SOURCE: Thomis, Malcolm I. “Machine-Breakers and Luddites.” In The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England, pp. 11-40. Newton Abbot, Eng.: David & Charles, 1970.

[In the following excerpt, Thomis discusses the social and political context of the Luddite Rebellion and attempts to define exactly who the Luddites were and what they sought to achieve. He also examines inconsistencies in depictions of Luddism in writings from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.]

The Luddites present initially a problem of definition. It is useless to write or argue about them unless their identity is clear.

Employers were being threatened by letters signed ‘Ned Ludd’ in December 1811, and in that month the Nottingham Review carried reports of stocking-frame breakers or ‘Luddites as they are now called’. The name was first used, it seems, of men who broke stocking-frames in 1811, and shortly afterwards John Blackner, a historian of Nottingham, proffered an explanation of the term which has satisfied most historians since that day. Blackner suggested that ‘the framebreakers assumed this appellation from the circumstance of an ignorant youth, in Leicestershire, of the name of Ludlam, who, when ordered by his father, a framework-knitter, to square his needles, took a hammer and beat them into a heap’; when frame-breaking began in Nottingham in 1811 Ludlam was remembered and his name was adopted by the frame-breakers. As machine-breaking spread in 1812 from the hosiery and lace trades of the east Midlands into first the woollen industry of the West Riding of Yorkshire and then the cotton industry of south Lancashire and north Cheshire, it was natural that the same term should be applied to machine-breaking in these different contexts. And as contemporaries were ready to use it to cover the different kinds of machine-breaking in the years 1811-16, so have some historians accepted it as the generic term for machine-breakers whatever their time and place in history. Thus a recent examination of the breaking of threshing-machines in southern England in 1830 has talked of ‘agricultural Luddism’ and concluded that ‘Lud's true name was Swing’, for the fabulous Captain Swing was the most successful machine-breaker of them all and way ahead of the fabulous General Ludd in his achievements. And if the historian has taken over the term for all of history's machine-breakers, so has the layman accepted it for all those who resist mechanisation, automation and the like, and who are the supposed enemies of ‘progress’ where the adoption of labour-saving devices is concerned.¹

Machine-breaking was, of course, by no means a new phenomenon when it appeared in Nottinghamshire in March 1811, being almost a time-honoured tradition among certain occupational groups. Early attacks on machinery were recorded in Restoration times and continued to be recorded into Victorian times. In a period of increasingly widespread legislation against trade-union activity, which culminated in the comprehensive codification of 1799-1800, orthodox negotiation between employers and representatives of the men, supplemented where necessary by a withdrawal of labour, was not a viable proposition. Industrial workers tended, anyhow, not to be concentrated in towns in a way which made their organisation for trade-union purposes possible, but to be scattered throughout the countryside with minimal contacts with each other. In these circumstances the sophisticated techniques of a modern trade union, supported by the ultimate sanction of a properly organised strike, were impossible. Instead, there was machine-breaking, or ‘collective bargaining by riot’, which could effectively and quickly strike at an offensive local employer.²

Machine-breaking, or the threat of it, was, it has been suggested, the basis of power of a number of early trade unions; besides constituting a threat to be held out against employers, it was also a means of combating blacklegs and ensuring solidarity in industrial disputes. In the campaigns of the Spitalfields weavers, for instance, in the late 1760s, assaults on looms served a double purpose of hitting out at wage-cutting employers and bringing into line those workmen who were not co-operating with the rest by contributing to strike funds.³

Machine-breaking in the eighteenth century, it has been said, was used primarily for bringing pressure to bear upon employers for one purpose or another. In 1710 a London hosier who had infringed Charles II's Charter to the Worshipful Company of Framework-Knitters by taking no fewer than forty-nine apprentices at one time, had his frames broken in consequence. In 1779, following their abortive attempt to secure parliamentary regulation for the hosiery trade, the framework-knitters of Nottingham in their anger broke the frames of their employers in what the Hammonds have described as ‘characteristic fashion’. Ten years later the Nottingham Journal reported another incident when men with blackened faces smashed a frame of unacceptable width. All the grievances against which the framework-knitters protested, excessive employment of apprentices, absence of parliamentary regulation, and the use of wide frames, were present in the Luddite period in Nottinghamshire, and it is correct to place Midlands Luddism within this context of collective bargaining by riot and the pressurising of employers by the use of force. Early examples of these can also be found inside another industry, the woollen cloth trade, which was again to feature prominently in the Luddism of 1812. The West of England clothworkers, for instance, repeatedly pressed their demands upon their employers at various times in the eighteenth century by attacking both their industrial and private property. And similar behaviour has been recorded amongst the coal-miners; riots in Northumberland in the 1740s involved the breaking of pit-head machinery and won wage increases, while an outburst of machine-breaking in 1765 won for the men the right to select new employers when their annual contracts had expired. The Luddite period of 1811-16 saw traditional practices being pursued as the machine breakers of the Midlands used the vulnerability of their employers' property as a means of attempting to bring pressure to bear upon them over their various demands.⁴

These attacks on machines did not imply any necessary hostility to machinery as such; machinery was just a conveniently exposed target against which an attack could be made. Just as the Luddism of 1811-16 was to consist of a mixture of coercion of employers by violence and anti-machinery demonstrations, so were both these elements present in the century and a half that preceded 1811. Hostility to labour-saving machinery was no new feature of English life, as a whole code of medieval and early modern paternalist, protective legislation clearly indicates, and attacks upon such machinery were a well-established feature of the industrial scene well before the time of the Luddites. But examples have been cited of the unopposed introduction of machinery into the mining and printing industries where improvements did not threaten the position of existing groups of workers. A particularly noteworthy example of this, since it concerns areas and industries so much implicated in machine-breaking on other occasions, was the warm welcome given to the pioneers of cotton-spinning, Hargreaves and Arkwright, in Nottingham in the second half of the eighteenth century, after they had been allegedly driven from Lancashire by working-class hostility to their inventions. In their own areas their work appeared to threaten the livelihood of established interests; in Nottingham it would be a valuable supplement to the existing hosiery trade and offer the alternative employment of cotton-spinning to workmen, whose opportunities were thereby enlarged.⁵

But such a convenient harmonising of interests did not exist everywhere, and conflict often followed industrial innovation and mechanical invention. When Dutch or engine looms were brought over to London at the beginning of the seventeenth century there were complaints against the use of ‘engines for workinge of tape, lace, ribbon, and such, wherein one man doth more amongst them than seven English men can doe’, and in 1638 the Crown, confirming and extending the Charter of the London weavers, banned the use of these machines. In 1675 the weavers of Spitalfields rioted for three days against machines which could, allegedly, do the work of twenty men. Over a century later the engine-weavers were believed to be the cause of great distress to the narrow-weavers because they could do six times the normal amount of work, and in January 1768 attacks were made by the single-hand weavers against their opponents' looms. Another almost classical case of an anti-machinery attack in London was the assault on a mechanical sawmill by 500 sawyers in 1768.⁶

The cloth-finishers had repeatedly proclaimed their hostility to new machinery before the crisis year of 1812. Tudor legislation of 1551-2 had suppressed gig-mills but had been difficult to enforce, and a century later popular clamour had provoked a strengthened prohibition through a royal proclamation. In 1737 finishers in the Lancashire woollen areas complained that machinery was being extensively used and that cloth was being dressed at one-third the normal cost, causing their hands to lose work. The campaign against the gig-mill and the more recent shearing-frame, which together threatened to render valueless the traditional skill of the cropper in raising the nap of woollen cloth and cutting it level, turned to violent machine-breaking riots in the last years of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth century. These were particularly serious in the West Country woollen areas, though it was in the West Riding sector that many years of bitter opposition to machinery, old and new, finally culminated in the Luddite outbreaks of 1812. It is known that a shop containing gig-mills at Holbeck, Leeds, was burnt to the ground by an irate populace ‘about thirteen years’ before the troubles of 1812, and there were possibly other such cases in Leeds, for the manufacturers of that town were effectively subdued into suspending attempts to introduce the unpopular machinery. A few years later, in 1802, all gig-mills which had been introduced into Huddersfield shops were evidently ‘totally stopt from working’ by action from the croppers, though this was no more than a passing triumph and no effective deterrent to the experiments of later innovators.⁷

But it was, not surprisingly, the Lancashire cotton industry which experienced most cases of machine-destruction during the eighteenth century. In 1758 a man was arraigned at Lancaster Assizes for threatening to burn down the engine-house of a Manchester merchant, Garside, and it is thought that this case probably arose out of the current weavers' dispute and the opposition to the recent introduction of the swivel-loom for small-ware weaving. In 1768 and 1769 there were riots in and around Blackburn; in the second phase, in February and March 1769, a mob of a hundred attempted to pull down looms at Oswaldtwistle and Blackburn. The precise nature of these riots is in some doubt, but it seems probable that one phase was the spinning-jenny riots which were responsible, according to the story handed down, for driving Hargreaves, the inventor of the jenny, out of Lancashire, though there is some obscurity concerning the dating of the jenny riots and Hargreaves' departure for Nottingham. The most serious outburst, however, occurred in the autumn of 1779, when Arkwright's water-frames and carding-engines were destroyed as well as spinning-jennies, and it is interesting to note the participation of colliers and labourers in this cotton-trade dispute. It is also of some interest to observe that the crowds left the jennies of twenty-four spindles or under untouched, destroying only the bigger machines, with a view, evidently, to attempting to keep spinning by jenny as a domestic industry by eliminating the machines that had to be housed in factories. In the event, the displaced spinners were absorbed readily enough in the fast-expanding weaving side of the industry, and it was to be in connection with weaving that Lancashire became involved in Luddism in 1812. Already, in 1792, there had been a declared opposition to steam-loom weaving and this had been manifested in an attack on Grimshaw's factory at Manchester, which contained twenty-four of Cartwright's patent looms. The factory was burnt down by angry handloom weavers, who anticipated by twenty years the action of the Lancashire Luddites who similarly mobilised against power looms in 1812.⁸

And so it can be seen clearly enough that Luddism, the machine-breaking which started in 1811, was part of a well-established pattern of behaviour amongst industrial workers. The novelty of the events of the years 1811-16 lies rather in their coincidence and in their intensity than in their nature.

This is not an attempt to describe the entire phenomenon of machine-breaking through the ages, or to assess comprehensively the importance of resistance to mechanisation as a factor in industrial growth. It is more modestly an account of those who broke machinery in the years 1811-16, though this does not mean that all ambiguities about the meaning of terms are now at an end. The adaptations and distortions of later generations are as nothing compared with the confusions of contemporaries when they discussed the subject, and it is these confusions which must now be examined.

The distinction drawn by one historian between ‘Luddism proper’ and ‘what was called Luddism’ is a distinction which sympathetic observers were concerned to make at the time. The less sympathetic were less inclined to discriminate between the law-breakers who were involved in machine-wrecking and other people who were simultaneously carrying out illegal activities of other kinds or who were simply involved in one of the many protest movements of the time which coincided with Luddism but had not necessarily any close connection with it. The Leeds Intelligencer specifically admitted in December 1812 that it recognised no distinction between Luddites and thieves and robbers, by which it presumably meant that all were criminals and all equally bad. Others would undoubtedly have wished to add food rioters, trade unionists, parliamentary reformers, and other radicals to this list of groups who might suitably have been classified, and were in fact classified, with the machine-breakers as Luddites who disturbed the peace and tranquillity of Regency England, acting illegally or simply in a manner unacceptable to the respectable elements of society. The strands of Luddism are then difficult to separate, and it is useful to look at the other forms of unacceptable behaviour that were being practised at this time and with which Luddism was repeatedly confused. This is not to prejudge the issue of whether the Luddites were or were not something more than industrial saboteurs with industrial aims, or to claim that Luddism was something entirely separate from contemporaneous conflicts. It is simply to state that a lot of other activities were going on at the same time as Luddism which would have gone on anyhow, with which Luddism became in the popular mind confused and, as far as many commentators are concerned, closely connected. There is a not uncommon view that every act of industrial organisation from incipient trade unionism to violent sabotage, every act of political agitation from that of the mild reformer to that of the blood-seeking revolutionary, and every conceivable crime from petty larceny to murder, were somehow, in the years 1811-18, the work of the Luddites. An almighty crime wave swept over England and this was Luddism; at any rate this is often seen as Luddism.⁹

Part of the problem is to distinguish Luddism from this general outbreak of crime which seems to have accompanied and in part derived from it. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that many of the alleged Luddites were in fact simply criminals who would have existed at any time but flourished particularly at this time amidst the general unrest. As early as 5 December 1811 a correspondent from Crich in Derbyshire made the prediction, to the Home Secretary, that unless Luddism were speedily stopped all sorts of depredations would be committed under cover of frame-breaking; highway-robbers and housebreakers were very numerous, he wrote, and a dreadful winter lay ahead. This prediction was particularly well fulfilled in Yorkshire. At the subsequent Yorkshire Assizes in January 1813 Mr Justice Le Blanc traced the growth of Luddism from an anti-machinery movement, through a campaign of robbery for the possession of fire-arms, into a series of thefts by force of property of every description, leaving the original cause of the movement entirely behind. The Leeds press reported in September and October 1812 that prisoners were daily being brought in on charges of robbery under cover of Luddism, and the Lord-Lieutenant of the West Riding, Lord Fitzwilliam, received the comment that machinery had become a mere excuse for private assassination and robbery. By November Fitzwilliam saw plunder as the only real objective of the law-breakers; even the fire-arms, which had interested the robbers at an earlier stage, were now seized only if they happened to come by them in the course of their evening's work. And when Colonel Norton wrote to the Huddersfield magistrate, Joseph Radcliffe, about the seventeen Luddites executed at York, he said that he considered that only eight were real Luddites; nine were depredators who took advantage of the time.¹⁰

These people believed that Luddism, while separate from conventional crime, was an incitement to it. Others simply made no distinction between Luddism and plain crime. The Leeds Intelligencer, for instance, reported in July 1812 that General Ludd had evidently begun his operations in Leeds, and substantiated this by listing the thefts that had recently occurred. Even the Mercury, which usually reported Luddism carefully and sympathetically, slipped into the language of its opponents when it reported on 5 December 1812 the resurgence of a violent spirit of Luddism at Huddersfield, which it illustrated by citing several examples of robbery with violence by an organised gang of criminals in the area. One confessing member, James Hay, suggested that the Luddites were organised in parties of ten for their activities, but it is clear from his account that he was simply a robber who stole money and watches, though a robber who called himself a Luddite. And so it is not surprising that a Yorkshire annalist should describe the robberies of the time as his account of Yorkshire Luddism in 1812.¹¹

In fact the authorities of the day appraised the situation much more coolly and accurately than this confusion would perhaps suggest. Mr Allison wrote from Huddersfield on 15 September to inform the Home Secretary that Radcliffe had committed Batley, Fisher and Lamb, who seemed to be nothing but a set of desperate housebreakers who had taken advantage of the times to keep the neighbourhood in a state of alarm; Allison feared that there were many nests of thieves still to be broken into as well as some secret organisations amongst the croppers, but he did not confuse the two. Similarly, General Maitland, in charge of operations against the Luddites, reported on 5 November that some organised robbery was still going on in the neighbourhood of Halifax, but that this was something entirely separate from the Luddite combination. It is simply not enough to state that one or two groups of house-breakers who masqueraded as Luddites confused the picture. As far as contemporaries were concerned, the imitators had taken over from the real ones and were just as much a problem as their models. A real crime explosion was detonated by the Luddites and the masqueraders must not be dismissed so lightly because they were debasing the coinage of real Luddism, which was highly motivated and heroically accomplished.¹²

In Lancashire, too, machine-breaking began a sequence of arms raids and general robberies, and a similar situation existed in Nottinghamshire. Machine-breaking provided a cover for all sorts of criminal activities and an excuse for acts of outrage against the property of individuals. Many a crime was committed and many a private score settled during the Luddite period, it was believed, whilst the authorities were tracking down frame-breakers and looking for culprits amongst the stockingers. The Nottingham Journal separated ‘Ned Lud's’ men from the ‘true Luddites’; the former, it suggested, were simply criminals who exploited the existing situation. In the early stages of Luddism selected frames were broken but other private property left untouched; in the later stages thefts were commonplace and the breaking of frames sometimes seemed incidental to the main business. Another feature of frame-breaking in Nottinghamshire, which was peculiar to this area, was the professional nature of the enterprises and the actual employment of men to break machines. This was a further incitement and inducement to the criminals of the area, and undoubtedly prolonged Midlands Luddism at the same time as it was extending crime.¹³

One of the most common features of the disturbances during the Luddite period was that of food riots. There was nothing new about this type of behaviour in times of scarce food and high prices, and economic historians have no difficulty in showing that these conditions prevailed in 1812, the worst—and in Lancashire and Yorkshire the only—year of Luddism. In mid-April there were potato riots in Barnsley and Sheffield, and in the latter case the crowds attacked the local armoury and seized and destroyed several hundred rifles belonging to the militia. The affair, according to General Grey's report to the Home Secretary, had arisen spontaneously and was entirely unconnected with events in the machine-breaking areas of the West Riding further to the north; also the riots, once suppressed, were not followed by other lawless outbreaks. More alarming and more widespread were the mid-April food riots in the cotton country of south Lancashire and north-east Cheshire, with Manchester, Rochdale, Oldham, Bolton, Ashton, Macclesfield, Stockport and Chester all involved. These coincided in time almost exactly with the peak of Lancashire Luddism in Stockport, Middleton and Westhoughton and produced large numbers of prisoners who were tried at the subsequent Chester and Lancaster Assizes, along with men accused of machine-breaking. More food riots occurred throughout England during April, which was both the month of the greatest Luddite crisis on both sides of the Pennines and the month when authorities were most severely plagued by the more conventional problem of food rioting. It is not surprising that the two issues became confused, for the causes of food rioting and Luddism have much in common and it was always possible that what started out as a food riot might, in the current atmosphere, end in an attack upon machinery.

In this context Lancashire poses a particularly acute problem, so much so that the question has been raised of the extent to which Lancashire unrest can reasonably be described as ‘authentic Luddism’, consisting as it did, in large measure, of spontaneous riots. But food riots were inextricably bound up with Luddism in the public mind for several reasons; one was that informers suggested that there had been Luddite instigation in the fomenting of the troubles, and another was that the current terminology of Luddism came readily to the lips of those who were involved in protest movements of other kinds. The two leaders of the Stockport crowds were men dressed in women's clothes who described themselves as ‘General Ludd's wives’; Ludd could evidently be expected to rectify wrongs beyond his usual fields of operation, and where there was an issue on which women were naturally and traditionally forward in pressing a popular demand, that for lower food prices, Ludd's female half assumed leadership of the popular movement. This happened also in the Leeds corn riots of August, when ‘Lady Ludd’, a food rioter using the name of the supposed leader of the machine-breakers, put herself at the head of a band of women and boys who rioted in the marketplace and threatened meal-shops in the district. The Stockport riots of 14 April reached their climax in attacks on the house and factory of Joseph Goodair, an owner of steam-looms, and the Middleton battle of 20-21 April between the defenders of Daniel Burton's steam-loom factory and its numerous hordes of attackers began as a food riot in Oldham.

After the April upheavals the next round of northern food riots occurred in August. Again Sheffield was a disturbed centre, and again it was asserted by the local magistrates that the disturbances arose entirely as a result of the high price of flour and had ‘no relation to the system that alone is dangerous’, that of the secret meetings and oath-takings which were believed to prevail elsewhere. It was reported from Knottingley that women had almost managed to organise a bread riot there, and it was a woman, Lady Ludd, who led the corn riots in Leeds in August. But not even the Leeds Intelligencer, usually alarmist in tone, doubted that the troubles had arisen on account of high prices, and commentators are agreed that it was the price of corn at 180s (£9) a quarter which prompted the troubles.¹⁴

Meanwhile, in early September, Nottingham, the original centre of Luddism, was itself about to undergo one of its most serious food riots for many years, when the town became the scene of violence and tumult for two days on account of the high price of flour. At the start of the outbreak the rioting women and children were temporarily joined by several of the West Kent Militia stationed in the area, who were allegedly annoyed at being supplied with underweight loaves. But the disturbance was easily put down, as was the potato riot of November, and there was never the least suggestion on either occasion that the food rioting was in any way connected with machine-breaking. After all, Nottingham had experienced its annual food riot and egalitarian behaviour from its crowds for the previous half-century, and so there was nothing new about this sort of event in 1812.¹⁵

It would appear that the food riots constituted a separate and independent issue, apart from Luddism, connected to it in the sense that food prices and shortages were amongst the grievances experienced by Luddites as well as food rioters and by the fact that angry food rioters might turn Luddite. They were little more than a passing threat to public order in particular places, which they had frequently been throughout the eighteenth century and would remain during the years of an ineffective policing system. But they were a relatively simple and uncomplex problem for the authorities, though complicated at this time by the fact that they were coinciding with the less easily tackled problem of Luddism.

Unquestionably the greatest confusion, for both contemporaries and historians, has arisen from the difficulty involved in separating Luddism from the various political reform movements that were going on concurrently with it, and the greatest mistake has been, in many cases, the failure to draw any distinction between the political and industrial movements. For contemporaries who believed, as many did, that the Luddites had political designs, the obvious leaders with whom to endow the Luddites were the national leaders of the parliamentary reform movement, figures like Major Cartwright, Cobbett, or Sir Francis Burdett; of these perhaps Burdett was most frequently cited in wild and speculative communications as the man ‘to lead the Commonwealth’ or alternatively to be ‘King of England’ after the revolution. The reform leaders were naturally embarrassed by this popular identification of themselves with the exponents of industrial sabotage and direct action, and were always anxious to deny the association. Cartwright was very active promoting the cause of parliamentary reform in all the main Luddite centres in the years 1811-13, in part with the hope of weaning the working classes away from direct action and towards constitutional agitation for reform, but Luddism discredited his cause and the disaffected allegedly looked up to him as their leader in spite of his repeated denunciations of the Luddites and their methods. ‘The late rebellious state of Lancashire and Yorkshire’, wrote one man in November 1812, ‘may chiefly be attributed to the written addresses and inflammatory harangues of Burdett and Cartwright’, and even the coolest men on the side of the authorities were guilty of wild statements on the issue of Luddism and parliamentary reform. General Maitland, remarkable for his sanity and careful judgement most of the time, was reporting in late July that petitions for peace and parliamentary reform had just been opened in Lancashire and were being signed by ‘those notoriously connected with the late disturbances’. A fortnight later he again reported that the spirit of disaffection remained unabated and that the disaffected were now having meetings for parliamentary reform.

The nature of Luddite disaffection will be discussed at length later, but it seems useful to observe now that Luddism's connection with the parliamentary reform movement was no more than the support that individual Luddites would naturally give to a campaign to reform the political system. It is not surprising that George Mellor, from his condemned cell at York, asked for his name to be added to a petition for reform that was currently being prepared, or that some Luddites in both the Midlands and Lancashire should have later turned their thoughts to parliamentary reform. This is not to say that it was any of their concern as Luddites; the reforming Leeds Mercury was scandalised that this association should be voiced, and all reforming leaders did their utmost to deny it.¹⁶

Two particular cases illustrate well the contemporary and later confusion between Luddism and the political reform movement. One is the case of the ‘38’, sometimes called the ‘38 Luddites’, a group of Manchester reformers who were arrested by Joseph Nadin, deputy constable of Manchester, and tried for administering illegal oaths on the basis of evidence produced by Samuel Fleming, a spy and informer in the pay of Nadin. The proven innocence of the men on the indictment, and the much-publicised opinion of the authorities and a press favourable to them that the men were in fact guilty, constitute a controversy which is not our immediate concern. What is of interest is that the affair should have become part of the story of Luddism in Lancashire. One historian of Manchester, for instance, cites the arrest of the men as evidence that the Luddite conspiracy for breaking machinery had by that time spread to Lancashire. It had, of course, spread to Lancashire several months before the arrest, which is quite irrelevant to Lancashire Luddism anyway. Colonel Ralph Fletcher, the Bolton magistrate who played a very active role against the Luddites, suggested that the Manchester Luddites were actively engaged in raising money for the support of the thirty-eight men, and it was commonly supposed that the oaths with which they were allegedly involved were those which the machine-breakers had themselves taken. In fact the defence of the arrested men was undertaken by Brougham, engaged by Cartwright, who was strongly convinced of the men's innocence concerning oath-taking and Luddite activities. Cartwright's involvement was communicated to the authorities by the informer Yarwood. His suggestion that Cartwright had paid for the men's celebrations on acquittal was intended to lend weight to the idea of the men's guilt and Cartwright's implication in the conspiracy. In fact, it serves now to substantiate the notion of the men's innocence of the charge on which they were indicted; the authorities had done their best to find evidence of guilt by transcribing, annotating, and interpreting all the letters written by the men as prisoners, but they were unable to find anything incriminating. Yet the fact remains that the ‘38’ invariably feature as an integral part of the Luddite story.¹⁷

Similarly with John Baines, the Halifax hatter; along with his sons, he was convicted on the evidence of spies of administering illegal oaths. He stood trial at the York Assizes in January 1813, together with the men who were convicted of Luddite attacks on mills and the murder of William Horsfall, and Baines inevitably features in accounts of Yorkshire Luddism as the leading figure amongst the Luddites in Halifax. His guilt was proven more to the satisfaction of the authorities than to that of historians; the Crown expected trouble because of the nature of their witnesses, and there is some ground to suppose that they could have been broken and that the defence mismanaged its case. The question of the involvement of Baines in Luddism remains even more open, for the trial revealed nothing. The so-called ‘verbal tradition’ collected by Frank Peel in the late nineteenth century has Baines as a former Jacobin who patronised and encouraged the Luddites, but the leading modern authority on the question declines to commit himself on the issue of whether political radicals such as Baines were directly involved. It seems probable that Baines and his family were not involved in actual machine-breaking, that as politically orientated working-class intelligentsia they would have serious doubts about the efficacy of machine-breaking as a means of achieving the desired ends, but that as ex-Paineites they were not unhappy to see a blow being struck against authority. But there is no means of knowing whether they properly belong to the Luddite story; this is just one more factor which makes it difficult to tell.¹⁸

Again, in the trade-union sphere as well as the political one, there is a separate story to tell of working-class industrial activity which sometimes appears to overlap with the Luddite narrative, sometimes appears to have become thoroughly confused with it, and which was none the less a development of much greater antiquity and future than the Luddite phase in industrial relations. The extent of trade-union involvement will be considered in some detail later; it is enough to say now that the fairly well-established trade-union practices that prevailed and the trade-union organisation that existed in the industries troubled by Luddism were further factors which complicated the task of authorities and historians in determining what the Luddites were doing.

Of all the areas associated with Luddism, unquestionably the one which poses the most difficulties for the historian is Lancashire, for there all the many complicating elements were present in abundance; the criminals, the food rioters, the parliamentary reformers and the trade unionists were there in force, activated in part by spies and agents-provocateurs, and all of them combining to obscure the phenomenon of machine-breaking which went on in their midst. There was one element that characterised the Luddism of 1812 and separated it from other earlier movements of political and industrial protest, namely the conspiracy over a wide front to attack industrial machinery. Such attacks did occur in Lancashire in 1812, but they were perhaps so very incidental to other matters as to justify the serious raising of the query whether the unrest in Lancashire may be described as ‘authentic Luddism’.¹⁹

So it is necessary now to attempt the essential definition of terms and to say who the Luddites were. For immediate purposes the Luddites were not the Pentrich or Grange Moor rebels, the would-be revolutionaries or the parliamentary reformers, the food rioters or the trade unionists. Nor were they even the Swing rioters or other agricultural or industrial workers who destroyed machinery and practised industrial sabotage as a means of imposing conditions upon employers or making some sort of protest gesture. They were rather the people who broke machinery as a deliberate, calculated policy in a particular historical period, the years 1811-16. It would be possible to examine the phenomenon of machine-breaking in Scotland, in France, or elsewhere, but this study is confined to the English machine-breakers in this period who, for present purposes, are being identified as the Luddites. And it may well be necessary during the course of the examination to ask if the use of one blanket term to cover episodes in different parts of the country does not suggest for Luddism a greater degree of homogeneity and national purpose than it in fact possessed. Perhaps Luddism, like Chartism, is no more than a convenient term which can be as misleading as it is helpful if its regional nature is not emphasised, though it would be useless at this stage to prejudge the issue of how far links were established and maintained between Luddites in different parts of the country and how far they experienced any sense of common purpose in what they did.

To define a subject is not to justify it, and new writing on an old subject is justifiable only if something remains to be said either about the actual events which occurred or the meaning to be placed upon them. Surprisingly for a subject so limited in extent, Luddism has left quite a number of ambiguities about what actually happened. It is not difficult to find accounts of individual incidents which have a fair measure of agreement with each other; it is very difficult to add up the incidents and produce a total which receives general concurrence. It is highly unlikely that historians have still to uncover from diaries, the press, or other sources some previously unnoted Luddite outrage of which we are still in total ignorance, yet it is a difficult task to put together the ones that are known about and to say just how intensively they occurred. And if some apparently basic assembling of fairly elementary material has still to be accomplished, there remains almost infinite scope for disagreement about the meaning of all the incidents which are being assembled. When historians are in agreement about the Luddites, historical controversy will be at an end. It is sound policy to attempt to draw ‘only the most tentative conclusions’ on many of the main issues arising out of Luddism, even though it is not always possible to resist the temptation to draw conclusions which are something more than tentative.²⁰

It would be almost impossible to list all the erroneous statements that have been made about Luddism, that is alleged statements of fact which in no way depend upon interpretation or opinion. A few of these will serve to illustrate the curious things that have been said. The most common confusion has concerned the stocking-frame, the first object of Luddite attention. Though in use since Elizabethan times and basically unchanged in intervening years, it acquired in 1811 a villainous reputation for having come suddenly into existence and having created massive redundancy. The myth of the Luddite who resisted the introduction of machinery was born, and it was nurtured by the behaviour of the Yorkshire Luddites, who really were resisting machinery that created unemployment. Some press accounts blamed only the improvements alleged to have occurred in the stocking-frame, but others went the entire way, to be followed later by historians who wrote of the invention of a new stocking-frame, the violent opposition in Nottingham to the use of stocking-frames (as if the stockinger was demanding the ancient right to use four knitting-needles), and Luddites who went around the countryside destroying machinery wherever they heard it was erected. A slight refinement of this myth has appeared in the official introduction to the Radcliffe Manuscripts, where the Yorkshire Luddites are described as ‘followers of the movement in Nottingham against the introduction of machinery into the mills’, mills which, unfortunately for the stockingers and their standard of living, did not come into being for a further forty years.

If the fact that the Midlands stockingers had been working stocking-frames for over 200 years at the time of Luddism has led to misunderstanding, so too has the fact that Nottingham Luddism involved two industries, hosiery and lace, which are repeatedly confused. And the extent of the upheavals was a further subject for contemporary misunderstanding which historians have hardly yet managed to clear up. In December 1811, for instance, the Statesman carried a report that 20,000 stocking-makers were unemployed, that 900 lace-frames had already been broken at the rate of 20-30 per night (though stocking-frames would have been a more appropriate target for stocking-makers), that corn and hay stacks were being fired throughout Nottinghamshire, and the whole county for twenty miles around the town was full of these ruinous proceedings, which could not be checked. This inaccurate and highly misleading description unfortunately set the tone for many later accounts. It is perhaps not surprising, when accurate information was apparently so difficult to come by and communicate, that the House of Lords Committee of Secrecy should have thought that Liversedge and Heckmondwike, in the heart of the heavy woollen district, which names they encountered in connection with Rawfolds Mill, were in the neighbourhood of the moors dividing Lancashire and Yorkshire. And there is still some tendency to view Yorkshire Luddism as set in a scene from Wuthering Heights rather than in the gentler countryside of Shirley where it properly belongs. But the differences between Yorkshire and Lancashire, wool and cotton, lace and hosiery, moors and pastures, must be left to emerge rather than be explained in detail to set the record straight.²¹

But if the record should ever be straightened, it would still be difficult to produce a consensus account of Luddism which contained universally acceptable answers to questions about who the Luddites were, why they were Luddites, precisely what they were after, and what exactly they achieved. Some of these remain highly contentious issues, and it is useful briefly to take stock of the historiography of the subject at the present time.

Historians, however great their professionalism and technical competence, remain human beings. We are repeatedly warned that by and large they find in the past what they want to find there, and the factors that influence them in their search are too numerous and complex to warrant discussion here. Yet these factors are particularly important where a subject such as the Luddites is concerned, for it is on this sort of subject that the historian has had particular difficulty in achieving, not objectivity, for this is beyond him, but a recognition of the subjectivity which pervades his work. And so the Luddites have usually been presented as the people we want them to have been and at the same time we have believed that this is what they really were.

Luddites have too frequently had to be either villains or heroes. At least one eminent historian has recently deplored the fact that modern writers are disinclined to apportion blame and guilt and that there are no longer right and wrong sides to be identified. Presumably he is not too unhappy at Luddite historiography, which has always had a generous sprinkling of good men and bad men. A splendid example of the moral judgement that found against the Luddites is that of J. Russell, who in 1906 condemned the Luddites along with other radicals and trade unionists who mistakenly supposed that they could alter society by their agitations, and this in a most detached and scholarly publication which would never believe itself descending to partisan political controversy. The Hammonds, while in no way escaping from their own predispositions, did manage a more balanced outlook in lamenting the conditions that produced Luddism but regretting the means that were chosen to ameliorate them. Their Fabian outlook has in turn brought them heavy censure of late. It has been suggested that the Luddites were given a raw deal by the Hammonds for not being well-behaved trade unionists or parliamentary socialists of a kind who later gave direction to the working-class movement in England and brought it to national respectability. Instead of being judged in the light of how things turned out, they should, it is argued, be judged in their immediate context, for they were living men faced with real and severe problems, not raw material for historians, waiting to be judged as part of some great process. And seen in this way they have been adjudged men of heroic stature and noble achievement. We are now almost back amongst the cowboys and Indians, our good men and bad men, with the traditional roles reversed, the upholders of law rather than the law-breakers, the employers rather than the workers, taking on the part of the villains, and the Luddites filling the role of the virtuous.²²

Naturally opinions have changed on just about all aspects of Luddism. To the authorities of the day its causes were not a matter of prime importance; they saw the problem as one of law and order and their main concern was to suppress Luddism and punish the evil-doers for the wrongs committed. It was left to critics of the government to suggest that an equal concern should be the matters which gave rise to Luddism and that a more constructive approach to the problem might be to investigate the causes with a view to eliminating them, rather than simply to deal with the outward manifestations of the discontent. Historians have, of course, rectified this situation and, seeing the explanation of causes as just as much their task as the description of events, have investigated the causes of Luddism at some length; at too great a length, perhaps, for some who feel that we are now in danger of failing to see the wood for the trees. We have spent so much time accumulating statistics and basing conclusions upon them that we have failed to appreciate the more basic, fundamental point that Luddism represented ‘the crisis point in the abrogation of paternalist legislation, and in the imposition of the political economy of laissez faire upon, and against the will and conscience of, the working people’. We should take a broader, more imaginative view of the causes of Luddism and not see it in too narrow an economic and historical context, though the Luddites themselves must be seen in precisely this sort of context.²³

On the question of Luddite aims we have now completed a curious full circle. Whereas many contemporaries were convinced that the industrial grievances of the Luddites were only symptomatic of a deeper discontent and that their industrial activities were merely the forerunner of much more serious political activities which would culminate in revolution, it has been the main task of the historian to deny that the Luddites had any such intentions and to place them firmly in an industrial context, with industrial grievances and industrial aims. And that was Luddite orthodoxy until the nineteenth century alarmists and sensationalists found surprising support for their views and interpretations from E. P. Thompson, who felt that the Luddites, judged as mere discontented workers, were receiving less than justice. They have now re-emerged, still with their economic discontent, but also with the alternative morality and alternative political system towards which they were groping, some more vaguely than others. If the Luddites were heroic figures worthy of lionisation, it follows that their opponents were right to be frightened of them and to treat them as seriously as they did, and the extremist interpretations of partially informed and panic-stricken magistrates are now acquiring a belated justification in the most unexpected of places.²⁴

Similarly, we are being urged to change our opinions radically about the nature of Luddite achievements. If contemporaries thought that Luddism had any consequences, they measured them in terms of the harmful effects that machine-breaking had on industrial growth, frightening away capital from particular areas and retarding mechanisation in industries which needed it. They believed that the Luddites had misjudged completely their own interests and that their behaviour could have nothing but detrimental results for them; machine-breaking brought them no profits and, in so far as working-class prosperity derived from industrial prosperity, it damaged their prospects for the future. It eventually became clear that the damaging consequences of Luddism for industrial development had been exaggerated, but the objective appraisal of Darvall could find no working-class gains from Luddism save the indirect ones which came as a result of reforms a couple of decades later, reforms which, it might be argued, owed their existence in part to the deficiencies in the old system that Luddism had exposed.

Perhaps the first major attempt to suggest that the Luddites had appraised their situation realistically and acted rationally and profitably was made by E. J. Hobsbawm, who suggested collective bargaining by riot as a feasible alternative to more orthodox trade unionism in the years of the Combination Laws. The problem was to show that the collective bargaining had actually achieved something and had been a worthwhile enterprise. The view that it had was later advanced with great force when it was suggested that Luddism represented a more realistic assessment of the economic situation than the employers were showing and that the successes of the Luddites were to be measured in currency other than a purely economic one, that is their contribution to working-class consciousness through their very willingness to act illegally and challenge society. A dispassionate observer who needs to see achievements in some measurable currency continues to have difficulty in accepting that the Luddites bettered themselves, their successors, or their industries, through their efforts. It is difficult to see how they contributed positively to thinking on the problems of any of the industries in which they were involved, and there must still be a strong inclination to see their thinking and methods as irrelevant to anything other than an immediate satisfaction of a sense of grievance deeply felt. They were in no sense moving towards the thinking or techniques which were eventually able to strengthen their own bargaining powers in the economic battle or give them power to wield inside the state.²⁵

And if it is necessary to re-pose all the fundamental questions about Luddism and the Luddites, it is equally necessary to ask what means are now available to help ensure that these questions shall be given accurate answers. On the official side the documentation is vast, with the enormous bulk of material in the Public Record Office being supplemented in recent years by the papers of the Lord-Lieutenant of the West Riding, Earl Fitzwilliam, and the magistrate most active in suppressing Yorkshire Luddism, Joseph Radcliffe of Huddersfield. On the Luddite side there is, of course, very little; by the very nature of their existence the Luddites were precluded from keeping records of their activities, and it was only after individuals were taken into captivity that they contributed to the written record of their enterprises, through depositions and confessions. The events of Luddism are well enough known, but it has recently been suggested that much work remains for the local historian in the provincial centres before its mysteries are properly cleared up. It must still be felt that the local stages are being filled by names rather than by people and there is much that the historian would like to know about the individuals who were involved in Luddism, their motives, their activities, and their feelings.

Some of this can be discovered by reference to what has been described as ‘oral tradition’, stories handed down by word of mouth and recorded by such people as Frank Peel who attempted to check and confirm much that was told to him before producing his account of Yorkshire Luddism in the 1880s. This kind of evidence, lively and entertaining as it can undoubtedly be, is, however, some of the most difficult to handle, and there is a danger that it might be given a weighting and importance beyond its merits. Peel did perhaps attempt to check his material against the files of the Leeds Mercury, but that did not prevent him from making a great number of mistakes in his facts and his interpretation, and he is not entitled to be considered a primary source of the reliability that has been accorded him. But even if this sort of account could not be proved in parts erroneous and misleading, it would still be undesirable for a historian to accept the authenticity of a story on the ground that it was ‘according to tradition’. Traditions are often notoriously corrupted versions of the original, and traditions relating to Luddism have doubtless been determined by what men have chosen to remember and hand down rather than by what actually occurred at the time. ‘Popular legend’ might have given pride of place to the great hammers used by the Yorkshire Luddites in their midnight maraudings, but ‘popular legend’ is not necessarily the stuff of which good history is made, however entertaining it might be for its own sake.²⁶

Whether much new information is still recoverable must be a matter of doubt, and until more is known the problem is to make proper use of the information that is available. The great figures in Luddite historiography, the Hammonds and Darvall, looked at the source material and reached their conclusions on the basis of what they could show to be so from the records. Speculations and accusations which could not be justified or substantiated by the documents were discounted, and in consequence these historians have been accused of writing unimaginatively. This ‘failure of the historical imagination’, which has allegedly afflicted other and more recent writers is, indeed, a problem in interpreting material which is usually not so complete as its user would wish, but the use of the imagination, while a necessary part of the historian's technique, constitutes a comparable problem if it leads to flights of pure fancy. The hypothesis of the imaginative historian must fall some way short of the fiction of the novel-writer if it is to be a useful working basis for future research. What any reassessment of Luddism now involves is, in fact, a further look at the issues and traditional accounts in the light of E. P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class, for early nineteenth century English history can never be the same again since the publication of this work.²⁷

Notes

1. Nottingham Review, 20 December 1811; Blackner, J. History of Nottingham (1815) pp 401-3; Hobsbawm, E. J. and Rudé, G. Captain Swing (1969) pp 17, 19 and jacket

2. Hobsbawm, E. J. The Machine Breakers, Past and Present (1952) 1

3. Hobsbawm, E. J. The Machine Breakers; the term ‘blackleg’ in fact belongs to the second half of the century, before which time different local terms were employed, eg ‘nobs’ in Scotland; McCallum, D. Old and New Glasgow (1890) p 7

4. Hobsbawm, E. J. The Machine Breakers; Henson, G. History of the Framework Knitters (1831) pp 95-6; Hammond, J. L. and B. The Skilled Labourer (1919) p 226; Nottingham Journal, 3 November 1787; Rudé, G. The Crowd in History (1964) pp 66-77

5. Hobsbawm, E. J. The Machine Breakers; Baines, E. History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1835) pp 151, 158

6. Wadsworth, A. P. and Mann, J. D. L. The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600-1780 (1931) p 101; Rudé, G. The Crowd in History pp 71-3

7. Wadsworth, A. P. and Mann, J. D. L. The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600-1780 (1931) p 353; Leeds Mercury, 25 January 1812; Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class (1963) p 525, quotes Fitzwilliam MSS F45d for Huddersfield incident

8. Wadsworth, A. P. and Mann, J. D. L. The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1600-1780, pp 302, 375, 380, 478-81; Bythell, D. The Handloom Weavers (1969) p 74

9. Rudé, G. The Crowd in History, p 85; Leeds Intelligencer, 7 December 1812

10. HO (Home Office papers) 42/118, Crich correspondent to HO, 5 December 1811; Fitzwilliam MSS 45/140; HO 42/129, Fitzwilliam to Maitland, 2 November 1812; Radcliffe MSS 126/114

11. Leeds Intelligencer, 13 July 1812; Leeds Mercury, 5 December 1812; HO 42/130, Confession of James Hay, 14 December 1812; Mayall, J. Annals of Yorkshire (1859) pp 239-240

12. HO 42/127, Allison to HO, 15 September 1812; Fitzwilliam MSS 46/94; Thompson, E. P. The Making … p 572

13. HO 42/119, Brief Statement of Transactions in the County and Town of Nottingham; HO 42/153, Enfield to HO, 14 October 1816; Nottingham Journal, 10 January 1812; HO 42/117, Coldham to HO, 13 December 1811; Sutton, J. F. The Date Book of Nottingham, 1750-1850 (1852) p 334

14. Leeds Mercury, 18, 25 April 1812; Fitzwilliam MSS 45/127, 128; HO 42/122, Grey to HO, 18 April 1812; Thompson, E. P. The Making … pp 565-6; Manchester Mercury, 21 April 1812; Manchester Commercial Advertiser, 21 April 1812; Parsons, E. History of Leeds (1834) p 74; Leeds Mercury, 15, 22 August 1812; HO 42/125, Maitland to HO, 22 August 1812; Leeds Mercury, 15 August 1812; Leeds Intelligencer, 24 August 1812

15. Nottingham Review, 11 September 1812; Nottingham Journal, 7 November 1812

16. HO 40/1, ‘Ned Ludd’ to Mr Smith, undated; HO 42/127, details of persons committed at York; Miller, N. C. ‘John Cartwright and Radical Reform, 1808-19’, English Historical Review, LXXXIII, 1968; HO 42/129, Higgins to HO, 2 November 1812; HO 42/125, Maitland to HO, 20 July 1812; HO 42/127, 5 August 1812; Thompson, E. P. The Making … p 602; Leeds Mercury, 19 September 1812

17. Bruton, F. A. Short History of Manchester and Salford (1927) pp 169-70; HO 42/124, Fletcher to HO, 30 June 1812; Miller, N. C. ‘John Cartwright and Radical Reform 1808-19’; HO 40/2, Lloyd to HO, 16 October 1812; HO 42/129, verbatim copies of extracts from prisoners' letters

18. HO 42/129, Hobhouse to HO, 29 November 1812; Peel, F. The Risings of the Luddites (1880) p 24; Thompson, E. P. The Making … p 590

19. Ibid pp 565-6

20. Ibid p 575

21. Leeds Mercury, 23 November 1811; Astle, W. ed History of Stockport (1922) p 7; Sykes, D. F. E. History of Huddersfield and its vicinity (1898) p 273; Stirling, A. M. W. Annals of a Yorkshire House (1911); Statesman article quoted in Leeds Mercury, 21 December, 1811; Report of House of Lords Committee of Secrecy, July 1812; Rudé, G. The Crowd in History p 86

22. Taylor, A. J. P. The Observer, 27 July 1969; Russell, J. ‘The Luddites’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society, 1906; Hammond, J. L. & B. The Skilled Labourer (1919); Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class.

23. Ibid p 543

24. eg Darvall, F. O. Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (1934); Thompson, E. P. The Making. …

25. Darvall, F. O. Popular Disturbances … pp 215-17; Hobsbawm, E. J. The Machine Breakers; Thompson, E. P. The Making … pp 550-1, 601

26. Introduction to fourth edition of Peel, F. The Risings of the Luddites, by E. P. Thompson (1969) p XV; eg Thompson, E. P. The Making … pp 557, 559

27. Ibid p 577 and postscript to 2nd edition

Primary Sources

Manuscript

Home Office Papers

HO 40. Correspondence and papers, Disturbances

HO 42. Correspondence and Papers, Domestic and General George III Correspondence, 1782-1820

Treasury Solicitors' Papers (TS)

Fitzwilliam MSS

Newcastle MSS (NeC)

Radcliffe MSS

Nottingham Borough Records. Framework-knitters' Papers, 1812-14; Letters from London Police Officers, M429

Place Collection. Additional MSS 27798-27817

Printed

Official

Parliamentary Debates

Parliamentary Papers

Newspapers

Leeds Intelligencer

Leeds Mercury

Manchester Commercial Advertiser

Manchester Mercury

Nottingham Journal

Nottingham Review

Other near-contemporary writing

Baines, E. History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain (1835)

Blackner, J. History of Nottingham (1815)

Felkin, W. History of the Machine-wrought Hosiery and Lace Manufacturers (1867, reprinted Newton Abbot 1967)

Historical Account of the Luddites of 1811, 1822, and 1813 with Report of their Trials (Huddersfield 1862)

Knight, J. (intro) The Trial at Full Length of the 38 Men from Manchester

Parsons, E. History of Leeds (1834)

Raynes, F. An Appeal to the Public, containing an account of Services rendered during the Disturbances in the North of England in the year 1812 (1817)

Sutton, J. F. The Date Book of Nottingham, 1750-1850 (1852)

Secondary Works of particular help

Bythell, D. The Handloom Weavers (1969)

Chambers, J. D. ‘The Vale of Trent, 1670-1800’, Economic History Review Supplement 3, (1957)

Crump, W. B. The Leeds Woollen Industry (1931)

Crump, W. B. and Gorbal, G. History of the Huddersfield Woollen Industry (1935)

Darvall, F. O. Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (1934)

Hammond, J. L. & B. The Skilled Labourer, 1760-1832 (1919)

Hobsbawm, E. J. The Machine Breakers, Past & Present (1952) 1

Peel, F. The Risings of the Luddites (1880)

Peel, F. Spen Valley Past and Present (1893)

Rudé, G. F. E. The Crowd in History (1964)

Russell, J. ‘The Luddites’, Transactions of the Thoroton Society (1906)

Thompson, E. P. The Making of the English Working Class (1963)

Wadsworth, A. P. and Mann, J. D. L. The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire, 1660-1780 (1931)