The Dumb Steeple and the Luddites

The busy roundabout where the A62 and A644 meet just outside Huddersfield is an unusual stoppoing spot - and actually you can't.  The nearest car park belongs to The Three Nuns Pub just up the road, so we had an ideal excuse to stop for lunch.  There's been a pub on the site of the Three Nuns since the fifteenth century.  The current building has been there since the nineteenth century.  The name comes from the fact that it stands inside the grounds of Kirklees Priory where Robin Hood is said to have been buried.  There's more to find out about Kirklees Priory in nearby Mirfield.  It's on my list of places to explore.

But back to the Dumb Steeple.  Its easy to miss it if you don't know that its there and no one is really clear as to what its doing where it is.  One theory says that it marks the spot where wanted men could claim sanctuary from the law for forty days and forty nights.  If that is the case then Dumb Steeple is a corruption of Doom Steeple.  History suggests that this isn't the case. Another theory says that it was a marker to show the way to a nearby ford; yet another theory declares that it replaced an ancient megalith.

The dumb steeple's real history dates from  April1812 when the Luddites, disgruntled croppers who were losing their livelihoods to the new cropping machines, met in the fields behind the dumb steeple. Croppers were important workers in the manufacture of finished cloth.  Once the weavers had created the cloth, the croppers used enormous shears to finish it and to raise the nap.  Their trade was a highly skilled one which commanded good wages until the advent of a machine that could do the work of many men. 

In a bid to prevent the loss of their jobs they began to destroy the machines.  On the 11th April 1812 a group of Luddites met at the dumb steeple before marching on Rawfolds Mill near Cleckheaton.  The owner of Rawfolds was prepared and there was a pitched battle.  For a while the authorities feared that Huddersfield and Halifax were fermenting rebellion.  There were more soldiers in the north than Wellington had in the Peninsula Campaign. 

Cars thunder by, their occupants look slightly bewildered at the sight of me with my camera.  Clearly they have no idea of the momentous events that took place here two hundred years ago.