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