Luddites london

When the economic pressures of the Napoleonic Wars made the cheap competition of early textile factories particularly threatening to the artisans, a few desperate weavers began breaking into factories and smashing textile machines. The first major instances of machine breaking took place in in Nottingham, and the practice soon spread across the English countryside.

Machine-breaking Luddites attacked and burned factories, and in some cases they even exchanged gunfire with company guards and soldiers.

The workers hoped their raids would deter employers from installing expensive machinery, but the British government instead moved to quash the uprisings by making machine-breaking punishable by death. The unrest finally reached its peak in April , when a few Luddites were gunned down during an attack on a mill near Huddersfield. The army had deployed several thousand troops to round up these dissidents in the days that followed, and dozens were hanged or transported to Australia.

By , the Luddite resistance had all but vanished. They held a mass trial of those caught in and executed 17 men, others were sent to penal colonies. These were show trials and sat uncomfortably with some politicians, an air of panic had settled in Government.

The harsh punishments meted out did stop the Luddite protests, in all between 60 and 70 people were executed. This was a very large stick with which to beat people who were desperate. The Luddites could not stem the tide of the machines, if indeed that had been their goal. They brought attention to the poor in society and the shocking conditions in which they existed.

Luddites wanted a fairer society, they did not achieve it. The first half of the 19th century was a time of very real hardship for people.

It took another twenty years before any type of reform took place. The movement was organised and effective, with bands often meeting on the moors at night to practise drills and manoeuvres, all in the hope that the government would agree to impose a ban on the use of textile machinery.

One attack took place on 20 March , when a Stockport warehouse belonging to William Radcliffe — one of the first manufacturers to use the power-loom — was attacked by a band of Luddites.

Certainly, most of the Luddite violence was aimed at the machinery rather than against people, but death threats were sent to some employers. Deaths and injuries seem to have taken place where attempts were made to defend the machinery and factory premises. One of the most violent attacks took place in April , in West Riding, when William Horsfall, an outspoken anti-Luddite who had replaced many of the skilled workers at his mill with shearing frames, was killed in cold blood as he rode to inspect some cloth.

Despite the relatively small numbers involved in machine breaking, and the fact that it was confined mainly to the Midlands and Yorkshire, government in London took the Luddite threat very seriously. In February , the Frame-Breaking Act was passed, which went a step further than previous acts that had made frame-breaking a criminal offence: it now carried the death penalty.

Thousands of parliamentary troops were sent to restore order, with more men deployed to the Midlands and the north of England than were fighting Napoleon in Spain.