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