hardy, JP, wrote from Loughborough ten days later, ‘… we find the class of men to whom we are obliged to look for information, in general very unwilling to give it’.¹¹

The Lord Lieutenant of Cheshire, Viscount Bulkeley, recommended to the Home Secretary that John Lloyd, a solicitor and clerk to the Stockport magistrate, Revd Charles Prescott, should be employed as a spy to investigate contacts between the Midland framework-knitters and the northern cotton weavers. This suggestion was adopted, and Lloyd became a zealous spymaster and persecutor of suspected agitators and machine-wreckers, extracting information by threat and sometimes, rumour had it, by torture. General Maitland, in command of the troops in the north-west, admitted that much of Lloyd's work was ‘out of the strict letter of the law, though, I believe, perfectly in the spirit both of the law and of the constitution’.¹²

Among the first guardians of the law in Yorkshire to take an uncompromising stand against the Luddites was Joseph Radcliffe, a Huddersfield magistrate. Radcliffe, a wealthy landowner, was unstinting in his pursuit of the criminals, and constantly urged the government, through the Lord Lieutenant, to send in more troops. He had no sympathy with the workers' grievances, and made himself so unpopular that there were several threats to his life and at least one real attempt, necessitating a round-the-clock military guard at his home, Milnsbridge House, where a room used for interrogating suspects became known as the ‘sweat room’. Radcliffe asked the local commanding officer for ‘ten privates and a non-commissioned officer to be here night and day’.¹³ It came to the point where he left his house only when it was absolutely necessary, and his daughters never walked beyond the grounds without receiving insults. Few people, either among the workers or the authorities, seemed to like or trust Radcliffe. The Luddites did not trust him to give them justice in any circumstances. The solicitor-spy, Lloyd, accused him of talking too much. Radcliffe was jealous of Lloyd's success in apprehending suspects. General Maitland considered Radcliffe pompous and neurotic, and indeed his increasing rage and vindictiveness contributed eventually to the development of a nervous tremor, which made his spidery handwriting extremely difficult to decipher. His later letters were mostly written by his clerk, Jonas Allison.¹⁴

The Home Office was bombarded with confusing and contradictory advice from the provincial guardians of law and order. The Duke of Newcastle had called for martial law to be imposed, and suspected foreign interference. He wrote to the Home Secretary on 20 February: ‘I think it right to inform you that it is known that there are orders at Birmingham for arms for the rioters; and it is as far as I can learn certain that delegates are sent from hence into all the great Towns in this Country. The disturbances at Leeds were planned from hence, as I learn.’ But he added cautiously: ‘I cannot pretend to vouch for the entire authenticity of all that I have mentioned in the latter part of this letter. I can only add that I am strongly induced to believe them.’¹⁵

The two Bow Street officers, Conant and Baker, denied the ‘state of war’ impression mentioned in The Times, at least as far as Nottingham was concerned, reporting in February that ‘this place has been in the most perfect quiet ever since we have been in it’. One frame, they said, had been broken at Attenborough a few nights earlier.¹⁶ Conant was scornful about the rumours of arms from Birmingham. There was no evidence of it, he said, dismissing the informant as ‘credulous’.¹⁷ His doubts were seemingly borne out subsequently, when a mob in Sheffield, during a food riot on 14 April, attacked a military armoury and, instead of seizing the weapons there, destroyed most of them. It seems that 198 firearms were broken, the young men involved being urged on by the crowd to smash them. Only 78 muskets were stolen.¹⁸

Revd John Becher, a magistrate of Southwell and friend of Byron, and a well-known Poor Law reformer, wrote a long and well-argued letter to the Home Office in February in which he analysed the cause of the troubles, and reckoned that more than a thousand frames had been destroyed, with a total estimated value of £10,000. He saw the problem purely as an industrial/economic one, without political implications. Having recorded his Tory gentry's dismay that the lower orders had sufficient time on their hands to talk about politics, and his observation that the attractions of working in trade in the towns had led, among other inconveniences, to the ‘difficulty of procuring servants’, his analysis of the situation, though somewhat verbose, is one of the most carefully reasoned and understanding of all submissions made to the Home Office on the subject. Southwell was outside the area of great Luddite turmoil, so Mr Becher was able, no doubt, to take a more detached view than his colleagues with more sorely pressing responsibilities. Whether his recommendation of frame-rent regulation would itself have been sufficient to satisfy the knitters is another matter.¹⁹

William Nunn, a lace manufacturer, believed the solution to the problem was wondrously elementary:

As many Hundred Letters have been sent sign'd ‘Ludd’ threatening the Lives and to burn and destroy the Houses, Frames and Property of most of the principal Manufacturers through the Post office, and very few letters are sent through that means but on these occasions, were you to direct Mr. Connant [sic] or those in whom you place your confidence, that when such Letters come, the Person within to open them, and by signal give Notice to others without to follow them, you would in a few days find out the Committee: directly opposite is a Hair Dressers shop where women, boys or men might be station'd, or any others, as three long streets command a Sight of the Office, again if Thirty one-Pound Banknotes all mark'd were to be sent to … the Sir Isaac Newton in a Bag, with Directions to send them to Ludd and his Men, they would immediately get into circulation through the Butcher Baker etc. get the five Banks when they come in (which they would do in a few days), to make each Person write his name and place of abode on them and send them to the Magistrates who would send for the Parties all together and examine them, it would immediately be found who the acting men were.

For those who are demolishing in the Villages, a man or two should be placed at the top of a house in each, or on a Hill by the Roadside with Rockets when a party of these Men were in a Village, send up one or more of the Rockets giving a particular Light which would give the alarm to the other on Watch the Soldiers on Guard in the neighbouring Towns to push forward to the Rocket, giving the Signal where the Rioters are: the horse along the Roads, the Foot over the Fields, a sufficient Number would be secured to stop the whole: leave a few Men in each adjoining Village to detect such as might escape: martial law being proclaimed and every Man order'd to be in by eight or nine 'Clock at Night.

If you would send Mr. Connant six more men by tonights mail, all may be quieted in a week, and all well as soon as the Leaders are taken.²⁰

From Yorkshire, a magistrate named Taylor at Horbury wanted the obnoxious shearing frames in the area to be destroyed in order to placate the shearmen,²¹ while an elderly magistrate named Walker at Birstall delivered himself of the opinion, in a letter to Earl Fitzwilliam, that all the troubles could be put down to ‘young boys larking about in the hills with fireworks’.²²

Darvall appears to have exaggerated in saying that the neighbourhood of Leeds, like those of Nottingham and Manchester, was ‘a seething mass of distress and discontent, liable at any moment, in the bitterness of its apparently insoluble disputes, to break out into disorder’.²³ In spite of the facts that there was a known strong Jacobin presence in Leeds, and that about half the shearmen in Yorkshire worked there, Luddism never gathered force in Leeds any more than in Bradford, the wool town par excellence, which does not feature at all in the Luddite story. The reason was that the introduction of gig-mills had been successfully resisted there for some years, and local mill owners were simply not installing new machinery on any significant scale at the time. The owners of machinery throughout the troubled areas were certainly alarmed for the safety of their property, but rumour and false reports seem to have resulted in an impression of ordinary citizens being afraid to go out at night, just as modern television reporting raises public fears by giving—however unintentionally—a hair-raising impression of the current crime rate.

Draconian new laws were passed in 1812 to deal with Luddism, which some saw simply as an alarming and widespread new crime wave. The Luddites were not merely disgruntled workers turning to theft and vandalism. Their actions had specific aims, but machine-breaking was sometimes accompanied by other crimes, and it is clear that ordinary criminals took advantage of Luddism as a cover for their activities. The Nottingham Journal was alert to the differences between genuine Luddites and those who adopted ‘the nom de guerre “Ned Ludd's men” as a cloak for the commission of almost every crime’.²⁴

There was also, no doubt, some occurrence of the now well-known phenomenon of ‘copycat crime’. There were local destructive attacks on farm machinery in the period of Yorkshire Luddism, in the spring and summer of 1812. Some workers with grudges against their employers simply jumped on the bandwagon. There was no evidence of any ideological campaign. A shopkeeper named Sykes came up for trial in May 1812 after announcing to one of his neighbours that he was one of General Ludd's men and demanding arms. The jury was persuaded that it was only a prank by one who was the worse for drink, and the defendant was acquitted.²⁵

It was, ironically, the magistrates of Leicestershire, the textile county least afflicted by machine-breaking, who, with the enthusiastic support of the Treasury Solicitor, Henry Hobhouse, urged on the Home Secretary a Bill to make machine-breaking a capital offence,²⁶ and it was this proposal that Spencer Perceval's government acted upon, after continuing incidents of destruction in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire towns and villages. The Frame-Breaking Bill was introduced to the House of Commons on 14 February 1812. The Bill was drafted to provide for the ‘exemplary punishment of persons destroying or injuring any stocking- or lace-frames, or other machines or engines used in the frame-work knitted manufactory, or any article or goods in such frames or machines’. It made no reference to gig-mills, shearing frames or power-looms, and was directed solely and specifically at the Midland framework-knitters.

Although several Members of Parliament in a thinly attended House expressed themselves reluctant to support a premature move to extreme measures, and some wanted a committee of enquiry to be set up before resorting to hasty remedies, the Bill passed its first reading by forty-nine votes to eleven. At the second reading, three days later, Sir Samuel Romilly adopted his by-now traditional role in leading the opposition to any further increase in the severity of the criminal code. He argued that the terror of death would not be greater than the terror of transportation, and that the Bill would be self-defeating, for the liability to such punishment would deter witnesses from coming forward, with the result that criminals would not be punished at all. Samuel Whitbread, Sir Francis Burdett and Richard Brinsley Sheridan, in one of the final acts of his political career, were among a few others who voted against the Bill. William Lamb, the future Prime Minister and Viscount Melbourne, demonstrating his intellect by declaring that ‘the fear of death had a powerful influence over the human mind’, was among those who supported the Bill. Only 111 members passed through the division lobbies, and the second reading was carried by ninety-four votes to seventeen. The third reading in the Commons was on 20 February.²⁷

It was during the second reading in the House of Lords, on 27 February, when Lord Holland (Recorder of Nottingham) and Lord Grenville, the former Whig Prime Minister, were among those opposing the Bill, that Lord Byron rose to make his impassioned and famous maiden speech. The Byron family seat at Newstead Abbey, between Nottingham and Mansfield, was situated at the heart of the most troubled hosiery manufacturing district, and the poet had seen for himself the miseries of the local working population. ‘I have traversed the seat of war in the Peninsula;’ he said, ‘I have been in some of the most oppressed provinces of Turkey; but never, under the most despotic of infidel governments, did I behold such squalid wretchedness as I have seen since my return, in the very heart of a Christian country.’ Byron was against the Bill because of its ‘palpable injustice, and its certain inefficacy’, as he had told Lord Holland in a letter two days earlier. ‘The few words I shall venture to offer on Thursday will be founded on these opinions formed from my own observations on the spot.’²⁸

‘Is there not blood enough upon your penal code’, Byron demanded of the assembled peers,

that more must be poured forth to ascend to Heaven and testify against you? How will you carry the Bill into effect? Can you commit a whole country to their own prisons? Will you erect a gibbet in every field, and hang up men like scarecrows? … When a proposal is made to emancipate or relieve, you hesitate, you deliberate for years, you temporise and tamper with the minds of men; but a death-bill must be passed off-hand, without a thought of the consequences.

The House listened in silence as Lord Byron reached his great peroration. Suppose the Bill were passed, he said,

… suppose one of these men, as I have seen them,—meagre with famine, sullen with despair, careless of a life which your Lordships are perhaps about to value at something less than the price of a stocking-frame;—suppose this man surrounded by the children for whom he is unable to procure bread at the hazard of his existence, about to be torn forever from a family which he lately supported in peaceful industry, and which it is not his fault that he can no longer so support;—suppose this man—and there are ten thousand such from whom you may select your victims—dragged into court, to be tried for this new offence, by this new law; still, there are two things wanting to convict and condemn him; and these are, in my opinion, twelve butchers for a jury, and a Jeffreys for a judge!

Byron was warmly congratulated on his speech by persons on both sides of both Houses of Parliament, and Sir Francis Burdett told him that it was the best speech by a Lord since ‘the Lord knows when’, but Byron's eloquence and logic were lost on the majority of their Lordships, and had no influence on the final outcome. The noblemen of England were deeply entrenched in their support for capital punishment. The Lord Chancellor, Eldon, considered that terror of the gallows in the minds of all men was sufficient reason in itself to retain the death penalty. On the motion for the third reading, on 5 March, the Bill was passed without division.²⁹

It was already a capital offence, under the notorious Black Act, to go about armed and in disguise, or to write a threatening letter. If desperate men were willing to risk the savagery of the law in those respects, they were hardly likely, one might think, to be deterred from their campaign against losing their livelihoods. As Coleridge remarked some years later, ‘what man who saw assured starvation before him, ever feared hanging?’ Indeed, these men thought they might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, and turned their thoughts to murdering the capitalists instead of destroying the implements of exploitation. A popular rhyme soon gained currency:

Welcome Ned Ludd, your case is good,
Make Perceval your aim;
For by this Bill, 'tis understood
It's death to break a Frame—
With dexterous skill, the Hosier's kill
For they are quite as bad;
And die you must, by the late Bill,
Go on my bonny lad!—
You might as well be hung for death
As breaking a machine—
So now my lad, your sword unsheath
And make it sharp and keen—
We are ready now your cause to join
Whenever you may call;
So make foul blood run clear and fine
Of Tyrants great and small!(30)

Even while the Frame-Breaking Bill was going through its readings in parliament, knitting-frames were smashed in Nottingham and in Derbyshire, and shearing frames in the Huddersfield district. The Nottingham Review reported a local incident on 21 February:

This morning, about five o'clock, a number of men entered in at the chamber window of Mr. Harvey, West-street, Broad-lane, in this town, and while some of them secured the family, others proceeded into the workshop, and demolished five warp lace-frames, which were employed in making two-course-hole net: they were all very valuable frames, and one of them was 72 inches wide … Two frames were left unbroken, and it is supposed they were saved thro' a neighbouring woman calling out ‘Murder’; and who had a pistol fired at her to make her cease her noise. Mr. H. had two loaded pistols and a blunder-buss in his house, the former of which the Frame-breakers took away; and as they were descending from the window, it was thought by persons who saw them, that the nightly piquet was receiving them to conduct them to prison; but it turned out to be about 25 of their companions, armed and dressed in soldiers great-coats, one of whom was dignified with a large staff, and, it is supposed, he was the commander of the party.³¹

In Yorkshire armed men with blackened faces broke into Joseph Hirst's premises at Marsh and held up a man and two boys, then smashed up seven frames and twenty-four pairs of shears. They moved on to James Balderstone's house at Crosland Moor and held Mr Balderstone and his wife at gunpoint while smashing a frame and eight pairs of shears.³² All the machinery in the dressing shop of William Hinchcliffe at Leymoor was destroyed on the eve of Byron's speech.

A local firm of iron-founders, Enoch and James Taylor, whose foundry was at Marsden, near Huddersfield, was building shearing frames for local employers, and they were putting skilled croppers out of work. Yet neither the Taylors nor their premises were ever attacked. The Taylor brothers also made sledge-hammers, and some of these were utilised by the Yorkshire machine-breakers, who nicknamed the implements ‘Great Enoch’ after their maker. ‘Enoch made them; Enoch shall break them,’ the motto went, as the heavy hammers wrecked the machines. Nevertheless, it is curious, to say the least, that a local firm making profit from the very machinery that was threatening the croppers' jobs should have been immune from attack. Even the murder of the proprietors would hardly have seemed surprising in the circumstances of the time. One of the attackers at Hinchcliffe's shop was alleged to have shouted ‘Let's kill him!’, but was dissuaded by another, and several victims of machine-wrecking and arms raids spoke of being threatened with having their brains blown out if they did not keep quiet. So why were the Taylor brothers left alone? Both the brothers and other members of the Taylor family were well known to be free-thinking radicals. It may be that a leading Luddite with Jacobin sympathies, such as George Mellor, protected them. Mellor, twenty-two years old, has generally been identified as the leader of the Luddites in the Calder Valley area of Yorkshire.

Local magistrates, manufacturers, merchants and others met at the George Inn, Huddersfield, on Thursday 27 February to consider means of preventing further depredations, and resolved to offer a reward of a hundred guineas for information leading to any conviction for the recent attacks.³³ But no such information was forthcoming. There was a profound hostility among the working people of the north, as in the Midlands, to the capitalist employers and the magistrates who supported them. General Grey, commanding the troops in Yorkshire, reported that ‘even the more respectable portion of the inhabitants’ were ‘in unison with the deluded and ill-disposed populace with respect to the present object of their resentment, Gig Mills and Shearing Frames’.³⁴ In the Midland hosiery industry, many of the masters, who were themselves struggling to survive against competition from the wide frame cut-ups of less scrupulous manufacturers, quietly approved of the Luddites' results, even if they did not entirely acquiesce in their violent methods.

On 14 March large crowds gathered in Stockport and raided provision stores in the town, then went to the house of Peter Marsland in Heaton Lane and broke his windows, after which they threw stones at the windows of his mill across the river. Then they attacked several factories on the south side of the town, pausing on the way there to break the windows of the house of the local constable, John Birch. Finally they broke into John Goodair's mill at Edgeley, where they cut up warps and destroyed looms, before moving on to his house in Castle Street. They set fire to the house and made a bonfire of Mr Goodair's furniture in the garden. While they were at their destructive work here, the military arrived, and the Riot Act was read by Charles Prescott. When the crowd refused to disperse, the cavalry charged them with drawn swords, and infantrymen advanced with fixed bayonets. Many people were wounded, and some of the ringleaders were arrested and committed to Chester Castle to await trial.³⁵

The mob was led by two men dressed as women, who were referred to among the crowd as ‘General Ludd's wives’. This large-scale riot included attacks on food shops, and confirms the strong connection between Luddism and the frequent food riots of the period. Women, tenacious when it came to feeding their children, were often the instigators and leaders of such riots, and were thought less liable to arrest and prosecution than men. The ‘Bloody Code’ was generally perceived as being more lenient towards women. (Later in the summer a food riot in Leeds was led by a woman who called herself ‘Lady Ludd’.)

There was a spate of machine-breaking in villages in the Huddersfield area between 5 and 15 March, culminating in an attack on the premises of Francis Vickerman, a cloth finisher at Taylor Hill. Vickerman had a cropping shop with ten shearing frames, and had earlier received a letter threatening not only the machinery but his life—‘we will poll [sic] all down some night and kill him that Nave and Roag’.³⁶ At about 8:30 p.m. on 15 March a gang of men forced an entry into the premises and smashed the ten frames and thirty pairs of shears. Household furniture was also smashed, as well as all the windows in the dressing shop, and an abortive attempt was made to burn the place down. The gang departed hurriedly when shots were fired by well-placed look-outs to warn them that soldiers were approaching. The gang was led by George Mellor and William Thorpe, both cloth-dressers from Huddersfield.

Meanwhile, Revd Hammond Roberson, vicar of Liversedge and a zealous enemy of the Luddites, had written to Radcliffe on 9 March that he had ‘good reason to think we should have had a visit from these Croppers if we had not been prepared—as we are. I almost wish they would make an attempt. I think we should give a good account of them.’³⁷

Radcliffe had asked the Lord Lieutenant to beg the Home Secretary for more troops to be sent to the area, and Lord Fitzwilliam received, for once, a prompt government response from the Under-Secretary of State:

Whitehall, 14 March 1812

Sir,

I have been honored this morning with your Letter of the 12th Inst. with its Inclosures—and I am to acquaint you by Mr. Sec. Ryder's Directions that the necessary orders have been given for stationing 2 Troops of the 2nd Dragoon Guards at Huddersfield.—Should the Magistrates think it necessary to call to their aid an additional military Force I am to request that their application may be made to Lieut General Grey Commander in the York District.

I have the honor to be Sir your most obedient & faithful servant J. Beckett³⁸

Two days after the attack on Vickerman's in Yorkshire, eight men were brought before Sir John Bayley at Nottingham Assizes charged with machine-breaking. Six were convicted and the other two acquitted. The guilty men were William Carnell, aged 22; Joseph Maples, 16; Benjamin Poley, 16; Benjamin Haycock, 22; Gervas Marshal, 17; and George Green, about 22. All six were sentenced to transportation—Carnell and Maples for fourteen years; the others for seven years.³⁹

The sentences were greeted with outrage in some quarters, not for their savagery, but quite the opposite. Judge Bayley's leniency was deplored by Joseph Radcliffe, among others. Having the death penalty at his disposal, the judge, it was alleged, had failed to implement it. In actual fact, however, the men were not legally liable to the death penalty unless burglary were proved against them as well, which it was not. The Act making machine-breaking a capital offence did not receive the royal assent and become law until 20 March. Nevertheless, Radcliffe thought that Bayley had given ‘great Encouragements to the Luddites who call him their friend and me their Enemy’.⁴⁰ Even so, the foreman of the jury, a Mr Byrnny, received a threat in biblical tones from a representative of ‘General Ludd’: ‘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.’⁴¹ The two witnesses, John and Elizabeth Braithwaite, upon whose evidence Carnell and Maples were convicted, were forced to leave the area for their own safety, after receiving a reward of £50 each.⁴²

A manufacturer named George Smith at Huddersfield received, in the same month, an ominous undated letter signed in the name of ‘the General of the Army of Redressers, Ned Ludd, Clerk’. After threatening Mr Smith that if he did not dismantle his shearing frames, three hundred men would be sent to do it for him and would, for good measure, burn his buildings to ashes and murder him if he should have the ‘Impudence to fire upon any of my Men’, the letter went on to refer to ‘that Damn'd set of Rogues, Percival [sic] and 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.’ There were, the letter added, ‘2782 Sworn Heroes bound in a Bond of Necessity either to redress their Grievances or gloriously perish in the Attempt in the Army of Huddersfield alone, nearly double sworn Men in Leeds’.⁴³

Missives of this kind, which were at least semi-literate, naturally reinforced the opinions of many of those in authority who feared there was more to the Luddite outbreaks than mere economic opposition to machinery. The educated radical then, as always, came under immediate suspicion as being the prime mover and leader of the illiterate rabble. A lurid letter was addressed at about the same time to ‘all Croppers, Weavers &c & Public at large’, and signed ‘General Ludd Commander of the Army of Redressers’:

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 even 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 and establish a new one.

Apply to General Ludd Commander of the Army of Redressers.⁴⁴

Clearly these two letters were by the same author, but who was he? George Mellor, perhaps? No one was ever sure.

On 20 March, in the early hours of the morning, a sizeable mob attacked the premises of William Radcliffe at Stockport. Radcliffe was the inventor of a steam-powered dressing machine, and used power-looms in his mill. The attackers broke windows and attempted to set fire to the warehouse by throwing in lighted torches of cotton waste dipped in pitch, tar and turpentine. But the men were driven off by the military, and little damage was done. John Lloyd promptly announced a reward of £200 for information leading to the conviction of the ‘Principals concerned in this diabolical crime’. On the same day, a letter, ostensibly from Nottingham, was sent to Joseph Radcliffe:

Take notice that a Declaration was this Day filed against you in Ludd's Court at Nottingham, and unless you remains neutral judgment will immediately be signed against you for Default, I shall thence summon a jury for an Enquiry of Damages take out Execution against Both your Body and House, and then you may expect General Ludd, and his well Organised Army to Levy it with all Destruction possible.

And I am Sir your

—Solicitor to General Ludd.

s PS you have Sir rather taken an active part against the General But you are quiet and may Remain so if you Chuse (And your Brother Justices also) for him, but if you Either Convict one, or Countenance the other side as you have Done (or any of you), you may Expect your House in Flames and, your-Self in Ashes in a few days from your next move.⁴⁵

Three days after the Stockport attack, during the night of 23/24 March, a large-scale raid took place at Rawdon, near Leeds, when more than thirty machines were smashed at the firm of William Thompson & Brothers. On the next night the premises of Dickinson, Carr & Shann in Leeds came under attack, when the factory was entered and ‘eighteen pieces of fine cloth, dressed by machinery, torn and cut into shreds’.⁴⁶

After Easter, more attacks occurred in the Huddersfield area, when shearing frames were wrecked by small gangs attacking three workshops at Honley and Snowgate Head, Holmfirth. The machinery smashed in these raids included that belonging to George Smith, the recipient, a few weeks earlier, of the threatening letter quoted above. A few days after this, on the night of Thursday 9 April, a more ambitious attack was made on Josiah Foster's mill at Horbury, near Wakefield. Three hundred men were reported to have been involved in this raid. (Foster himself thought there were six hundred.) Many men were seen crossing Grange Moor from the Huddersfield direction, while others converged on the mill from the Wakefield side. This was clearly a carefully planned and coordinated operation, although many in the crowd were only sympathetic onlookers, not active Luddites. The latter, at any rate, wasted no time in achieving their object of breaking up gig-mills and shearing frames, while Mr Foster's three sons, ejected from the adjoining house in their nightshirts, were forced at gunpoint to witness the destruction of their father's property, valued at about £700.⁴⁷ After the attack a copy of the constitution of the United Britons, an old underground republican movement, was found at Foster's mill—allegedly dropped by one of the Luddites.

The jubilant Yorkshire shearmen soon had their own anthem, which, it has to be said, displays a somewhat higher literary quality than the verses of the Midland men:

Come cropper lads of high renown,
Who love to drink good ale that's brown
And strike each haughty tyrant down
With hatchet, pike and gun.
Who though the specials still advance
And soldiers nightly round us prance,
The cropper lads still lead the dance
With hatchet, pike and gun.
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.
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.
Chorus
Oh, the cropper lads for me,
The gallant lads for me,
Who with lusty stroke the shear frames broke,
The cropper lads for me.

Notes

1. HO 42/119.

2. Darvall, Popular Disturbances, p. 75.

3. E. Lipson: History of the Woollen and Worsted Industries (A. & C. Black, 1921), p. 181.

4. HO 42/117.

5. HO 42/121.

6. HO 42/120, letter dated 11 February 1812 to unknown correspondent, quoted in Aspinall: Early English Trade Unions, p. 120.

7. Darvall: Popular Disturbances, p. 75.

8. Thompson: English Working Class, p. 605.

9. Ibid., p. 630.

10. See, for instance, Aspinall: Early English Trade Unions, pp. 95n, 98, 99, 121.

11. HO 42/118. Letters from Duke of Newcastle and Revd R. Hardy, JP, dated 9 and 19 December respectively.

12. HO 42/127.

13. Radcliffe MSS, 126/50.

14. HO 42/126; Radcliffe MSS; A. Brooke & L. Kipling: Liberty or Death: Radicals, Republicans and Luddites (Huddersfield, 1993), pp. 30-1.

15. HO 42/120.

16. Quoted in Thomis: The Luddites, p. 143.

17. HO 42/120.

18. F. K. Donnelly & J. L. Baxter, ‘Sheffield and the English revolutionary tradition, 1790-1820’, in S. Pollard & C. Holmes (eds): Essays in the Economic and Social History of South Yorkshire (South Yorkshire County Council, 1976), pp. 102-4.

19. HO 42/120.

20. HO 42/118 (William Nunn to Home Office, 6 December 1811).

21. HO 42/121.

22. Robert Reid: Land of Lost Content (Heinemann, 1986), p. 92.

23. Darvall: Popular Disturbances, p. 63.

24. Nottingham Journal, 10 December 1811.

25. Leeds Mercury, 16 May 1812.

26. HO 42/119.

27. Parliamentary Debates, XXI, 808 et seq., 14, 17, 18 and 20 February 1812.

28. Peter Gunn (ed.): Byron: Selected Prose (Penguin, 1972), pp. 104-6.

29. Ibid., pp. 113-4; Annual Register, 1812, pp 35-8.

30. HO 42/123.

31. Nottingham Review, 21 February 1812.

32. Leeds Mercury, 29 February 1812; Brooke & Kipling: Liberty or Death, p. 17.

33. Leeds Mercury, 29 February 1812.

34. Darvall: Popular Disturbances, p. 62.

35. Henry Heginbotham: Stockport: Ancient and Modern (Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1882), pp. 74-5.

36. Radcliffe MSS, 126/26.

37. Ibid., 126/19.

38. Ibid., 126/24.

39. Felkin says (op cit., p. 235) that four men were sentenced to fourteen years and three to seven years. Darvall (op cit., p. 86) says that five men were sentenced to fourteen years and two to five years. R. J. White: Waterloo to Peterloo (Penguin edn, 1968) says (p. 124) that seven were sentenced to transportation for life. None of these accounts tallies with Mr Justice Bayley's own report to the Home Office, dated 18 March, in HO 42/121.

40. Radcliffe MSS, 126/96.

41. HO 42/122.

42. HO 42/123; Hammond: Skilled Labourer, p. 219.

43. HO 40/11. Quoted in full in R. Offor, ‘The Papers of Benjamin Gott in the Library of the University of Leeds’ in W. B. Crump (ed.): The Leeds Woollen Industry, 1780-1820 (Thoresby Society, 1931), pp. 229-30.

44. Ibid., p. 229.

45. Radcliffe MSS, 126/27.

46. Leeds Mercury, 28 March 1812.

47. Ibid., 11 April 1812.

Bibliography

Official and Government Documents

Home Office papers in the Public Record Office

Manuscripts

The Radcliffe Papers, Leeds City Archives

Other Primary Sources

Aspinall, A. (ed.). The Early English Trade Unions. Documents from the Home Office Papers in the Public Record Office (London, Batchworth Press, 1949)

Secondary Sources

Brooke, Alan & Kipling, Lesley. Liberty or Death: Radicals, Republicans and Luddites (Huddersfield, Workers History Publications, 1993)

Darvall, F. O. Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1969)

Felkin, William. History of the Machine-Wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufactures (Newton Abbot, David & Charles edn, 1967)

Hammond, J. L. and B. The Skilled Labourer (Longman, 1979)

Kipling, L. & Hall, N. On the trail of the Luddites (Huddersfield, Pennine Heritage Network, 1982)

Lipson, E. History of the Woollen and Worsted Industries (A. & C. Black, 1921)

Reid, Robert. Land of Lost Content (Heinemann, 1986)

Thomis, Malcolm I. The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England (Newton Abbot, David & Charles, 1970)

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin edn, 1991)

White, R. J. Waterloo to Peterloo (Penguin edn, 1968)