No one knows when Manchester first became a manufacturing town, and the introduction of Flemish artificers in the reign of Edward III is rather a probable than a certain starting-point. Nothing is distinctly known of the progress of woolen manufacture, until the reign of Henry VIII, at which time it had evidently grown into considerable importance. In the statute of the thirty-third year of his reign it appears that the inhabitants of Manchester carried on a considerable manufacture both of linens and woolens by which they were acquiring great wealth; but no mention has yet been found of cotton manufacture in that city earlier than the year 1641. By this time, however, it had become well established.
The labor was entirely handicraft; and it was not until the establishment of the factory by Arkwright that Manchester and the other manufacturing towns of England came into prominence in the political life of the nation; indeed it was not until the nineteenth century was well advanced that the inhabitants of these cities were represented in Parliament.
It has been held that the factory is an episode, not an element, in modern sociological development, and in a strict sense this is true. But because the factory led to the growth of great manufacturing towns and caused the migration thither of a vast population from the agricultural districts, and because it was among this population that the social discontent, which for a long period had existed in the lower classes, first became articulate, the factory directly contributed to the development of modern democracy.
The factory transformed not only craftsmen into operatives, but agricultural laborers as well, the latter becoming for the first time free to dispose of their own labor; for while serfdom had been declared illegal long before the establishment of the factory, yet the peasant remained dependent, in a large measure, upon the good will of his employer and he was bound by custom if not by law to the soil he tilled. The migration of this vast laboring population from the fields to the towns led to far-reaching social results.
“Meanwhile, at social Industry’s command
How quick and fast an increase! From the germ
Of some poor hamlet, rapidly produced,
Here a large town, continuous and compact,
Hiding the face of earth for leagues—and there,
Where not a habitation stood before,