Now! Then! Tag: Luddism (1811-17)

Entries for the tag ‘Luddism (1811-17)’

In Yorkshire's West Riding, a movement of croppers opposed to the use of shearing frames and gig mills to raise productivity in the finishing woollen cloth, involving machine-breaking, political radicalism, arms raids, and the administration of illegal oaths - brutally suppressed.

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”
15 January 1812: The Leeds authorities foil the first Luddite attack in Yorkshire – at Sheepscar
17 February 1812: Leeds businessmen meeting at the magistrates court act against the authors of the first successful Luddite attack in Yorkshire, at the Oates, Wood, and Smithson works at Oatlands, Woodhouse Carr
11 April 1812: On a moonless night, “the army of General Ludd” attacks William Cartwright’s mill at Rawfolds (Cleckheaton) – later providing inspiration for Charlotte Brontë’s “Shirley”
28 April 1812: Methodist Luddites fatally wound the textile manufacturer William Horsfall on his way home from Huddersfield market
19 May 1812: An Anglican Whit walk encounters a Nonconformist one at “Briarfield” (Birstall), amid Luddites and wars with France and the US, in the imagination of Charlotte Brontë
18 August 1812: Lady Ludd leads bread rioters through the streets of Leeds
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
10 November 1817: Though organised Luddism is in decline, a gig-mill burns on Hunslet Lane, Leeds
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
11 January 1825: American comment on William Hirst of Leeds’s revolutionary and controversial labour-saving improvements to spinning and stubbing machines, patented today

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