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. [...]

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. [...]

[...] It is true that Napoleon’s Contintental System and the retaliatory Orders had so disrupted the markets for British textiles that the industries of Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands were stagnant. Both war and successive bad harvests had contributed to raising the price of provisions to ‘famine’ heights. But this will not do as an explanation of Luddism; it may help to explain its occasion, but not its character. These years of distress, 1811 and 1812, added the supreme grievance of continuous hunger to existing grievances. It made each device by which the least scrupulous masters sought to economize on labour, and cheapen its value (power-looms, shearing-frames, or ‘cut-ups’), seem more offensive. But the character of Luddism was not that of a blind protest, or of a food riot (as took place in many other districts). Nor will it do to describe Luddism as a form of ‘primitive’ trade unionism. As we have seen, the men who organized, sheltered, or condoned Luddism were far from primitive. They were shrewd and humorous; next to the London artisans, some of them were amongst the most articulate of the ‘industrious classes’. A few had read Adam Smith, more had made some study of trade union law. Croppers, stockingers, and weavers were capable of managing a complex organization; undertaking its finances and correspondence; sending delegates as far as Ireland or maintaining regular communication with the West Country. All of them had had dealings, through their representatives, with Parliament; while duly-apprenticed stockingers in Nottingham were burgesses and electors.

Luddism must be seen as arising at 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. [...]

It is of course easy to fall back on an otiose ‘economist’ explanation, which attributes Luddism to the simple cause and effect of the Orders in Council.

In the first place, then, we must see Luddism in this context. The journeymen and artisans felt themselves to be robbed of constitutional rights, and this was a deeply felt conviction. Ned Ludd was the ‘Redresser’ or ‘Grand Executioner’, defending (‘by unanimous vote of the Trade’) rights too deeply established ‘by Custom and Law’ for them to be set aside by a few masters or even by Parliament:

[...] The Bill making frame-breaking a capital offence was deprecated even by those hosiers whose interests it was supposed to defend. And, in this light, the conventional picture of the Luddism of these years as a blind opposition to machinery as such becomes less and less tenable. What was at issue was the ‘freedom’ of the capitalist to destroy the customs of the trade, whether by new machinery, by the factory-system, or by unrestricted competition, beating-down wages, undercutting his rivals, and undermining standards of craftsmanship. We are so accustomed to the notion that it was both inevitable and ‘progressive’ that trade should have been freed in the early nineteenth century from ‘restrictive practices’, that it requires an effort of imagination to understand that the ‘free’ factory-owner or large hosier or cotton-manufacturer, who built his fortune by these means, was regarded not only with jealousy but as a man engaging in immoral and illegal practices. The tradition of the just price and the fair wage lived longer among ‘the lower orders’ than is sometimes supposed. They saw laissez faire, not as freedom, but as ‘foul Imposition’. They could see no natural law by which one man, or a few men, could engage in practices which brought manifest injury to their fellows.

For despite all the homilies addressed to the Luddites (then and subsequently) as to the beneficial consequences of new machinery or of ‘free’ enterprise

Even if we make allowances for the cheapening of the product, it is impossible to designate as ‘progressive’, in any meaningful sense, processes which brought about the degradation, for twenty or thirty years ahead, of the workers employed in the industry. And, viewed from this aspect, we may see Luddism as a moment of transitional conflict. On the one hand, it looked backward to old customs and paternalist legislation which could never be revived; on the other hand, it tried to revive ancient rights in order to establish new precedents. At different times their demands included a legal minimum wage; the control of the ‘sweating’ of women or juveniles; arbitration; the engagement by the masters to find work for skilled men made redundant by machinery; the prohibition of shoddy work; the right to open trade union combination. All these demands looked forwards, as much as backwards; and they contained within them a shadowy image, not so much of a paternalist, but of a democratic community, in which industrial growth should be regulated according to ethical priorities and the pursuit of profit be subordinated to human needs.

Luddism lingers in the popular mind as an uncouth, spontaneous affair of illiterate handworkers, blindly resisting machinery. But machine-breaking has a far longer history. The destruction of materials, looms, threshing-machines, the flooding of pits or damage to pit-head gear, or the robbing or firing of houses or property of unpopular employers – these, and other forms of violent direct action, were employed in the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth, while ‘rattening’ was still endemic in parts of the Sheffield cutlery industry in the 1860s. Such methods were sometimes aimed at machinery held to be obnoxious as such. More often they were a means of enforcing customary conditions, intimidating blacklegs, ‘illegal’ men, or masters, or were (often effective) ancillary means to strike or other ‘trade union’ action.

Although related to this tradition, the Luddite movement must be distinguished from it, first, by its high degree of organization, second, by the political context within which it flourished. These differences may be summed up in a single characteristic: while finding its origin in particular industrial grievances, Luddism was a quasi-insurrectionary movement, which continually trembled on the edge of ulterior revolutionary objectives. This is not to say that it was a wholly conscious revolutionary movement; on the other hand, it had a tendency towards becoming such a movement, and it is this tendency which is most often understated.

[...] With a year’s intermission, war had continued for almost twenty years. The people had few civil and no trade union liberties. They were not gifted with historical clairvoyance, so that they might be comforted by the knowledge that in twenty years (when many of them would be dead) the middle class would secure the vote. In 1812 the weavers had experienced a disastrous decline in their status and living standards. People were so hungry that they were willing to risk their lives upsetting a barrow of potatoes. In these conditions, it might appear more surprising if men had not plotted revolutionary uprisings than if they had; and it would seem highly unlikely that such conditions would nourish a crop of gradualist constitutional reformers, acting within a Constitution which did not admit their political existence.

Hence ‘history’ has dealt fairly with the Tolpuddle Martyrs, and fulsomely with Francis Place

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. [...]