Ben o' Bill's, the Luddite: A Yorkshire Tale — Reading Companion

IT HURTS me sore that folk in these days should so little understand the doings of us Luddites. To hear young people talk, the Luddites were miscreants that well, deserved the hanging they got--a set of idle, dissolute knaves and cut-throats the country was well rid of. Nay, worse, many young lads with a college learning seem to know next to nothing about them, and talk as though all great deeds were done in far-of parts, and as though of heroes and martyrs England has none to show. I am little apt at writing, and my hand is stiff and cramped with years. But my memory is good still, and I can remember better the things of fifty years ago than those of yesterday. So, before hand and mind fail me altogether, I will set on record all I call mind of those memorable days that closed so black after that bloody York Assize. And if to any reader I should seem garrulous or egotistical, be it remembered in excuse that I can only tell the tale as I now recall it, and that I write of things I saw and things I knew, and of doings I took part in. I risked my own neck, and had the good fortune to escape with my life, and with honour, too, which not all who escaped whole and safe could say. When I was a boy, in the last days of the past century, our folk lived at Lower Holme, above Slaithwaite, in the old homestead in which my father's father and his father before him had lived. We were tenants of my Lord Dartmouth. The house is still there, and when I close my eyes of an evening, before the fire and my pipe goes out as I sit thinking, I can see the old place yet, as I knew it in my boyhood's days. My father, William Bamforth--Bill o' Ben's--was a manufacturer, a small manufacturer we should say now; but no one thought of calling him a small manufacturer in those days. He was as big as most men thereabouts. He bought his wool of the stapler at Huddersfield--old Abe Hirst;--it was scoured and dyed in the vats in the farmyard; my mother and my cousin Mary, and Martha, the servant lass, that cleaned the house and milked the cows, and kept my mother's mind on the rack and her tongue on the clack from morning till night, helped with the spinning. The warping and the weaving we did at home in the long upper chamber. We had four looms at home, and, moreover, we put our work out to the neighbours. It was a busy house you may be sure, what with the milking and the churning, and the calves, and the pigs, and the poultry, and the people coming for milk, and the men coming for their warps, and the constant work at the old hand-looms in the long, low chamber above, with its windows stretched right across the front to catch the precious light. What stir, too, there used to be when father and I set off for the fairs at Nottingham and Macclesfield and Newcastle, for all those markets did Bill o' Ben's attend regular as the almanac itself. There was the loading, overnight, of the great covered waggon with the pieces of good linsey, and here and there a piece of broadcloth for the clergy and the better classes, and the grooming and shoeing of "Old Bess," the stout grey mare. Then the start at early dawn, with the first lark in summer, in the starlight of the winter mornings. Oh! it was grand in the summer across the moors, when the roads were plain to see, and only the crusted ruts to jolt our bones; but in the dark mornings of November, when the wind howled about the waggon's arch, and the rain beat like pellets about the tarpaulin, and the waggon wheels sunk deep in slush, and in the set winter-time, when the roads were lost in snow, it was cruel work for man and beast. It was gamesome, too, at the slimmer statutes at Nottingham and Macclesfield, when I had nothing to do but stand at the stall in the market-place and cut the suit-lengths for the customers, or carry their parcels to their inns. And grand it was to see the men servants and the buxom country lasses at the hiring, making their half-yearly holiday, and spending their money right cheerfully. My father had an old connection, and scarce ever had to return with pieces unsold. Then, when the fair was over, and he sat in the parlour of the Angel at Nottingham, or the Swan at Macclesfield, smoking his long, "churchwarden" and drinking gin and water, I would off into the town to see the booths, and the actors, and the giants, and the fat women, and the dwarfs and two-headed monsters, and many other curiosities that may not now be seen. I used to sit for hours in the winter nights at home telling Mary of the bearded woman, and the hen with five legs, and the learned pig, but of the country lasses, whose cheeks were so rosy and lips so ripe, she cared not to hear.