The original Luddites were skilled English textile workers who ran a disciplined underground campaign against the misuse of machinery. They took their name from Ned Ludd, an apprentice said to have smashed two stocking frames in 1779 who almost certainly never existed, and signed threatening letters as General or King Ludd to shield real leaders. Their trades were run by merchant capitalists who could cancel orders overnight, and the Napoleonic Wars brought inflation and mass unemployment between 1810 and 1812. With unions banned under the Combination Acts of 1799, the movement began in Nottinghamshire in March 1811 and spread to Yorkshire and the northwest, with night drills on the moors and raids that targeted only specific machines.
In the Midlands they smashed wide frames that turned out cheap cut-and-sewn stockings. In Yorkshire they attacked gig mills and shearing frames that let two unskilled boys replace croppers wielding 50-pound shears. Parliament made frame breaking a capital crime in 1812, and the government sent more than 12,000 troops north. In April 1812 George Mellor and three others ambushed mill owner William Horsfall near Huddersfield, who had boasted he would ride up to his saddle in Luddite blood. An informer betrayed them, and the York trials of January 1813 charged more than 60 men, leaving many hanged or transported to Australia. Lord Byron defended the workers in the House of Lords.
Yorkshire raiders used sledgehammers forged by Enoch Taylor, who also built cropping machines, and shouted that Enoch made them and Enoch shall break them.
The force sent north was larger than the army the Duke of Wellington first took to the Iberian Peninsula in 1808.
Some mill owners built fortified hiding rooms inside their factories.
Luddite letters demanded a minimum wage and an end to child labor, and some quoted the American and French revolutions.
Byron told the Lords he had seen worse wretchedness in England than in the most oppressed provinces of the Ottoman Empire.
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