(1781-1849) Poet, born at Masborough, Yorkshire, in his youth worked in an iron-foundry, and in 1821 took up the same business on his own account with success. He is best known by his poems on behalf of the poor and oppressed, and especially for his denunciations of the Corn Laws, which gained for him the title of the Corn Law Rhymer. Though now little read, he had considerable poetic gift. His principal poems are Corn Law Rhymes (1831), The Ranter, and The Village Patriarch (1829).