General Maitland, writing from Buxton (June 22, 1812) to the Home Secretary, says that, in his opinion, “the whole of this business ... originated in those constant efforts made by these associations for many years past to keep up the price of the manufacturers’ wages; that finding their efforts for this unavailing, both from the circumstances of the trade and the high price of provisions, they in a moment of irritation, for which it is but just to say they had considerable ground from the real state of distress in which they were placed ... began to think of effecting that by force which they had ever been trying to do by other means; and that in this state the oath was introduced.... I believe the whole to be, certainly a most mischievous, but undefined and indistinct attempt to be in a state of preparation to do that by force which they had not succeeded in carrying into effect as they usually did by other means.” The whole episode has been too much ignored, even by social historians; and “Byron’s famous speech and Charlotte Brontë’s more famous novel give to most people their idea of the misery of the time, and of its cause, the displacement of hand labour by machinery.”[156] The coal-miners were in many respects even worse off than the hosiery workers and the cotton weavers. In Scotland they had been but lately freed from actual serfdom, the final act of emancipation not having been passed until 1799. In Monmouthshire and South Wales the oppression of the “tommy shops” of the small employers was extreme. In the North of England the “yearly bond,” the truck system, and the arbitrary fines kept the underground workers in complete subjection. The result is seen in the turbulence of their frequent “sticks” or strikes, during which troops were often required to quell their violence. The great strike of 1810 was carried on by an oath-bound confederacy recruited by the practice of “brothering,” “so named because the members of the union bound themselves by a most solemn oath to obey the orders of the brotherhood, under the penalty of being stabbed through the heart or of having their bowels ripped up.”[157]