employment and consequent starvation. The locality where these riots were most frequent was the northern midland counties, where the newly-invented stocking-frames were specially obnoxious to them. The Luddites became the type of bodies of rioters who by a half-blind instinct throughout this period threw themselves 165 against the advancing battalions of industrial revolution.
In 1816, the year which followed the peace with France, the cessation of all the war industries threw still more people out of employment, and in addition the harvest was a specially bad one. As a consequence, this hunger insurrection was particularly vigorous in that year. The riots were put down with corresponding violence, and the rioters punished with the utmost harshness. But as times mended somewhat, this insurrection, which was, as we have said, a mere matter of hunger, and was founded on no principle, died out, although for a time riots having for their object destruction of property, especially of the plant and stock of manufacturers, went on through the whole of the first half of the century. The “Plug Riots,” in the middle of the Chartist agitation, may be taken for an example of these131
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