The Radicals Live in the Hills: Luddites in Lancashire

The night is 11 June 1812. The times are dark. Thirty-eight men are gathered in the Prince Regents Arms on the corner of Laystall Street and Great Ancoats Street in Manchester. Minutes later the pub will be raided by police. The men will be sent to Lancaster gaol. For now, a petition is being signed.

Among the signatories was John Knight. John was a radical, a “noted Jacobin” according to one of his contemporaries – meaning a man who sympathised with the recent revolution in France and fancied something similar happening on these shores. He was an “uncultivated savage of Saddleworth,” in the ruder words of another.

Born in Mossley, a village three miles east of Oldham that was then part of Saddleworth, Knight had been arrested for inciting a riot in Royton in 1795. He subsequently became a prominent political figure in Oldham. An organiser at Peterloo in 1819, he canvassed for the National Union of The Working Classes in 1830 and initiated the Oldham branch of Ten-Hour Association for limits on the working day in 1833. He later became an agent advocating for electoral reform with the prominent Chartist newspaper Northern Star. That night in June 1812 saw Knight sign a petition that would land him in jail.

Violence and starvation had been sweeping Northern England and the Midlands since the previous summer. England was at war with France. Food prices were at a record high – inflation, we call that these days – and riots were common. Food was being stolen, and under the threat of violence its sale was forced at fairer prices.

People were starving. In response, rural villagers – from Nottinghamshire, through the West Riding of Yorkshire, to the hills around Manchester – known as Luddites were attacking mills and smashing up machinery. The word ‘luddite’ is bandied around often nowadays, usually to dismiss someone who dislikes technology – that one uncle who swears microwaves are dodgy, the shop owner that refuses to take card.

In 1812, a Luddite was anyone who rallied around the mythical leader “Ned Ludd.” General Ludd was supposedly a young apprentice in the textile industry who had rebelled against worsening conditions and collapsing rates of pay by attacking the new machinery that was responsible for cheapening his labour. Those who marched in the name of Ludd identified new machinery owned by elites as a symbol of an industrial system that ruined their environments and left them underemployed and hungry.

Inventing a leader would become a popular ploy used by various working-class radicals (a mythical “Rebecca” led the Welsh tollgate riots, and “Captain Swing” was Ludd’s successor amongst the English agrarian workers), but in 1812 this was a new strategy. Faced by what appeared to be an organised radical movement with a clear leader, the authorities feared revolution. In response, parliament made machine-breaking punishable by death and soon the Luddites were being hanged throughout the land. 

“We will never lay down our Arms,” wrote one Luddite in Yorkshire, not until:

“The House of Commons passes an Act to put down all Machinery hurtful to Commonality, and repeal that to hang Frame Breakers. But we petition no more that won’t do, fighting must.

Signed by the General of the Army of
Redressers
Ned Ludd Clerk.”

Around 12,000 troops had been deployed to stop the food riots and machine breaking. “The tranquillity of the country is only imperfectly preserved even at the point of a bayonet,” wrote the Leeds Mercury. The moment was one of anger and possibility. Revolution was in the minds of all in Europe after events in France: “we hope for assistance from the French Emperor in shaking off the Yoke of the Rottenest, Wickedest, and most Tyranious Government that ever existed,” wrote that same Ned Ludd Clerk.  

Parallels with today present themselves readily. Hunger. War. Labour-saving technology. The Luddites would certainly have recognised today’s fears about tech taking jobs. Indeed, by 1812 the textile sector’s machinic innovations had significantly reduced the price of labour – not good news in a time of inflated prices. 

This was also the moment that industrialisation was beginning to take off. Rural villages were becoming suburbs and towns, canals were being carved through hills, coal pits pockmarked the landscape. In December 1811, six people drowned in their homes as a new reservoir burst its banks. It was a time of radical transformation. Populations boomed. Land was privatised. People were excluded from access to common rights, and the environment was degraded as a result. Some people got rich. More people got poor. 

And John Knight got locked in Lancaster gaol. He was carted off from the pub to prison that same night he’d written his name down in the Prince Regent Arms. Later he wrote a letter from jail to congratulate a friend who was leaving for America. In it he neatly summarised the state of the nation:

Dear Madam, I […] congratulate you on the probability of leaving such a Land as this, a Land with violence and wrong, a Land where the Labourers starve and the worthless not to say the wicked almost absorb the produce of that labor…

To a Land where Rent is little, taxes less, and tythes not any; and consequently, the cultivator of the Earth enjoys nearly the whole produce of his labor.

I congratulate your Husband on resolving such a step as that of removing from a Land groaning under oppression to a Land of Liberty.

Knight was a classic radical of his day. He was a weaver, suffering in a fast-changing textile sector. His writing evoked the rights of common people to work on the land and enjoy the fruits of the Earth. This was because Knight came from a place that was changing beyond recognition. The hills, woods, and moors around Oldham were being enclosed by private elites. Populations doubled in two decades and kept rising. This was true in Saddleworth as it was elsewhere. 

Representatives from Hollinwood, Ashton, Newton, Droylsden, Stockport, Withington, Northenden, Stretford, Urmston, Eccles, Worsley, Westhoughton, and Astley were all active in 1812. Agitators often met in Manchester, but the real hotbeds of activity were further into the hills. The fighting was happening in villages that were fast becoming towns and would soon be swallowed up by the city, places like Middleton and Westhoughton, around Manchester, and Marsden near Huddersfield, where pitched battles were fought against mill owners and the army. 

We often assume radicalism is an urban phenomenon. The real history is different: these places were closer to rurality than they were the industrialised city, and it was exactly the harmful effects of joining the network of ever-industrialising cities that the Luddites in these towns and villages sought to contest.

Change in 1812 was rapid, relentless, and ruining people. Knight was one of many whose life and politics and concerns were shaped not by the city but changes in the towns and villages that surrounded it. 1812 might have been the closest England had ever come to a revolution since the days of Oliver Cromwell, and the violent resistance to industrialisation, poverty, and inflation was led by semi-rural villagers and townsfolk.

The lessons for today are bitter ones. What crushed the Luddites was an alliance of politicians and capitalists. Those who operated the machinery of government used their power to deploy the military and police to protect the property of their wealthy peers. 

To look for easy answers from this history would be a mistake. There is no silver bullet. The anger and radicalism of 1812 sits in a long tradition of workers agitating for their rights. It is a history of slow and determined struggle, often in the face of defeat. And yet – as the long and active life of John Knight shows us – there is hope in struggle.

Knight was imprisoned in 1812 and he was at Peterloo to see working people massacred in 1819. He lived long enough to see millions of people petition the government in support of the democratic demands of the Chartists, only for the government to reject them and swiftly crush the subsequent unrest. And yet by 1918 five of the Chartists’ six demands had been achieved – including universal male suffrage, the introduction of the secret ballot, and the removal of the property qualification for MPs.

John Knight did not live to see the realisation of all the things he struggled for. He never saw the introduction of the ten-hour working day, the introduction of mass democracy, or the minimum wage. He saw massacres and defeat, but he worked, and he fought, and he resisted, and many of the good things he wished for did eventually come to pass. 

And so, when we think of John Knight and the countless other Luddites who resisted in the hills around England, we should think in terms of hope. In the famous words of George Eliot, “the growing good of the world is partly dependant on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”