Ford Madox Brown, "Work," 1852-1863

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This brief interpretation of Luddite discourse is a fragmentary  extract from the opening chapter of Writings of the Luddites, ed. Kevin Binfield (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). No part of this page may be reproduced in any form without the written permission of Kevin Binfield.

Early in his book Radical Expression, James Epstein recounts one side of an exchange between Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke. In The Rights of Man, Paine demands of Burke a clear enunciation of "the Constitution." Defining a constitution as "a thing antecedent to government," Paine protests in the form of a question: "Can then Mr. Burke produce the English Constitution? If he cannot, we may fairly conclude, that though it has been so much talked about, no such thing as a constitution exists, or ever did exist, and consequently that the people have yet a constitution to form." The appeal to "the Constitution" was a master trope during much of the long eighteenth century, and the use of the trope continued in the discourse of working-class protest to validate labor and protection of the traditional forms of labor.

Like other groups, the textile workers of the English Midlands and North based both their daily vocational practices and their breaking of the machinery that was being used to drive down wages and produce cloth of inferior quality upon a group foundation--the customs of "the Trade," which Trade often takes the form of a governing body, both in its legitimate and covert forms. Often, however, the Luddite writers sought validation for custom itself in originary documents of sorts. These documents served a "constitutional" purpose for the textile trades, and, ironically, were created by Paine's "unconstitutional" English government. They include statutes regulating the trades by prohibiting colting, which is the hiring of workers who had not completed apprenticeships within a trade (5 Elizabeth cap. 4), prohibiting the use of the gig-mill (5 & 6 Edward VI cap. 22), and limiting the number of looms any weaver could possess (2 & 3 Philip and Mary cap. 11). In probably the best example of such validation, the framework knitters (also called stockingers), who launched the Luddite protests in Nottingham in 1811, justified their actions by referring to their own originary or constitutive charter, the 1663 Charter of the Company of Framework Knitters. 

Although the Charter founds a particular trade-community, an extra-communal character of the Charter is evident in two facts about it. First, by its origin in the seventeenth century and by its extension during the period of Nottingham Luddism, the Charter and its derivative discourses were English nationalistic documents. Through the Charter, the Company was established to protect the English stocking industry against transplantation to foreign shores. Early attempts at transplantation almost smack of "industrial treason." William Lee, the inventor of the knitting loom, had removed his own frames and artisans to France, although most returned to England after his death. Other Britons conspired with foreign states to capture the industry--Henry Mead and Southcot Vaymouth with Venice, and Abraham Jones with Holland. The Charter and the Worshipful Company's rules provide for the punishment of such offenders. Furthermore, the most constitutionally "refined" of the trades that produced Luddism, Midlands framework knitting, was also the least insurrectionist. Founded to preserve an English industry, the Charter perhaps tempered any revolutionary fervor which might otherwise have pulled Midlands Luddism outside of its nationalistic and legal-regulatory bounds. For instance, Midlands Luddism did not consistently produce Jacobinical threats in the way that Yorkshire Luddism--which lacked founding documents and a formal, document-based trade organization--did from its beginning, as we find in a leaflet distributed in Yorkshire early in 1812, in which "General Ludd Commander of the Army of Redressers" calls upon "all Croppers, Weavers &c & Public at large . . . to come forward with Arms and help the Redressers to redress their Wrongs and shake off the hateful Yoke of a Silly Old Man, and his Son more silly and their Rogueish Ministers, all Nobles and Tyrants must be brought down." 

A revolutionary style in the Yorkshire proclamation is clear in both the substance of the argument ("crush the old Government & establish a new one") and in the totalizing tenor of the salutation, which combines into a single ideological entity ("Generous Countrymen") the interests of particular trades ("all Croppers, Weavers") with a general and unbounded "&c & Public at large." Although it would be difficult to demonstrate that the framework knitters' Charter had a moderating influence upon Nottinghamshire Luddism, I think that it is sufficient to demonstrate that moderation characterized the ludding of the framework knitters, who had a document which instituted, organized, and provided for the regulation of their trade and the addressing of grievances. In contrast, the more violent and insurrectionary croppers of West Yorkshire had no constitutive document, and only one protectionist document--the very specific statute prohibiting the use of the gig-mill. And that statute had been repealed in 1809.

Second, the codes and values embodied in the Charter had been carried from London, the center of stocking manufacture in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, to Nottingham and other Midlands communities during the middle and late eighteenth century. The masters and assistants in the stocking trade were aware of national, and not just communal, issues facing the trade. Migration from one community to another was one method by which the knitters participated in the new industrial economy, but the Charter moved with them from one community to others and was invoked periodically as the binding force of the trade.

The Charter is unusual as a constitutive document in that it designates economic (and what amount to legal and political) operants through the dispensation of King Charles II. The Luddites, however, do not necessarily appeal to the dispensation of the king but rather to the Charter itself. We cannot know to what extent they may have been concerned about the risks inhering in what might appear to be a Jacobite appeal (the Stuart line having been deposed in the 1688 Revolution); it simply is beside the point. What is to the point is that the Luddites continued to locate their founding document in what was a living context linking their present to their past through a moral economy which was recognized and chartered by a king and empowered to regulate and sustain itself.

The nature of self-regulatory power is evident in the Charter itself and the Company's Rule Book, and has also been outlined by J. L. Hammond and Barbara Hammond and by Chambers. Among the most important mechanisms were those specifically authorizing search, supervision, and legal standing to ensure quality of work. There were also mechanisms for prosecuting those selling substandard goods or undercutting prices, for licensing apprentices, and for preventing the flow to the Continent of workers and machines. As recently as 1808, the Company brought a claim, decided at King's Bench favorably to the Company, against William Payne, who had set up shop without being a freeman of the trade. Both Henson and Chambers note the national-protectionist intentions underlying the Charter. The mingling of trade, legal, and national-political languages and purposes in the Charter make it interesting as a discourse-event. Most importantly, its multiple purposes seem to have facilitated its use as law against law and its use to justify the violent breaking of the objectionable wide stocking frames used to drive down wages and produce inferior material--especially hosiery articles that were flimsy or that lost their shape. The Charter had established a system of self-regulation running beside and sometimes intersecting (but usually not threatening) the larger legal system.

The Charter was not merely a political document conferring legal rights over property to the knitters. Even the independent artisans working in the moral economy did not own, in an ordinary sense, the materials that were produced into cloth; the regulatory powers held by the Framework Knitters' Company are evidence of this. Each knitter did, however, have an investment in those materials by virtue of the Charter. In this case, economic power and accompanying legal rights derive from a political assignation. Often, the legal and trade languages are blended almost seamlessly, like the gallows and the stocking-frame in a March 1812 letter from "Genaral Lud's" headquarters to George Rowbottom, a Nottinghamshire hosier (see M23 in Writings of the Luddites).

Although frame-wrecking seems not to have taken place in Nottinghamshire between March and November of 1811, it appears from the 1 January 1812 document titled "By the Framework Knitters, A Declaration" and the November 1811 "Declaration: Extraordinary" that a Luddite subculture had been forming and devising its own language of origination and continuation, despite the lull. The January "Declaration" is the more general of the two declarations, more clearly oriented toward affirming a system with regulatory powers contained within "the charter granted by our late Sovereign Lord Charles the Second" (M10 in Writings of the Luddites). The Luddite writer conceives of the power granted by the Charter to be so great, perhaps for reasons of primacy or of decentralizing custom, that the framework knitters empowered by the Charter can nullify even an Act of Parliament (the bill that made frame breaking a felony) that contravenes the Charter. Under this conception, power devolves to the trades and falls under the regulatory powers of custom, thereby becoming permanent and legitimating the subculture against the larger nation. The "Framework Knitters' Declaration" is more political in its legalisms, and the language of the "Declaration; Extraordinary" (M1 in Writings of the Luddites) is more juridically legalistic, but both address matters of jurisdiction, judgment, damages, forfeiture and punishment in case of default, and the assignment of agency and surrogacy in enforcement. Although the Luddite writers did not make any direct attribution of their stylistic sources, in both vocabulary and points of concern both declarations seem to be hybrids of legal and other governmental forms. Such forms were readily available within some of the established trades of the period. For example, an 1812 document, "The Articles to Be Observed by the Woolcombers," contains a number of forms, such as a "Form of an Address, To any master, or firm, who has employed men who have been divided," and a "Form of a Petition, To obtain redress of any grievances, &c." Many of the forms resemble the Luddite documents in style and vocabulary.

Luddite vocabulary and structure seem to have been deliberately chosen by the Luddite writers in reliance upon the model of authority afforded by the Charter, but the style depended upon the perceived power of the Charter. While the Charter facilitated the emergence and continuation of a subculture, the "official" legal and political discourses of the day provided the subculture with models for its conduct and its rhetorical extension and participation in larger public life. The timing of the appearance of the two Nottinghamshire declarations suggests evidence of such modeling. The "Declaration; Extraordinary" uses a more focused legal vocabulary drawn, perhaps, from sources available in late 1811. The January 1812 "Framework Knitters' Declaration" pits sovereign against sovereign (Charles II against George III and the Prince Regent) and reward against reward, apparently parodying the Prince Regent's December 1811 proclamation.

The fact that the legalistic discourse appears to resemble or derive from official forms but also to contradict the official forms in intent may have caused scholars such as E. P. Thompson to concentrate their attention more on the directly threatening letters as more uniquely Luddite; however, the double treatment of law is manifested in some other of the more familiar documents, too. One such document, the Luddite anthem, "General Ludd's Triumph," is remarkable for its dual treatment of law (see M11 in Writings of the Luddites).

General Ludd is described as having "disrespect for the laws" and as outdoing Robin Hood in the material expressions of disrespect; however, the second stanza creates an alternative-legal discourse--"guilty," "estate," "sentenced to die," "unanimous vote of the Trade," "executioner." We must inquire into the source of the blending of anti-legal and alternative-legal language, the blending of "Custom and Law." How, for example, did "the Trade," as an extralegal and even renegade institution, acquire the power to pass sentence? Furthermore, what role is served by the eponymic General Ludd?

The eponym "Ned Ludd" grows out of the framework knitters' experiences, mythic or actual. It is not, like a metonym, a gathering figure used to draw together an immaterial plurality into a material singularity. Wai Chee Dimock describes a metonym as a "a form of reduction, involving the telescoping of an immaterial order within a material embodiment." The Midlands Luddite experience was very material in the sense that the mechanisms through which it was known and interpreted--the Charter, the trade, and custom--were tied to the materiality of working life in an established and entrenched manner. In contrast to the metonym, the eponym expresses resentment specific to the trade, where that resentment existed. General Ludd is a singularity, but one that grows out of material existence in an almost organic sense. The eponym offers not a new gathering but rather a method of bringing renewed attention to a Charter that had fallen into obscurity, perhaps even disuse. Although they needed a way to express grievances, the Midlands Luddites could not claim a new Charter, but they needed new attention to the old one. The eponym provided a way of drawing attention.

By mid-1812, the continued complicity of masters and magistrates, the continued abuses on the part of the government, and the futility of collective bargaining both by negotiation and riot forced even Nottingham Luddism to turn more and more to grand threats and desperate complaints. Whereas before, Ned Ludd had served as the center of a discourse of moderation and constraint, yet nevertheless effective and demanding of the perceived rights of the trade, he later came to be seen in terms of an adversary, the Prince Regent. Nevertheless, Ludd continued to provide a discourse of morality and even patriotism, whereas the Prince Regent embodied and distilled all of the abuses that the Luddites found reprehensible, and merited an enormous variety of threats, such as one from Nottingham, written on 4 June 1812 (see M36 in Writings of the Luddites).

Throughout much of its course, Midlands Luddism based its resistance to machinery upon legal dispensations and the Charter of their trade and devised a system of regulation which had effects both inside and outside of the Trade, upon the larger culture as a whole. The 1814 letter to the Review illustrates what I believe characterizes many of the Midlands documents collected below--that the figure of Ned Ludd served as a discourse for concentrating public attention upon a set of principles, previously sanctioned by the government but under threat at the time. Ludd is an eponym for a subculture, a selective trade culture, that grew out of a larger culture. The selected codes which founded and regulated the culture of framework knitters and facilitated its discursive extension into the larger culture were products of that larger culture. Studying the discourses of law and origination in Luddism makes clear that what the Midlands Luddites demanded was recognition by the larger culture, according to selected, but shared, codes. In the two other Luddite regions, the task proved to be different.