|
Ned Lud is the person that forms the basis for the character of "King (or Captain) Ludd" who was supposedly the leader and founder of the Luddites.
No proof to his existence has been found, but he is often thought to have come from the village of Anstey, just outside Leicester, where he broke two stocking frames in a rage. The incident is identified as being in 1779, rather than at the time of the Luddites in the 1810s. The act was one of frustration, rather than an act of vandalism against the technology that the stocking frames represented: that technology had been in existence for almost two centuries. His action – carried through the years in folk memory – was thus mischaracterised by the Luddites.
References
- Pynchon essay (http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html)
|
