NEW research has suggested that the Luddite rebellion is celebrated for the wrong reasons.

The Luddites are generally hailed as the first working men to stand up and fight for their rights.

But Richard Jones, a research student at the University of Cambridge, claims the Luddites’ legacy has been over-blown.

Mr Jones says that far from being a national uprising, the movement was “fragmented, localised and small.”

The research has thrown into question whether it really was the moment at which working class Britain found its political voice.

A mob attack on Rawfolds Mill in Cleckheaton in April 1812 was the culmination of a series of protests which started the year before in Nottinghamshire.

The Luddites were angered by new technologies, like automated looms, which were being used in the textile industry threatening the livelihoods of skilled workers.

Invoking a mythical leader, Ned Ludd, the insurgents broke into factories and wrecked the offending equipment.

For historians, the revolt has traditionally been seen as a watershed moment in which the industrial working classes made their presence felt as a political force for the first time.

This supposedly laid the ground for later reform movements, such as Chartism, as well as the trade unions.

But Mr Jones argues that it was not a movement which represented the concerns of the working classes at all – rather those of privileged professionals with disparate, local concerns.

“For historians, the Luddites have traditionally been seen as a phenomenon of social history,” he said.

“They are viewed as workers dispossessed by economic advances, frozen out of existing structures and doing whatever they could to make their voices heard.

“But these were not downtrodden working class labourers. The Luddites were elite craftspeople.”

Critically, Jones also challenges the idea that the Luddites were organised into any sort of national movement.

His study of Yorkshire reveals that local grievances lay at the heart of the attack on William Cartwright’s Rawfolds Mill, and the assassination of millowner William Horsfall, in Huddersfield, on April 28, 1812. Both men had made themselves deeply unpopular with the local workforce already.

Similarly, there is little indication that Yorkshire Luddism, in spite of its explosive high-points, was part of an organised national uprising.

Its leaders met in local pubs and their grievances represented community concerns.

Two articles by Mr Jones will be published in History Today and BBC History Magazine next month.