AT the York Special Commission in 1812, sixty-six persons were tried for various offences in connection with the Luddite rising against the introduction of machinery. Of these sixty six seventeen were executed, one reprieved, six transported for seven years, seven were acquitted, seventeen were discharged on bail, fifteen by proclamation, and one stood over but was not called on. The story, Ben o' Bill's, is mostly true, and the authors have not felt called upon to vary in any material respects the story as it was gleaned in part from the lips and in part from the papers of the narrator. It is proper to say that the Ben Walker of the narrative was of kin to neither of the writers. The thanks of the authors are tendered to Dr. Edwin Dean, of Slaithwaite, and to the Justices of the West Riding for permission to reproduce the portraits of Dr. Dean and of Sir Joseph Radcliffe. DEDICATED (Without Permission) TO MARY LOUISA SYKES, THE FRIEND OF BOTH, AND WIFE OF ONE OF THE AUTHORS CHAPTER I. 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