Learn more about the John Fielden letters…
Staff and volunteers in Information Services have been working together to transcribe a number of letters which were donated to us and will be going to live with WYAS ultimately. They include some personal correspondence between members of the prominent Fielden family but are mainly concerned with the Poor Law Riots in the winter of 1838.
Bad feeling had been brewing within Todmorden and Walsden for some time over the introduction of a new Poor Law in 1834 controlling how parish relief was handled within England. The law would require townships to build workhouses which would house paupers and make them carry out piecework at little to no pay while they tried to get back on their feet. Todmorden and Walsden’s existing system focused on supporting people in their homes rather than pushing them into workhouses or forcing them to sell all their goods before being able to receive help. Many in Todmorden, including John Fielden (MP for Oldham and “local lad done good” success story), felt that the new rules were overly restrictive and morally unsound. Local “Guardians” were meant to be elected in order to enforce the new rules and dole out relief, and the only willing candidates were men like James Taylor and William Helliwell who owned local mills and were business rivals of the Fieldens. Fielden openly agitated against the new law and at one point sacked his entire workforce of over a thousand men for a single day in order to highlight its impracticality. Mill workers, knowing they had the implicit support of their employer, openly revolted against the Guardians. Soldiers were barracked in the town for several years in order to prevent further rioting and destruction of property. These conflicts exceeded not just personal rivalries but also highlighted class divisions which would later form a major part of the local Chartist movement.
“I was many times knocked down by the crowd and dragged through the dirt and my hat taken from my head and trodden into the dirt and afterwards put on in that state” – testimony of Constable William King regarding the Mankinholes Riot in November 1838
The relevant letters are witness and defendant statements in the trials which took place in York in early 1839. Allegations are made of harassment of witnesses in the form of charges being brought against them months after an offense had taken place but subsequent to the witness making a statement against the local constables; of crowds of workers swarming the houses of local Guardians and committing such atrocities as stripping a constable nearly naked and “otherwise abusing” him all the way down from Mankinholes to Shaw Wood by the canal; and of defendants taken from their bedrooms at night and held in uncomfortable jail cells with no details of the charges against them being given to them for several days. One letter is from Samuel Fielden, who was acting as the lawyer for some of the men accused of taking part in riotous behaviour, detailing his plan for challenging witnesses for the prosecution and finding the holes in their retelling of the events. Another is describing the Coroner’s inquest in Halifax in which several men were initially charged for rioting, and a Halifax magistrate as saying of one of the constables’ testimony that “if King’s word would do, all Todmorden would be brought to Halifax.” As a whole they tell a fascinating story of two sets of stubborn people at odds with each other, both convinced of the righteousness of their cause and determined to win out over the other by whatever means necessary.
“They said that, we took them off at the side, or as we came at them. Those that humbled themselves we let go, and those that were stupid and unwilling to go, they took up” – testimony of Charles Ratcliff, barber in Halifax, that Constables King and Feather did not know the men who they alleged assaulted them during the riots.
Afterwards, Guardians started to be elected who were sympathetic to the old way of doing things and effectively covered up for the township carrying on as it had before. As for the unpopular new Poor Law provisions, Todmorden and Walsden held out on building a new-style workhouse until 1874, and only because they were threatened with the area being split between Halifax and Rochdale’s jurisdiction and paupers being sent away from the town altogether.
Keep an eye out for the finished transcriptions and preserved letters becoming available in both Information Services and West Yorkshire Archives!
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