The movement for a repeal of the Combination Laws began in a period of industrial dislocation and severe political repression. The economic results of the long war, culminating in the comparatively low prices of the peace for most manufactured products, though not for wheat, led in 1816 to an almost universal reduction of wages throughout the country. In open defiance of the law the masters, in many instances, deliberately combined in agreements to pay lower rates. This agreement was not confined to the employers in a particular trade, who may have been confronted by organised bodies of journeymen, but extended, in some cases, to all employers of labour in a particular locality. The landowners and farmers of Tiverton, for instance, at a “numerous and respectable meeting at the Town Hall” in 1816, resolved “that, in consequence of the low price of provisions,” not more than certain specified wages should be given to smiths, carpenters, masons, thatchers, or masons’ labourers.[164] The Compositors, Coopers, Shoemakers, Carpenters, and many other trades record serious reductions of wages at this period. In these cases the masters justified their action on the ground that, owing to the fall of prices, the Standard of Life of the journeymen would not be depressed. But in the great staple industries there ensued a cutting competition between employers to secure orders in a falling market, their method being to undersell each other by beating down wages below subsistence level--an operation often aided by the practice, then common, of supplementing insufficient earnings out of the Poor Rate. This produced such ruinous results that local protests were soon made. At Leicester the authorities decided to maintain the men’s “Statement Price” by agreeing to wholly support out of a voluntary fund those who could not get work at the full rates. This was bitterly resented by the neighbouring employers, who seriously contemplated indicting the lord-lieutenant, mayor, alder-men, clergy, and other subscribers for criminal conspiracy to keep up wages.[165] And in 1820 a public meeting of the ratepayers of Sheffield protested against the “evil of parish pay to supplement earnings,” and recommended employers to revert to the uniform price list which the men had gained in 1810.[166] Finally we have the employers themselves publicly denouncing the ruinous extent to which the cutting of wages had been carried. A declaration dated June 16, 1819, and signed by fourteen Lancashire manufacturers, regrets that they have been compelled by the action of a few competitors to lower wages to the present rates, and strongly condemns any further reduction; whilst twenty-five of the most eminent calico-printing firms append an emphatic approval of the protest, and state “that the system of paying such extremely low wages for manufacturing labour is injurious to the trade at large.”[167] At Coventry the ribbon manufacturers combined