THE LUDDITE NOVELS 7: BANKS, BOND SLAVES

 The Centres of Yorkshire Luddism

1] Almondbury & Castle Hill 2] Milnsbridge 3] Warren House 4] Rawfolds 5] Hartshead 6] Dumb Steeple 7 Three Nuns 7] The Shears 8] The Yew Tree 9] The Star 10] Brighouse and Raistrick 11] Bradley Woods 

Bond Slaves – the Story of a Struggle, Mrs George Linnaeus Banks, 1893 (Manchester, Northern Grove Publishing Project, 2012)

The Title:

Comparing factory workers to slaves is a frequent trope in the anti-factory rhetoric of the early 19th century.    It takes central place in Richard Oastler’s letter to the Leeds Mercury in Sept 29 1830:

‘It is the pride of Britain that a slave cannot exist on her soil. ... Let truth speak out, appalling as the statement may appear. The fact is true. Thousands of our fellow-creatures and fellow-subjects, both male and female, the miserable inhabitants of a Yorkshire town, (Yorkshire now represented in Parliament by the giant of anti-slavery principles [William Wilberforce] ) are this very moment existing in a state of slavery, more horrid than are the victims of that hellish system 'colonial' slavery.’

https://web.archive.org/web/20070612055526/http://chi.gospelcom.net/DAILYF/2002/09/daily-09-29-2002.shtml

                  The Richard Oastler statue, Northgate Square,                                   The Luddite statue, Liversedge.

                           Bradford, John Birnie Philip 1869                                       Peter Rogers and Alex Hallowes, 2012 

                  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Oastler                                   

            http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/9649548.First_memorial_to_Luddites_unveiled_in_Liversedge/

Despite Oastler's opposition to the Luddites, both statues have adopted a similar 'man protects child' trope. 

Oastler features in Inheritance and finds a keen disciple in Jonathan Bamforth.   Readers familiar with the ‘slave/operative’ metaphor would be likely to assume that Bond Slaves compares the Luddite movement to the revolt of slaves.  In fact the opposite is true.   Book II, Chapter 2, reveals that the author considers the ‘bond slaves’ to be George Mellor’s followers, bound to him through enforced oaths: ‘He had an army of bond slaves at his beck’, (p 284).  The ‘struggle’ that interests Banks is the moral struggle experienced by characters like Wat Hartland.   

Geography/Names/History:

The geography is accurate, based, as Banks tells readers on research in ‘rare books’ and ‘plans’ and ‘sketches’ (Author’s Preface p 5).  A few proper and place names are changed : ‘William Horsfall’ to ‘Mr Horsley’, ‘William Cartwright’ to ‘Wilfred Wainwright’, the ‘Rev Hammond Roberson’ to ‘Rev Bertram Marston’ whilst  ‘Rawfolds Mill’ becomes ‘Greenfold’s Mill’.    Bank’s knowledge is rarely intrusive because the book begins with a stranger, Marian Greenwood, being introduced into the area, so the descriptions of the landscape and the inhabitants come from her new husband Wat explaining the area to an incomer. 

Bank’s interest in the area is as much antiquarian as historical.  She locates Wat’s house as being one of two in Outlane, on a road running north-west out of Huddersfield.  Outlane has since grown to be a long village on the far side of the M62.

Stainland Church.  

Like many contemporary 18th Century churches, such as Raistrick, (see Daisy Baines) the church uses Medieval elements, such as  

the tower and the shape of the nave but the windows and the tower are deliberately more classical than Gothic.

Such churches were designed to promote Church of England Christianity as 'rational' not 'enthusiastic', unlike the Christianity of

Dissenters and Non-conformists.  

Hogarth's 1760s print Enthusiam Delineated satirises 'enthusiastic' Dissent and 'superstitious' Catholicism alike.  

http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=1439204&partId=1&people=58368&peoA=58368-3-18&page=1

The cross is mediaeval,[ https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1133961] though it has been moved to a more picturesque position [https://historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1133961].  It looks as if it may have been reassembled from fragments.    On top of the cross shaft is a small cuboid with a St Andrew’s Cross on each facet.    This cuboid perches uneasily on the shaft.  It may have been placed there from another cross after the original cruciform top was destroyed by Puritans at some point between the reigns of Henry VIII and Charles II.   

Stainland Cross.

It originally stood close to cottages as Malcolm Bull's site shows. 

http://freepages.history.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~calderdalecompanion/ph560.html

The Huddersfield of the novel’s opening is still medieval enough to have a stocks in which drunks can be placed (Bk I, Chp 4 p 40).  These stocks are long since gone but equivalents are preserved in outlying villages such as Hartshead, Mirfield and Barkisland or even small towns like Marsden.

By contrast to the time-honoured sanctity of Stainland Church,  a 19th century mill at Almondbury stands dark and satanic against the sun.

That the problem of industrialisation is national and not just local is shown by the extensive geographical scope and historical ambition of the book that takes in not only Yorkshire but Nottinghamshire and Lancashire.  The text subtly interweaves history, tradition and fiction in a manner that is hard for ordinary readers to disentangle.    The text draws on history to show the abuse of power by the authorities as well as the exercise of violence by the operatives but the flaws of authority are shown to be corrected whereas the violence of the Luddites is only resolved by punitive measures.  The most significant example of the paranoia of the magistrates occurs when David Hartland is arrested at a play rehearsal.    The actors are mistaken for Luddites by over-zealous law-enforcers because the man playing Othello has his face blackened like a Luddite preparing for a night raid (Bk II, Chp 1, p 276).  Nevertheless he bears his suffering with fortitude and is eventually released in Chapter 9.   Unlike his father Wat, or the George Mellor of Sad Times he accepts his lot with stoicism and Christian forbearance.   

York features in the novel as the place of the trail and execution of George Mellor and other Luddites, including Wat.  Banks seems to confuse York and Leeds by giving York a ‘Briggate’ but otherwise shows an accurate knowledge of York.   In one scene Lydia is comforted by Josiah on the walls of York after her father has been condemned : ‘Leaning to rest against an embrasure in the ancient wall, with the Minster and Clifford’s white tower both in view,’ ( Bk III, Chp, 13,p 387).   The Minster stands for the judgement of God; Clifford’s Tower for the judgement of man and each implicitly endorses the judgement on Wat.    To look through a embrasure would place the viewer inside the wall looking outwards.  The only place on the wall where this happens is Tower 39 where the wall runs parallel to York Castle.      

From Tower 39 the brick back of the Debtors' Prison, where the Luddites were imprisoned, is clearly visible and

the keep of York Castle, Clifford's Tower, can be seen beyond.

 Over the roof, above the word 'Lodge', part of one of the west towers of the Minster peeps out.

Banks might see the obscuring of a cathedral by Wetherspoon's, the pub-chain, as symbolic of a secular century ... 

Conflict: Moral Struggle:

As it was for Charlotte Bronte, the moral framework ordering Bank’s material is Christianity.   Judging from the testimony of the informer M’Donald, who would have had every reason to exaggerate, the Luddite oath was a swift and business-like event, in his case administered by the radical John Baines in a private room of the Crispin Inn, Halifax.   The oath was sworn and then the Bible kissed, (Reid, p 193).   The procedure seems to have deliberately imitated the swearing on the Bible carried out in court as if the Luddites were appropriating and redirecting the apparatus of the state’s justice to support instead of oppose them. 

In Bank’s writing the oath becomes Satanic.  This is first hinted at when Wat is ‘twisted’ (sworn) in.  Joseph Sowden, one of George Mellor’s actual workmates, is inscribed into the text as a Greek chorus, commenting on the tragedy of Wat’s temptation and fall.   His final remarks in Book 2 Chapter 2 compare Mellor to a ‘limb of Satan’ and a ‘fiery demon’ (p 158) and prepare readers for the Gothic opening of Chapter 3.   Unlike historically attested accounts of the Luddite oath, this takes place in a moonlit forest amidst ‘a dark-some clump of Scotch firs, where the very moonbeams seemed to have lost their way’ (Bk2, Chp 3, p 159).   If the ‘dark figure’ who demands a password turned out to have cloven feet readers would not be surprised… (Bk2, Chp 3, p 159).   Instead Banks settles for describing the event as a ‘blasphemous call on God to bless the iniquitous oath he had so impotently uttered ‘before heaven’, (Bk2, Chp 3, p 163).

                    'A dark figure came forward to meet them'                                      Lower Grimscar Wood in 2016.

               How a contemporary illustrator might have drawn 

     Bank's conception of the Luddite meeting in Grimescar Wood.

When Banks recreates a twisting in at the Crispin Inn the implications of Satanism are intensified.  M’Donald’s account has been transformed into an experience  akin to a black mass, attended by ‘two silent figures in black masks, clothed in the white garments of the grave, and holding murderous-looking daggers in their hands’, ‘There, strongly depicted in white on a black ground was a full-sized coffin with a nameless lid, and above that a grinning skull and crossbones, set between a pistol and a dagger ‘,  (Bk 2, Chp 14, p 256).  This stage-like paraphernalia would seem unnecessary to simply convey the warning ‘DEATH TO THE TRAITOR!’ (Bk 2, Chp 14, p 256) but it emphasises Banks’ view that rebellion against the powers that be is simultaneously rebellion against God.    Another eyewitness testimony from a man who swore the Luddite oath in 1812 mentions none of the theatrical trappings that Banks invents. https://www.marxists.org/history/england/combination-laws/luddites-1812.htm

Tyre City has replaced the Crispin Inn

As 'Fiction and Commentary Section 8' discusses, Banks account of the assassination of William Horsfall is extremely unlikely in so far as it introduces the figure of Joe Eastwood to offer Mellor and his confederates the chance to repent and abandon their attack.  Joe says:

   'You are meditating an awful crime, which may bring yourselves to an untimely end.  do go home i implore you.  you will never stop the progress of machinery by violent and unlawful deeds.'

            Eastwood admonishes Mellor (as a                                                                             Mellor and Thorpe lie in wait (as a 

          contemporary illustrator might have                                                                            contemporary illustrator might have 

                 represented the incident).                                                                                          represented the incident).

In reality the assassins did not reveal themselves but shot when Horsfall had no chance of escape.

Through incidents like this, Banks deliberately creates a setting in which innocents like Watt or John Booth become Adams seduced by satanic forces, so the trial in York has to restore divine as well as mortal justice.   Their ignorant innocence is no defence.   They have placed themselves on the same level as born malcontents like Mellor and Baines and Banks’ plot shows all radical forces to be culpable and deserving punishment.  Consequently she is not interested by the possibility that Mellor and his co-accused might be innocent of murder.   She sees them as rebels against man and god who, like the devil  their master, are intrinsically untrustworthy and immoral.   Like Reid she assumes their alibis are faked and does not speculate, unlike Brooke and Kipling or Kipling and Hall whether the defence might have been true.   Justice is carried out in the spirit of Old not New Testament.  Wat may attract the readers’ pity but the court hangs him as remorselessly as they hang the unlamented Mellor.   

The only consolation Banks can give is that Wat will be spared ‘the after-horror of dissection’, (Bk 3, Chp 14, p 385).    Banks’ comment on Mellor’s verdict is ambiguous in tone: ‘A short shrift and a long cord was truly the maxim of our forefathers’, (Bk 3, Chp 13, p 378).  However Banks allows Susan the final comment on the fate of John Baines who is transported not executed: ‘“Not hanged?  Not hanged?” she almost screamed. ‘Then there’s no such thing as justice!’ (Bk 3, Chp 13, p 389).  Putting together the two comments indicates that readers are invited to see the trail as a model of how all ‘democratic’ tendencies should be purged from the heartland of Christian England.  Baines is described as ‘the democratic hatter, the leader of a set of men known at the time as Tom Painites; men who scoffed at religion and all lawfully-constituted authority’, (Bk1, Chp 10, p 85).  Bank's attack on socialism here is even more direct than Brooke and Kipling note: ‘Peel’s anachronistic characterisation of the Rawfolds martyr John Booth as an Owenite, is seized upon to condemn all socialists’, (p 98).   

Wat’s fall is occasioned not directly by economic competition but from a series of accidents.  His house is damaged by a gale that kills his father and dog and cripples his son (Bk I, Chp 8, p 78).  In Chapter 9 his wife Marion’s father is killed by a tree-fall and she sinks into illness.   In Chapter 11 Wat is beaten and robbed by two ex- soldiers.    This demoralises him and by 1811 he lacks ‘sufficient work’ (Bk I, Chp 13, p 116) and is ready for temptation by the demonic Mellor.   As Banks sums up matters ‘The humbler classes in the bulk were intensely ignorant,’   (Bk I, Chp 13, p 115) but what seems to have been tested in the case of Wat is not knowledge but moral fortitude.   The accidents might be classified by an insurance company as ‘Acts of God’ and the paradigm used by the text at this point appears to be the Book of Job.  Where Job stays true to God, endures the test and is rewarded: ‘Also the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before’, (King James, Job 42.10), Wat fails and the little that he has is taken away.    In such a context it is no surprise to find that when Marion’s brother John  Greenwood is transported,  Botany Bay is described with a Miltonic adjective: ‘that pandemonium, Botany Bay,’ ( Bk II, Chp 13, p 250). 

Race:  ‘Hartland’ as ‘Heartland’

This ideological battle for England’s heartland is embedded within the juxtaposition of the symbolic names ‘Hartland’ and ‘Greenwood’.  The story begins in Nottinghamshire.  This is logical in so far as historically Nottinghamshire saw the first outbreaks of Luddism.   Though the novel is set in Yorkshire, reports of Luddism in Nottinghamshire are sent via letter to Yorkshire throughout the text.   Banks, however, moves beyond realism by naming the Nottinghamshire family:  ‘Greenwood’.  Plainly the movement of the bride from  the ‘grassy ways’ of ‘Sherwood Forest’ to the bare moorland landscape of Huddersfield symbolises the transformation of the heartland of Britain from pastoral to industrial, from arboreal to urban.  The first landscape of Huddersfield is not a literal description of the town of Huddersfield before industrialisation but a comparison with the industrial town of the 1890s: ‘It was small in area.  The sky was clearer; there were no tall factory chimneys belching forth smoke, for steam had not yet been called in to work a revolution … there was no railway with its marvellous viaduct, no infirmary for the sick in body and but one church for the sick in soul (Bk I, Chp 3, p 26).  The connection between the two is made evident and inescapable.  When the manufacturers employ steam power they make possible not only the prosperity but also the pollution of the later century.  Even Sherwood Forest is being felled: ‘an’ if they go on cutting down th’ timber as they’n been doin’ latterly, there’ll not be much o’ Robin Hood’s Sherwood left soon,’ (Chp 2, p 18)

The symbolism of ‘Greenwood’ becomes even  more contrived when the first page of the novel shows  the Greenwood family to consist of ‘foresters’ called Robin, Marion and Little John (Jack).  The text goes out of its way to remind readers of the original tales of Robin Hood.  This has a historical/geographical relevance in so far as the earliest Robin Hood tales locate him in Yorkshire, as Wat says: ‘I’ll tak’ you some day to see his grave at Kirklees,’ (Chp 2, p 18) but the symbolism is more important.   Robin Hood has a powerful grip on the 19th century imagination.  Margaret Drabble quotes the radical Samuel Bamford on how inspiring he found Robin Hood: ‘I was quite delighted with the idea of a free life in the merrie green-wood,’ (A Writer’s Britain, London, BCA, 1979, p 24).  As Banks is concerned with suppressing rather than encouraging radicalism this doesn’t seem to be the Robin she has in mind.  She makes a point of her Robin Greenwood’s disapproval of his brother John who falls into bad company, consorts with Luddites and is eventually transported.

St Mary's Abbey, York

In the 15th century Geste of Robyn Hode one of Robin's principle enemies is the abbot of St Mary's.

This is not the kind of Yorkshire link that Banks wishes to bring to readers' attention;  not the Robin she wishes to remind readers of. 

The Robin Hood Banks wishes to recollect through her Robin Greenwood is most likely Sir Walter Scott’s Robin Hood, who features in Ivanhoe as more a loyal supporter of King Richard than a rebel against the tyranny of the usurper John.  Here Robin is a Saxon yeoman who resists the oppression of a particularly cruel group of Norman knights.   This reverses the conception of Robin as a nobleman that gained prominence in the 16th century.  Anthony Munday’s play The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntington and The Death of Robert Earl of Huntington make Robin into one of Richard I’s earls http://www.robinhoodlegend.com/later-story/.  It is this 'Robin the nobleman' who may be rejected by the Luddite song: ‘The Triumph of General Ludd’.  Rather than seeing the Luddite’s actions as a continuation of Robin’s resistance to oppression, the text dismisses him:

No more chant your old rhymes about old Robin Hood

His feats I do little admire

I'll sing the achievements of General Ludd

Now the hero of Nottinghamshire.

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/chumbawamba/thetriumphofgeneralludd.html

Bank’s Robin Hood is fitted into this spectrum as a voice for conformity, a keeper not a poacher, who refuses to join Little John when John becomes a Luddite and is ashamed by John’s arrest: ‘Robin says he shall never be able to look honest men in the face again,’ (Bk 2, Chp 12, p 231).  He is rewarded not only socially but materially; he inherits the money Jack made after being transported to Australia: ‘three hundred punds per annum … John Greenwood’s savings, and his legacy to his next of kin,’ (Bk 3, Chp 14 p 401)

Similarly Banks makes it clear that her Marion is nothing like the original.  She is not ‘the bold and buxom bride of the noted outlaw’, she had ‘learned the doctrine of love and obedience’, (Bk 1, Chp 1, p 8).  Despite  Banks’ praise of traditional gender roles, the book’s early chapters show that Marion’s labour is as important as Wat’s in the pre-industrial  world.  She weaves at home whilst he travels as a tailor.  When the market for this work is all but destroyed by trade depression and mechanisation, Wat starts to listen to George Mellor and the Luddites.  When he joins them, the corruption of the heartland seems possible, until Wat atones for his deeds in death.  Despite Banks’ best efforts, readers might draw a Marxist message from the book.  Wat’s morality depends on his prosperity; if he had remained an employed tailor, Mellor would never have been able to recruit him. 

Dissent

If Wat represents how the political body of England can be weakened by need and corrupted by desperation Banks appropriates the actual Luddite John Booth to show the spiritual temptations facing England. 

Booth has been seduced from the teaching of his father,  a parson in the Church of England, by Baines and made into an ‘Owenite’, a political and economic position denounced at some length in Book I Chapter 14: ‘In these essays he [Robert Owen]  contrived to do a great deal of mischief where he only designed to do good’.  The problem arises when ‘His essays fell in the hands of half-educated, undisciplined men, who took up his theories by the wrong handle, and were for a forcible levelling down, instead of a gradual levelling up, ‘ (p 123).

From this account readers would not realise that Owenism was strongly established in Huddersfield.  An Owenite lecture theatre, the Hall of Science, was built in 1839 in Bath Street   [https://www.kirklees.gov.uk/visitors/huddersfield/pdf/discover_hudds_radical_heritage_trail.pdf]

   Owen Science Hall, Bath Street.  It looks very like many non-conformist chapels of the area.

On the economic front Owenites established a Co-operative Society in Buxton Road. https://www.kirklees.gov.uk/visitors/huddersfield/pdf/discover_hudds_radical_heritage_trail.pdf

 In 1936 the Co-Op rebuilt the structure in an Art Deco style to command the south end of town.

The building reflected a confidence that ethical, co-operative trading could be commercially as well as morally dominant.  

               The 1936 Co-operative Building, Huddersfield.                            Modern Co-Op, in a petrol station at Gomersal.      

                               Up for sale in 2016.                                     Today's Co-Ops are not as grand as their predecessors; they tend 

                                                                                                           to squeeze into modern sites not transform them.

The opportunities offered by institutions of the Mechanics’ Institute type look similar but were established with different motives, to increase the abilities rather than the awareness of the working class.  The Institutes were usually founded by a philanthropic industrialist who believed such an Institute would keep men out of pubs and fill their minds with practical rather than political matters, creating a skilled rather than subversive workforce.   

Marsden is typical of such endeavours, in that it was founded by James Taylor, an ironfounder of Ready Carr in 1841.  http://www.marsdenhistory.co.uk/education/mechanics-institute/

 In 1861 it had a new centre created for it, the distinctive building with architectural aspirations that juts into to the main street of the village to the annoyance of modern traffic:

                    Marsden Mechanic's Institute.                                                           Huddersfield's Mechanic's Institute.  

                    Though both buildings use aspects of classical architecture, Huddersfield's institute is a more conventional symmetrical 

building, lacking the idiosyncasy of the off-set tower of Marsden. 

Banks shows a world in which any fall from morality is irredeemable.  If a man is intrinsically good, like Watt, the pattern is tragic; if a man is intrinsically bad, like Mellor, the pattern is moralistic.  The fatalism of Banks derives from Calvinism not materialism and the text offers purgation rather than catharsis.  After Watt and Mellor are executed, the future appears to be left to be shaped by the obedient children of Watt.  Though there is no hint of the Huddersfield uprising of 1820 or the emergence of the Chartists, the book’s message appears to be that every generation has to learn the painful lesson of obedience to God’s will and God is at the apex of an unchallengeable hierarchy.