Rambles in an Old City / comprising antiquarian, historical, biographical and political associations

by Susan Swain Madders

parent of English looms, and English weavers of wool, claims it; the city, that has for centuries robed the priesthood of Christendom in its camlets; that has invented crapes, and bombazines, and paramattas, to clothe one-half of the world in the sable “livery of woe;” that has draped the fair daughters of every clime in the graceful folds of its far-famed “filover;” that has in later years shod the feet of no small proportion of the nation’s population; whose every court and alley echoes the throw of the shuttle and rattle of the loom; whose every cellar and hovel has its winding frame for childhood and old age to earn their mite upon; whose garrets pour forth their pale sickly wool-combers, with faces blanched by the fumes of charcoal; that has its districts of “cord-wainers,” and colonies of “binders;” its hidden timber-yards, where thousands of square feet are rapidly being transformed into “vestas” and “lucifers,” and “silent lights;” and its tall factories, whose heaped-up stories send down their streams of human working bees, from the cells of their monster queen, the steam-engine, and the task of making produce to supply the rich man’s wants—has, we say, a claim upon us in her character of a manufacturing place. The venerable city, once the summit of the pyramid of our nation’s commercial glory, stands no longer in isolated grandeur, the mistress of trade, but for long has had to look up at a vast mass of capital and

labour, accumulated above her head by the energies and activities of younger rivals. India has gorged with its raw material the markets once fed with the wool of home-grown sheep, and cotton towns have risen up and outgrown the old woollen mart of the country. Fashion and its fluctuations, machinery and its progressions, iron and coal in their partial distribution, have each and all helped to lay the head of the mighty low; but there is strong vitality left within her—powerful talents and great resources; she is even now rising from the lethargy that had crept over her. Would our space permit, how fain would we trace the workings yet going on in her midst: the progress of the shearer’s wool from the wool-sack to the rich brocaded cashmere; through its “combing” with irons heated over charcoal furnaces, that poison the atmosphere around, and shorten the lives of the operatives engaged in it, forsooth, because the foreman of the manufactory has a perquisite of selling charcoal,—thence to the huge factory with giant engines, and labyrinths of spinning-wheels; away, again, to the spider-looking winding-frame, that children and old women may turn to help to fill the shuttles of the abler workers at the loom; thence to the dyers, and then to the loom itself, where manhood, youth, and woman’s feebler strength alike find exercise and room for labour. How many histories have been woven into the

fabric—what tears or smiles have cast their light or shade upon the tints,—what notes of harmony or love, or wailings of sorrow and sickness have echoed the shuttle’s throw,—how many tales of stern heart griefs, pining wants, wasting penury, or disease, are wrapped in the luxurious folds that minister to the comfort and enjoyment of the unconscious wearer.

But we dare not tarry amid these scenes, richly fraught as they may be with subject for graphic sketching; we may not pause to visit the great gatherings in factory chambers, or linger amongst the home labours of the industrious artisan; can barely hint at traits of heroism, lives of gentle loving duty going on amid the rattling noise of looms that trench upon the narrow limits of the sick bed; deeds of good Samaritanism that grace the weary weaver’s home, or dwell upon the Christian lessons they have power to teach. If the anatomy of a manufacturing city does revolt the senses and sensibilities in the pictures of suffering and poverty it seldom fails to abound with, there is yet much beauty in the deep, earnest, truthful poetry to be read in the page it lays open. Mary Barton is no fiction; scarce a district in a manufacturing province that could not furnish a heroine like her; nor need we, perhaps, look to the other side of the Atlantic, to find the prototype of “Uncle Tom.”

There is little doubt that woollen manufactures of

some kind existed in this neighbourhood from a very early period. Sheep were here in great abundance, and as soon as there were ships to send them in, were exported to other countries from these parts. Doomsday Book mentions numerous “sheep-walks,” covering many acres of ground; whether these “walks” comprised such lands as we now term “meadows or pastures,” is not explained, but most probably such is the interpretation to be put upon the term, and not, as at first sight might seem to be implied, that the sheep had narrow strips of “esplanade,” or promenade, all to themselves, upon which they marched up and down in regimental order. About these same sheep it has been said, in these our times, that there exists strong presumptive evidence that the fine Spanish “merino” is a lineal descendant of the family, and that the wool now imported as of foreign extraction, is literally and truly the growth of the offspring of respectable English forefathers, some members of whose domestic circle were honoured by being made presents of to Spanish princes by the sovereign of England, in the days when the office and title of shepherd was coveted by nobles in that country. The hypothesis we pretend not to establish, so “revenons à nos moutons.”

The preparing of wool was a favourite occupation of the British ladies of rank; and soon after the settlement of the Romans, it is recorded by Dionysius

Alexandrinus, that “the wool of Britain was often spun so fine, that it was in a manner comparable to a spider’s thread.” The mother of Alfred is described as being skilled in the spinning of wool, and busied in training her daughters to similar occupations. The advent of the various workmen who followed in the train of the conqueror from Normandy, caused fresh energy to be infused into this, as all other branches of manufactures; but the main stimulus was given by a colony of Dutch, who, driven from their own country by inundations in the reign of Henry the First, crossed the channel, and selecting the convenient promontory of Norfolk, settled themselves down at a little village called Worsted, about thirteen miles from Norwich, whence the name of the wool first spun there by them.

In the reign of Stephen the woollen manufactures were so flourishing in many large towns, that the merchants petitioned for power to form themselves into distinct guilds or corporations,—the earliest development of the principle of joint stock companies, borrowed by the Normans from the free cities of Italy, where trade and manufactures had long flourished, and where this combination of mercantile influence had been employed by the Roman monarchs as a check upon the feudal power of the barons. The inconvenience, however, that attended the monopolies that sprung from this source were soon manifest;

and disturbances were continually arising, until free trade was in a measure restored. The sumptuary laws of Edward the Third, and the inducements held out by him to foreigners to settle in his dominions,—the fixing of the staples, that obliged all merchants to bring their wool and woollen cloths for sale to Norwich, forbidding any to offer such articles in any other part of Norfolk or Suffolk,—tended materially to the commercial prosperity of the city; but in the reign of Richard the Second, discontent spread itself throughout the working population of the kingdom, and the insurrection of Wat Tyler was followed by an open rebellion in Suffolk, when 80,000 men marched upon Norwich, and committed divers acts of devastation and plunder, headed by John Litester, a dyer. This, united to the jealousies that existed between the native and foreign artisans, caused a decline in the local manufactures for some time. In Elizabeth’s reign they revived, through the invitation given to the Dutch and Walloons, then fleeing from the persecutions of the Duke of Alva. By the advice of the Duke of Norfolk, thirty of these, all experienced workmen, were invited to attend in Norwich, each bringing with him ten servants, to be maintained at the expense of the duke. These speedily multiplied, until their number exceeded five thousand. No matter of surprise, therefore, is it that the Old City retains so many quaint traces of