ABSTRACT
The suppression of the Plug Riots left the country still in a sadly disturbed state owing to the scarcity of work and the dearness of provisions, and great meetings and riots such as those already chronicled continued at intervals during several years. The prisons all over the country, in the clothing districts especially, were crowded with chartist leaders, no less than fifty of the principal agitators being imprisoned at one time. Amongst these were the wary leader of the movement, Feargus O’Connor and his trusty lieutenants, George Julian Harney and Dr. McDouall, who were tried together before Baron Rolfe, at Lancaster. Hundreds of the leaders of the plug rioters in Yorkshire and Lancashire were also put upon their defence, and some of the accounts given by these men of the circumstances which had led them to engage in that desperate undertaking were of a very pathetic character. Benjamin Wilson, of Salterhebble, who was himself mixed up with the chartist movement, refers to a man named Pilling, who was one of the originators of the great strike which resulted in the plug riots. In his defence, Pilling stood forward and thus addressed the jury:—”Gentlemen, I am somewhere about 43 years of age. I was asked last night if I was not 60. At first, when I went to Ashton, my two sons and myself worked at the mill for 12£d. per eut. Our work was thirty cuts a week, which 345made £1 lis. 3d., this would be 10s. 5d. each. In a little over twelve months we had to submit to three reductions in wages, bringing them down to 7s. lid. each per week. These were starvation wages, and on another attempt being made soon after to reduce us still further, flesh and blood rebelled and we struck. In Ashton not one pennyworth of damage was done to property, although we were slowly starving for six weeks. My lord and gentlemen, it was a hard case with me and mine. My second son fell into a consumption from insufficient nourishment and hardship. Before we struok our united wages had sunk to 16s. per week, and that was all nine of us had to live upon, and 3s. of that had to go for rent. During this time the son I have named laid helpless before me. I have gone home night after night and seen that son on a sick bed and dying pillow, having nothing to eat but potatoes and salt and no medical attendance. Someone who knew my sore straits went to a gentleman’s house to beg a bottle of wine for my son, and the answer was, “Oh, he is a chartist, he must have none I’ Mr. Rayner, of Ashton, had given notice a day or two before that he would reduce wages 25 per cent. That aroused the people’s indignation and the strike was the result. The people first rose in desperation because they oould not live, and that was why I joined the movement.”
