English Economic History: Select Documents

by Unknown

But before it comes this length, it requires a prodigious number of people, horses, carts or wagons, to carry it from place to place; for the people of those countries where the wool is grown, or taken as above, are not the people who spin it into yarn.

On the contrary, some whole counties and parts of counties are employed in spinning, who see nothing of any manufacture among them, the mere spinning only excepted.

Thus the weavers of Norwich and of the parts adjacent, and the weavers of Spitalfields in London, send exceeding great quantities of wool into remote counties to be spun, besides what they spin in both those populous counties of Norfolk and Suffolk; particularly they employ almost the whole counties of Cambridge, Bedford, and Hertford; and besides that, as if all this part of England was not sufficient for them, they send a very great quantity of wool one hundred and fifty miles by land carriage to the north, as far as Westmoreland, to be spun; and the yarn is brought back in the same manner to London and to Norwich.

This vast consumption of wool in Norfolk and Suffolk is supplied chiefly out of Lincolnshire, a county famous for the large sheep bred up for the supply of the London markets, as the western manufacturers are supplied from Leicestershire; of which in its place.

Nor is all this sufficient still; but as if all England was not able to spin sufficient to the manufacture, a very great quantity of yarn, ready spun, is brought from Ireland, landed at Bristol, and brought from thence by land carriage to London, and then to Norwich also.

The county of Essex, a large and exceedingly populous county, is chiefly taken up with the great manufacture of bays and perpets; the consumption of wool for this manufacture is chiefly bought of the staplers in London; the sorting, oiling, combing, or otherwise preparing the wool, is the work of the master manufacturer or bay maker; and the yarn is generally spun in the same county, the extent of it being not less than between fifty and sixty miles' square, and full of great and populous towns, such as Colchester, Braintree, Coggeshall, Chelmsford, Billericay, Bishop Stortford, Saffron Walden, Waltham, Romford, and innumerable smaller but very populous villages, and, in a word, the whole county full of people.

The western part of England, superior both in manufactures and in numbers of people also, are not to be supplied either with wool or with spinning, among themselves, notwithstanding two such articles in both, as no other part of England can come up to by a great deal, viz.:

1. Notwithstanding the prodigious numbers of sheep fed upon those almost boundless downs and plains in the counties of Dorset, Wilts, Gloucester, Somerset, and Hampshire, where the multitudes, not of sheep only, but even of flocks of sheep, are not to be reckoned up; insomuch that the people of Dorchester say there are six hundred thousand sheep always feeding within six miles round that one town.

2. Notwithstanding the large and most populous counties of Wilts, Somerset, Gloucester, and Devon, in which the manufacture being so exceeding great, all the women inhabitants may be supposed to be thoroughly employed in spinning the yarn for them, and in which counties are, besides, the populous cities of Exeter, Salisbury, Wells, Bath, Bristol, and Gloucester; I say besides these, the greatest towns, and the greatest number of them that any other part of the whole kingdom of Great Britain can show, some of which exceed even the great towns of Leeds, Wakefield, Sheffield, etc., in the North; such as Taunton, Devizes, Tiverton, Crediton, Bradford, Trowbridge, Westbury, Froome, Stroud, Biddeford, Barnstaple, Dartmouth, Bridgewater, Mynhead, Poole, Weymouth, Dorchester, Blandford, Wimbourn, Sherbourne, Cirencester, Honiton, Warminster, Tewksbury, Tedbury, Malmsbury, and abundance of others, too many to set down; all which I mention, because those who pretend to have calculated the numbers of people employed in these four counties assure me that there are not so few as a million of people constantly employed there in spinning and weaving for the woollen manufacture only; that besides the great cities, towns, and seaports, mentioned above, there are not less than one hundred and twenty market towns, six large cities, and fifteen hundred parishes, some of which are exceeding full of people.

And yet, notwithstanding all this, such is the greatness of this prodigious manufacture, that they are said to take yearly thirty thousand packs of wool, and twenty-five thousand packs of yarn ready spun from Ireland.