The Luddites broke machines they knew how to run

Letters signed General Ludd

Toward the end of 1811, in the hosiery villages around Nottingham, framework knitters began breaking the stocking frames in their employers' shops.¹ Over the next five years the raids spread to the croppers of Yorkshire and the weavers of Lancashire, and did not subside until about 1816.² The threatening letters that came first were signed by a General Ludd, a King Ludd, a Ned Ludd who led no one, because he had almost certainly never existed.³ The founding anecdote — a Leicestershire workman who took a hammer to a knitting frame around 1779 — was not set down in print until 1847, in a life of Lord Sidmouth.¹

What the wide frames were for

The knitters were not smashing frames because frames were new. The wide frame let one hand turn out stockings cheaply and badly, and it ran on unapprenticed boys hired to undercut a trade that took years to learn.⁴ In Yorkshire the croppers, who finished cloth by hand with shears, faced the gig mill and the shearing frame that would put most of them out of the trade within a decade.⁴ The reading now best supported by historians, E. P. Thompson's and Brian Merchant's after him, is that the Luddites opposed the use of machinery to cut wages and gut a craft, not machinery itself.⁵ As Merchant puts it, "The Luddites were not anti-machinery; many of them were machine experts."⁵

A hanging offense

Parliament's answer was the Frame Breaking Act, which made the destruction of a stocking or lace frame a capital felony.⁶ On 27 February 1812, at the bill's second reading in the Lords, a twenty-four-year-old Lord Byron rose in his maiden speech to oppose setting a starving man's life below the price of a machine.⁷

The Act received royal assent on 20 March 1812 and was written to lapse on 1 March 1814. A further Act in 1813 replaced the death penalty with transportation.⁶ The government held the districts with some twelve thousand troops, a figure that traces to the historian F. O. Darvall.⁸ At York in January 1813 the Special Commission hanged seventeen men: three on 8 January for the murder of the mill-owner William Horsfall,⁹ and fourteen more on 16 January for the attack on William Cartwright's Rawfolds Mill and a run of burglaries.¹⁰

The word that outlived the frames

The frames won. By 1816 the raids had been hanged and transported out of existence, and within a few decades the word had slipped its origins.² It stopped meaning a Nottingham knitter defending his wage and came to mean anyone who resents a new device, the sense a dictionary now records second.¹ Merchant's point is that the ruling classes of the day did that flattening on purpose, popularizing a Luddite who simply hated machines.⁵ The men who signed themselves General Ludd knew their machines. What they would not accept was a machine turned against the trade that fed them.