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These Irish were neither stupid nor barbarians. Mayhew often remarked upon their generosity, their ‘powers of speech and quickness of apprehension’. They adhered to a different value-system than that of the English artisan; and in shocking English proprieties one feels that they often enjoyed themselves and acted up the part. Often, a Bolton attorney recalled, they played the fool in the dock, bringing forward a tribe of countrymen as ‘character witnesses’, showing an acute knowledge of legal procedure in their prevarications, and making magistrates dizzy with their blarney. The same disregard for veracity made many of them consummate beggars. Generous to each other, if they saved money it was for some definite project – emigration to Canada or marriage. To bring wives and children, brothers and sisters, to England they would ‘treasure up halfpenny after halfpenny’ for years, but ‘they will not save to preserve either themselves or their children from the degradation of a workhouse…’ As street-sellers they remained in the poorest grades, as hawkers or rag-dealers; their temperament, Mayhew dryly commented, was not adapted to ‘buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest’. To the English Poor Laws they maintained a cheerful predatory attitude. They turned the obsolete Settlement Laws to their advantage, joy-riding up and down the country at parochial expense (and who would know whether Manchester was or was not the parish of origin of Paddy M’Guire?) and slipping out of the overseer’s cart when the stopping-place seemed congenial. They would accept parochial relief ‘without the least sense of shame’.1
the pages before go into detail about how the irish were seen as pathologically lazy and dumb etc
[...] The Irish were, a Catholic priest admitted in 1836, ‘more prone to take part in trades unions, combinations and secret societies than the English’. ‘They are the talkers and ring-leaders on all occasions,’ claimed another witness. Engels saw the ‘passionate, mercurial Irish temperament’ as the precipitate which brought the more disciplined and reserved English workers to the point of political action:
… the mixing of the more facile, excitable, fiery Irish temperament with the stable, reasoning, persevering English must, in the long run, be productive only of good for both. The rough egotism of the English bourgeoisie would have kept its hold on the working-class much more firmly if the Irish nature, generous to a fault, and ruled primarily by sentiment, had not intervened, and softened the cold, rational English character in part by a mixture of the races, and in part by the ordinary contact of life.
We may dispute Engels’ language of ‘nature’ and ‘race’. But we need only replace these terms to find that his judgement is valid. It was an advantage to the employers, at a time when precision engineering coexisted with tunnelling by means of shovel and pick, to be able to call upon both types of labour. But the price which had to be paid was the confluence of sophisticated political Radicalism with a more primitive and excitable revolutionism. [...]
The process of industrialization is necessarily painful. It must involve the erosion of traditional patterns of life. But it was carried through with exceptional violence in Britain. It was unrelieved by any sense of national participation in communal effort, such as is found in countries undergoing a national revolution. Its ideology was that of the masters alone. Its messianic prophet was Dr Andrew Ure, who saw the factory system as ‘the great minister of civilization to the terraqueous globe’, diffusing ‘the life-blood of science and religion to myriads… still lying “in the region and shadow of death”.’1 But those who served it did not feel this to be so, any more than those ‘myriads’ who were served. The experience of immiseration came upon them in a hundred different forms; for the field labourer, the loss of his common rights and the vestiges of village democracy; for the artisan, the loss of his craftsman’s status; for the weaver, the loss of livelihood and of independence; for the child, the loss of work and play in the home; for many groups of workers whose real earnings improved, the loss of security, leisure and the deterioration of the urban environment. R. M. Martin, who gave evidence before the Hand-Loom Weavers’ Committee of 1834, and who had returned to England after an absence from Europe of ten years, was struck by the evidence of physical and spiritual deterioration:
Between Despard and Brandreth there stretches the illegal tradition. It is a tradition which will never be rescued from its obscurity. But we may approach it from three directions: first, from considering some surviving evidence as to the ‘underground’ between 1800 and 1802; second, from some criticism of the historical sources; and, third, from some examination of the quasi-legal trade union tradition. Unless we make this preparation, we shall be unable to understand the Luddite. movement, and the post-war years of the Pentridge Rising, Oliver the Spy, and the Cato Street Conspiracy.
The agitation promptly went underground once more. We may once again try to follow its history in the West Riding. Throughout the summer of 1801 meetings continued, mainly at night; Batley, Ossett, and Saddleworth are added to the list of centres. At Halifax, in July 1801, some kind of delegate committee appears to have met, with representatives from the textile towns and a speaker from Sheffield. There was talk of oath-taking or ‘twisting-in’ to the United Britons or Englishmen, whose main centre of activities may have been across the Pennines in Bolton. All who joined were required to answer in the affirmative three questions: (1) Did they desire a total change of system? (2) Were they willing to risk themselves in a contest to leave their posterity free? (3) ‘Are you willing to do all in your power to create the Spirit of Love, Brotherhood & Affection among the friends of freedom & omit no opportunity of getting all the political information you can…’ [...]
Hence the Home Office records (our main first-hand sources) often make perplexing reading. Like uncomprehending travellers, the magistrates and commanding officers were at the mercy of their informants. A friendly society might appear as an engine of sedition to a man who had never thought of the cost of burial to the poor. A ranting field preacher might sound like an agent of Despard. Employers might wish to freeze the magistrate’s blood with tales of Jacobins in order to ensure harsh treatment for trade unionists. [...]
For this reason the secret political tradition appears either as a series of catastrophes (Despard, Pentridge, Cato Street), or else as a trickle of propaganda so secretive and small-scale, and so hemmed in by suspicion, that it scarcely had any effect, except in those places where it effected a junction with the secret industrial tradition. Such a junction took place in the Luddite movement, and in Nottingham and Yorkshire the Luddites resisted permeation by spies with extraordinary success. Here the authorities were faced with a working-class culture so opaque that (unless a Luddite prisoner broke down under questioning and in fear of the scaffold) it resisted all penetration. When two experienced London police magistrates were sent down to Nottingham, they reported to the Home Office: ‘almost every creature of the lower order both in town & country are on their side’.
And here we may make several obvious points, as to the study of Luddism in particular. If there had been an underground in these years, by its very nature it would not have left written evidence. It would have had no periodicals, no minute Books, and, since the authorities watched the post, very little correspondence. One might, perhaps, have expected some members to have left personal reminiscences; and yet, to this day, no authenticated first-hand accounts by Luddites have come to light. But many active Luddites, while literate, were not readers and writers. Moreover, we have to look ahead from 1813. Luddism ended on the scaffold; and at any time in the next forty years to have proclaimed oneself as having been a Luddite instigator might have brought unwelcome attention from the authorities, perhaps even recriminations in the community where the relatives of those who had been executed still lived. Those Luddites who had left their past behind them had no more wish than a man with a criminal record to be reminded of their youth. [...]
hell yeah
This analysis already exists,1 but it may be corrected and supplemented by evidence which has more recently come to light. Luddism proper, in the years 1811–17, was confined to three areas and occupations: the West Riding (and the croppers), south Lancashire (and the cotton weavers), and the framework-knitting district centred on Nottingham and taking in parts of Leicestershire and Derbyshire.
Of these three groups, the croppers or shearmen2 were skilled and privileged workers, among the aristocracy of the woollen workers; while the weavers and framework-knitters were outworkers, with long artisan traditions, undergoing a deterioration in status. The croppers come closest to the Luddites of popular imagination. They were in direct conflict with machinery which both they and their employers knew perfectly well would displace them. [...]
However obsolete the statute of Edward VI prohibiting gig-mills may have been, it is important that the croppers were aware of it and held that protection against displacement by machinery was not only their ‘right’ but also their constitutional right. They also knew of the clause in the Elizabethan Statute of Artificers enforcing a seven years’ apprenticeship, and of a Statute of Philip and Mary limiting the number of looms which might be employed by one master. Not only did they know of these laws: they attempted to put them in force. In 1802 they canvassed public opinion in the West Riding, and won great sympathy in their contest with Gott. Their opposition to new machinery does not appear to have been unthinking or absolute; proposals were in the air for the gradual introduction of the machinery, with alternative employment found for displaced men, or by a tax of 6d. per yard upon cloth dressed by machinery, to be used as a fund for the unemployed seeking work. The croppers seem to have cherished some hope of a general negotiation within the trade, and were chiefly indignant at the attitude of a few masters, motivated by ‘Revenge and Avarice’, and who sought to press home their advantage in the ‘consciousness of… the facility with which the law favours the conviction of illegal combinations’.1
Indeed, the framework-knitters claimed a constitutional sanction even for frame-breaking. Under the Charter granted by Charles II there was a clause empowering the Framework-Knitters’ Company to appoint deputies to examine goods, and to cut to pieces those badly or deceitfully manufactured. These powers the Luddites now assumed as rights. In reply to magisterial proclamations against their activities, they issued a counter DECLARATION, be-spattered with ‘Whereases’ and ‘Whenevers’, declaring both their intention and their right to ‘break and destroy all manner of frames whatsoever that make the following spurious articles and all frames whatsoever that do not pay the regular price heretofore agreed to by the Masters and Workmen’. A list of the offensive frames and practices was subjoined.
The major phase of Nottinghamshire Luddism was between March 1811 and February 1812; and within that period there were two peaks, March and April, and November to January, when frame-breaking spread to Leicestershire and Derbyshire. In this phase perhaps 1,000 frames were destroyed, at a cost of between £6,000 and £10,000, and numerous articles damaged. [...]