he was a great advocate of the minimum wage idea for handloom weavers, and his projected "Boards of Trade," to fix the wages of these unfortunate operatives, received the approval of the Select Committee of 1834–35. He was an early convert to the Owenite schemes for factory reform, and in 1832 founded the "Society for National Regeneration" in which Owen was interested. This Society started an agitation for factory reform, in which several leaders of the Anti-Poor Law agitation were active. Fielden's own part in the latter agitation was small but important. He represented it in Parliament, where he was indefatigable in the presentation of petitions. By his own exertions he prevented the introduction of the Act of 1834, or of the Registration of Births, Marriages, and Deaths Act of 1837, which was closely connected with it, into the Todmorden area at all. It was a good generation later before pressure from Whitehall compelled the Todmorden Union to build a workhouse.[1] Fielden also encouraged similar resistance in neighbouring towns, like Huddersfield and Bury. This resistance was so effective that Lancashire and the West Riding were administered under the old system for several years after the Act was otherwise in full working order.
Two of Cobbett's sons, J. P. and R. B. B. Cobbett, both lawyers, played some part in the movement. They helped to run a periodical called the Champion, in which Fielden was also interested. As demagogues the two Cobbetts were failures, and when the agitation assumed a ferocious lawbreaking character, they fell out, and played no further part except as the legal advisers of Chartist prisoners.
The real leaders of the Anti-Poor Law agitation were Richard Oastler and Joseph Rayner Stephens. Oastler (1789–1861), "the factory king," was steward to the family of Thornhill, whose estates lay about Huddersfield, and he himself lived at Fixby Hall, the home of the absentee Thornhills, upon the moors on the Lancashire side of Huddersfield. He had come into prominence in 1830, when he opened a campaign against the exploitation of child-labour in the Yorkshire factories, an agitation which brought him into touch with Fielden, Robert Owen, and Michael Thomas Sadler. Stephens (1805–1879) was the son of a Wesleyan minister, and was educated at the Manchester Grammar School. In 1825 he entered the Wesleyan ministry and went off to a mission
- ↑ See for the resistance to the new Poor Law in Todmorden, J. Holden, A Short History of Todmorden, pp. 188-93.
