hom the Cloth
Hall was erected. Six hundred manufacturers attend this hall every Tuesday.

The principal manufactures are of broad and narrow cloths, serges,
kerseymeres, cords, and fancy goods of shawls and waistcoatings, composed of
mixed cotton, silk, and wool.

The neighbourhood of Huddersfield was the centre of the Luddite outbreak,
when a large number of persons engaged in the cloth manufacture, conceiving
that they were injured by the use of certain inventions for dressing cloth,
banded together, traversed the country at night, searching for and carrying
off fire-arms, and attacking and destroying the manufactories of persons
supposed to use the obnoxious machines.

Great alarm was excited, some expected nothing less than a general
insurrection; at length the rioters were attacked, dispersed, a large number
arrested, tried, and seventeen hanged. Since that period not one but scores
of mechanical improvements have been introduced into the woollen manufacture
without occasioning disturbance, and with benefit in increased employment to
the working classes.

The case of the Luddites was one of the few on which Lord Byron spoke in the
Upper House, and Horace Smith sang for Fitzgerald . . .

"What makes the price of beer and Luddites rise?
What fills the butchers' shops with large blue flies?"

The population is about 30,000, and returns one member to the House of
Commons.

About half a mile from the town is Lockwood Spa, of strongly sulphurous
waters, for which a set of handsome buildings have been provided.

LEEDS.

LEEDS, seventeen miles from Huddersfield, is the centre of five railways, by
which it has direct connection with Hull, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle,
on the east, and Carlisle on the west coast, Sheffield, Nottingham, Derby,
and Birmingham, in the Midland counties, possesses one of the finest central
railway stations in the kingdom, and has also the advantage of being in the
centre of inland navigation (a great advantage for the transport of heavy
goods), as it communicates with the eastern seas by the Aire and Calder
navigation to the Humber, and westward by the Leeds and Liverpool to the
Mersey. The town stands on a hill, which rises from the banks of the river
Aire. Leeds has claims to antiquity, but few remains. When Domesday Book
was compiled it appears to have been an agricultural district.

Wakefield was formerly the more important town. Lord Clarendon, in 1642,
sp