Twelve years later it was the brutality of another prosecution of the compositors that impressed Francis Place with the necessity of an alteration in the law. “The cruel persecutions,” he writes, “of the Journeymen Printers employed in _The Times_ newspaper in 1810 were carried to an almost incredible extent. The judge who tried and sentenced some of them was the Common Sergeant of London, Sir John Sylvester, commonly known by the cognomen of ‘Bloody Black Jack.’... No judge took more pains than did this judge on the unfortunate printers, to make it appear that their offence was one of great enormity, to beat down and alarm the really respectable men who had fallen into his clutches, and on whom he inflicted scandalously severe sentences.”[134] Nor did prosecution always depend on the caprice of an employer. In December 1817 the Bolton constables, accidentally getting to know that ten delegates of the calico-printers from the various districts of the kingdom were to meet on New Year’s Day, arranged to arrest the whole body and seize all their papers. The ten delegates suffered three months’ imprisonment, although no dispute with their employers was in progress.[135] But the main use of the law to the employers was to checkmate strikes, and ward off demands for better conditions of labour. Already, in 1786, the law of conspiracy had been strained to convict, and punish with two years’ imprisonment, the five London bookbinders who were leading a strike to reduce hours from twelve to eleven.[136] When, at the Aberdeen Master Tailors’ Gild, in 1797, “it was represented to the trade that their journeymen had entered into an illegal combination for the purpose of raising their wages,” the masters unanimously “agreed not to give any additional wages to their servants,” and backed up this resolution of their own combination by getting twelve journeymen prosecuted and fined for the crime of combining.[137] In 1799 the success of the London shoemakers in picketing obnoxious employers led to the prosecution of two of them, which was made the means of inducing the men to consent to dissolve their society, then seven years old, and return to work at once.[138] Two other shoemakers of York were convicted in the same year for the crime of “combining to raise the price of their labour in making shoes, and refusing to make shoes under a certain price,” and counsel said that “in every great town in the North combinations of this sort existed.”[139] The coach-makers’ strike of 1819 was similarly stopped, and the “Benevolent Society of Coachmakers” broken up by the conviction of the general secretary and twenty other members, who were, upon this condition, released on their own recognisances.[140] In 1819 some calico-engravers in the service of a Manchester firm protested against the undue multiplication of apprentices by their employers, and enforced their protest by declining to work. For this “conspiracy”