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SHARPE’S Justice
Richard Sharpe and the
Peace of the Congress of Vienna
Screenplay Written by Patrick Harbinson and Bernard Cornwell.
Novel Adapted by Paul Kaster
PART TWO
1814 November - December
Chapter 5
YORKSHIRE
Village of Keighley
1814. PEACE! The war with France is over. A long, … war. Napoleon has been exiled to the island of Elba. Louis, King of France, has been returned to his throne. Now it is time for Europe to decide the fate of countries and people. The leaders of the four countries of the Sixth Coalition will meet in Vienna to define their world without Napoleon’s armies to worry about.
Wellington’s victorious army has been scattered to feed the British need for troops in America, South Africa, India and many more remote places Britain has gained during the wars. Since fewer battalions are needed, many officers and soldiers find themselves cast adrift into a world where postings and jobs are hard to come by.
Some return to the cities, towns and villages they came from. Others choose to stay in a country they fought to liberate or conquer.
England in 1814 celebrated the victory over Napoleon in Spain and the return of her armies. They returned to homes to be treated as interlopers.
In 1813, the country had already begun to have work riots. In the summer of that year, a mob broke into a mill, destroyed the looms with hammers and burned the water wheels to retaliate against the machines that were taking work from them. The militia was called to restore order. By 1814, more incidents were occurring.
People feared loss of work and wages from the machines that could work longer and more consistently than they could and from the soldiers returning who would look to find jobs..
Keighley is a small village north of Sheffield. The Rivers Aire and Worth flow nearby. For many years, this area has been a source of wool and flax to provide fibers to the mills that were established years before. Along one of these streams, a weaving mill was built by the land owner, Sir Willoughby Parfitt. The water turns the wheel that provides the power to the weaving machine.
Inside the building, the shaft from the waterwheel is adorned with pulley wheels. Pulley wheels with fabric belts looped around the wheel and then off into the transfer wheels strung above the loom. Beneath, the shuttle bars and fingers move to the pace of the belts. With primitive start and stop controls, the machine sets the pace for all.
Men, women and children go about working the looms. They attend to the threads that will become sheets of cloth for the clothing of the people of England. The work is hard and dangerous. The Moving machine parts are open to the room. The machine parts and people dance a coordinated dance to make the threads change from bobbins into sheets of cloth with a thread count that no human threaded loom can produce. But, the humans must dance very carefully.
Often threads will separate under the tension of the weave. Small boys and girls work to crawl under the web and between the machine parts to find the broken ends so that the thread may be rejoined and the weave continued. Fingers, hands, legs, arms and heads are at risk each time to complete the work. Scared children pause before venturing in to do the job. They know that the loom shuttle continues to operate as they explore for the ends. Workers in this and other mills have been caught in the machines. The outcome has been the loss of fingers, hands or arms. Some have died. For the injured or dead, there is no compensation for their loss. And worse, if they are injured that they can not continue to work their job, they are cast out, to be replaced by another.
Hewitt, their foreman, is a hard man with size and strength to bully any worker who doesn’t follow the rules. He worked his way up in this and other mills. He knows how to make sure that the mill produces more than any other mill. He walks through the aisles of the mill to watch the workers. It is his job to keep the output of the mill to the owner’s targets. Regardless of what happens to the workers.
On this walk through he sees one boy delaying to fish a broken thread.
“Boy, find the end and get it pieced up.”
One of the workers named West approaches the foreman.
“What are you doing Hewitt? You leave the boy alone.”
Hewitt barks at him
“Get back to your bloody loom, West. Plenty others want your job, lad.”
West grumbles, but returns to work. Other workers watch them. They would protest too, but need the money. If they cause trouble there are too many nearby who will be glad to take their place.
Not far from this mill, under an arch on a quiet street in town, a crowd of nearly thirty men have gathered. They are dressed in odd collections of coats and hats. But they wear the clothing of common, working folks, not the clothes of anyone with money.
Some have brought flasks to help take the chill off as they listen to one man speak. All gathered watch nervously to the streets that come in and out of the meeting place. What this man will say can be dangerous to all that are gathered. Matthew Truman is thirty-eight years old and has lived his life mostly in Keighley. He stands five feet, eight inches tall. His good looks and strong voice cause people to pay attention to him.
His family had lived in Skipton. He has always been good with his hands and machinery. When he was a boy, he was apprenticed to a mechanic at one of the mills in Keighley. It was while he worked at that mill that he met Sharpe. They had liked the same girl. Often they fought. Then one day, Sharpe was gone. The girl they liked had changed. And her boss was missing.
After Sharpe vanished, Truman’s boss sent him to Sheffield to train on more and newer machines. When he returned, the boss would hire him out to mills from Sheffield to Shipley to Skipton. He was hired on an ‘as needed’ basis, but he worked regularly.
As he worked at different mills, he was able to go to see the conditions deteriorate for the workers in many of the mills. Three years ago, at one of Parfitt’s mills he stood up to Saunders who was beating on one of the boys that worked there. Saunders took him outside where they fought. Truman knocked Saunders down.
Shortly after that incident, he was no longer hired for work at Parfitt’s mills. About same time, machinebreakers started raiding mills in West Yorkshire. Soon Truman was being blamed as the leader of these machinebreakers.
He could work only to the south. No one there had heard about him and machinebreakers. But he kept coming back to Keighley because of Elsie.
When he was in his twenties, he met Primitive Methodists in Sheffield. They taught him to read and write. Some of the leaders planned that he would be a minister of the church. But, Truman wasn’t interested in being a full-time evangelist. With the skills he learned from the Methodists, when came to Keighley he started to speak publicly against conditions and the mills and the way the wealthy owners abused their workers. And he addressed Parfitt, mostly...
Standing on a box to see above the crowd, Truman speaks to them.
“The war’s over.”
“Boney is beat. It’s victory my friends.”
Some in the crowd guffaw at this.
“And what difference will it make to the likes of you?”
Truman pauses for emphasis.
“The difference is thousands of bastard soldiers all crawling the country as poor and desperate as you.”
More in the crowd sound their dislike of this.
“Fighting you for jobs.”
“Jobs in these stinking mills.”
“Jobs that won’t pay you enough to put clothes on your backs or food in your children’s mouths.”
Some call out, ”Or roofs over our ‘eads.”
“That’s victory Friends.”
The crowd rumbles. They understand what Truman is saying. It is nice talk, but how can this talk change things for them. The mill owners control the number of jobs, the wages and the conditions that they have to work in.
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