July 3, 2013 • 29 mins
The Luddite uprising was a series of protests in northern England, in which workers smashed machines in mills and factories. This wasn't the first organized violence against mechanization, but Luddites are the most infamous of all the machine-breakers.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy me Wilson. And today we have a listener
request from Anna one that I had a little trouble
(00:23):
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. This one was difficult because many many
people use the word luodite, I mean like some obstinate,
(00:43):
foot draggy person who doesn't want to adopt the new
technology right um. And and many of the articles that
use the term that way also include just enough floodite
history that it gets tagged that way, and all the
databases and so researching about the Luodites means that you
have to wait through all kinds of stuff about people
not want to fancy your phones or new technologies or
(01:05):
like some you know, new massively open online course thing,
all kinds or I myself have called myself a luddite
when I have to call someone on the phone instead
of texting them, like some kind of flodite. Yeah, it's
one of those words that's been kind of co opted
into modern slang, right, And I think because it sounds
inherently funny, just because of the construction of the word um,
(01:28):
that's why people love it so much. Yes, And while
there was an anti technology piece to the Leodite rebellion,
that's not really what it was about. It's one small
element of a much bigger picture, right. The The idea
that the Ludites were just anti machine zealots who dragged
their feet against progress and went around smashing things is
(01:52):
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. It So. The Ladite Uprising was a
series of protests in northern England 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
(02:15):
where people took to breaking machines to try to protest something.
But the Luodites are of all the machine breakers, the
most famous ones and the really the only ones whose
name became synonymous was something. Yeah, We've talked about it
even a little bit in another podcasts. We talked about
it in the Sewing Machine podcast. The words sabotage comes
(02:36):
from the word for shoe suboh, which got thrown into things.
But the leadites are exactly what you said. They have
become completely synonymous with this anti machinery, violent hatred for it,
right when it's not, you know, not so much what
it was about. So, yeah, this was taking place we
should contextualize in the early nineteenth century, so it was
towards the end of the Industrial Revolution, the American War
(02:59):
end the Pendance 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 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.
(03:22):
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 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
(03:44):
not making up for the drop in trade. Uh And
in addition, trade unions had been outlawed by the Combination
Acts of sevent eighteen hundred, so people were not allowed
to band together to try to get an increase in
pay or 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
(04:06):
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 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.
(04:27):
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 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. Really
(04:48):
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 years earlier, when William Lee invented the
stocking frame, and this was a knitting machine that many
people feared would put traditional knitters out of work. The
concern was great enough that Queen Elizabeth the First actually
(05:11):
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 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
(05:34):
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 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
(05:55):
with other improvements, ultimately allowed the textile industry to grow
and then turns of overall numbers. It created more jobs
than it eliminated in the very long run, but in
the short term people were losing their jobs, and at
the same time, mechanization had sparked a number of disputes
over wages and working conditions and the quality of work,
(06:15):
and these disputes were really at the heart of the
Laddite 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 weighed about
fifty pounds, to smooth out the surface of the wool.
This required both strength and skill, and so experienced croppers
(06:38):
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. So
as cropping machines became widespread, many croppers just wound up unemployed.
They also had a reputation for being unsavory and rowdy,
(07:01):
and the croppers made up some of the most violent Luddites.
Conditions in newly open factories were very often really not
what you would categorize this ideal, and many of them
workers were required to live in dormitories, and those spaces
were very cramped and tended to be dirty. People would
have their pay docked for all kinds of really seemingly
(07:23):
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 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
(07:45):
of material. But new mechanization and manufacturing techniques were making
it possible to cut garments out that used to be
made on the frame, out of a large piece of
cloth and then stitched me together. These were known as
cut ups, and they require less skilled to make, and
the workers and a lot of other people really perceived
them to be of much lower quality than things that
(08:06):
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 themes,
and then if there's a lot of seeming and piecing,
it's seen as less So yeah, 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,
(08:27):
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 few work that's not as good? Yeah, they didn't
want their industry to go downhill. Uh, And workers didn't
like that the people were being employed in the garment
industry that weren't apprenticed first, So it factors into that
(08:48):
whole quality issue. H 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
just got put in the factory floor. So while the
Luodites have a reputation for being anti machine and a
hallmark of the Luddite uprising was smashing machines to bits.
(09:10):
It wasn't the machines themselves that were the problem. The
Loodites were fine with machines as long as the people
using them were trained to do it well and safely,
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 tradespeople who took part in the Ladite protests, but croppers,
(09:34):
handloom weavers, and knitters, who were the ones most affected
by mechanization at the time, were the 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 Ladite Uprising, quote,
(09:55):
it would not do to stop the progress of invention,
to damage science by discouraging its improvements. 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
(10:16):
took their bread from them. They hated the buildings which
contained those machines. They hated the manufacturers 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
(10:39):
home peacefully once they had been dispersed 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 marched this as the first Luddite protest, and
from there, operating under cover of night, people smash machines
and factories, and sometimes even set factories on fire as
(11:01):
part of their demonstrations. There wasn't 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
(11:23):
Lancashire and the West riding of Yorkshire. 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.
(11:47):
Whereas on Thursday night last, about ten o'clock, a great
number of men armed with pistols, hammers and clubs entered
the dwelling house of George Ball, framework knitter 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 wantedly and feloniously broke and destroyed
(12:11):
five stocking frames standing in the workshop, four 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 Rowe, John Jackson and Thomas Naylor were working
(12:32):
on the frames at the time, being paid and had
no complaint with either George Ball or Francis Breathwaite. 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
(12:52):
was Lord Byron, whose first speech in the House of
Lords was against the death penalty for machine breakers. I
just want to take a moment to note year 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 the trajectory we've gone
(13:13):
through rather rapidly. Right. So violence escalated, with protesters and
factory people taking shots 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
(13:34):
crowd of protesters who were threatening his factory's machines. At
least three people died and eighteen were wounded. The next day,
soldiers 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
(13:56):
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 the protesters were killed. This protest was one
of the most prominent events and the Ludite uprising in
the West Riding, and it was one of the inspirations
for Charlotte Bronte's novel Shirley, which we quoted from earlier.
(14:18):
On the twenty April, William Horsefall, a manufacturer who had
boasted that he would ride up to his saddle in
Luddite blood, was killed 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 Ldite riots. In spite
(14:41):
of the presence of troops for much of the Ldite
ride at riots, it was hard for officials to get
things under control. The Luddites were doing most of their
machines mashing 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 forces who were
hunting them down. And although the movement was relatively coordinated,
(15:02):
there wasn't one central leadership that the army could find
and capture to 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 bigger than any military force ever used
(15:23):
to fight domestic unrest in England. As the protest escalated,
Bloodites were arrested and tried, with the courts trying to
make an example of the people who were on trial
to discourage for their protests. Bloodyites were sentenced to prison,
transported to Australia, or hanged. Eventually, Benjamin Walker, William Thorpe,
(15:45):
Thomas Smith, and George Miller confessed to being involved in
the murder of William Horsefall. Walker turned 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 investigate
sin and the investigation into the attack on Rawford's Mill,
and he betrayed sixteen other Luddites to the Crown. When
(16:07):
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 of the charges
(16:27):
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 their own. In some areas,
(16:49):
Luddites took an oath that should they reveal Ludite 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 knew, either because
of genuine support for the movement or because they feared
(17:11):
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 bloodism and money
to the people who informed on other protesters. Since the
lie and activities were really happening at night, he ordered
the troops to fight them. At night. Soldiers broke up
(17:33):
meetings and imprisoned protesters. An 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 executed for
machine breaking were sent to Australia for giving or receiving
(17:57):
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 of mechanization, and the
(18:18):
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 still a failure, and
(18:38):
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, there's also a neo Luddite
(19:00):
moved the centers on the idea that technology's central place
in our lives is damaging some of this linguistic staying power,
maybe thanks to the flair 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 in your mind of someone smashing machine tibits,
(19:23):
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
at night. And they communicated through secret hand signals, using
(19:44):
gestures to send messages and identify one another, as well
as conveying poems and songs to each other. Yeah, you
can still find a lot of the lyrics to these online. Uh.
The name came about through the mythic character of Ned Luod,
also known as Captain General Lud or King Lood. The
first known use of this name in the context of
(20:05):
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 of
(20:26):
the movement, even though he had nothing to do with it.
He had nothing to do with it, and there was
no blood leading the riots when they actually happened. Yeah,
but the story spread and Luod became the face, though
invisible of the movement. King Lood became a mythic figure who,
just like Robin Hood, lived in Sherwood Forest of all places,
and he wrote taunting letters from his office there, all
(20:50):
of which was fictional. Yeah. Uh. The Loodites were also quotable.
In one protest, the Leoodites were using giant sledgehammers to
break machines in Yorkshire. They named 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.
They had a rallying cry of Enoch made them Enoch
(21:12):
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
all these things together kind of made it a protest
that had character, which I think is one of the
(21:34):
reasons that it has more staying power in people's minds
than some of the other machine breaking protests. A lot
of the Ludite, too evaded capture, were really deeply reluctant
to talk about it for years afterward because they feared punishment.
This may also have added to this air of mystery
about it. Although around the eighteen seventies, as many of
(21:56):
the Ladites reached their very later years, some of them
did start start to tell their stories and revived some
of the Ladite lore. So today a Luddite wouldn't say
something along the lines of I don't want an iPhone
more like and admittedly this is something of an Apple's
to Orange is comparison, uh they would make between Kodak,
(22:17):
which employed on 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
was correlating the rise and capital expenses on things like
robots and technology and a drop in paying actual human
(22:40):
labor as a global trend having gone on since the
nineteen eighties. That is the sort of thing that would
lead to a neo Luddite protest today, more so than
I don't want the latest operating, no new things. King
lad may rise again. So yes, that is the movement
(23:04):
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 say that when I'm like, oh,
we can talk about the Luddites. Were they like the Amish?
Not at all? Really not real. We really didn't have
(23:27):
a problem with machines if the machines were used. Well, yeah,
do you want to take a moment to talk about
Audible dot Com? Yes? So. Audible dot Com is the
leading provider of downloadable digital audio books and spoken word entertainment.
Audible has more than one thousand titles to choose from
to be downloaded to your iPod or your m P
three player. Go to audible podcast dot com slash history
(23:50):
to get a free audio book download of your choice
when you sign up today. And they have a title
that is completely relevant to our podcast today, which is
Charlotte Bronte Shirley and you two can get in on
the luddite information told in a fictional book. You can
hear all the parts that we did not read from,
which is the vast majority of the book. Yeah. So
(24:11):
go to audible podcast dot com slash history and get
in on that deal. I think you also have listener
mail from I do. This is from Nathan. Nathan says,
hello again, History ladies. Like your podcast on the Oneida community.
I enjoyed listening to your show about the brook Farm community.
It seems to me that these Enlightenment and post Enlightenment
(24:31):
era experiments and communism fail because one their success hinged
on new, unestablished ideas which invariably changed and to the
experiments began with the Enlightenment ideal, but the perfection of
man was an attainable goal, and that they were much
closer to attaining that goal than they were. It seems
to me that the only lasting successful communist ventures have
(24:53):
been monasteries. Whether Buddhist, Roman, Catholic, or Orthodox Christian. Monastic
communities have succeeded kids one they are founded with an
ideology that has been established and generally does not change.
And two, the monk or none joins with the knowledge
that they are a long way from the perfection slash
Nirvana slash stainthood slash Theosis, and they have a lot
(25:15):
of work to do. As if you didn't have enough
podcast requests, it would be fabulous to hear a podcast
on Mount Athos, also known as the Holy Mountain. Sitting
on a peninsula in Greece, the mountain has been home
to twenty monasteries for over a thousand years. The monasteries
house innumerable ancient artifacts and manuscripts which are only now
being discovered and cataloged. The mountain is off limits to women.
(25:39):
It has been protected by stars and emperors, and protected
since Ottumn times by the Sultan and even Hitler. All
enticing reasons to view an Athos podcast, don't you think so? First,
thanks to Nathan for sending that letter. We got several
letters after the Brook Farm episode from people who were saying,
you know, I think monasteries are the only people who
(25:59):
made this work. We did. Like that was a trend
in our in our inbox, just kind of fascinating, and
I've kind of wondered, um, Like I had some personal
theories about that, about like the expectation joining a monastery
is deeply different from the expectation and joining a commune,
Like those two words conjure up completely different thoughts about
(26:20):
what life is going to be, like they do, and
I wonder if some of it isn't um And I'm
just shooting from the hip. You know, when you sign
into a life of service in a monastery or even
a convent um, it's you recognize that your goal is
that you will give service, Whereas when you go into
(26:43):
a commune like Brook Farm, a lot of those people
their goal was that they would achieve happiness. Yeah, it
was a little bit more of a selfish motivation, even
if it was very well intended, and they were like, yes,
we will work for the good of all of us
because that will make us all happy, versus we will
work for this thing that is bigger than us and
it will never come to you know, us in a
(27:06):
personal um benefit way. You know, they could certainly get
benefit from it and and feel very much at peace
and a sense of happiness, but that wasn't the goal
of it, whereas it was of something like Brooke Farm
right well. And it also reminded me of an idea
I had several years ago, and how I really wished
that there was like a secular monasticism, where like, if
(27:29):
somebody wanted to have a monastic life, there there was
a monastery that they could go to that that was
not tied to a particular religion. And I remember a
couple of times like trying to see if there really
was such a thing anywhere, And I wonder if that
actually would work, uh without some kind of like deep
seated history, right, would you just send up with a
(27:51):
bunch of hermits who would have a hard time working
together to make things go. I kind of think that
might be that might be a thing that would be
a challenge there. So thank you so much for sending
that letter. If you would like to write to us,
you can. We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash History
class Stuff and on Twitter at mist in History. You
(28:14):
can find our tumbler at mist in history dot tumbler
dot com, and we are also on Pinterest. If you
would like to read a little more about some of
the context that lad up to the Luddite uprising, you
can come to our website and put the word Industrial
Revolution in the search bar. You will find the top
ten Industrial Revolution inventions. You can do all of that
(28:34):
and a whole lot more at our website, which is
how Stuff Works dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, it has to works dot com.
(28:56):
Audible dot com is the leading provider of downloadable digital
audiobooks and spoken word entertainment. Audible has more than one
hundred thousand titles to choose from to be downloaded to
your iPod or MP three player. Go to audible podcast
dot com slash history to get a free audio book
download of your choice when you sign up today.
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy me Wilson. And today we have a listener
request from Anna one that I had a little trouble
(00:23):
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. This one was difficult because many many
people use the word luodite, I mean like some obstinate,
(00:43):
foot draggy person who doesn't want to adopt the new
technology right um. And and many of the articles that
use the term that way also include just enough floodite
history that it gets tagged that way, and all the
databases and so researching about the Luodites means that you
have to wait through all kinds of stuff about people
not want to fancy your phones or new technologies or
(01:05):
like some you know, new massively open online course thing,
all kinds or I myself have called myself a luddite
when I have to call someone on the phone instead
of texting them, like some kind of flodite. Yeah, it's
one of those words that's been kind of co opted
into modern slang, right, And I think because it sounds
inherently funny, just because of the construction of the word um,
(01:28):
that's why people love it so much. Yes, And while
there was an anti technology piece to the Leodite rebellion,
that's not really what it was about. It's one small
element of a much bigger picture, right. The The idea
that the Ludites were just anti machine zealots who dragged
their feet against progress and went around smashing things is
(01:52):
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. It So. The Ladite Uprising was a
series of protests in northern England 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
(02:15):
where people took to breaking machines to try to protest something.
But the Luodites are of all the machine breakers, the
most famous ones and the really the only ones whose
name became synonymous was something. Yeah, We've talked about it
even a little bit in another podcasts. We talked about
it in the Sewing Machine podcast. The words sabotage comes
(02:36):
from the word for shoe suboh, which got thrown into things.
But the leadites are exactly what you said. They have
become completely synonymous with this anti machinery, violent hatred for it,
right when it's not, you know, not so much what
it was about. So, yeah, this was taking place we
should contextualize in the early nineteenth century, so it was
towards the end of the Industrial Revolution, the American War
(02:59):
end the Pendance 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 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.
(03:22):
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 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
(03:44):
not making up for the drop in trade. Uh And
in addition, trade unions had been outlawed by the Combination
Acts of sevent eighteen hundred, so people were not allowed
to band together to try to get an increase in
pay or 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
(04:06):
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 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.
(04:27):
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 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. Really
(04:48):
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 years earlier, when William Lee invented the
stocking frame, and this was a knitting machine that many
people feared would put traditional knitters out of work. The
concern was great enough that Queen Elizabeth the First actually
(05:11):
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 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
(05:34):
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 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
(05:55):
with other improvements, ultimately allowed the textile industry to grow
and then turns of overall numbers. It created more jobs
than it eliminated in the very long run, but in
the short term people were losing their jobs, and at
the same time, mechanization had sparked a number of disputes
over wages and working conditions and the quality of work,
(06:15):
and these disputes were really at the heart of the
Laddite 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 weighed about
fifty pounds, to smooth out the surface of the wool.
This required both strength and skill, and so experienced croppers
(06:38):
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. So
as cropping machines became widespread, many croppers just wound up unemployed.
They also had a reputation for being unsavory and rowdy,
(07:01):
and the croppers made up some of the most violent Luddites.
Conditions in newly open factories were very often really not
what you would categorize this ideal, and many of them
workers were required to live in dormitories, and those spaces
were very cramped and tended to be dirty. People would
have their pay docked for all kinds of really seemingly
(07:23):
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 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
(07:45):
of material. But new mechanization and manufacturing techniques were making
it possible to cut garments out that used to be
made on the frame, out of a large piece of
cloth and then stitched me together. These were known as
cut ups, and they require less skilled to make, and
the workers and a lot of other people really perceived
them to be of much lower quality than things that
(08:06):
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 themes,
and then if there's a lot of seeming and piecing,
it's seen as less So yeah, 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,
(08:27):
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 few work that's not as good? Yeah, they didn't
want their industry to go downhill. Uh, And workers didn't
like that the people were being employed in the garment
industry that weren't apprenticed first, So it factors into that
(08:48):
whole quality issue. H 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
just got put in the factory floor. So while the
Luodites have a reputation for being anti machine and a
hallmark of the Luddite uprising was smashing machines to bits.
(09:10):
It wasn't the machines themselves that were the problem. The
Loodites were fine with machines as long as the people
using them were trained to do it well and safely,
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 tradespeople who took part in the Ladite protests, but croppers,
(09:34):
handloom weavers, and knitters, who were the ones most affected
by mechanization at the time, were the 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 Ladite Uprising, quote,
(09:55):
it would not do to stop the progress of invention,
to damage science by discouraging its improvements. 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
(10:16):
took their bread from them. They hated the buildings which
contained those machines. They hated the manufacturers 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
(10:39):
home peacefully once they had been dispersed 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 marched this as the first Luddite protest, and
from there, operating under cover of night, people smash machines
and factories, and sometimes even set factories on fire as
(11:01):
part of their demonstrations. There wasn't 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
(11:23):
Lancashire and the West riding of Yorkshire. 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.
(11:47):
Whereas on Thursday night last, about ten o'clock, a great
number of men armed with pistols, hammers and clubs entered
the dwelling house of George Ball, framework knitter 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 wantedly and feloniously broke and destroyed
(12:11):
five stocking frames standing in the workshop, four 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 Rowe, John Jackson and Thomas Naylor were working
(12:32):
on the frames at the time, being paid and had
no complaint with either George Ball or Francis Breathwaite. 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
(12:52):
was Lord Byron, whose first speech in the House of
Lords was against the death penalty for machine breakers. I
just want to take a moment to note year 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 the trajectory we've gone
(13:13):
through rather rapidly. Right. So violence escalated, with protesters and
factory people taking shots 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
(13:34):
crowd of protesters who were threatening his factory's machines. At
least three people died and eighteen were wounded. The next day,
soldiers 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
(13:56):
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 the protesters were killed. This protest was one
of the most prominent events and the Ludite uprising in
the West Riding, and it was one of the inspirations
for Charlotte Bronte's novel Shirley, which we quoted from earlier.
(14:18):
On the twenty April, William Horsefall, a manufacturer who had
boasted that he would ride up to his saddle in
Luddite blood, was killed 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 Ldite riots. In spite
(14:41):
of the presence of troops for much of the Ldite
ride at riots, it was hard for officials to get
things under control. The Luddites were doing most of their
machines mashing 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 forces who were
hunting them down. And although the movement was relatively coordinated,
(15:02):
there wasn't one central leadership that the army could find
and capture to 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 bigger than any military force ever used
(15:23):
to fight domestic unrest in England. As the protest escalated,
Bloodites were arrested and tried, with the courts trying to
make an example of the people who were on trial
to discourage for their protests. Bloodyites were sentenced to prison,
transported to Australia, or hanged. Eventually, Benjamin Walker, William Thorpe,
(15:45):
Thomas Smith, and George Miller confessed to being involved in
the murder of William Horsefall. Walker turned 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 investigate
sin and the investigation into the attack on Rawford's Mill,
and he betrayed sixteen other Luddites to the Crown. When
(16:07):
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 of the charges
(16:27):
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 their own. In some areas,
(16:49):
Luddites took an oath that should they reveal Ludite 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 knew, either because
of genuine support for the movement or because they feared
(17:11):
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 bloodism and money
to the people who informed on other protesters. Since the
lie and activities were really happening at night, he ordered
the troops to fight them. At night. Soldiers broke up
(17:33):
meetings and imprisoned protesters. An 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 executed for
machine breaking were sent to Australia for giving or receiving
(17:57):
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 of mechanization, and the
(18:18):
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 still a failure, and
(18:38):
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, there's also a neo Luddite
(19:00):
moved the centers on the idea that technology's central place
in our lives is damaging some of this linguistic staying power,
maybe thanks to the flair 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 in your mind of someone smashing machine tibits,
(19:23):
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
at night. And they communicated through secret hand signals, using
(19:44):
gestures to send messages and identify one another, as well
as conveying poems and songs to each other. Yeah, you
can still find a lot of the lyrics to these online. Uh.
The name came about through the mythic character of Ned Luod,
also known as Captain General Lud or King Lood. The
first known use of this name in the context of
(20:05):
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 of
(20:26):
the movement, even though he had nothing to do with it.
He had nothing to do with it, and there was
no blood leading the riots when they actually happened. Yeah,
but the story spread and Luod became the face, though
invisible of the movement. King Lood became a mythic figure who,
just like Robin Hood, lived in Sherwood Forest of all places,
and he wrote taunting letters from his office there, all
(20:50):
of which was fictional. Yeah. Uh. The Loodites were also quotable.
In one protest, the Leoodites were using giant sledgehammers to
break machines in Yorkshire. They named 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.
They had a rallying cry of Enoch made them Enoch
(21:12):
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
all these things together kind of made it a protest
that had character, which I think is one of the
(21:34):
reasons that it has more staying power in people's minds
than some of the other machine breaking protests. A lot
of the Ludite, too evaded capture, were really deeply reluctant
to talk about it for years afterward because they feared punishment.
This may also have added to this air of mystery
about it. Although around the eighteen seventies, as many of
(21:56):
the Ladites reached their very later years, some of them
did start start to tell their stories and revived some
of the Ladite lore. So today a Luddite wouldn't say
something along the lines of I don't want an iPhone
more like and admittedly this is something of an Apple's
to Orange is comparison, uh they would make between Kodak,
(22:17):
which employed on 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
was correlating the rise and capital expenses on things like
robots and technology and a drop in paying actual human
(22:40):
labor as a global trend having gone on since the
nineteen eighties. That is the sort of thing that would
lead to a neo Luddite protest today, more so than
I don't want the latest operating, no new things. King
lad may rise again. So yes, that is the movement
(23:04):
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 say that when I'm like, oh,
we can talk about the Luddites. Were they like the Amish?
Not at all? Really not real. We really didn't have
(23:27):
a problem with machines if the machines were used. Well, yeah,
do you want to take a moment to talk about
Audible dot Com? Yes? So. Audible dot Com is the
leading provider of downloadable digital audio books and spoken word entertainment.
Audible has more than one thousand titles to choose from
to be downloaded to your iPod or your m P
three player. Go to audible podcast dot com slash history
(23:50):
to get a free audio book download of your choice
when you sign up today. And they have a title
that is completely relevant to our podcast today, which is
Charlotte Bronte Shirley and you two can get in on
the luddite information told in a fictional book. You can
hear all the parts that we did not read from,
which is the vast majority of the book. Yeah. So
(24:11):
go to audible podcast dot com slash history and get
in on that deal. I think you also have listener
mail from I do. This is from Nathan. Nathan says,
hello again, History ladies. Like your podcast on the Oneida community.
I enjoyed listening to your show about the brook Farm community.
It seems to me that these Enlightenment and post Enlightenment
(24:31):
era experiments and communism fail because one their success hinged
on new, unestablished ideas which invariably changed and to the
experiments began with the Enlightenment ideal, but the perfection of
man was an attainable goal, and that they were much
closer to attaining that goal than they were. It seems
to me that the only lasting successful communist ventures have
(24:53):
been monasteries. Whether Buddhist, Roman, Catholic, or Orthodox Christian. Monastic
communities have succeeded kids one they are founded with an
ideology that has been established and generally does not change.
And two, the monk or none joins with the knowledge
that they are a long way from the perfection slash
Nirvana slash stainthood slash Theosis, and they have a lot
(25:15):
of work to do. As if you didn't have enough
podcast requests, it would be fabulous to hear a podcast
on Mount Athos, also known as the Holy Mountain. Sitting
on a peninsula in Greece, the mountain has been home
to twenty monasteries for over a thousand years. The monasteries
house innumerable ancient artifacts and manuscripts which are only now
being discovered and cataloged. The mountain is off limits to women.
(25:39):
It has been protected by stars and emperors, and protected
since Ottumn times by the Sultan and even Hitler. All
enticing reasons to view an Athos podcast, don't you think so? First,
thanks to Nathan for sending that letter. We got several
letters after the Brook Farm episode from people who were saying,
you know, I think monasteries are the only people who
(25:59):
made this work. We did. Like that was a trend
in our in our inbox, just kind of fascinating, and
I've kind of wondered, um, Like I had some personal
theories about that, about like the expectation joining a monastery
is deeply different from the expectation and joining a commune,
Like those two words conjure up completely different thoughts about
(26:20):
what life is going to be, like they do, and
I wonder if some of it isn't um And I'm
just shooting from the hip. You know, when you sign
into a life of service in a monastery or even
a convent um, it's you recognize that your goal is
that you will give service, Whereas when you go into
(26:43):
a commune like Brook Farm, a lot of those people
their goal was that they would achieve happiness. Yeah, it
was a little bit more of a selfish motivation, even
if it was very well intended, and they were like, yes,
we will work for the good of all of us
because that will make us all happy, versus we will
work for this thing that is bigger than us and
it will never come to you know, us in a
(27:06):
personal um benefit way. You know, they could certainly get
benefit from it and and feel very much at peace
and a sense of happiness, but that wasn't the goal
of it, whereas it was of something like Brooke Farm
right well. And it also reminded me of an idea
I had several years ago, and how I really wished
that there was like a secular monasticism, where like, if
(27:29):
somebody wanted to have a monastic life, there there was
a monastery that they could go to that that was
not tied to a particular religion. And I remember a
couple of times like trying to see if there really
was such a thing anywhere, And I wonder if that
actually would work, uh without some kind of like deep
seated history, right, would you just send up with a
(27:51):
bunch of hermits who would have a hard time working
together to make things go. I kind of think that
might be that might be a thing that would be
a challenge there. So thank you so much for sending
that letter. If you would like to write to us,
you can. We're at History Podcast at Discovery dot com.
We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com slash History
class Stuff and on Twitter at mist in History. You
(28:14):
can find our tumbler at mist in history dot tumbler
dot com, and we are also on Pinterest. If you
would like to read a little more about some of
the context that lad up to the Luddite uprising, you
can come to our website and put the word Industrial
Revolution in the search bar. You will find the top
ten Industrial Revolution inventions. You can do all of that
(28:34):
and a whole lot more at our website, which is
how Stuff Works dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, it has to works dot com.
(28:56):
Audible dot com is the leading provider of downloadable digital
audiobooks and spoken word entertainment. Audible has more than one
hundred thousand titles to choose from to be downloaded to
your iPod or MP three player. Go to audible podcast
dot com slash history to get a free audio book
download of your choice when you sign up today.
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