E P Thompson on beyond Tolpuddle, the other Martyrs
E P Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class contains a number of references to the Tolpuddle Martyrs and perhaps particularly the impact that their victimisation had.
However he also reminds us that they were far from alone in being victims of a justice system that was determined to protect the rule of the wealthy at the expense of the poor:
Since Luddites or food rioters do not appears satisfactory ‘fore-runners’ of ‘the Labour Movement’ they merited neither sympathy or close attention. And this bias was supplemented, from another direction, by the more conservative bias of the orthodox academic tradition. Hence ‘history’ has dealt fairly with the Tolpuddle Martyrs… but the hundreds of men and women executed or transported for oath-taking, Jacobin conspiracy, Luddism, the Pentridge and Grange Moor risings, food and enclosure and turnpike riots, the Ely riots and the Labourers’ Revolt of 1830 and a score of minor affrays, have been forgotten by all but a few specialists, or, if they are remembered they are thought to be simpletons or men tainted with criminal folly’
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