Luddism in Nottinghamshire
by Luddism broke machinery and broke rules in Nottingham between 1811-1817. Was this the beginning of a social revolution in England?
Luddism (1811-1817) is basically a phenomenon where the breakage of machinery appears with a noticeable concentration in time and with an unusual intensity in the history of British industrialism. It was not the first time frames were attacked, but the first time they were so extensively.
Far from a main political motivation, Luddism was the consequence of an unprecedented economic distress in the framework-knitting and lace manufacturing in the Midlands. Since 1740, it became a popular saying the phrase “as poor as a stockinger”. It may be an exaggeration but the fact is that an average stockinger earned only seven shillings a week and “while he worked the frame, his wife seamed the stockings and his children wound the thread from hanks on to bobbins”.
As soon as 1710 it is possible to trace the first disturbances in relation with the forthcoming Luddism, more than a century before it all started. In that year, a mob of stockingers enters the house of a hosier called Nicholson and beats him and his twelve apprentices, smashing the frames and throwing them out the windows. During the next two nights, 100 frames were destroyed.
Later on, the trade moved to the Midlands (Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire), not due to these outrages but to the successive attempts of regulating hosiery and its wages.
Similar alterations of public order were to occur as well in 1752-1753 and 1778-1779, both dates coinciding with two frustrated attempts on behalf of the framework knitters to regulate the trade as fiercely as they had in London.
When on the 11th of March 1811 stocking frames are attacked again, incessant rumours spring all over the Midlands. In successive weeks, frame-breaking becomes an almost diary event; uninformed commentators from the House of Lords believe Luddism has to do with the shock produced in the trade by the arrival of new machinery. Radical activists blame the Tories and reckon the disturbances are an attempt to discredit any reform movement. Some think Luddites are actually receiving instructions from William Cobbet and other national leaders of the reform movement in London. Gravenor Henson, whose importance in the development of the legal consequences of the period will be later related, dares to say that it is all a scheme put up by the Government to enable it to place vast areas “under the heel of military despotism”.
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