Yorkshire Almanac The Leeds authorities foil the first Luddite attack in Yorkshire

15 January 1812: The Leeds authorities foil the first Luddite attack in Yorkshire – at Sheepscar

Leeds Mercury. 1812/01/18. Leeds January 18. Leeds. Get it:

Unedited excerpt

If an excerpt is used in the book, it will be shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.

On Wednesday night, information upon oath was given to the Magistrates of this Borough, of a conspiracy to destroy the Machinery of certain Mills in this town and neighbourhood, employed in the dressing of Cloth, for this purpose the members of this confederacy was to assemble in a certain place to be agreed upon, and from thence to divide themselves into strong parties, and proceed to the work of destruction, provided with the proper implements for effecting their purpose. The Magistrates upon receiving this information immediately assembled at the Town Clerk’s Office, and having arranged their plans, proceeded in person immediately to carry them into into effect. Near the Bridge, a number of persons were found assembled, many of them with their faces blacked who dispersed on the appearance of the Magistrates, seeking their safely in flight, one of these persons of the name of James Shaw, was taken into custody by a Magistrate, and on the following day he was examined before the Magistrates at the Rotation office, and committed to York-Castle, under what is called the Blek Act charged with disguising his person, and having in his persession several offensive weapons, we believe a hammer and chissel; he was escorted to the Castle by a party of the Scot’s Greys stationed in this town.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.

Comment

Ned Ludd has a better piece, which gives times and Sheepscar as the destination, but I haven’t seen it – is it in the Intelligencer?

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Comment

Ned Ludd has a better piece, which gives times and Sheepscar as the destination, but I haven’t seen it – is it in the Intelligencer?

Something to say? Get in touch

18 August 1812: Lady Ludd leads bread rioters through the streets of Leeds

10 November 1817: Though organised Luddism is in decline, a gig-mill burns on Hunslet Lane, Leeds

11 April 1812: On a moonless night, Luddites attack William Cartwright’s mill at Rawfolds (Cleckheaton) – subsequently inspiring Charlotte Brontë’s “Shirley”

11 January 1825: American comment on William Hirst of Leeds’s revolutionary and controversial labour-saving improvements to spinning and stubbing machines, patented today

4 January 1813: Alexander Thomson, Baron of the Exchequer, fires the Georgian state’s opening salvo in the great trial at York of Luddites from the West Riding

13 January 1812: “My neighbours would think I was going to ruin if they could not smell my factory children half an hour after they had gone down the lane”

28 April 1812: Luddites fatally wound the Marsden textile manufacturer William Horsfall on his way home from Huddersfield market

14 February 1818: 17 girls aged 9-18 die in a fire at Thomas Atkinson’s cotton mill at Colne Bridge (Huddersfield), but the counting house and warehouse are saved

7 January 1813: In a novelisation of the Luddite murder of Marsden textile manufacturer William Horsfall, a local Baptist minister, Abraham Webster, reports on his execution-eve visit to George Mellor in York Castle

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Comment

Some background to the novel:

D. F. E. Sykes, a Huddersfield solicitor married to the daughter of an Anglican clergyman, focused in Ben o’ Bills, The Luddite, which the author claimed to be based on oral testimony and ‘mostly true’, on a fictional family, the Bamforths, connected with the Particular Baptists at Powle Moor, near Slaithwaite, where the minister, Abraham Webster, was so decidedly against the new machines that old Mrs Bamforth ‘died in the belief that the curse of Scripture was upon them’. George Mellor, a cousin of the Bamforths in the novel, enters the story on Christmas Eve, 1811, intoning the first verse of ‘Christians Awake’. He goes along with the rest of the family to Christmas morning service at Slaithwaite Church, where ‘near all Slaithwaite’ had gathered ‘Methodies and Baptists and all; and even folk that went nowhere, Owenites they called them’, who ‘made a point of going to church that one morning of the year’. Mellor, who occasionally speaks in moderate tones, but elsewhere gives vent to Painite anti-clerical and republican sentiments, is portrayed presiding at a Luddite oath-taking ceremony with a Bible to hand. He refers to Benjamin Walker, the accomplice who betrayed him, whose family Sykes also links with the Baptists at Powle Moor, as a ‘Judas’, He is visited twice in his York prison cell by Abraham Webster, who prays with him on the eve of his execution. According to Sykes, this final pastoral visit inspired Mellor to offer words of forgiveness for his enemies from the scaffold, though Sykes was clearly using dramatic licence in allowing Webster to lead the singing of a Methodist hymn at Mellor’s execution, since all the contemporary accounts record this as a feature of the execution of another group of Luddites. At the end of the novel, Soldier Jack, a former militia-man-turned-Luddite, reflecting on Mellor’s fate, philosophizes: ‘”Yo’re dissenters at th’ Powle … an’ … if there’d been no dissenters there’d been no Luds, ‘an George Mellor ‘d noan ha’ danced out 0′ th’ world on nowt”‘.

Much of the background to Sykes’s novel is authentic, as are several of the key characters, including Abraham Webster, the Baptist minister at Powle Moor, the Reverend Charles Chew, the curate at Slaithwaite and the Luddites George Mellor and Benjamin Walker. A succession of popular evangelical Calvinistic Anglican curates in the Venn tradition at Slaithwaite and the reluctance of the earls of Dartmouth to release land on their estates for the building of Nonconformist places of worship had delayed the local development of both Wesleyanism and Dissent, a factor of which Sykes was clearly aware in his reconstruction of popular religion in the Colne Valley. In fact, no Wesleyan chapel was built at Slaithwaite until 1839, though a chapel had been opened in 1810 at Linthwaite, the first to be built in the Colne Valley, and cottage meetings were begun at Marsden in the same year. The Baptist secession had occurred as recently as 1787 and the Powle Moor Chapel was built· three years later on moorland waste in the neighbouring township of Scammonden, having been denied building land on the Dartmouth estates in the Colne Valley. The most recent historians of the chapel have, however, found no evidence in the chapel records to corroborate the links between Sykes’s characters and the chapel and dismissed Sykes’s account as purely fictional.
(Hargreaves 1990)

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