Luddism

The Luddite Rebellion

In the latter years of the eighteenth century, the inventions of spinning tools, steam engines, and power looms began to revolutionize the industries and the lifestyle of middle and northern England. As it did a few generations later in the United States, industrialization led to an urbanization of society. Villagers and rural folk were drawn to urban centers by the possibility of employment in the burgeoning textile industry, among others. This massive population influx was accompanied by such hardships as political unrest, economic shortfalls, and rampant crime. Napoleon's blockading of ports, as well as deficient harvests, had raised the average price of wheat in 1812 to “155 shillings—a price it had never attained before, which it has never reached since, and in all human probability will never reach again” (Peel 1888, p. 24). Many towns in England featured starving populations “seeking for work, or failing to obtain it, parading through the streets in gaunt famine-stricken crowds, headed by men with bloody loaves mounted on spears, crying in plaintive, wailing chorus for bread” (Peel l888, pp. 24–25). It was in this era that the textile workers who objected to their working and living conditions began to sabotage the machinery that threatened to replace them.

Machine breaking as a tactic in industrial disputes was not unprecedented, having occurred perhaps as many as thirty-five times in the previous century. But it was the hosiery workers of Nottinghamshire that became infamous for the practice. Debate exists about whether the workers detested the new wide-lace frames themselves, the fact that women could now be hired to perform jobs previously open only to men, or the general conditions that made them feel interchangeable and devalued. An instance of the latter is evident in the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 that prohibited the banding of workers for the purpose of improving work situations. In any event, early in 1811 Nottingham textile manufacturers started to receive letters of protest about employment and wage conditions from “General Ned Ludd and his Army of Redressers.” Rumors then and since have suggested that Ludd either did not exist at all, lived a Robin Hood–like existence in the forest, or was modeled after the mentally retarded Ned Ludd of Leicestershire who angrily destroyed the frames he found in a building when he could not locate the children he was chasing wildly.

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