The fate of six farm laborers in Dorset and the huge protest and movement that their brutal transportation to Australia stirred are touchstones to the British labor movement. The Tolpuddle Martyrs are widely celebrated in England as well as in the
The fate of six farm laborers in Dorset and the huge protest and movement that their brutal transportation to Australia stirred are touchstones to the British labor movement. The Tolpuddle Martyrs are widely celebrated in England as well as in the former penal colony where they were sent and in far off Canada. Most Americans have never heard of them. We aim to rectify that.
In 1833 George Loveless, a Methodist lay preacher, and a respected leader among the farm laborers around the village of Tolpuddle in southern England, called a few of his mates together. Legend has it that six of them met under a sycamore tree. Others say that they squeezed into the tiny hovel of Thomas Standfield. They had serious business to attend to.
Landlords in the area were putting the arm on their laborers and tenants. Unlike areas closer to London or the grimy cities of the rapidly industrializing north, farmers in Dorset did not have to keep up wages to compete with the lure of the cities and factory jobs. In addition modest changes to age old farming practices were reducing the number of laborer needed on the farms and estates. Conditions were ripe for wage cutting.
Local wages had been steady at 10 schillings a week—hardly a fortune, but enough to barely fed and cloth a family. Landowners had already cut that to 7 and had announced a second cut to 6 was imminent. No reductions in the rent demanded for their cottages were proposed.
Earlier, in 1830, farm workers had responded to such cuts and the new farm equipment that made them possible with the Swing Rebellion—a Luddite like uprising in which laborers rioted, attacking and burning equipment like threshing machines and menacing landlords. Frightened farmers suspended their cuts, or sometimes even gave wage boosts, but waited for authorities to act.
And act they did. Militia and Army units swept the county rounding up hundreds of suspects. At trial several were sentenced to hang, although in the end only a handful were swung in public as an object lesson, the rest were torn from their families and transported to Australia. Conditions returned to what they were before the protests—or worse.
Loveless and his friends knew that violence and disorganized riot was not the answer. They had to find new ways of organizing a protest. They had some reasons for hope. The Combination Acts, passed in 1799 at the height of panic about the possible spread of revo