The early English cotton industry

by George W. Daniels

It is in the first half of the twelfth century that we get the first evidence of the production of cotton fabrics in the Christian countries of Europe. Edward Baines, who in his excellent and scholarly account[1] of the origins of the cotton industry dated its European beginnings from the reign of Abderahman the Great (A.D. 912-961) in Moorish Spain, and showed that it had become well established in Barcelona by the thirteenth century, could not find any trace of it in Italy before the beginning of the fourteenth century. Recent research[2] has, however, proved that by the middle of the twelfth century there already existed a flourishing export trade from Genoa to the Levant of the fustians of Northern Italy and Tuscany and of the light cottons (pignolato) of Piacenza; so that the fustians which are found on sale at the Champagne fairs[3] at that period were probably from Italy as well as from Spain. The frequent mention of cotton wool and yarn as articles of commerce makes it probable that fabrics containing cotton were produced in Flanders during the fourteenth century. At the same time a fustian manufacture began to grow up around Ulm and Augsburg, deriving its cotton supplies through Venice, which acquired a European reputation in the sixteenth century.[4]

Of the great range of new social classes engaged in, or concerned with, the textile industries that were built up during the Middle Ages by the creative energy of free fellowship, it is impossible here to attempt any account. There were gilds of weavers which secured in the twelfth century chartered right of marketing and autonomy before the rise of municipal self-government[5]; gilds of importers and exporters of cloth formed amongst the wealthy class that administered the first forms of civic independence[6]; gilds of tailors or cloth-cutters (Gewand-schneider) that attempted to monopolise the right to retail trade[7]; gilds of small masters in the auxiliary crafts—of fullers, dyers and shearmen seeking to maintain an independent contact with the market[8]; and finally, gilds of wage-earning journeymen who never secured full recognition of their right to a separate organisation. The conflict between these class interests was a main factor in municipal politics during the fourteenth century and culminated not infrequently in revolution.

In 1345 a dispute at Ghent between the fullers and their employers, the weavers and clothmakers about a piece-work rate led to a pitched battle in which hundreds were slain.[9] For a few months during the Ciompi rising of 1378 the nine thousand textile wage-earners of Florence maintained themselves by a temporary transformation of the gild constitution on an equal footing with the wealthier classes of the city, but were then obliged to fall back on that Friendly Society form of organisation out of which the Lancashire weavers in the eighteenth century constructed their later trade unions.[10] Elsewhere in many places the struggle of the town wage-earners for recognition was carried on with varying success during the fifteenth century. In 1453 the journeymen fullers of Brussels formed part of an international federation comprising forty-two towns and cities whose objects were to limit the supply of labour and to exclude all workers from towns in their black list.[11] The journeymen weavers followed the example of the fullers and their black list included the whole of England as well as the cities of Malines and Ypres. The records of the last successful strike of the fullers of Leyden in 1478 show that their fraternity, though it included small masters, was mainly representative of the journeyman class.[12]

From that time till the end of the seventeenth century we hear little of the activities of the journeymen. In all cases where they expanded, the textile industries outgrew the limits of the town economy and drew supplies both of capital and labour from sources outside the corporate boroughs and the gilds. The textile workers became in every country a much larger and more important section of the community than before, but their centre of gravity shifted from the journeyman wage-earner to the working master who was essentially a small capitalist and receiver of credit, and whose economic well-being depended primarily upon a free flow of capital and credit.[13] It remains to consider briefly how this was affected by the mercantilist policy of the state.

III

Capitalist employers and even, to some extent, our wage-earning proletariat were to be found as early as the close of the thirteenth century in the chief urban centres of the textile industries in Flanders and Italy; and at first sight there seems little to distinguish the industrial conditions and the class relations prevailing in those centres from those described as existing in Lancashire between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The patrician draper of Douai in the last quarter of the thirteenth century[14] ran his business on lines which we find still maintained by the Chethams and the Mosleys of seventeenth-century Manchester. In both cases the capitalist was primarily a merchant with agents or partners in other cities, who bought his raw material from abroad and helped to put his goods on a distant market. At the industrial centre he had a warehouse and also a workshop where he employed a few workers chiefly in finishing the cloth or in preparing the material for manufacture. But his relation with most of those who were in effect his workpeople was ostensibly that of a trader. He sold them the materials of their craft and bought the finished products, allowing them credit for the interval.

The other form of industrial organisation found in eighteenth-century Manchester, in which the materials were delivered through putters-out to the cottage workers of the surrounding country, had been already fully developed by the Wool Gild of fourteenth-century Florence.[15]

What constitutes the vital difference between the conditions at Douai and Florence on the one hand, and those in Lancashire on the other hand, was the virtual monopoly of the employing function and of the supply of capital or credit which the civic constitution of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries gave to the patrician merchant or to the members of the wool gild, and which was entirely absent from the Manchester fustian or cotton industry. The weaver who obtained his materials from the Chethams or Mosleys might, if their terms were better, have got credit from the Irish yarn dealers or other “foreigners” who visited the Manchester market, and he was free to set up as an independent manufacturer as soon as he had acquired the necessary capital or credit. Such freedom, however, was by no means universal or even normal in the textile industries of sixteenth-century England. A monopoly of the employing function had grown up in the corporate burghs which were the older centres of the industry and the effect of the industrial and commercial policy of the sixteenth century was to give a national sanction to this monopoly, and to put a ban upon expansion or improvement.

One of the main instruments of that policy was the company of Merchant Adventurers. This was a cartel of English merchants, mainly Londoners, which had gradually gained a control of the export trade of cloth to Antwerp—the chief Continental market. Throughout the sixteenth century it sought to prevent the English clothier from exporting his own cloth and the foreign merchant from coming to buy it in England. At the same time it restricted the number of its own members and limited the amount of trade done by each. So far, therefore, from having been, as is commonly supposed, the main organ for the expansion of English trade, it constituted, in fact, the main hindrance to that expansion. In 1551-1552 the government of Edward VI., in order to raise from the Adventurers a desperately needed loan, gave an official sanction to their monopoly. It stopped the trade of the Hanseatic merchants who had recently been exporting over one-third of the rapidly increasing output of English cloth,[16] and it authorised the Adventurers to exclude other native merchants from the trade. As the Adventurers could not find a market for the whole national output, they complained of over-production.[17] The corporate boroughs which were the older privileged centres of the industry naturally supported this complaint, and a series of enactments from 1552 to 1563 (including the Statute of Weavers and the Statute of Apprentices) which endeavoured to restrict the expansion of the textile manufactures in the country districts were largely due to the combined influence of these two vested interests and to the fiscal needs of the Government.

The Hanseatic trade was restored under Philip and Mary, and during the first half of Elizabeth’s reign the German merchants continued to find a market for a considerable quantity of English cloth.