The most notorious of these “seditions,” about which little is really known, was the “Luddite” upheaval of 1811-12, when riotous mobs of manual workers, acting under some sort of organisation, went about destroying textile machinery and sometimes wrecking factories. To what extent this had any direct connection with the Trade Union Movement seems to us, pending more penetrating investigation of the unpublished evidence, somewhat uncertain. That the operatives very generally sympathised with the most violent protest against the displacement of hand labour by machinery, and the extreme distress which it was causing, is clear. The Luddite movement apparently began among the Framework-knitters, who had long been organised in local clubs, with some rudimentary federal bond; and the whole direction of the Luddites was often ascribed, as by the Mayor of Leicester in 1812, to “the Committee of Framework-knitters, who have as complete an organisation of the whole body as you could have of a regiment.”[154] But money was collected from men of other trades, notably bricklayers, masons, spinners, weavers, and colliers, as well as from the soldiers in some of the regiments stationed at provincial centres; and such evidence as we have found points rather to a widespread secret oath-bound conspiracy, not of the men of any one trade, but of wage-earners of all kinds. We find an informer stating (June 22, 1812), with what truth we know not, “that the Union extends from London to Nottingham, and from thence to Manchester and Carlisle. Small towns lying between the principal places are not yet organised, such as Garstang and Burton. Only some of the trades have taken the first oath. He says there is a second oath taken by suspicious persons.”[155] On the other hand, it looks as if the various local Trade Clubs were made use of, in some cases informally, as agents or branches of the conspiracy.