All the towns belonging to the Manchester family-circle present more or less decidedly the features mentioned. They differ from one another not in style, or habits, or physiognomy; the difference is simply that one makes calico, another muslins, and that they cover a less or greater extent of ground. The social, moral, and intellectual qualities of the various places form quite another subject of consideration. For the present it must wait; except with the remark that a Lancashire manufacturing town, however humble, is seldom without a lyceum, or some similar institution; and if wealthy, is prone to emulate cities. Witness the beautiful Art Exhibition held not long ago at Darwen!
WARRINGTON
The industrial history of the important Lancashire cotton towns, although their modern development covers less than ninety years, dates from the beginning of the fourteenth century. As early as a.d. 1311, temp. Edward II., friezes were manufactured at Colne, but, as elsewhere in the country, they would seem to have been coarse and of little value. "The English at that time," says quaint old Fuller, "knew no more what to do with their wool than the sheep that weare it, as to any artificial curious drapery." The great bulk of the native produce of wool was transmitted to Flanders and the Rhenish provinces, where it was woven, England repurchasing the cloth. Edward III., allowing himself to be guided by the far-reaching sagacity of his wise queen, Philippa, resolved that the manufacture should be kept at home. Parties of the Flemish weavers were easily induced to come over, the more so because wretchedly treated in their own country. Manchester, Bolton, Rochdale, and Warrington, were tenanted almost immediately, and a new character was at once given to the textile productions both of the district and the island in general. Furness Abbey was then in its glory; its fertile pastures supplied the wants of these industrious people: they seem, however, not to have cared to push their establishments so far, keeping in the south and east of the county, over which they gradually spread, carrying, wherever they went, the "merry music of the loom." The same period witnessed the original use of coal—again, it is believed, through the advice of Philippa; the two great sources of Lancashire prosperity being thus in their rise contemporaneous. The numerous little rivers and waterfalls of East Lancashire contributed to the success of the new adventurers. Fulling-mills and dye-works were erected upon the margins: the particular spots are now only conjectural; mementoes of these ancient works are nevertheless preserved in the springing up occasionally, to the present day, on the lower Lancashire river-banks, of plants botanically alien to the neighbourhood. These are specially the fullers' teasel, Dipsacus fullonum, and the dyers' weed, Reseda luteola, both of which were regularly used, the refuse, with seeds, cast into the stream being carried many miles down and deposited where the plants now renew themselves. The retention of their vitality by seeds properly ripened, when buried too deep for the operation of the atmosphere, sunshine, and moisture, all at once, is well known to naturalists, as well as their germination when brought near enough to the surface of the ground. This ancient woollen manufacture endured for quite 300 years. Cotton then became a competitor, and gradually superseded it; Rochdale and a few other places alone vindicating the old traditions.
The Flemings also introduced the national sabots, from which have descended the wooden clogs heard in operative Lancashire wherever pavement allows of the clatter, only that while the sabots were wholly wooden, with a lining of lambskin, the Lancashire clogs have leathern tops.
In the writings of the period before us, and in others long afterwards, the Flemings' woollens are called "cottonnes," a circumstance which has led to much misapprehension as to the date of the original use in England of cotton ipsissima. In 1551-52, temp. Edward VI., an "Acte" passed for the making of "woollen clothe" prescribes the length and breadth of "all and everie cottonnes called Manchester, Lancashire, and Cheshire cottonnes." Leland, in the following reign, mentions in similar phrase, that "divers villagers in the moores about Bolton do make cottons." Genuine cotton fabrics manufactured abroad were known in England, no doubt, though the raw material had not been seen. Chaucer habits his Knight in "fustian," a word which points to Spain as the probable source. The truth as regards the "cottonnes" would seem to be that certain woollens were made so as to resemble cotton, and called by the same name, just as to-day certain calicoes have the look of linen given to them, and are sold as "imitation Irish," and as gloves made of the skins of uncertain animals are passed off as "French kid"; unless, indeed, as conjectured by some, the word "cottonnes" was a corruption of "coatings."
The employment of cotton for manufacturing in England is mentioned first in 1641, when it was brought to London from Cyprus and Smyrna. The word "cotton" itself, we need hardly say, is of oriental origin, taking one back to India, the old-world birthplace of the plant. Used there as the clothing material from time immemorial, it is singular that the movement westward should have been so slow. The people who introduced it, practically, to Europe, were the Moors, who in the tenth century cultivated cotton in old Granada, simultaneously with rice, the sugar-cane, and the orange-tree, all brought by themselves from Asia. In those days Moslems and Christians declined to be friendly, and thus, although the looms were never still, the superabundance of the manufacture went exclusively to Africa and the Levant. The cotton-plant being indigenous also to Mexico and the West Indies, when commerce arose with the latter, Cyprus and Smyrna no longer had the monopoly. Precise dates, however, are wanting till the first years of the eighteenth century, when the United States and the Mersey of to-day had their prototype in Barbadoes and the Lune, already mentioned as having been a cotton port long anterior to Liverpool. Lancaster city itself is not accessible by ships. The cotton was usually landed on the curious lingula which juts into the Irish Sea where the estuary disappears, and hither the country people used to come to wonder at it.[15] The first advertisement of a sale of cotton in Liverpool appeared in November 1758, but thirty years after that Lancaster was still the principal Lancashire seat of import. One of the most distinguished of the "Lancashire worthies," old Mr. John Blackburne, of Orford Mount, near Warrington, an enthusiastic gardener, cultivated the cotton-plant so successfully that he was able to provide his wife with a muslin dress, worn by her on some state occasion in or about 1790, the material derived wholly from the greenhouse he loved so fondly. Strange that, except occasionally in an engine-room, we scarcely ever see the cotton-plant in the county it has filled with riches—the very place where one would expect to find it cherished. How well would it occupy a few inches of the space so generally devoted to the pomps and vanities of mere colour-worship! Apart from the associations, it is beautiful; the leaves resemble those of the grape-vine; the flowers are like single yellow roses. There never was a flood without its ark. One man a few years ago did his part with becoming zeal—the late Mr. R. H. Alcock, of Bury. Lancashire, it may be allowed here to remind the reader, is the only manufacturing district in England which depends entirely upon foreign countries for the supply of its raw material. One great distinction between England and other countries is that the latter send away the whole, or very much, of their natural produce, usually as gathered together, England importing it and working it up. How terribly the dependence in question was proved at the time of the Federal and Confederate war, all who were cognisant of the great Cotton-famine will remember. Next in order would come sugar and timber, a dearth of either of which would unquestionably be disastrous; but not like want of cotton in Lancashire—the stranding of a whole community.
The Lancashire cotton towns owe their existence essentially to the magic touch of modern mechanical art. During all the long procession of centuries that had elapsed since the time of the "white-armed" daughter of Alcinous, her maidens, and their spinning-wheels, and of the swarthy weavers of ancient Egypt, the primeval modes of manufacture had been followed almost implicitly. The work of the Flemings themselves was little in advance of that of the Hebrews under Solomon. In comparison with that long period, the time covered by the change induced by machinery was but a moment, and the growth of the weaving communities, compared with that of previous times, like a lightning-flash. The movement commenced about 1760. Up till long after the time of Elizabeth, the staple manufacture of Lancashire, as we have seen, was woollen. Flax, in the sixteenth century, began to be imported largely, both from Ireland and the Continent, and when cotton at last arrived the two materials were combined. Flax was used for the "warp" or longitudinal threads, which in weaving require to be stronger than the "woof," while cotton was employed only for the latter—technically the "weft."