[66]Sir J. A. Picton’s Memorials of Liverpool, 1875; A Digest of the Evidence before the Committee on Artizans and Machinery, by George White, 1824, p. 233; Conflicts of Labour and Capital, by G. Howell, 1890, pp. 82-3.
[67]Report of Committee on the Woollen Manufacture, 1806, p. 16; see also Conflicts of Labour and Capital, by G. Howell, 1890.
[68]See Chapter III.
[69]In volume entitled Tracts Relating to Trade, in British Museum, 816, m. 13. Tankard-bearers were water carriers.
[70]Reasons against the designed leather impositions on gloves, B.M. 816, m. 13.
[71]We shall have occasion later to refer to the absence of effective Trade Unionism in those trades which are still carried on by small working masters.
[72]The assumption frequently made that the Craft Gilds, at their best period, included practically the whole working population, appears to us unfounded. The gild system at no time extended to any but the skilled handicraftsmen, alongside of whom must always have worked a large number of unapprenticed labourers, who received less than half the wages of the craftsmen. We venture to suggest that it is doubtful whether the Craft Gilds at any time numbered as large a proportion of the working population as the Trade Unions of the present day. See Industrial Democracy, p. 480.
[73]“Tumults,” or strikes, among the coal-miners are occasionally mentioned during the eighteenth century, but no lasting combinations. See, for those in Somerset, Carmarthenshire, etc., in 1757, Gentlemen’s Magazine, 1757, pp. 90, 185, 285, etc. In 1765 there was a prolonged strike against the “yearly bond” by the Durham miners (Calendar of Home Office Papers, 1765; Sykes’ Local Records, vol. i, p. 254). The Keelmen, who loaded coals on the Tyne, “mutinied” in 1654 and 1671 “for the increase of wages”; and there were fierce strikes in 1710, 1744, 1750, 1771, and 1794. We have, however, no particulars as to their associations, which were probably ephemeral (Sykes’ Local Records; Richardson’s Local Historian’s Table Book; Gentlemen’s Magazine, 1750).
[74]Many instances of insolence and aggression by the woolcombers are on record; the employers’ advertisements in the Nottingham Journal, August 31, 1795, and the Leicester Herald of June 1792, are only two out of many similar recitals.
[75]Jubilee Souvenir History of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, 1901, p. 12.