March 10, 2018 • 25 mins
This classic revisits the Luddite uprising -- protests in northern England, in which workers smashed machines in mills and factories. This wasn't the first organized violence against mechanization, but Luddites became iconic machine-breakers.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
On March eleventh, eighteen eleven, authorities broke up a demonstration
of workers who were rallying for better wages and workplace conditions.
That night, the demonstrators smashed knitting machines at a nearby factory.
It's recognized as the first Luddite protest. So this seems
like a good time to re share our episode on
the subject, which is also an old favorite. That's enough
(00:26):
of a favorite that I made a tag on our
website called smashing Things to include it. At the end
of this episode, which originally came out in As We said,
we talked about how many employees Instagram has. Instagram has
of course been acquired by Facebook since that time, so uh,
that number maybe not accurate anymore, but the comparison still
(00:50):
pretty much the same. Welcome to stuff you missed in
history class from how Stop Works dot com. Um, Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and
(01:11):
I'll fry and today we have a listener request from
Anna one that I had a little trouble finding information
about not for the usual reason, No, for an unusual
but funny reason. Yes, the usual reason is that something
is either obscure or so long ago that everything is contradictory.
(01:31):
This one was difficult because many many people use the
word Luddite to mean like some obstinate, foot draggy person
who doesn't want to adopt the new technology. Um. And
and many of the articles that use the term that
way also include just enough Luddite history that it gets
tagged that way, and all the databases and so researching
(01:53):
about the Luodites means that you have to wade through
all kinds of stuff about people not wanting to fancy
your phones or new technology geez or like some you know,
new massively open online course thing, all kinds or I
myself have called myself a lodite when I have to
call someone on the phone instead of texting them, like
some kind of bloodite. Yeah, it's one of those words.
(02:15):
It's been kind of co opted into modern slang. And
I think because it sounds inherently funny, just because of
the construction of the word. Um, that's why people love
it so much. Yes, and while there was an anti
technology piece to the Loodite rebellion, that's not really what
it was about. It's one small element of a much
(02:37):
bigger picture. Right the the idea that that Ludites were
just anti machine zealots who dragged their feet against progress
and went around smashing things is not really the whole
picture at all. So that's what we're going to talk
about today, and thanks to Anna for suggesting it. So
the Leoodite Uprising was a series of protests in Northern
(03:00):
Land in which workers smashed machines in mills and factories.
So this wasn't the first organized violence against machinery, and
England wasn't the only place where people took to breaking
machines to try to protest something. But the Luddites are,
of all the machine breakers, the most famous ones and
the really the only ones whose name became synonymous was something. Yeah,
(03:23):
we've talked about it even a little bit in another podcast.
We talked about it in the Sewing Machine podcast. The
word sabotage comes from the word for shoe subo, which
got thrown into things. But the Luddites are exactly what
you said. They have become completely synonymous with this anti machinery,
violent hatred for it when it's not, you know, not
(03:45):
so much what it was about. So, yeah, this was
taking place we should contextualize in the early nineteenth century,
so it's towards the end of the Industrial Revolution. The
American War for Independence was still a pretty recent memory,
and the Napoleonic Wars between England and France had been
going on for a while. So in England money was
really tight. Times were pretty hard, and food was becoming
(04:06):
scarce and expensive, and the French Revolution was also in
the very recent past, so the people in charge were
more anxious than usual about the idea of poor people
rising up against rich people. It was a time of
general unrest and mistrust right and the War of eighteen
twelve was looming at this point. So in addition to
no longer trading with France, England also wasn't trading with
(04:29):
the young United States, and the textile industry was really
suffering as a result. The increased work that was coming
from putting clothing on soldiers was not making up for
the drop in trade. Uh And in addition, trade unions
had been outlawed by the Combination Acts of seventeen eighteen hundred,
so people were not allowed to band together to try
(04:51):
to get an increase in pay or a decrease in hours,
or to strike. The penalty was jail time or hard labor,
and if you gave some money to somebody who had
been convicted to help them out, you could actually be
fined for your charitable inclination. On top of the legal
issues with unionizing, when labor disputes came up, there wasn't
always some kind of central place to go in protest
(05:14):
or to raise concerns. Um Some larger factories had been built,
but a lot of aspects of textile work we're still
really a cottage industry. So when people were doing their
work at home or in a small mill that was
operated by just a couple of people, there wasn't really
one juggernaut of an employer where people could go in
petition for change. So when you're a knitter working out
(05:36):
of your home, you can't really just have a picket
line of one out in your front yard. I mean
you could, but it would not be a very effective
form of protests, so we wouldn't probably make the statement
you were aiming for. No. Uh and machines get a
lot of the spotlight in the Ladite uprising, but the
mechanization in question had really started a full two hundred
years earlier, when William Lee invented the stocking frame. And
(05:58):
this was a machine that many people feared would put
traditional knitters out of work. The concern was great enough
that Queen Elizabeth the First actually denied lea patent and
outlawed the frames production, saying quote, I have too much
love for my poor people who obtained their bread by
the employment of knitting, to give my money to forward
an invention that will tend to their ruin, which is
(06:20):
a lovely sentiment on her part. A lot of her
successors shared this sentiment and continued to support traditional production
over machine production. But by the turn of the nineteenth century,
manufacturers are starting to defy the law and mechanize anyway.
At first, workers took a legal course of action, and
they raised money to lobby Parliament to try to keep
(06:41):
mechanization illegal, but their efforts failed, and Parliament repealed the
laws that were on the books in eighteen o nine.
But the stocking frame, along with other improvements, ultimately allowed
the textile industry to grow, and in terms of overall numbers,
it created more jobs than it eliminated in the very
long But in the short term people were losing their jobs,
(07:03):
and at the same time, mechanization had sparked a number
of disputes over wages and working conditions and the quality
of work, and these disputes were really at the heart
of the Luddite complaints. A good example of the wage
issue came from the manufacture of wool cloth. Before mechanization,
skilled laborers called croppers would use tools, some of which
(07:25):
weighed about fifty pounds, to smooth out the surface of
the wool. This required both strength and skill, and so
experienced croppers could demand higher wages than a lot of
other textile workers could. But when cropping machines were invented,
traditional croppers weren't needed anymore, and the other jobs that
were being created required less skill and therefore paid less money.
(07:48):
So as cropping machines became widespread, many croppers just wound
up unemployed. They also had a reputation for being unsavory
and rowdy, and the croppers made up some of the
most violent Luddites. Conditions in newly opened factories were very
(08:12):
often really not what you would categorize as ideal, and
many of them. Workers were required to live in dormitories,
and those spaces were very cramped intended to be dirty.
People would have their pay docked for all kinds of
really seemingly insignificant infractions, and the hours were really long
and the work was really tedious, so it while it
may have given you a living wage, it was not
(08:33):
a very enjoyable life that you were leading at that point.
And then there's the question of quality. Framework knitters, for example,
had been making garments entirely on frames, so to make
stockings they would use the frame to knit a tube
of material. But new mechanization and manufacturing techniques were making
it possible to cut garments out that used to be
(08:54):
made on the frame out of a large piece of
cloth and then stitched them together. These were known as
cut ups, and they required less skill to make, and
the workers and a lot of other people really perceived
them to be of much lower quality than things that
had been made as one piece. And that's still the case,
you know, and Coultur work things that are actually certified
as Coultur, Like there are lace pieces that are no seams,
(09:18):
and then if there's a lot of seeming and piecing,
it's seen as less So it's still a consistent mindset
about how things are assembled. In terms of textile workers
were really angry about the decline and quality I mean people,
the wages and the living conditions get a lot of attention,
but there was a lot of anger about Okay, now
this is less good work. Why are you making us
(09:38):
do work that's not as good? Yeah, they didn't want
their industry to go downhill. Uh. And workers didn't like
that that the people were being employed in the garment
industry that weren't apprenticed first. So it factors into that
whole quality issue. Uh. This practice was known as culting,
and the quality of the work was poor in part
because people weren't actually trained to do it. They hadn't
gone through that apprenticeship period to learn their trade. They
(10:01):
just got put in the factory floor. So while the
Luddites have a reputation for being anti machine, and a
hallmark of the Luddite uprising was smashing machines to bits,
it wasn't the machines themselves that were the problem. The
Luodites were fine with machines as long as the people
using them were trained to do it well and safely,
(10:21):
and had fair wages and working hours, and as long
as the introduction of machines wasn't erasing more jobs than
it created or cranking out poor quality kids. There were
many trades people who took part in the Laddite protests,
but croppers, hand loom weavers and knitters, who were the
ones most affected by mechanization at the time, were the
(10:41):
most prominent. Exactly which workers were at the forefront varied
based on which trades were most practiced in any particular area.
From the second chapter of Charlotte Bronte's novel Surely, which
was published about forty years later and was set during
the Ledite uprising, quote, it would not do to stop
the progress of invention, to damage science by discouraging its improvements.
(11:03):
The war could not be terminated. Efficient relief could not
be raised. There was no help then, So the unemployed
underwent their destiny, ate the bread and drank the waters
of affliction. Misery generates hate. These sufferers hated the machines
which they believed took their bread from them. They hated
the buildings which contained those machines. They hated the manufacturers
(11:23):
who owned those buildings. So that's the context for the
protest which started on March eleventh, eighteen eleven. That's when
protesters in Nottingham got together to demand better wages and
British troops had to break up the demonstration, but the
protesters didn't just go home peacefully once they had been dispersed.
(11:44):
That night, they broke into a factory in a nearby
town and smashed all the machines. Although the name Luddite
hadn't been coined yet, history generally marks this as the
first Luddite protest, and from there, operating under cover of night,
people smash machines in factory ease and sometimes even set
factories on fire as part of their demonstrations. There wasn't
(12:05):
a lot of local law enforcement at the time. Towns
didn't really have a police force to call on, so
most of the response wound up coming from the military
and from the owners of the mills, who armed themselves
and hired men to help defend their property. By January
of eighteen twelve, protests were occurring pretty much every night,
and they spread to Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire.
(12:28):
From there they moved to Leicestershire and Derbyshire, and the
government dispatched three thousand troops to try to stop these protests.
For a sense of what was going on at these incidents,
here's an example of a reward poster from January twelve
which offered two hundred pounds for knowledge about a frame
breaking incident, Whereas on Thursday night last, about ten o'clock,
(12:52):
a great number of men armed with pistols, hammers and
clubs entered the dwelling house of George Ball Framework, net
of Linton, near Nottingham, disguised with masks and handkerchiefs over
their faces and in other ways. And after striking and
abusing the said George Ball, they wantonly and feloniously broke
and destroyed five stocking frames standing in the workshop, four
(13:16):
of which belonged to George Ball, and one frame forty
gauge belonging to Mr Francis Breathwaite Hosier, all of which
we're working at the full price. The poster also a
test that workman Thomas Rue, John Jackson and Thomas Naylor
were working on the frames at the time, being paid
and had no complaint with either George Ball or Francis Breathwaite.
(13:40):
Soldiers started raiding houses and they were setting ambushes to
try to stop these protests, and Parliament saw machine breaking
is such a threat to Northern England that it made
machine breaking a capital crime Among this law's detractors in
Parliament was Lord Byron, whose first speech in the House
of Lords was against the death penalty for machine break.
I just want to take a moment to note here
(14:02):
that we had gone from the Queen saying that she
would not allow machines to be made because it was
taking the livelihood of poor people too. If you break
a machine, we will hang you. That is that is
the spect the trajectory we've gone through rather rapidly. Right.
So violence escalated, with protesters and factory people taking shots
(14:22):
at one another. When Luddites were killed during demonstrations, they
would retaliate by killing the mills owners. April of eighteen
twelve was a particularly bloody month in Manchester. A mill
owner ordered his men to fire into a crowd of
protesters who were threatening his factory's machines. At least three
people died and eighteen were wounded. The next day, soldiers
(14:45):
killed at least five more people. On April eleven, William Cartwright,
who was owner of Rawford's mill, fortified the mill with
things like iron bars and a vat of acid to
pour on protesters. He had been appointed as a constable
to supplement the army in the militia about a month before,
and he gathered soldiers and attacked a group of about
a hundred protesters who were approaching the mill. Two of
(15:07):
the protesters were killed. This protest was one of the
most prominent events in the Luddite uprising in the West Riding,
and it was one of the inspirations for Charlotte Bronte's
novel Shirley, which we quoted from earlier. On the twenty April,
William Horsefall, a manufacturer who had boasted that he would
ride up to his saddle in Luddite blood, was killed
(15:29):
in an ambush. Joseph Radcliffe, a magistrate, called in more
troops to fight the protesters and put the area under
martial law. Radcliffe was eventually given a baronetcy for his
work during the Ledite riots. In spite of the presence
of troops for much of the Ludite riot riots, it
was hard for officials to get things under control. The
(15:49):
Luddites were doing most of their machines smashing at night
while masked, and they usually had the support of the
local people, so a lot of times they were protected
from the legal force as who were hunting them down
and Although the movement was relatively coordinated, there wasn't one
central leadership that the army could find and capture to
(16:10):
put an end to the whole thing. By May of
eighteen twelve, fourteen thousand, four hundred troops had been sent
to fight these riots. The military force in England became
bigger than Wellington's army in Portugal, and it was far
(16:30):
bigger than any military force ever used to fight domestic
unrest in England. As the protest escalated, Loodites were arrested
and tried, with the courts trying to make an example
of the people who were on trial to discourage further protests.
Bloodites were sentenced to prison, transported to Australia, or hanged. Eventually,
(16:52):
Benjamin Walker, William Thorpe, Thomas Smith, and George Miller confessed
to being involved in the murder of William Horsfall. Walker
earned King's evidence and the other three men were hanged
the following January. Another man, William Hall, turned King's evidence
in both the Horsefall investigation and the investigation into the
attack on Rawford's mill, and he betrayed sixteen other Luddites
(17:15):
to the Crown. When the defendants were tried and the
Rawford's Mill attack. The jury didn't even adjourn for deliberation.
They talked about among themselves for a moment before delivering
a guilty verdict against eight defendants. In May of eighteen twelve,
several defendants were tried at a special commission in Lancashire,
but none of them on charges of machine breaking. Most
(17:36):
of the charges were for food riots, arson and making
illegal oaths. Even so, eight people were sentenced to death
and seventeen were sentenced to transportation to Australia. Seven others
were sentenced to prison. The courts weren't the only ones
trying to frighten the protesters and to staying in line.
Leaders of the movement were also using scare tactics of
(17:56):
their own. In some areas, Luddites took an oath that
they reveal Luddite secrets, they would be quote sent out
of the world by the first brother who shall meet me,
and my name and character blotted out of existence, never
to be remembered, but with contempt and abhorrence. So people
were reluctant to blow the whistle on Luddites that they
(18:17):
knew either because of genuine support for the movement, or
because they feared the retribution indicated in that oath. In
the summer of eighteen twelve, General Thomas Maitland came to
put the rebellion down. He offered pardons to people who
renounced Luddism and money to the people who informed on
other protesters. Since the light activities were really happening at night,
(18:39):
he ordered the troops to fight them at night. Soldiers
broke up meetings and imprisoned protesters, and anonymous person sent
Maitland a letter that that September detailing a number of
public houses where Luddites met, and there were of course
raids followed by arrests. As a consequence. Sixty four men
stood trial at York Castle in eighteen thirteen. Seventeen were
(19:01):
executed for machine breaking, twenty five were sent to Australia
for giving or receiving illegal oaths. Twenty two were acquitted
or released on bail, and that's when the Luddite rebellion
really started to dissipate. The peak of the Luddite activity
was in eighteen eleven and eighteen twelve, but protests continued
until eighteen sixteen. The textile industry continued on its path
(19:25):
of mechanization, and the rebellion failed in all of its aims.
It didn't stop mechanization, It didn't save people's jobs or wages.
It didn't reverse the trend of manufacturers making lower quality goods.
It didn't change working conditions in fledgling factories. They really
failed on all accounts, and many of them lost their
lives doing it. Yes, and yet while the protest was
(19:46):
still a failure, and you know, it wasn't the first
riot like this in history, the Luddite name has lasted
for two hundred years, unlike all of the other machine
breaking incidents. Uh, the word Luddite, as we said earlier,
became synonymous was something that relates to, although is not
exactly the same as what the original protest was all about. Today,
(20:08):
there's also a neo Luddite movement that centers on the
idea that technology's central place in our lives is damaging
some of this linguistic staying power, maybe thanks to the
flare for lack of a better word, that the Luddites
put into their protests. They were so passionate, and it's
such an it's an image that's so easy to conjure
(20:28):
in your mind of someone smashing a machine, tibits that
it just naturally people make the association, and it's yeah, well,
and then rather be rather than being an unruly smash
and grab mob. They targeted which mills to go after,
and then they disguised themselves to do so. And they
also wild disguised did military style drills on the moors
(20:49):
at night. And they communicated through secret hand signals, using
gestures to send messages and identify one another, as well
as conveying poems and songs to each other. You can
still find a lot of the lyrics to these online. Uh.
The name came about through the mythic character of ned Lud,
also known as Captain Lud, General Lud, or King Luod.
(21:11):
The first known use of this name in the context
of the protests came in November of eighteen eleven. It
probably stems from an incident that allegedly took place twenty
two years before, when an apprentice whose last name was
Lud or Ludlum smashed a stocking frame in rage after
being told to square his needles. So his name kind
of stuck and became the name of this mythic leader
(21:35):
of the movement, even though he had nothing to do
with it. He had nothing to do with it, and
there was no Luod leading the riots when they actually happened.
The story spread and this fictionalized Luod became the face,
though invisible, of the movement. King Lud become a became
a mythic figure who, just like Robin Hood, lived in
Sherwood Forest of all places, and he wrote taunting letters
(21:59):
from his office us there, all of which was fictional. Yeah. Uh.
The Ladites were also quotable. In one protest, the Ldites
were using giant sledge hammers to break them to break
machines in Yorkshire. They named these these hammers Great Enoch,
after Enoch Taylor, who ran the firm that made the
sledge hammers and also owned the machines that they were destroying.
(22:21):
They had a rallying cry of Enoch made them, Enoch
will break them. And they also protested in dresses um
and called themselves General Lud's wives when they did this
just sort of an odd image of these men in
drag with giant hammers, chanting and destroying things. Well, and
(22:41):
all these things together kind of made it a protest
that had character, which I think is one of the
reasons that it has more staying power in people's minds
than some of the other machine breaking protests. A lot
of the Leadites who evaded capture were really deeply reluctant
to talk about it for years after because they feared punishment.
(23:02):
This may also have added to this air of mystery
about it. Although around the eighteen seventies, as many of
the Luddites reached their very later years, some of them
did start start to tell their stories and revive some
of the Luddite lore. So today a Luddite wouldn't say
something along the lines of I don't want an iPhone
(23:23):
more like and admittedly this is something of an Apple's
to Oranges comparison, uh, they would make between Kodak, which
employed one and forty thousand people, in Instagram, which employs
about a dozen, or the way newspapers have fallen in
the face of the Internet becoming so popular and accessible. Yeah,
or just this morning, um, I saw an article that
(23:45):
was correlating the rise and capital expenses on things like
robots and technology and a drop in paying actual human
labor as a global trend having gone on since the
nineteen eighties. That is the sort of thing that would
lead to a neo lud I protest today more so
than I don't want the latest operating systems, no new things.
(24:09):
King Leod may rise again. So yes, that is the
story of the Luddite movement. Different than people probably suspect
in any way. Yes, definitely different than the colloquial use
of Luddite. Well, and I think some people associate them
with and this is completely wrong, of course, the Amish.
I think there was a I mean, I've had people
(24:31):
say that when I'm like, we're going to talk about
the Luodites. Were they like the Amish? Not at all?
Really not really, we really didn't have a problem with
machines if the machines were used. Well yeah, thank you
so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since
(24:52):
this is out of the archive, if you heard an
email address or a Facebook U r L or something
similar during the course of the show, that maybe obs eleape. Now,
so here's our current contact information. We are at History Podcasts,
at how Stuff Works dot com, and then we're at
Missed in the History. All over social media that is
our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks
(25:14):
again for listening for more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works? Dot com
On March eleventh, eighteen eleven, authorities broke up a demonstration
of workers who were rallying for better wages and workplace conditions.
That night, the demonstrators smashed knitting machines at a nearby factory.
It's recognized as the first Luddite protest. So this seems
like a good time to re share our episode on
the subject, which is also an old favorite. That's enough
(00:26):
of a favorite that I made a tag on our
website called smashing Things to include it. At the end
of this episode, which originally came out in As We said,
we talked about how many employees Instagram has. Instagram has
of course been acquired by Facebook since that time, so uh,
that number maybe not accurate anymore, but the comparison still
(00:50):
pretty much the same. Welcome to stuff you missed in
history class from how Stop Works dot com. Um, Hello,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and
(01:11):
I'll fry and today we have a listener request from
Anna one that I had a little trouble finding information
about not for the usual reason, No, for an unusual
but funny reason. Yes, the usual reason is that something
is either obscure or so long ago that everything is contradictory.
(01:31):
This one was difficult because many many people use the
word Luddite to mean like some obstinate, foot draggy person
who doesn't want to adopt the new technology. Um. And
and many of the articles that use the term that
way also include just enough Luddite history that it gets
tagged that way, and all the databases and so researching
(01:53):
about the Luodites means that you have to wade through
all kinds of stuff about people not wanting to fancy
your phones or new technology geez or like some you know,
new massively open online course thing, all kinds or I
myself have called myself a lodite when I have to
call someone on the phone instead of texting them, like
some kind of bloodite. Yeah, it's one of those words.
(02:15):
It's been kind of co opted into modern slang. And
I think because it sounds inherently funny, just because of
the construction of the word. Um, that's why people love
it so much. Yes, and while there was an anti
technology piece to the Loodite rebellion, that's not really what
it was about. It's one small element of a much
(02:37):
bigger picture. Right the the idea that that Ludites were
just anti machine zealots who dragged their feet against progress
and went around smashing things is not really the whole
picture at all. So that's what we're going to talk
about today, and thanks to Anna for suggesting it. So
the Leoodite Uprising was a series of protests in Northern
(03:00):
Land in which workers smashed machines in mills and factories.
So this wasn't the first organized violence against machinery, and
England wasn't the only place where people took to breaking
machines to try to protest something. But the Luddites are,
of all the machine breakers, the most famous ones and
the really the only ones whose name became synonymous was something. Yeah,
(03:23):
we've talked about it even a little bit in another podcast.
We talked about it in the Sewing Machine podcast. The
word sabotage comes from the word for shoe subo, which
got thrown into things. But the Luddites are exactly what
you said. They have become completely synonymous with this anti machinery,
violent hatred for it when it's not, you know, not
(03:45):
so much what it was about. So, yeah, this was
taking place we should contextualize in the early nineteenth century,
so it's towards the end of the Industrial Revolution. The
American War for Independence was still a pretty recent memory,
and the Napoleonic Wars between England and France had been
going on for a while. So in England money was
really tight. Times were pretty hard, and food was becoming
(04:06):
scarce and expensive, and the French Revolution was also in
the very recent past, so the people in charge were
more anxious than usual about the idea of poor people
rising up against rich people. It was a time of
general unrest and mistrust right and the War of eighteen
twelve was looming at this point. So in addition to
no longer trading with France, England also wasn't trading with
(04:29):
the young United States, and the textile industry was really
suffering as a result. The increased work that was coming
from putting clothing on soldiers was not making up for
the drop in trade. Uh And in addition, trade unions
had been outlawed by the Combination Acts of seventeen eighteen hundred,
so people were not allowed to band together to try
(04:51):
to get an increase in pay or a decrease in hours,
or to strike. The penalty was jail time or hard labor,
and if you gave some money to somebody who had
been convicted to help them out, you could actually be
fined for your charitable inclination. On top of the legal
issues with unionizing, when labor disputes came up, there wasn't
always some kind of central place to go in protest
(05:14):
or to raise concerns. Um Some larger factories had been built,
but a lot of aspects of textile work we're still
really a cottage industry. So when people were doing their
work at home or in a small mill that was
operated by just a couple of people, there wasn't really
one juggernaut of an employer where people could go in
petition for change. So when you're a knitter working out
(05:36):
of your home, you can't really just have a picket
line of one out in your front yard. I mean
you could, but it would not be a very effective
form of protests, so we wouldn't probably make the statement
you were aiming for. No. Uh and machines get a
lot of the spotlight in the Ladite uprising, but the
mechanization in question had really started a full two hundred
years earlier, when William Lee invented the stocking frame. And
(05:58):
this was a machine that many people feared would put
traditional knitters out of work. The concern was great enough
that Queen Elizabeth the First actually denied lea patent and
outlawed the frames production, saying quote, I have too much
love for my poor people who obtained their bread by
the employment of knitting, to give my money to forward
an invention that will tend to their ruin, which is
(06:20):
a lovely sentiment on her part. A lot of her
successors shared this sentiment and continued to support traditional production
over machine production. But by the turn of the nineteenth century,
manufacturers are starting to defy the law and mechanize anyway.
At first, workers took a legal course of action, and
they raised money to lobby Parliament to try to keep
(06:41):
mechanization illegal, but their efforts failed, and Parliament repealed the
laws that were on the books in eighteen o nine.
But the stocking frame, along with other improvements, ultimately allowed
the textile industry to grow, and in terms of overall numbers,
it created more jobs than it eliminated in the very
long But in the short term people were losing their jobs,
(07:03):
and at the same time, mechanization had sparked a number
of disputes over wages and working conditions and the quality
of work, and these disputes were really at the heart
of the Luddite complaints. A good example of the wage
issue came from the manufacture of wool cloth. Before mechanization,
skilled laborers called croppers would use tools, some of which
(07:25):
weighed about fifty pounds, to smooth out the surface of
the wool. This required both strength and skill, and so
experienced croppers could demand higher wages than a lot of
other textile workers could. But when cropping machines were invented,
traditional croppers weren't needed anymore, and the other jobs that
were being created required less skill and therefore paid less money.
(07:48):
So as cropping machines became widespread, many croppers just wound
up unemployed. They also had a reputation for being unsavory
and rowdy, and the croppers made up some of the
most violent Luddites. Conditions in newly opened factories were very
(08:12):
often really not what you would categorize as ideal, and
many of them. Workers were required to live in dormitories,
and those spaces were very cramped intended to be dirty.
People would have their pay docked for all kinds of
really seemingly insignificant infractions, and the hours were really long
and the work was really tedious, so it while it
may have given you a living wage, it was not
(08:33):
a very enjoyable life that you were leading at that point.
And then there's the question of quality. Framework knitters, for example,
had been making garments entirely on frames, so to make
stockings they would use the frame to knit a tube
of material. But new mechanization and manufacturing techniques were making
it possible to cut garments out that used to be
(08:54):
made on the frame out of a large piece of
cloth and then stitched them together. These were known as
cut ups, and they required less skill to make, and
the workers and a lot of other people really perceived
them to be of much lower quality than things that
had been made as one piece. And that's still the case,
you know, and Coultur work things that are actually certified
as Coultur, Like there are lace pieces that are no seams,
(09:18):
and then if there's a lot of seeming and piecing,
it's seen as less So it's still a consistent mindset
about how things are assembled. In terms of textile workers
were really angry about the decline and quality I mean people,
the wages and the living conditions get a lot of attention,
but there was a lot of anger about Okay, now
this is less good work. Why are you making us
(09:38):
do work that's not as good? Yeah, they didn't want
their industry to go downhill. Uh. And workers didn't like
that that the people were being employed in the garment
industry that weren't apprenticed first. So it factors into that
whole quality issue. Uh. This practice was known as culting,
and the quality of the work was poor in part
because people weren't actually trained to do it. They hadn't
gone through that apprenticeship period to learn their trade. They
(10:01):
just got put in the factory floor. So while the
Luddites have a reputation for being anti machine, and a
hallmark of the Luddite uprising was smashing machines to bits,
it wasn't the machines themselves that were the problem. The
Luodites were fine with machines as long as the people
using them were trained to do it well and safely,
(10:21):
and had fair wages and working hours, and as long
as the introduction of machines wasn't erasing more jobs than
it created or cranking out poor quality kids. There were
many trades people who took part in the Laddite protests,
but croppers, hand loom weavers and knitters, who were the
ones most affected by mechanization at the time, were the
(10:41):
most prominent. Exactly which workers were at the forefront varied
based on which trades were most practiced in any particular area.
From the second chapter of Charlotte Bronte's novel Surely, which
was published about forty years later and was set during
the Ledite uprising, quote, it would not do to stop
the progress of invention, to damage science by discouraging its improvements.
(11:03):
The war could not be terminated. Efficient relief could not
be raised. There was no help then, So the unemployed
underwent their destiny, ate the bread and drank the waters
of affliction. Misery generates hate. These sufferers hated the machines
which they believed took their bread from them. They hated
the buildings which contained those machines. They hated the manufacturers
(11:23):
who owned those buildings. So that's the context for the
protest which started on March eleventh, eighteen eleven. That's when
protesters in Nottingham got together to demand better wages and
British troops had to break up the demonstration, but the
protesters didn't just go home peacefully once they had been dispersed.
(11:44):
That night, they broke into a factory in a nearby
town and smashed all the machines. Although the name Luddite
hadn't been coined yet, history generally marks this as the
first Luddite protest, and from there, operating under cover of night,
people smash machines in factory ease and sometimes even set
factories on fire as part of their demonstrations. There wasn't
(12:05):
a lot of local law enforcement at the time. Towns
didn't really have a police force to call on, so
most of the response wound up coming from the military
and from the owners of the mills, who armed themselves
and hired men to help defend their property. By January
of eighteen twelve, protests were occurring pretty much every night,
and they spread to Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire.
(12:28):
From there they moved to Leicestershire and Derbyshire, and the
government dispatched three thousand troops to try to stop these protests.
For a sense of what was going on at these incidents,
here's an example of a reward poster from January twelve
which offered two hundred pounds for knowledge about a frame
breaking incident, Whereas on Thursday night last, about ten o'clock,
(12:52):
a great number of men armed with pistols, hammers and
clubs entered the dwelling house of George Ball Framework, net
of Linton, near Nottingham, disguised with masks and handkerchiefs over
their faces and in other ways. And after striking and
abusing the said George Ball, they wantonly and feloniously broke
and destroyed five stocking frames standing in the workshop, four
(13:16):
of which belonged to George Ball, and one frame forty
gauge belonging to Mr Francis Breathwaite Hosier, all of which
we're working at the full price. The poster also a
test that workman Thomas Rue, John Jackson and Thomas Naylor
were working on the frames at the time, being paid
and had no complaint with either George Ball or Francis Breathwaite.
(13:40):
Soldiers started raiding houses and they were setting ambushes to
try to stop these protests, and Parliament saw machine breaking
is such a threat to Northern England that it made
machine breaking a capital crime Among this law's detractors in
Parliament was Lord Byron, whose first speech in the House
of Lords was against the death penalty for machine break.
I just want to take a moment to note here
(14:02):
that we had gone from the Queen saying that she
would not allow machines to be made because it was
taking the livelihood of poor people too. If you break
a machine, we will hang you. That is that is
the spect the trajectory we've gone through rather rapidly. Right.
So violence escalated, with protesters and factory people taking shots
(14:22):
at one another. When Luddites were killed during demonstrations, they
would retaliate by killing the mills owners. April of eighteen
twelve was a particularly bloody month in Manchester. A mill
owner ordered his men to fire into a crowd of
protesters who were threatening his factory's machines. At least three
people died and eighteen were wounded. The next day, soldiers
(14:45):
killed at least five more people. On April eleven, William Cartwright,
who was owner of Rawford's mill, fortified the mill with
things like iron bars and a vat of acid to
pour on protesters. He had been appointed as a constable
to supplement the army in the militia about a month before,
and he gathered soldiers and attacked a group of about
a hundred protesters who were approaching the mill. Two of
(15:07):
the protesters were killed. This protest was one of the
most prominent events in the Luddite uprising in the West Riding,
and it was one of the inspirations for Charlotte Bronte's
novel Shirley, which we quoted from earlier. On the twenty April,
William Horsefall, a manufacturer who had boasted that he would
ride up to his saddle in Luddite blood, was killed
(15:29):
in an ambush. Joseph Radcliffe, a magistrate, called in more
troops to fight the protesters and put the area under
martial law. Radcliffe was eventually given a baronetcy for his
work during the Ledite riots. In spite of the presence
of troops for much of the Ludite riot riots, it
was hard for officials to get things under control. The
(15:49):
Luddites were doing most of their machines smashing at night
while masked, and they usually had the support of the
local people, so a lot of times they were protected
from the legal force as who were hunting them down
and Although the movement was relatively coordinated, there wasn't one
central leadership that the army could find and capture to
(16:10):
put an end to the whole thing. By May of
eighteen twelve, fourteen thousand, four hundred troops had been sent
to fight these riots. The military force in England became
bigger than Wellington's army in Portugal, and it was far
(16:30):
bigger than any military force ever used to fight domestic
unrest in England. As the protest escalated, Loodites were arrested
and tried, with the courts trying to make an example
of the people who were on trial to discourage further protests.
Bloodites were sentenced to prison, transported to Australia, or hanged. Eventually,
(16:52):
Benjamin Walker, William Thorpe, Thomas Smith, and George Miller confessed
to being involved in the murder of William Horsfall. Walker
earned King's evidence and the other three men were hanged
the following January. Another man, William Hall, turned King's evidence
in both the Horsefall investigation and the investigation into the
attack on Rawford's mill, and he betrayed sixteen other Luddites
(17:15):
to the Crown. When the defendants were tried and the
Rawford's Mill attack. The jury didn't even adjourn for deliberation.
They talked about among themselves for a moment before delivering
a guilty verdict against eight defendants. In May of eighteen twelve,
several defendants were tried at a special commission in Lancashire,
but none of them on charges of machine breaking. Most
(17:36):
of the charges were for food riots, arson and making
illegal oaths. Even so, eight people were sentenced to death
and seventeen were sentenced to transportation to Australia. Seven others
were sentenced to prison. The courts weren't the only ones
trying to frighten the protesters and to staying in line.
Leaders of the movement were also using scare tactics of
(17:56):
their own. In some areas, Luddites took an oath that
they reveal Luddite secrets, they would be quote sent out
of the world by the first brother who shall meet me,
and my name and character blotted out of existence, never
to be remembered, but with contempt and abhorrence. So people
were reluctant to blow the whistle on Luddites that they
(18:17):
knew either because of genuine support for the movement, or
because they feared the retribution indicated in that oath. In
the summer of eighteen twelve, General Thomas Maitland came to
put the rebellion down. He offered pardons to people who
renounced Luddism and money to the people who informed on
other protesters. Since the light activities were really happening at night,
(18:39):
he ordered the troops to fight them at night. Soldiers
broke up meetings and imprisoned protesters, and anonymous person sent
Maitland a letter that that September detailing a number of
public houses where Luddites met, and there were of course
raids followed by arrests. As a consequence. Sixty four men
stood trial at York Castle in eighteen thirteen. Seventeen were
(19:01):
executed for machine breaking, twenty five were sent to Australia
for giving or receiving illegal oaths. Twenty two were acquitted
or released on bail, and that's when the Luddite rebellion
really started to dissipate. The peak of the Luddite activity
was in eighteen eleven and eighteen twelve, but protests continued
until eighteen sixteen. The textile industry continued on its path
(19:25):
of mechanization, and the rebellion failed in all of its aims.
It didn't stop mechanization, It didn't save people's jobs or wages.
It didn't reverse the trend of manufacturers making lower quality goods.
It didn't change working conditions in fledgling factories. They really
failed on all accounts, and many of them lost their
lives doing it. Yes, and yet while the protest was
(19:46):
still a failure, and you know, it wasn't the first
riot like this in history, the Luddite name has lasted
for two hundred years, unlike all of the other machine
breaking incidents. Uh, the word Luddite, as we said earlier,
became synonymous was something that relates to, although is not
exactly the same as what the original protest was all about. Today,
(20:08):
there's also a neo Luddite movement that centers on the
idea that technology's central place in our lives is damaging
some of this linguistic staying power, maybe thanks to the
flare for lack of a better word, that the Luddites
put into their protests. They were so passionate, and it's
such an it's an image that's so easy to conjure
(20:28):
in your mind of someone smashing a machine, tibits that
it just naturally people make the association, and it's yeah, well,
and then rather be rather than being an unruly smash
and grab mob. They targeted which mills to go after,
and then they disguised themselves to do so. And they
also wild disguised did military style drills on the moors
(20:49):
at night. And they communicated through secret hand signals, using
gestures to send messages and identify one another, as well
as conveying poems and songs to each other. You can
still find a lot of the lyrics to these online. Uh.
The name came about through the mythic character of ned Lud,
also known as Captain Lud, General Lud, or King Luod.
(21:11):
The first known use of this name in the context
of the protests came in November of eighteen eleven. It
probably stems from an incident that allegedly took place twenty
two years before, when an apprentice whose last name was
Lud or Ludlum smashed a stocking frame in rage after
being told to square his needles. So his name kind
of stuck and became the name of this mythic leader
(21:35):
of the movement, even though he had nothing to do
with it. He had nothing to do with it, and
there was no Luod leading the riots when they actually happened.
The story spread and this fictionalized Luod became the face,
though invisible, of the movement. King Lud become a became
a mythic figure who, just like Robin Hood, lived in
Sherwood Forest of all places, and he wrote taunting letters
(21:59):
from his office us there, all of which was fictional. Yeah. Uh.
The Ladites were also quotable. In one protest, the Ldites
were using giant sledge hammers to break them to break
machines in Yorkshire. They named these these hammers Great Enoch,
after Enoch Taylor, who ran the firm that made the
sledge hammers and also owned the machines that they were destroying.
(22:21):
They had a rallying cry of Enoch made them, Enoch
will break them. And they also protested in dresses um
and called themselves General Lud's wives when they did this
just sort of an odd image of these men in
drag with giant hammers, chanting and destroying things. Well, and
(22:41):
all these things together kind of made it a protest
that had character, which I think is one of the
reasons that it has more staying power in people's minds
than some of the other machine breaking protests. A lot
of the Leadites who evaded capture were really deeply reluctant
to talk about it for years after because they feared punishment.
(23:02):
This may also have added to this air of mystery
about it. Although around the eighteen seventies, as many of
the Luddites reached their very later years, some of them
did start start to tell their stories and revive some
of the Luddite lore. So today a Luddite wouldn't say
something along the lines of I don't want an iPhone
(23:23):
more like and admittedly this is something of an Apple's
to Oranges comparison, uh, they would make between Kodak, which
employed one and forty thousand people, in Instagram, which employs
about a dozen, or the way newspapers have fallen in
the face of the Internet becoming so popular and accessible. Yeah,
or just this morning, um, I saw an article that
(23:45):
was correlating the rise and capital expenses on things like
robots and technology and a drop in paying actual human
labor as a global trend having gone on since the
nineteen eighties. That is the sort of thing that would
lead to a neo lud I protest today more so
than I don't want the latest operating systems, no new things.
(24:09):
King Leod may rise again. So yes, that is the
story of the Luddite movement. Different than people probably suspect
in any way. Yes, definitely different than the colloquial use
of Luddite. Well, and I think some people associate them
with and this is completely wrong, of course, the Amish.
I think there was a I mean, I've had people
(24:31):
say that when I'm like, we're going to talk about
the Luodites. Were they like the Amish? Not at all?
Really not really, we really didn't have a problem with
machines if the machines were used. Well yeah, thank you
so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since
(24:52):
this is out of the archive, if you heard an
email address or a Facebook U r L or something
similar during the course of the show, that maybe obs eleape. Now,
so here's our current contact information. We are at History Podcasts,
at how Stuff Works dot com, and then we're at
Missed in the History. All over social media that is
our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks
(25:14):
again for listening for more on this and thousands of
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