The cover image was adapted from the original by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain. The listed errata have been corrected in the text.

PUBLICATIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

HISTORICAL SERIES

No. XXXVI

THE EARLY
ENGLISH COTTON INDUSTRY

Published by the University of Manchester at
THE UNIVERSITY PRESS (H. M. McKechnie, Secretary)
12 Lime Grove, Oxford Road, MANCHESTER

LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.
London: 39 Paternoster Row
New York: 443-449 Fourth Avenue and Thirtieth Street
Chicago: Prairie Avenue and Twenty-fifth Street
Bombay: 8 Hornby Road
Calcutta: 6 Old Court House Street
Madras: 167 Mount Road

STATUE OF SAMUEL CROMPTON
NELSON SQUARE, BOLTON

On the base there is a representation of Hall-i’-th’-Wood
which can just be distinguished in the photograph

THE EARLY
ENGLISH COTTON INDUSTRY

WITH SOME UNPUBLISHED LETTERS OF
SAMUEL CROMPTON

BY

GEORGE W. DANIELS, M.A.

SENIOR LECTURER IN ECONOMICS IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER BY

GEORGE UNWIN, M.A.

PROFESSOR OF ECONOMIC HISTORY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER

MANCHESTER: AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS

12 LIME GROVE, OXFORD ROAD

LONGMANS, GREEN & CO.

LONDON, NEW YORK, BOMBAY, ETC.

1920

PUBLICATIONS OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
No. CXXXIII

PREFACE

In view of what is said by Professor Unwin in his introductory chapter concerning the business material of the firm of M‘Connel & Kennedy, the reason why this small volume has been written requires little explanation. From the time this material was kindly placed at our disposal by Mr. J. W. M‘Connel, grandson of one of the founders of the firm, my interest has been centred mainly in the development of the English cotton industry from its beginning to about the end of the third decade of the nineteenth century.

Fortunately this investigation fitted in well with work on which I was already engaged. For some time previously the preparation of lectures for students of the Tutorial classes, conducted by the University of Manchester in conjunction with the Workers’ Educational Association, had caused me to turn my attention to the sources of the social and economic history of the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries, with the object of enabling me to speak with a little more confidence than I could gain from easily accessible books.

Last summer when I began that which has developed into the following chapters my intention was to write a few pages of introduction to the succeeding letters of Samuel Crompton, and later to publish a volume dealing with the English cotton industry throughout the period mentioned. Much of what appears in this volume was intended to form the first part of that work, but the second part has been left for a separate volume. There are, therefore, many gaps and deficiencies in the present volume. Some of these gaps, I trust, may be filled and deficiencies supplied at a later date.

My obligations are very numerous and in some cases extend to much more than appears in this volume. To the late Humphrey Chetham I am indebted for providing in Manchester the library which bears his name, in the reading-room of which I have spent so many delightful hours.

Mr. H. Crossley, the present librarian, has rendered me untiring assistance in searching out the authorities that I have used, as have the librarians of the Manchester Reference Library and the Christie Library. Miss F. Collier has assisted me in many ways, but particularly in the tedious task of wading page by page through the Journals of the House of Commons and the files of The Manchester Mercury and making extracts therefrom. Miss P. Heap has sketched the map from the one published in 1795 with Aikin’s Thirty to Forty Miles Round Manchester. The Corporation of the Royal Exchange Assurance, through its Manchester manager, Mr. J. Loudon, has granted me permission to reproduce the photograph of the model of Manchester in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The model has been constructed by Mr. H. Yates of Moss Side, Manchester, and is a remarkable piece of work. It is based upon “A Plan of Manchester and Salford, taken about 1650” (referred to on p. 25) and must have involved an enormous amount of research, as by far the greater part of its detail is based upon contemporary documents and prints. It is to be hoped that before long the model may find a permanent resting-place in some Manchester public institution.

Too late for me to avail myself of the information they contain, I find that Mr. Loudon has published a series of articles in The Royal Exchange Assurance Magazine, entitled “Manchester Memoirs.” In writing these articles Mr. Loudon has made use of such records of the Corporation as were not destroyed when the Royal Exchange was burned down in January, 1838. Sufficient remain, however, to indicate their value in the elucidation of the social and economic history of the Manchester district in the eighteenth century, and the part that was played by the Corporation in its development. Records are still in existence of policies taken out by prominent Manchester business men at that time, including one by Richard Arkwright, in 1785, when he insured his Manchester factory for £5000.

In addition to the persons already mentioned, I am indebted to Mr. Thomas Midgley, Curator of Chadwick Museum, Bolton, for valuable information and for the photograph of Crompton’s statue; to Mr. J. Wadsworth, of the staff of The Manchester Guardian, for important references; to Mr. H. L. Beales, of the University of Sheffield, for compiling the index; and to Professor D. H. Macgregor for reading my proofs. To Mr. H. M. M‘Kechnie, the Secretary of the University Press, I am deeply grateful, as he has advised my every step while the book has been passing through the press, and has helped me in many other ways.

But my greatest debt is to Professor George Unwin. Whatever taste for social and economic history I now possess, or may acquire, I owe to him. He has contributed far more to this volume than the introductory chapter. But my deepest obligation is for his companionship, which for many years has been to me a constant source of encouragement and inspiration.

G. W. D.

The University, Manchester,

June, 1920.

CONTENTS

ERRATA

ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION

I

In the year 1906 one of the oldest and largest firms in the cotton industry, that of Messrs. M‘Connel & Co. Ltd., published, under the title of A Century of Fine Cotton Spinning, a brief history of their business, including some deeply interesting extracts from their earliest letter-books. The use of this material in 1913, when a second edition had been issued, by a research student of the University, Mr. W. Bradburn, M.A., prompted inquiries about the original sources and led to the discovery of what is probably a unique set of economic documents—the entire record of a great industrial and commercial enterprise during the forty years of its most rapid expansion. In an upper storey of one of Messrs. M‘Connel’s mills in Ancoats, Mr. Daniels and myself found not only a great array of day-books, cash-books, ledgers and letter-books for the period 1795-1835, but also the whole correspondence, invoices, receipts, etc., of the firm neatly endorsed and carefully packed year by year into tin boxes, each box having the date duly painted upon it. It almost seemed as if the firm had from the first foreseen the lively interest which their achievements would excite in the economic historian of the future, and the fact that one of its early members, Mr. John Kennedy, made a number of valuable contributions to the history of the cotton industry in the Transactions of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and elsewhere lends reasonableness to this supposition.

These records were generously placed at the disposal of the University for the purposes of research. They have already enabled Mr. Daniels to cast much new light on the vicissitudes of the cotton trade during the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and he hopes in time to illustrate by their aid many aspects of the cotton industry during the most important period of its development. In the meantime a new stimulus has been given to the investigation of origins. These had never been exhaustively studied, and the discovery amongst Messrs. M‘Connel’s business correspondence of a series of original letters of Samuel Crompton which, though written in the year 1812, are concerned with his invention of the mule, more than thirty years before, furnished an additional reason for the reconsideration of the earliest history of the industry which has been attempted in this volume.

From the earliest recorded times down to the period of the Industrial Revolution, the textile crafts and the commerce based upon them had in more than one important sense occupied a central position in economic history. The weaving of home-spun fabrics had always furnished the main transitional link between the world of the self-subsisting agriculturalist and the world of specialised industry. Moreover, this almost universally diffused domestic manufacture, organised for the supply of distant markets, represents a phase of industrial development historically intermediate between the “handcraft system” of the mediæval city and the factory system of the nineteenth century; and the fabrics thus produced, the silks of China, Italy and France, the cottons of India and Central Asia, the fine woollens of Flanders and Florence, the kerseys and broadcloths of England, the linens of Holland and Silesia, the fustians of Barcelona and Bavaria, have been in turn during twenty centuries amongst the chief commodities of international and intercontinental trade.

For these reasons the story of the textile crafts affords better illustrations than could be obtained from any other source of three of the main aspects of economic history—i.e. (1) that of social differentiation and the formation of classes; (2) that of the development of industrial and commercial organisation, and (3) that of the development of the industrial and commercial policies of modern states. That the Lancashire cotton industry possesses this representative character is a commonplace. In no other modern industry can the emergence and separate organisation of a wage-earning class, the development of the factory system and the world market, the story of industrial legislation and of British commercial policy in the nineteenth century be so adequately studied.

But the cotton industry is, as Mr. Daniels has shown, a new graft on an old stock. Long before it passed under the factory system it was organised on a capitalist basis, derived in all probability from the fustian manufacture which it had displaced. The account of the disputes of the smallware and check weavers with their employers in 1758-1759, and of their formation and enforced repudiation of box clubs, shows clearly that whilst, as regards their economic dependence on their employers, their status differed little from that of the hand-loom weaver in the early nineteenth century; their methods of combined action were essentially the same as those that prevailed amongst the textile crafts in the fifteenth century. A brief consideration, therefore, of the earlier phases in the organisation of labour and capital in the textile industries as a whole may serve to place the modern cotton industry on the right historical perspective and help to account for the unique rapidity of its expansion.

II

It is in the first half of the twelfth century that we get the first evidence of the production of cotton fabrics in the Christian countries of Europe. Edward Baines, who in his excellent and scholarly account[1] of the origins of the cotton industry dated its European beginnings from the reign of Abderahman the Great (A.D. 912-961) in Moorish Spain, and showed that it had become well established in Barcelona by the thirteenth century, could not find any trace of it in Italy before the beginning of the fourteenth century. Recent research[2] has, however, proved that by the middle of the twelfth century there already existed a flourishing export trade from Genoa to the Levant of the fustians of Northern Italy and Tuscany and of the light cottons (pignolato) of Piacenza; so that the fustians which are found on sale at the Champagne fairs[3] at that period were probably from Italy as well as from Spain. The frequent mention of cotton wool and yarn as articles of commerce makes it probable that fabrics containing cotton were produced in Flanders during the fourteenth century. At the same time a fustian manufacture began to grow up around Ulm and Augsburg, deriving its cotton supplies through Venice, which acquired a European reputation in the sixteenth century.[4]

Of the great range of new social classes engaged in, or concerned with, the textile industries that were built up during the Middle Ages by the creative energy of free fellowship, it is impossible here to attempt any account. There were gilds of weavers which secured in the twelfth century chartered right of marketing and autonomy before the rise of municipal self-government[5]; gilds of importers and exporters of cloth formed amongst the wealthy class that administered the first forms of civic independence[6]; gilds of tailors or cloth-cutters (Gewand-schneider) that attempted to monopolise the right to retail trade[7]; gilds of small masters in the auxiliary crafts—of fullers, dyers and shearmen seeking to maintain an independent contact with the market[8]; and finally, gilds of wage-earning journeymen who never secured full recognition of their right to a separate organisation. The conflict between these class interests was a main factor in municipal politics during the fourteenth century and culminated not infrequently in revolution.

In 1345 a dispute at Ghent between the fullers and their employers, the weavers and clothmakers about a piece-work rate led to a pitched battle in which hundreds were slain.[9] For a few months during the Ciompi rising of 1378 the nine thousand textile wage-earners of Florence maintained themselves by a temporary transformation of the gild constitution on an equal footing with the wealthier classes of the city, but were then obliged to fall back on that Friendly Society form of organisation out of which the Lancashire weavers in the eighteenth century constructed their later trade unions.[10] Elsewhere in many places the struggle of the town wage-earners for recognition was carried on with varying success during the fifteenth century. In 1453 the journeymen fullers of Brussels formed part of an international federation comprising forty-two towns and cities whose objects were to limit the supply of labour and to exclude all workers from towns in their black list.[11] The journeymen weavers followed the example of the fullers and their black list included the whole of England as well as the cities of Malines and Ypres. The records of the last successful strike of the fullers of Leyden in 1478 show that their fraternity, though it included small masters, was mainly representative of the journeyman class.[12]

From that time till the end of the seventeenth century we hear little of the activities of the journeymen. In all cases where they expanded, the textile industries outgrew the limits of the town economy and drew supplies both of capital and labour from sources outside the corporate boroughs and the gilds. The textile workers became in every country a much larger and more important section of the community than before, but their centre of gravity shifted from the journeyman wage-earner to the working master who was essentially a small capitalist and receiver of credit, and whose economic well-being depended primarily upon a free flow of capital and credit.[13] It remains to consider briefly how this was affected by the mercantilist policy of the state.

III

Capitalist employers and even, to some extent, our wage-earning proletariat were to be found as early as the close of the thirteenth century in the chief urban centres of the textile industries in Flanders and Italy; and at first sight there seems little to distinguish the industrial conditions and the class relations prevailing in those centres from those described as existing in Lancashire between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The patrician draper of Douai in the last quarter of the thirteenth century[14] ran his business on lines which we find still maintained by the Chethams and the Mosleys of seventeenth-century Manchester. In both cases the capitalist was primarily a merchant with agents or partners in other cities, who bought his raw material from abroad and helped to put his goods on a distant market. At the industrial centre he had a warehouse and also a workshop where he employed a few workers chiefly in finishing the cloth or in preparing the material for manufacture. But his relation with most of those who were in effect his workpeople was ostensibly that of a trader. He sold them the materials of their craft and bought the finished products, allowing them credit for the interval.

The other form of industrial organisation found in eighteenth-century Manchester, in which the materials were delivered through putters-out to the cottage workers of the surrounding country, had been already fully developed by the Wool Gild of fourteenth-century Florence.[15]

What constitutes the vital difference between the conditions at Douai and Florence on the one hand, and those in Lancashire on the other hand, was the virtual monopoly of the employing function and of the supply of capital or credit which the civic constitution of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries gave to the patrician merchant or to the members of the wool gild, and which was entirely absent from the Manchester fustian or cotton industry. The weaver who obtained his materials from the Chethams or Mosleys might, if their terms were better, have got credit from the Irish yarn dealers or other “foreigners” who visited the Manchester market, and he was free to set up as an independent manufacturer as soon as he had acquired the necessary capital or credit. Such freedom, however, was by no means universal or even normal in the textile industries of sixteenth-century England. A monopoly of the employing function had grown up in the corporate burghs which were the older centres of the industry and the effect of the industrial and commercial policy of the sixteenth century was to give a national sanction to this monopoly, and to put a ban upon expansion or improvement.

One of the main instruments of that policy was the company of Merchant Adventurers. This was a cartel of English merchants, mainly Londoners, which had gradually gained a control of the export trade of cloth to Antwerp—the chief Continental market. Throughout the sixteenth century it sought to prevent the English clothier from exporting his own cloth and the foreign merchant from coming to buy it in England. At the same time it restricted the number of its own members and limited the amount of trade done by each. So far, therefore, from having been, as is commonly supposed, the main organ for the expansion of English trade, it constituted, in fact, the main hindrance to that expansion. In 1551-1552 the government of Edward VI., in order to raise from the Adventurers a desperately needed loan, gave an official sanction to their monopoly. It stopped the trade of the Hanseatic merchants who had recently been exporting over one-third of the rapidly increasing output of English cloth,[16] and it authorised the Adventurers to exclude other native merchants from the trade. As the Adventurers could not find a market for the whole national output, they complained of over-production.[17] The corporate boroughs which were the older privileged centres of the industry naturally supported this complaint, and a series of enactments from 1552 to 1563 (including the Statute of Weavers and the Statute of Apprentices) which endeavoured to restrict the expansion of the textile manufactures in the country districts were largely due to the combined influence of these two vested interests and to the fiscal needs of the Government.

The Hanseatic trade was restored under Philip and Mary, and during the first half of Elizabeth’s reign the German merchants continued to find a market for a considerable quantity of English cloth.

This additional channel through which capital and credit could flow in and out of the country was rendered more indispensable by the gradual stoppage of trade with Central Europe through the Netherlands. But in the second decade of Elizabeth fresh hostilities arose between the Merchant Adventurers who had settled at Hamburg and the Hanseatic League with the result that the German merchants were in 1576 excluded from trading in Blackwell Hall, and later in 1580 deprived of all their remaining privileges in England, whilst the Adventurers lost their foothold in Hamburg.[18] At the very moment when the foreign channels for the export trade were thus being closed the native channels were being seriously narrowed through the action of the same vested interests. The monopoly of the Merchant Adventurers extended only to the Low Countries and Germany. The trade with Spain and the Baltic, with Venice and the Levant and Morocco had been free to all Englishmen and had been opened up by enterprising merchants, frequently from the lesser parts, who more truly deserved the title of Adventurers than the corporate monopolists of the markets nearer home. But between 1575 and 1588 each of these branches of foreign commerce was monopolised by a chartered syndicate formed after the model of the Merchant Adventurers and controlled largely by the same group of Londoners. Prices went up by leaps and bounds. “When every nation,” said Harrison, “was permitted to bring in her own commodities ... we had sugar for fourpence the pound that now ... is well worth half-a-crown, raisins and currants for a penny that now are bidden at sixpence. I do not deny that the navy of the land is in part maintained by their traffic, but so is the price of wares kept up now that they have gotten the only sale of things upon pretence of better futherance of the common wealth into their own hands.”[19]

Far more serious, however, was the monopoly of the export trade in cloth. In 1586 the Privy Council was receiving alarming reports of the discontent in Somerset. The poorer sort, who were wont to live by spinning, carding and working of wool, were starving for lack of work and on the point of rebellion. An accidental fire at Bath was taken for a beacon lighted to proclaim a general rising. “This great matter of the lack of work,” writes Burleigh to Hatton, “not only of cloths, which presently is the greatest, but of all other commodities which are restrained from Spain, Portugal, Barbary, France, Flanders, Hamburg and the States, cannot but, in process of time, work a great change and dangerous issue to the people of the Realm, who heretofore in time of outward peace lived thereby, and without it must either perish for want or fall into violence to feed and fill their lewd appetites with open spoil of others, which is the root of rebellion.”

The remedy proposed by Burleigh was to undo at one stroke the whole effect of the restrictions that had been accumulating since 1564. To have more sales there must be more buyers and more ships. The Hanseatic trade must be restored. Other alien merchants must receive the same liberty and be encouraged to use it by lower export duties.[20] Blackwell Hall must be opened again to German buyers, and if the Londoners refused, a cloth hall must be set up at Westminster. Finally, the exportation of cloth must be free to all English merchants whether members of the Adventurers’ Company or not.[21] But the application of these sound remedies was frustrated by the war with Spain and the reign of Elizabeth closed with a period of intensified monopoly and of commercial depression.[22]

The expansion of the textile industries of England, which there is no reason to doubt was taking place at this period, is clearly not to be placed to the credit of Elizabethan statesmanship. It took place almost entirely in the district exempted from the Weavers Acts. Foremost amongst those districts were Lancashire and the West Riding, which thus enjoyed the advantages of comparative laissez faire at a time when restrictions on the creation and the free flow of capital were part of the accepted national policy.

IV

The importance for the expansion of British industry of the subsequent removal of those restrictions can be best understood if we compare the conditions under which English woollen industry was developing at the close of the sixteenth century with those that prevailed in the cotton industry at the close of the eighteenth century. In the earlier period, of course, there was nothing to correspond to the jenny, the mule, and the steam-engine. But certain conditions quite as essential to the development of the industry are common to both cases—above all, a rapid accumulation of new capital and a simultaneous expansion of organising ability. It was a vital factor in both these developments that the capital and ability accumulating in one field should be free to flow over into and fertilise other fields.

This is clearly shown in the instructive case of William Radcliffe, whose account of the transition of the cotton industry to the factory system has been critically discussed and set in a new light by Mr. Daniels. William Radcliffe commenced working life as a hand-loom weaver at Mellor. Any young man, he tells us, of moderate ability and self-confidence could have got on at that time. The capital accumulating in his hands enabled him to give out work, exactly as a sixteenth-century clothier would have done, to all the villages round. Within about fifteen years he was finding employment for one thousand hand-looms; he had £11,000 invested in the business; a bank gave him credit for £5000. Most of this capital and credit was employed, not in the manufacture itself, but in trade. It was represented by large quantities of piece goods on their way to the consumer, but still unsold. The new captain of industry could not extend his enterprise unless he used his capital to find a new market. For this purpose Radcliffe took as his partner a young Scot with more education than himself, who brought another Scot into the business, and who regularly visited Frankfort and Leipzig to open a market for the firm’s muslins. Or let us take the case of David Dale, the father-in-law of Robert Owen and the founder of the New Lanark Mills. He commenced life, like Radcliffe, as a hand-loom weaver, but soon became clerk to a mercer who very likely found work for weavers. Then we find him importing foreign yarns to set weavers at work on his own account and taking in a partner to help him. With the capital thus acquired he started a whole series of spinning mills—the first in Scotland—and the need of finding an outlet for his yarns led him to extend his operations to weaving and dyeing. Finally, as he was getting on in years, he disposed of his manufacturing interests to younger and more energetic men like his son-in-law, and withdrew his own capital and organising ability into the less speculative field of banking. In the cases of Dale and Radcliffe we see capital accumulated in industry flowing over into commerce and banking. But all were not so successful as Dale. Even Radcliffe came to grief in his later years and was dependent on the capital of others. And in many cases capital and credit are to be observed flowing in the opposite direction. The merchant who imported cotton enabled the young manufacturer to set up for himself by giving him three months’ credit, whilst the exporting merchant rendered similar assistance by paying for the manufacturer’s output week by week. It was in this way, by a flow of capital inwards from commerce, that most of the early industrial enterprises of Lancashire got started and the immense expansion of the cotton industry was rendered possible. One other example will serve to complete the account and to show the international significance of the development at the moment when Radcliffe was sending out his partner to Germany. Nathan Meyer Rothschild was buying Manchester goods at Frankfort for transmission to more easterly markets. Some quarrel with a Manchester merchant led him to think that he could make better use of his capital by settling in Manchester himself. His father supplied him with £20,000, and he arrived to take part in an almost feverish expansion of the industry. He found there were three separate profits to be made in the manufacture: one upon the supply of the raw material, one upon the manufacturing, and one upon the dyeing and spinning. His capital and organising ability enabled him to combine all three. In half-a-dozen years he had turned his £20,000 to £60,000, and then, obeying the instinct of his race and following the signs of the times, he withdrew his capital to banking and became one of the leading figures in the London money market.[23]

Enough has been written—perhaps too much—by way of introduction to the new and valuable chapters which the researches of Mr. Daniels have added to the history of the Lancashire cotton industry—enough if I have succeeded in indicating the historical background of the industry and the world-wide character of the development—too much if I have anticipated here and there some of the more important conclusions that Mr. Daniels has drawn from his investigations.

G. Unwin.

THE EARLY ENGLISH
COTTON INDUSTRY

CHAPTER I
THE DEVELOPMENT OF A COTTON MANUFACTURE

I

At the present time the British cotton industry, which is almost entirely localised in Lancashire and in the adjoining parts of Cheshire and Yorkshire, is the largest of the world’s textile industries.[24] The year 1770, immediately after Arkwright obtained his first patent, marks a well-defined division in its history. From this date expansion became conspicuous and the industry became definitely organised on the lines of the factory system. Previously expansion had been comparatively slow, and the domestic system of organisation had prevailed. The expansion of the cotton industry, therefore, is an outstanding example of the transition which is now known as the Industrial Revolution—a movement which, it is not too much to say, found its centre within the area in which the cotton industry is now concentrated, and from thence has spread to all the economically advanced countries of the world. In the following pages we shall be mainly concerned with the earlier period and with some aspects of the transition, and it is hoped that some light will be thrown upon the question as to what the transition involved, particularly as regards the organisation of the cotton industry, and the economic relationships of the classes engaged therein.

At what date cotton was first used in the manufacture of cloth in England is somewhat obscure. When Baines wrote his History of the Cotton Manufacture he had found only two references to the import of cotton-wool from the end of the thirteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth centuries,[25] and it has generally been assumed that, during this period, it was imported only in small quantities, and used for minor purposes, such as candle-wicks. It has recently been shown, however, that, throughout the intervening centuries, cotton was a common article of import, figuring in the customs at many English ports,[26] and while as yet there is little evidence as to its uses, the knowledge of its regular import suggests that it may have been put to more important uses than that just mentioned.

Cotton cloth, or cloth partly made of cotton, had been imported long before the sixteenth century, and, in the early years of that century, there is ample evidence of its import, as well as an increasing amount of evidence of the import of the raw material.[27] About the same time the word “cottons” as the name of a cloth manufactured in Lancashire becomes conspicuous. In 1514, in a statute regulating the manufacture of cloth, cottons are mentioned, but are excluded from its provisions, as they are from the provisions of a similar statute twenty years later.[28] Also Hakluyt records the fact that, between the years 1511 and 1534, cottons were included among the cloth exports of the country,[29] and about the year 1538 we get Leland’s reference: “Bolton upon Moore Market stondith most by cottons and cowrse yarne. Divers villages in the Mores about Bolton do make cottons.”[30]

Until the middle of the century it appears that the manufacture of cottons was unregulated, but in 1551 a comprehensive statute was passed relating to the manufacture of cloth throughout the country, and “all and everie cottonnes called Manchester Lancashire and Cheshire Cottonnes” and “all cloths called Manchester Rugges otherwise named Friezes” were included within its scope.[31] By the regulations of this statute, the lengths, breadths and weights of these cloths were fixed, and also the amount of stretching to which they could be subjected. After this time the regulations were continued and modified in numerous statutes enacted during the remainder of the sixteenth century and in the early seventeenth century.

The next important statute affecting the Lancashire cloth industry, however, was the Weavers’ Act of 1555.[32] The main purpose of this Act was to prevent the increase of clothiers outside corporate towns, and, to secure this end, country clothiers were forbidden to have more than one loom each in their possession, while country weavers were limited to two looms, and also to two apprentices. Every weaver had to serve a seven years’ apprenticeship, and no person not already engaged in weaving or in causing to be woven any kind of broad white woollen cloth was allowed to begin, except in towns or in places where such cloth had been commonly made for the last ten years.

When the Act was passed, York, Cumberland, Northumberland and Westmorland were exempted from its provisions, but Lancashire was included. At this time the county was still largely a country district with a cloth industry that had not yet become famous, though there is much evidence that it was expanding. Consequently, had the Act remained unmodified, the development of the county and the expansion of its industry might have been seriously checked. Two years after its enactment, however, several additional counties were exempted from its provisions, except as regards apprenticeship, and Lancashire and Cheshire were included among them.[33]

From the beginning, considerable difficulty was experienced in regulating the manufacture of cloth in Lancashire. In the 1551 Act, the breadth allowed for Manchester cottons and friezes was narrower than for ordinary cloths, and when the Weavers’ Act was modified a provision was introduced which allowed them to be made in half-pieces. By 1566 more serious difficulties had been revealed. In an Act passed in that year,[34] it was stated that clothiers “inordinately seeking their own singular gains” were accustomed to carry away divers cottons, friezes, and rugs, and sell them before the Aulnager had fixed the Queen’s seal on them, and in some instances they had even counterfeited the seal. To meet these difficulties it was enacted that deputy Aulnagers should be appointed, to be situated at Manchester, Rochdale, Bolton, Blackburn and Bury. In view of the fact that, about this time, in addition to these places, the cloths were mentioned in connection with Salford, Leigh and Radcliffe,[35] it is probable that their manufacture was so extensive that, even if the clothiers had been more willing to conform to the regulations, the task of the Aulnager was too large to be efficiently performed.

But there were other difficulties. The clothiers protested that it was impossible for them to conform to the lengths, breadths, and weights laid down in the statutes without the undoing of great numbers of poor people commonly engaged in making the cloths, and further alterations had to be made. The alterations were mainly in the direction of allowing the cloths to be made considerably lighter, but ten years later a writer condemned all kinds of northern cloths for false dyeing, for shortness of weight and for stretching.[36]

By the last years of the sixteenth century the problem of regulation was still unsolved, and apparently it was decided that even more vigorous measures should be adopted. In 1597 an Act[37] was passed “against the deceitful stretching and tentering of Northern cloth,” and, in the preamble, it was stated that notwithstanding the many good and wholesome laws enacted hitherto, the cloths had grown worse and worse, were more stretched and strained, and were made lighter than ever before. The remedy adopted was to prohibit all tenters or engines for stretching cloth in the northern counties, and the Justices of Peace had to appoint overseers to enforce the regulations as to length and weight. In the year following the enactment of this statute a report was sent to the Council,[38] in which it was stated that, although sundry letters had been written to the Justices of Peace in Lancashire and Yorkshire, pointing out their duty in enforcing the statute, the regulations which it contained had not been observed. Consequently a recommendation was made that two honest men be appointed to inspect the making of kersies, northern dozens and cottons, with power to enforce the regulations. In the last year of Elizabeth’s reign it was found necessary to pass another similar statute with application to the whole country.[39]

The mere record of the futile attempts to enforce these statutes is sufficient proof that they were inappropriate to the situation. During the sixteenth century considerable changes were taking place in the English cloth industry. It was the period when the “New Drapery” was being introduced and attempts were being made to regulate it on the lines of the “Old Drapery.” The regulations never corresponded with the facts of the case and their effective enforcement was impossible.[40] It was not only the length, breadth, and weight of the cloths that caused difficulty. What were regarded as inferior materials were being introduced into them, something which the statute of 1551 attempted to cope with. This was not a new grievance at that time, but in the sixteenth century it may have had a new significance. In 1606 an attempt was made to distinguish between cloths made of perfect wool and those into which Flocks, Thrums, and Lambs’ Wool entered, by insisting that the latter should have a black yarn on the one edge and only a selvedge on the other. Afterwards, no person had to put any Hair, Flocks, Thrums, or any yarn made of Lambs’ Wool or other deceivable thing or things, in or upon any Woollen Cloth, Half-Cloth, Frieze, Dozen, Bays, Penistone, Cotton, Taunton Cloth, Bridgewater, Dunster Cotton, or any other cloth, upon pain of forfeiting such cloth.[41]

At this point this reference is important for our purpose in the evidence it offers that, at this time, cottons were regarded as a species of woollen cloth. All the references in the sixteenth century have the same implication,[42] and even as late as 1700, when all duties, subsidies, etc., imposed by previous Acts were swept away, cottons were still enumerated among “manufactures of wool.”[43] Moreover, the processes mentioned in connection with the making of cottons were those applicable to woollen goods. It appears, therefore, that cottons were not cotton fabrics in the modern sense. The cottons of the sixteenth century were an important manufacture not peculiar to Lancashire alone: they were made in other manufacturing districts. In an account of woollen goods exported between Michaelmas 1594 and Michaelmas 1595 the following figures were given:—baize, 10,976 pieces; cottons, 168,065 pieces; woollen stockings, 34,085 pairs; sayes, 4256 pieces; English Norwich, 339[44]; and, about the same time, Manchester cottons were enumerated among the principal exports of the country.[45]

But, while it can be definitely stated that cottons were regarded as woollen goods in the sixteenth century, it is hard to resist a suspicion that the vegetable fibre, cotton, may have been used in the manufacture of Lancashire cloths. The fact that they were regarded as woollens is not, of itself, conclusive, as, at that time, cotton was usually called cotton-wool.[46] Further, there is the circumstance of their comparatively light weight, and also the difficulty of their makers complying with the regulations laid down for them. Possibly these facts may be explained by the use of the materials mentioned in the statutes, and certainly similar difficulties appear to have been experienced over a wide range of fabrics. On the whole, the commonly accepted view, that Manchester cottons and other goods usually mentioned along with them were really woollen goods, appears to have justification, although, perhaps, it should not be stated without a caution.

II

Until recently there was no authentic evidence before 1641 that anything which might be called a cotton manufacture had become established in Lancashire. In that year, in the oft-quoted passage of Lewis Roberts, it was stated that “the towne of Manchester in Lancashire must be also herein remembered, and worthily for their incouragement commended, who buy yarne of the Irish in great quantity, and weaving it returne the same againe in Linen into Ireland to sell; neither doth the industry rest here, for they buy cotton woole in London that comes first from Cyprus and Smyrna, and at home worke the same, and perfit it into Fustians, Vermilions, Dymities, and other such stuffes; and then returne it to London, where the same is vented and sold, and not seldome sent into forrain parts, who have means at far easier termes, to provide themselves of the said first materials.” The same writer also informs us that “the Levant or Turkey Company ... brings ... great quantity of cotton and of cotton yarne ... into England.”[47]

We are now indebted to an American investigator[48] for the discovery of an earlier piece of evidence, in the form of a petition “as well of divers merchants and citizens of London that use buying and selling of fustians made in England as of makers of the same fustians” which is so important and not yet so well known that the relevant passages must be quoted: “About 20 years past divers people in this kingdom, but chiefly in the county of Lancaster, have found out the trade of making of the fustians, made of a kind of bombast or down, being a fruit of the earth growing upon little shrubs or bushes, brought into this kingdom by the Turkey Merchants, from Smyrna, Cyprus, Acra, and Sydon, but commonly called cotton-wool; and also of linen-yarn most part brought out of Scotland, and other some made in England, and no part of the same fustians of any wool at all, for which said bombast and yarn imported, his Majesty hath a great yearly sum of money for the custom and subsidy thereof. There is at least 40 thousand pieces of fustian of this kind yearly made in England, the subsidy to his Majesty of the materials for making of every piece coming to between 8d. and 10d. the piece; and thousands of poor people set on working of these fustians. The right honourable Duke of Lennox in 11 of Jacobus, 1613, procured a patent from his Majesty of alnager of new draperies for 60 years, upon pretence that wool was converted into other sorts of commodities to the loss of customs and subsidies for wool transported beyond seas; and therein is inserted into his patent, searching and sealing, and subsidy for 80 several stuffs; and amongst the rest these fustians or other stuffs of this kind of cotton-wool and subsidy and a fee for the same, and forfeiture of 20s. for putting any to sale unsealed, the moiety of the same forfeiture to the said duke, and power thereby given to the duke or to his deputies, to enter any man’s house, to search for any such stuffs and seize them till the forfeiture be paid; and if any resist such search to forfeit 10l. and power thereby given to the lord treasurer or chancellor of the Exchequer, to make new ordinances or grant commissions for the aid of the duke and his officers in execution of their office.”

The probable date of this petition is 1621, and its importance in relation to the beginning of the English cotton industry is evident. Although the “thousands” mentioned as employed in the making of fustians at the time is a stereotyped number in petitions, and may perhaps be somewhat discounted, the facts that a cotton manufacture had become established in England and that it had attained a considerable magnitude are placed beyond doubt.[49]

A little more light appears to be thrown upon the petition in a pamphlet which was published in 1613, the year in which the patent of the Duke of Lennox was extended[50] to include “80 several stuffs; and amongst the rest these fustians or other stuffs of this kind of cotton wool.” The pamphlet was written by John May, a “deputie alneger” who at the time was out of office, under the title, A Declaration of the Estate of Clothing now used within this Realme of England. With an Apologie for the Alneger showing the necessarie use of his Office, and was dedicated in obsequious terms “to the Duke of Lenox ... Alneger generall for the Realme of England and the Dominion of Wales.” The writer was concerned with the deceits that had crept into the clothing trade generally, owing to lack of supervision, but he was particularly anxious about the “many sorts of cloth or stuffs lately invented which have got new godfathers to name them in fantasticall fashion that they which weare them, know not how to name them, which are generally called newe draperie.”[51]

It is not without significance that in no part of his pamphlet does he give any inkling that he knew that any of the new goods were other than woollen goods, rather he implies the contrary.

Seeing that the Duke of Lennox secured the extension of his patent in the year this pamphlet was published, and that the writer was, at least potentially, an interested party, the connection between the two seems fairly clear. Moreover, his apparent lack of knowledge that some of the new cloths were not made of wool may help to explain the complaint in the petition, that fustians had been brought under regulation as though they were woollen fabrics.[52] At any rate, the pamphleteer specifically mentions fustians, among the new drapery, as requiring the attention of the Aulnager: “There is also a late commodite in greate use of making within the Kingdom which setteth many people on worke, called Fustians, which for want of government are so decayed by falsehood, keeping neither order in goodnesse nor assize, insomuch that the makers thereof, in this short time of use are wearie of their trades, and it is thought will returne again to the place whence it came, who doe still observe their sorts and goodnesse, in such true manner as by their seales they are sould, keeping up the credit of that which they make: what a shame is this to our nation, to be so void of reason and government, that a good trade should bee suppressed for want of good order amongst themselves, and have so good a president from others.”[53]

Whether or not the writer of the pamphlet knew of what materials fustians were made, in this passage he supplies further evidence that in 1613 their manufacture in this country was regarded as recent, and he also indicates that the manufacture had been introduced from some other country. According to Dr. Cunningham, the beginning of the new drapery “can be traced to the immigration of 406 persons who were driven out of Flanders in 1561 ... where the cotton manufacture had been a flourishing industry,”[54] and the immigration continued later in the century.[55] Dr. Cunningham surmised,[56] as did Baines when he wrote his book in 1835,[57] that the cotton manufacture was introduced into England by the immigrants, and that it commenced, therefore, in the second half of the sixteenth century. It would appear that their views have justification. Beginning at that time, a sufficient period would have elapsed by 1620 to allow the manufacture to grow to the stage indicated in the petition. Whether, in view of the considerations already adduced, cotton had been used in the manufacture of cloth before the immigrations must be left a doubtful question.

After the reference of Lewis Roberts in 1641 to the manufacture of fustians in Lancashire, there is no lack of evidence to the same effect. The first piece of evidence which may be noticed is of particular importance, in that it gives another indication of the extent of the industry, and suggests a fact which may have had a bearing upon its growth in this country.

At the beginning of 1654 trade in Lancashire, in common with the rest of the country, was in a state of depression owing to the restrictions on foreign intercourse consequent upon the Dutch War.[58] During the early months of the year petitions were presented to the Council by “traders for cotton wool, and fustians, and poor weavers in Lancashire on behalf of themselves and several thousands” to allow the import of cotton-wool “to prevent the ruin of the great manufacture of fustians and the makers and weavers.”[59]

In April, the following reasons were presented to the Council on behalf of the poor of Lancashire for liberty to bring in cotton-wool from France, Holland, etc. “The dearth of wool is worse to them than that of bread 3 years since, and now there are not 5 bags of wool in all the merchants’ hands in Lancashire for 20,000 poor in Lancashire who are employed in the manufacture of fustians. Mr. Seed and Mr. Winstanley, who reported 150 or 200 sacks of prize-wool, that they might gain time to sell their own wool, now confess that it proved 20 or 30 bags and the sale was prohibited. Unless cotton-wool be brought much lower, the manufacture will revert to Hamburg, whence our cheaper making gained it, for they can buy wool at 6d. or 7d., and we have to pay 18d. or 20d. Whilst we can have no supply but from the Straits, and that through the Turkey merchants, we cannot be supplied at such rates as will preserve our manufacture from ruin, as we cannot raise the price of our fustians on account of the lower price at Hamburg viz. 16s. a piece which we cannot afford under 20s., though they used to be 12s. or 13s. We beg therefore a dispensation as regards wool from the Act which enriches strangers and destroys the people of this nation. Such laws were better buried in oblivion than to bury alive the poor.”[60]

From these petitions it is evident that in 1654 there was a definitely established industry in Lancashire dependent for its prosperity upon regular supplies of cotton-wool. But, also, when what is known of the position in Germany in the first part of the seventeenth century is taken into account, the petition just quoted may have a further significance.

Whatever may have been the case in England prior to the sixteenth century regarding the use of cotton in the manufacture of cloth, at that time it had been so used in Germany for more than two centuries. In the fourteenth century a cloth called “barchent,” which like the English fustian consisted of a linen warp and cotton weft, was woven, and at that time found a widespread market. The early seats of the industry were Ulm and Augsburg, where the famous Fugger family rose to fame on the basis of barchent-weaving. Later the industry spread to other parts of Germany, to Alsace and to the towns along the northern trade-route. Before the end of the sixteenth century Nürnberg, Hof, Zwickau, Leipzig and Chemnitz were all engaged in cotton spinning and weaving, with the result that, at that time, Germany was far ahead of all other European countries in cotton manufacture. Before the end of the first quarter of the seventeenth century the country began to suffer one of the greatest devastations known to history through the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, and its cotton manufacture almost disappeared.[61]

In addition, therefore, to the immigration of Flemings and to the destruction of industry in their country, it seems reasonable, particularly in view of the statement in the above petition that the manufacture in which cotton-wool was used had been gained from Hamburg, to look to the decay of the German industry as part of the explanation of the rise into prominence of the English fustian manufacture in the first half of the seventeenth century.

When Fuller came to write of Lancashire in 1662 it was the fustian manufacture that especially attracted his attention. After referring to the various kinds of foreign fustians (including Augsburg fustians) which had long been imported into the country, he states that “These retain their old names to this day, though these several sorts are made in this county, whose Inhabitants buying the cotton-wool or yarne, coming from beyond the sea, make it here into fustians, to the good employment of the Poor and great improvement of the Rich therein, serving many people for their outsides, and their betters for the Lineings of their garments. Bolton is the staple-place for this commodity, being brought thither from all parts of the county. As for Manchester, the Cottons thereof carry away the credit in our nation, and so they did an hundred and fifty years agoe. For when learned Leland on the cost of King Henry the Eighth, with his Guide, travailed Lancashire he called Manchester the fairest and quickest Town in this county and sure I am, it hath lost neither spruceness nor spirits since that time.” He also mentions other products for which Manchester was noted to which reference will be made later.[62]

One point that should be noticed is that Fuller refers to Bolton as the centre of the fustian manufacture, while he mentions cottons, as a distinct fabric, especially in connection with Manchester. Though the manufacture of cotton had certainly made progress by this time, there is no substantial reason for thinking that the cottons referred to by him were different from the cottons of the sixteenth century. The fact is that the development of the cotton manufacture is definitely associated with the manufacture of fustians. In the middle of the eighteenth century, although other fabrics were then produced which had a stronger claim to be called cotton fabrics than had fustians, the words cotton manufacture still meant pre-eminently the manufacture of fustians.[63]

Further, the association of fustians in the seventeenth century with Bolton rather than with Manchester was probably justified. As we shall see, in its early stages the fustian manufacture was mainly, if not altogether, carried on in the outside districts. So far as Manchester was concerned, the manufacture of fustians appears, at first, to have been added to another branch of manufacture at a later date than when Fuller wrote. Before dealing with other branches of manufacture, however, it will be advisable to continue the history of the fustian manufacture into the thirties of the eighteenth century, which years mark an important stage in its development.

III

At the close of the seventeenth century, the annual import of cotton-wool amounted to nearly 2,000,000 lbs., and was still brought mainly from the Levant and the islands of the Mediterranean, though in the previous century some was imported from Africa.[64] In the seventeenth century, excellent witness is borne to the importance it had attained, by those interested in floating companies for colonisation putting forward prospects of its growth as an inducement to subscribers to their schemes.[65] Before the end of the century, cotton from the British plantations had assumed a prominent place, and from this time the European West Indian colonies, with South America, became the most important sources of supply until the end of the eighteenth century, when they in turn were displaced by the United States. Also, during these two centuries, cotton-yarn and fine cotton fabrics were imported by the East India Company from the ancient home of the cotton industry in the East.[66]

Apparently it was this import of fine cotton fabrics which in 1691 attracted the attention of John Barkstead, merchant, of London, and threatened to bring the developing cotton industry into the hands of a patentee. Mr. Barkstead was evidently an enterprising individual who was interested not only in the cotton industry, but also in the silk industry, and in copper mining.

We get the first glimpse of him in October, 1690, when he presented a petition, in which he pointed out that the workmanship of the fine thrown silk imported amounted to one quarter of its value, the benefits of which would be enjoyed by the poor if it were performed at home. As he had found out an engine which would achieve the desired end, he requested the grant of a patent for fourteen years to enable him to introduce it. In the same month a warrant for the patent was issued, but there is no clear indication that the claim stated in the petition materialised.[67] In May, 1692, however, in a warrant issued to prepare a Bill for incorporating a company for winding silk, he appeared as the first governor[68]; and in July of the preceding year as an assistant in a company which had as its object the purchase of lands where copper was expected to be found.[69]

It was in this month that he presented a petition, in which he claimed that, by his industry and at great expense, he had “procured cotton wool from the West Indies, to be spun so extraordinarily fine, as to be fit to make such cloths commonly called callicoes ... as well as in the East Indies,” and prayed for a patent for his invention.[70] A few days later a warrant was issued to prepare a Bill to grant this prayer.[71] Whether in the meantime his idea had developed, or he had evolved a new one, it is difficult to say, but in the following month his name as petitioner again appeared, this time in connection with an invention for “making calicoes, muslins, and other fine cloths of that sort (out of the cotton wool of the growth and produce of the Plantations in the West Indies) to as great perfection as those which are brought over and imported hither from Calicut and other places in the East Indies.”[72] Again a warrant was issued to prepare a Bill for the grant of a patent which he evidently secured.[73]

The next step was the customary one of applying for a charter of incorporation in order to exploit the invention. Consequently two months later (October, 1691) we find Mr. Barkstead and five other London merchants, including one of the assistants in the silk-winding company, pointing out that the “said Barkstead has found out an invention for making calicoes and muslins, etc., out of Cotton wool for which he has a patent for 14 years, but that the undertaking requiring at least £100,000 stock to carry on and manage the said invention, the petitioners humbly pray to be incorporated with the Earl of Nottingham as their first governor.” The petition was referred to the Attorney or Solicitor-General, but fortunately the scheme does not appear to have come to anything.[74]

As a matter of fact, although this incident is interesting, like the majority of schemes of a similar character relating to other industries, it cannot be regarded as of any importance in the development of the cotton industry in this country. The idea of supplanting the fine cotton fabrics of the East by home productions was, no doubt, an attractive one—doubly so because in 1691 the existing East India Company was being vigorously opposed by a rival syndicate. In the same month as the above charter was applied for, a petition was presented to the House of Commons, in the name of the London merchants, attacking the existing company, and less than five months later an address was presented to the King praying that he would dissolve it and incorporate a new one.[75] It may well have been that Mr. Barkstead’s scheme was a part of, or at any rate a symptom of, the opposition then prevailing, and had very little substantial foundation. His application for a patent stands altogether on a different footing from those of the next century, when the machinery to which they referred did actually attain the end which he claimed to have in view. In the seventeenth century this was impossible: at that time, it is questionable whether any fabrics consisting entirely of cotton were produced in the country at all. In any case it is certain that the chief products of the English cotton manufacture were the hybrid fustians consisting of a linen warp and cotton weft.

After the collapse of Mr. Barkstead’s scheme the English cotton industry does not appear to have had much attraction for men with grandiose aims, until the South Sea period arrived, when two companies were proposed, each with a capital of £2,000,000, one “for making calico in Great Britain and encouraging the growth of cotton in the plantations,” and the other “for the cotton manufacture in Lancashire,” while there was also “A proposal by several ladies and others to make, print and paint and stain callicoes in England and also fine linen as fine as any Holland to be made of British flax.” Subscribers to the latter scheme had to be women dressed in calico.[76] How this scheme fits into its historical environment will at once become apparent.

Before the end of the seventeenth century the import of fabrics from the East had created considerable agitation among those engaged in the silk and woollen trades, and demands were made for legislative interference. In 1700 an Act was passed,[77] by which the import of printed or dyed calicoes was prohibited, and their sale or use either for apparel or furniture made subject to a penalty. The prohibition was speedily followed by an import of plain calicoes which were printed or dyed in this country, and as early as 1703, petitions for further restrictions were again being presented to Parliament.[78] For some years little notice was taken of them, but from 1719 the petitions became a flood,[79] with the result that, in 1721, another Act[80] was passed which prohibited the use or wear of printed or dyed calicoes, whether the printing or dyeing had been performed in England or elsewhere.

It has been stated that one of the reasons for the failure of the Act of 1700 was that “Lancashire men set to work to produce cloth of linen warp and cotton weft which was sent to London to be printed and dyed in imitation of the prohibited Oriental fabrics.”[81] It appears, however, that there is little or no justification for this view. At a time when petitions to Parliament were regarded almost as a positive obligation on the part of anyone who had a real or imaginary grievance, it is exceedingly improbable, had such been the case, that the Lancashire men would have failed to make their voices heard. Apparently, not a single petition was presented from the county in opposition to the proposed legislation by those engaged in making cloth of the character mentioned, while there was at least one in favour of it.[82] Moreover, it is significant that no mention of such a cloth is to be found in the petitions praying for restriction. The opposition to the Bill came mainly from the towns of Scotland engaged in the linen industry, where it was feared that linens would be included, and this opposition was successful, as British linens were specifically excluded from the Act.[83]

Singularly enough, the opposition on behalf of a cotton manufacture came, not from Lancashire, but from Dorset in the following petition, which is of sufficient interest in the early history of the English cotton industry to be quoted in full:

A “Petition of the Mayor, Aldermen, Bailiffs, Capital Burgesses and principal inhabitants of the Borough of Weymouth and Melcomb Regis in the County of Dorset, together with the Merchants, Masters of Ships, Master workmen, Weavers and Spinners of Cotton Wool imported from the British Plantations and manufactured in the town aforesaid, in behalf of themselves and many hundred of poor Cotton spinners in that neighbourhood was presented to the House and read, setting forth, that for many years past a manufacture had been carried on in the said town for making Cotton Wool imported from the British Plantations into cloth of divers kinds, more particularly into such fabrics as imitate calicoes; which having, of late years, been printed and dyed, have afforded the manufacturers opportunity to support the Poor in that town and neighbourhood thereof. That the petitioners are apprehensive that the manufacture of cotton cloth in that town may, under the name of calicoes, be interdicted the weaving, by which means many hundred families of poor cotton spinners will be reduced to want, and the Manufacture of that town entirely lost: and praying that the Cotton cloth manufactured in that town, both checqued, printed, and dyed, may be permitted to be worn in the same manner and liable to the same duties as the Manufacture of British and Irish Linens are permitted.”[84]

The apprehension of the petitioners was justified, as a motion to refer their petition to the Committee of the whole House, then concerned with the Bill for more stringent restrictions on the use and wear of printed or dyed calicoes, was passed in the negative by 190 votes to 68.[85] In the Act of 1721 the prohibition included any printed stuff made of cotton or mixed therewith, but from its scope muslins, neckcloths, and fustians were excluded.[86]

The above petition is distinctly interesting, not only as evidence that cotton was manufactured in Dorset, but also in that there is no suggestion that the cloths were not composed solely of cotton, and this at a time when it is improbable that such cloths were manufactured to any extent in Lancashire.

The fustian manufacture had been in existence in the country for more than a century, and, by 1720, must have been of considerable importance, but apparently a stage had not been reached when printed fustians were seriously competitive with other kinds of printed cloth.

The prohibition of the use of printed calicoes had its effect, however, in stimulating the printing of other fabrics,[87] and after the passing of the Act of 1721 it is clear that printed fustians began to occupy a prominent place in the cloth trade of the country, which again called forth opposition from those engaged in the woollen trades which came to a head in 1735.

This time the opposition, which centred in Norwich, took the form of instituting prosecutions under the 1721 Act, of inserting notices in newspapers and distributing them, informing the public that the wearing or using of printed fustians was illegal. As printed fustians had been excluded from the scope of the Act, there was no illegality, but the opposition was sufficient to call forth a petition from the fustian manufacturers in Manchester and other parts of Lancashire, and in the counties of Cheshire and Derbyshire, appealing for the Act to be explained so that the question would be placed beyond doubt.[88] In the evidence on the petition[89] a strong case was presented on behalf of merchants engaged in foreign trade—particularly in the import of cotton—and of fustian manufacturers, it being stated that several thousand persons from five to seventy years of age were employed in the manufacture. One witness asserted that he and his brother employed upwards of 600 looms in the weaving of fustians, and as one weaver required four spinners to supply him with yarn, he computed that upwards of 3000 persons were dependent upon them for employment—a striking case of large-scale production, in the sense of numbers employed, nearly forty years before the appearance of the factory in the cotton industry.

In little over a month after the petition was presented the “Manchester Act”[90] was passed, which explained the 1721 Act, so as definitely to exclude from its scope printed goods made of linen yarn and cotton-wool, manufactured in Great Britain. It will be noticed that even this Act did not remove the prohibition on the use of printed goods made entirely of cotton. The justification given in the Act for allowing the use of printed goods, when made of linen-yarn and cotton-wool, was that they were “a branch of the ancient fustian manufacture of this kingdom.” So far as petitions were concerned, the only opposition to the “Manchester Act” came from the Company of Weavers in London, on the ground that fustians could only with great difficulty be distinguished from Indian calicoes, and that the use of the latter would be made easy; and from the Gentlemen, Landowners, Occupiers of Land, Wool-staplers, Wool-combers, and Weavers of the City of Peterborough, who desired the Bill which preceded the Act to be explained for the general good of the wool and silk manufactures.[91] On the other hand, the traders of Wakefield supported the Bill with the argument that a restriction on the import of cotton-wool, which the prohibition of printed fustians would involve, would prejudice their export of woollens, and the woollen manufacturers of Burnley adopted a similar attitude; also, the Bill was whole-heartedly supported by the merchants engaged in foreign trade at Glasgow, Whitehaven and Lancaster.[92]

From the thirties of the eighteenth century until the coming of the great inventions the cotton industry made slow but steady progress. The import of cotton-wool which in 1730 amounted to 1,545,472 lbs. reached 3,870,392 lbs. in 1764, but it was not until the eighties that a startling increase was seen; the average import in the last two years of that decade amounted to 32,000,000 lbs.[93] At that time the organisation of the industry, the methods of manufacture, and the character of its products, were undergoing the changes which mark the early stages of the industry in its present form.

IV

In considering the development which took place from the middle of the seventeenth century to the last quarter of the eighteenth as regards other textile commodities produced in the Manchester district, a useful starting-point is given by a writer about 1650, who described the trade of the town as “not inferior to that of many cities in the kingdom, chiefly consisting in woollen frizes, fustians, sack-cloths, mingled stuffs, caps, inkles, tapes, points, etc., whereby not only the better sort of men are employed, but also the very children by their own labour can maintain themselves.”[94]

By permission of the Corporation of the Royal Exchange Assurance, A.D. 1720]

MANCHESTER IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EARLY EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

The enumeration of commodities in this account, which is very similar to that given by Fuller in 1662, may be compared with another contained in an account of Manchester and its trade in 1751, which may be regarded as holding good in the main for a considerable time later: “Ye present Inhabitants ... are in particular known to be an Industrious people; the Reason of their being so numerous is y^e flourishing trade follow’d here for a long time known by y^e name of Manchester Trade w^ch not only makes y^e town but y^e Country round about for several miles populous, industrious & wealthy. The trade consists chiefly of three general branches, viz. The Fustian or Cotton Manufacturs, y^e Check Trade & Small Wares. The Fustian Manufacture call’d Manchester Cottons, has been long in y^e place & neighbourhood, & is of late much improv’d by several modern Inventions in dying and printing. The Check Trade includes several Articles, as Stuffs for Aprons, Gowns, Shirts, Ticking, Bolstering, &c. But y^e Small Ware Business comprehends most as Inckle, Lace of many sorts, Tapes, Filleting, &c. All these Trades employ both a great number & almost all sorts of Hands not only of Men both Rich & Poor but of Women & Children, even of 5 or 6 years old, who by Spinning, Winding, or Weaving, may earn more here than in any other part of y^e Kingdom.... There is not any Town in y^e nation excepting our Sea Ports y^t may be compared to it in Trade as appears from y^e number of Packs of Goods w^ch go weekly out of y^e Town, w^ch amount in a moderate Computation to 500.”

It will be noticed that a distinction is made between three general branches of trade, a distinction which an analysis of the first Manchester Directory, compiled twenty years later, shows to have had a sound basis.[95] At this point, however, we are concerned with the development which had taken place during the century which intervened between the two quotations, a development which can be traced in Ogden’s Description of Manchester, published in 1783.[96] Unfortunately he gives no definite dates as to the changes to which he refers, but the development of the three general branches of trade carried on in the town is fairly clearly indicated.

In addition to the manufacture of such commodities as those mentioned in the 1651 reference, he informs us that bolsters, bed-ticks, linen-girth web, and boot-straps were among the early manufactures, but that the trade in ticks and webs was soon lost to the West of England. This led to those concerned in making them turning to the manufacture of coarse checks, striped hollands, hooping and canvas.[97] As time went on “the manufacturers of check made great advances in trade and introduced new articles.” What they appear to have done was to progress in the direction of making goods consisting entirely of cotton and mainly of cotton.[98]

But there was another line of development pursued by those engaged in the manufacture of laces, inkles, tapes, and filleting. At an early stage these men added “divers kinds of bindings and worsted smallwares,”[99] and later when “it was found that the Dutch enjoyed the manufacture of fine Holland tapes unrivalled: plans were therefore procured, and ingenious mechanics invited over to construct swivel engines, at great expense, but adapted to light work for which they were first intended, on so true a principle, that they have been employed in most branches of smallwares with success.”[100]

As regards the fustian manufacture, Ogden implies that, at first, it was not carried on in Manchester to any extent, and in this respect his statement is supported by that of Fuller in 1662. Referring to an early date, Ogden states that “Fustians were made about Bolton, Leigh, and the places adjacent, but Bolton was the principal market for them, where they were bought in the grey by Manchester chapmen, who finished and sold them in the country.”[101] When we get to 1772, however, it is evident that there were a large number of fustian manufacturers in the town,[102] and in the petition which resulted in the 1736 “Manchester Act” “manufacturers of fustians in the town of Manchester” were certainly prominent. Ogden’s account of the matter is that the smallware “manufactory has not been sufficient to employ large capitals without the aid of some other branch. The fustian trade has been added to it, first as an auxiliary, and then embraced as a principal, where there was capital to support it.”[103]

Probably the development which took place was, that as fustians came to be printed, and their manufacture extended, some smallware manufacturers turned part of their capital into that trade, and later adopted it altogether, while others no doubt began in business as manufacturers of fustians. Thus by the middle of the eighteenth century, and particularly by 1772, the three branches of trade in Manchester could be fairly clearly distinguished from one another, although at that date some manufacturers were engaged in more than one of the three trades.[104]

The term fustian, it may be noticed, comprehended a large range of goods of which herring-bones, pillows for pockets and outside wear, strong cotton ribs and baragons, broad-raced linen thicksets and tufts, dyed, with white diapers, striped dimities, and lining jeans, are mentioned by Ogden.[105] Cotton thicksets and cotton velvets were also attempted, but in neither of these was much success attained until the later years of the eighteenth century owing to lack of better methods of dressing, bleaching, dyeing and finishing.[106] If thread[107] and sail-cloth[108] are added to the commodities which have been mentioned, also woollens, which were mainly produced in the districts directly north and north-east of Manchester, probably the principal textile goods manufactured in Lancashire until the seventies of the eighteenth century have been included in the list.

At the present day, it is difficult to discover the exact materials of which some of the goods mentioned were made, but as the smallware weavers were always known as worsted smallware weavers, it may be assumed that worsted entered largely into their products. With checks, and fustians, linen was a more prominent material, but into these cotton certainly entered, as it probably did into the majority of goods to some extent, and silk was also utilised.[109] Frequently it has been stated[110] that no goods were made entirely of cotton in England until Arkwright began to spin by rollers, but the statement is inaccurate. Maybe they were not produced to a large extent compared with mixed goods, but that they were made in the Manchester district before that time is distinctly stated by Ogden.[111] What is certain is that linen was largely manufactured. In a petition presented to the House of Commons in 1713 it was stated that in Lancashire 60,000 persons were engaged in its manufacture,[112] and this and other petitions show that they were situated in almost every part of the county.[113]

CHAPTER II
THE ORGANISATION OF THE COTTON MANUFACTURE

I

“One writeth that about Anno 1520 there were three famous clothiers living in the North Countrey viz. Cuthbert of Kendal, Hodgkins of Halifax, and Martin Brian, some say Byrom of Manchester. Every one of these kept a greate number of servants at worke, Spinners, Carders, Fullers, Dyers, Shearemen, &c., to the greate admiration of all that came to beehould them.”[114] This reference, and another in a statute of 1543, contain all the information we possess of the organisation of the Lancashire cloth industry, either on its industrial or commercial side, in the first half of the sixteenth century. From the reference in the statute, it appears that Manchester, in the middle of the sixteenth century, was not particularly noted for its wealth, though it was noted for the “good order strayte and true dealing of the inhabitantes.” Consequently “many strangers, as wel of Ireland as of other places within this realme, haue resorted to the saide towne with lynnen yarne, woolles, and other necessary wares for makinge of clothes, to be sold there, and haue used to credit & truste the poor inhabitantes of the same towne, which were not able and had not redy money to paye in hande for the saide yarnes woolles and wares vnto such time the saide credites with their industry labour and peynes myght make clothes of the said wolles yarns and other necessary wares, and solde the same, to contente and paye their creditours, wherein hath consisted much of the common wealth of the saide towne, and many poore folkes had lyunge, and children and seruants there vertuously brought up in honest and true labour, out of all ydlenes.”[115]

In 1577 some clothiers of Lancashire presented a petition praying that a statute passed in the reign of Edward VI.,[116] which imposed restrictions on middlemen buying and selling wool, should not be enforced. Under the terms of the statute, wool-growers were only allowed to sell their product either to a merchant of the staple or to persons actually engaged in its manufacture. This arrangement was unsuitable to the petitioners as they were “poore cotegers whose habylitye wyll not stretche neyther to buye any substance of woolles to mayntayne worke and labor, nor yet to fetche the same (the growyth of wolles being foure or fyve score myles at the leaste distant)” and they feared that if the statute were enforced “the trade will be driven into a fewe riche men’s hands, so that the poore shall not be paid for their worke, but as it pleaseth the riche.”[117]

Judging from this reference, it would appear that the conditions described as existing in Manchester more than thirty years before were still typical of Lancashire. Possibly this may have been the case in some parts of the county, but it is clear that, in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, and in the early years of the next century, there were many men of means resident in the Manchester district engaged in the cloth industry.

Especially prominent at this time were the Tippings, the Mosleys and the Chethams, and there were also others.[118] These men were variously described as clothiers, linen drapers, chapmen, silk weavers, mercers and glovers.[119] In 1607 Anthony Mosley of Manchester, clothier, third son of Edward Mosley, Gentleman, and younger son of Sir Nicholas Mosley, Lord of the Manor of Manchester, left a considerable fortune, and out of it bequeathed £500 for the building of an alms-house in the town, and for the purchasing of lands to belong to it, for the maintenance of the aged and the impotent, on condition that £1500 more were raised within a year.[120] At least two of this man’s sons became clothiers, one of them who died in 1628 leaving £5 to be distributed to the poor of Manchester at his funeral.[121] The bequeathing of money for charitable purposes was a frequent occurrence with the men engaged in the cloth industry in Manchester at this time. In 1621 William Mosier, chapman, left £10 to the churchwardens in trust for the use, maintenance and relief of the aged and impotent poor in the town,[122] and these benefactions reached their culmination in the monumental bequest of Humphrey Chetham, founder of Chetham’s Hospital and Library.

Some idea of the extent to which Anthony Mosley was engaged in the cloth trade may be gathered from the facts that at home he had cloth to the value of £247, and abroad (evidently in the hands of traders and finishers) to the value of £224.[123] He had debts owing to him to the extent of nearly £1300, of which sum £850 had been put into stock “with Francis Locker by indentures.” To what extent the other portion was owing for cloth is not clear, but the fact that a debt was owing by a mercer suggests that some of it was.

It is in connection with the Chethams, however, and particularly with Humphrey Chetham, whose life covered the period from 1580 to 1653,[124] that we get the most valuable information concerning the organisation of the cloth industry in the Manchester district in the seventeenth century. Besides Humphrey, three of his brothers were engaged in “Manchester trade.”[125] In 1597 he was apprenticed to Mr. Samuel Tipping, a Manchester linendraper, to whom his eldest brother, James, was also apprenticed, while another brother, George, was apprenticed to Mr. George Tipping, the younger brother of Samuel, who again was a “grosser and linen draper.”[126] About 1605 George and Humphrey Chetham entered into a partnership which was renewed and continued until the death of the former at the end of 1626, though after 1619, rather than to extend their mercantile business, they invested their capital in land.[127]

Their concern consisted of two branches, one in Manchester and the other in London, where George was a citizen and a member of the Merchant Taylors’ Company.[128] In 1619, when a new deed of partnership was drawn up, Humphrey was described as a “chapman” and his brother as a “grocer,” and their business was said to consist “in the trade of buying and selling fustians and other wares and merchandises.” George had to manage “the factory and business of the joint-trade in and about the city of London,” and Humphrey had to do the same in and about Manchester, and in any other parts of England. At this time they had a joint stock of about £10,000.[129]

When Fuller wrote his account of Humphrey Chetham he stated that three brothers of the family were engaged in the Manchester trade, and that they dealt chiefly in fustians purchased in the Bolton market, which they sent to London, and from this account it has been generally deduced that they were simply dealers in fustians. With the publication of an authentic life of Humphrey Chetham it has become apparent that he was more than this. In the Manchester district he bought “friezes, fustians, coattons, and haberdasherye,” which he not only sent in large quantities to the London market, but sold them by retail in Manchester. He was a general merchant who purchased a large variety of goods in all parts of the Manchester district. In addition he was a “manufacturer” employing people over an extensive area in spinning yarn, and in weaving and finishing cloth, and other members of the family were similarly engaged.[130]

In 1626 his accounts reveal several significant facts[131]:

From these accounts it is evident that Chetham dealt in cotton (Cypress wool) and also in linen yarn (Irish yarn), the two principal materials for the manufacture of fustians. The next fact has reference to the economic relationships which existed between him and those who worked the materials. A popular view is that in Lancashire up to the coming of the factory, in the latter years of the eighteenth century, the majority of the workpeople were more or less independent producers who usually bought their materials, and after working them into cloth sold it to traders such as Chetham. That this was not generally the case in the first half of the eighteenth century is certain, and that it obtained as a general rule in the previous century is seriously open to question. As already mentioned, Chetham employed spinners and weavers, and the above accounts suggest that when he sold cotton and yarn, much of it was sold in small quantities, and also that it was sold on credit. This means that Chetham, if he did not employ the buyers in the ordinary sense, financed them to the extent of the cost of their raw materials, and if so to this extent they were economically dependent upon him, as they probably were for the disposal of the product. The probability is that, in his day, Chetham’s position in the economic organisation was little different, if any, from that of the typical capitalist “clothier” of the domestic system who gave out work to workpeople, and paid them for their labour when its product was returned to him.[132]

This does not necessarily mean that, at this time, there were no small semi-independent producers in the rising cotton industry. Probably there were, and for a long time afterwards, but it is extremely doubtful whether they should be regarded as the typical workpeople. Rather, the evidence points to the contrary. In 1702 a petition was presented from the West Country clothing district complaining of the master weavers paying their workpeople in truck, instead of in money, and the allegations of the petition were found to be true,[133] with the result that a Bill was ordered to deal with the matter, which in the same year became an Act.[134] In the Act provision was made to restrain workpeople from embezzling materials delivered to them by clothiers and others, and within the scope of the Act those engaged in the cotton and fustian manufactures were included. At first the Act was a temporary measure, and referred only to the woollen, fustian, cotton, and iron manufactures of the kingdom. In 1710 it was made perpetual,[135] and in 1740 the leather manufacture was included.[136] In 1749 the scope of the Act was extended to the fur, hemp, flax, mohair and silk manufactures, and a provision was inserted for preventing unlawful combinations of all persons employed in all the trades mentioned.[137] None of the petitions presented from Lancashire in the first part of the eighteenth century gives the slightest reason for thinking that the system of organisation implied in the provisions of the 1702 Act did not generally obtain in the county during the first half of the eighteenth century. In the check and smallware branches of Manchester trade it certainly did, and it is extremely probable that long before 1770 the same can be said of the fustian branch.

In considering the position in this branch, it must be borne in mind that, at first, it was probably not carried on in and immediately about Manchester to the same extent as the other two. Taking Ogden as our authority he speaks of Manchester chapmen going to Bolton and other markets to buy fustian pieces from the weavers, “every weaver then procuring yarn or cotton as they could” as the original system.[138] When this original system was general he does not state, but the general impression he gives is that it was not later than the early years of the eighteenth century. In any case, the system was not sufficient to meet the demands of the traders, and “To remedy this inconvenience, some of them furnished warps and wool to the weavers and employed persons to put warps out to weaving by commission; and encouraged many weavers to fetch them from Manchester, endeavouring to secure the honesty and care of their workmen, upon bringing in the piece, by the force of good usage and prompt payment; but reserving to themselves a power of abatement, for deficiency in the spinning and workmanship.”[139]

The next quotation carries us to the sixties, when the jenny was introduced for spinning. “From the time that the original system was changed in the fustian branch, of buying pieces in the grey from the weavers, by delivering them out work, the custom of giving them out weft in the cops, which obtained for a while grew into disuse, as there was no detecting the knavery of spinners till a piece came in woven; so that the practice was changed, and wool given with warps, the weaver answering for the spinning; and the weavers, in a scarcity of spinning, have been paid less for the weft than they gave the spinner, but durst not complain, much less abate the spinner lest their looms should stand unemployed: but when jennies were introduced, and children could work on them, the case was altered, and many who had been insolent before, were glad to be employed in carding and slubbing for these engines.”[140] It will be noticed that the change mentioned in this quotation did not mean a reversion to the original system—the giving out of work continued—but the weaver was made responsible for the spinning as well as for the weaving. This change is easily understood and may well have taken place owing to the friction that would arise through abatements for bad work.

But during the period covered by the two quotations, another change had taken place which is referred to by Guest. He informs us that it was in 1740 that “the Manchester merchants began to give out warps and raw cotton to the weavers, receiving them back in cloth and paying for the carding, roving, spinning and weaving”[141] and that about 1750 there arose, chiefly in the country districts, a class of “second-rate merchants called fustian-masters,” who “gave out a warp and raw cotton to the weaver, paying the weaver for the weaving and spinning.”[142]

In view of the legislation just referred to, it is evident that the first date mentioned by Guest cannot be taken as marking the beginning of the system of giving out work in the fustian trade, and perhaps the second date relating to the appearance of country fustian masters should not be strictly regarded. With these reservations, however, there is much evidence that Guest’s statements were based upon facts which belong to the first part of the eighteenth century. The increased prominence of printed fustians and the proceedings which led to the Act of 1736 indicate that the fustian trade was expanding. About the same time, changes were taking place in commercial organisation, and it is exceedingly probable that the number of fustian manufacturers was increasing with accompanying changes in industrial organisation. In 1772, when we get definite evidence, it is certain that a large number of fustian manufacturers existed in the country districts, and altogether their number was far greater than either check or smallware manufacturers.[143] The conclusion that may be drawn from the statements of both Ogden and Guest, and from other evidence, is that even if it be true that before the first part of the eighteenth century the greater proportion of fustian weavers were semi-independent producers, who themselves bought their raw materials, and sold their product to traders, by the middle of the century they were certainly the workpeople of capitalist employers, as probably many of them were long before that time.

II

Fortunately, there is ample evidence of the organisation of the check and smallware trades in the fifties of the eighteenth century, and this evidence is important in that it shows clearly the relations which existed between the employers and the workpeople engaged in these trades at that time. In both trades the relations were exceedingly strained, and in both the workpeople attempted, through combination, to maintain and advance their economic position. As a matter of fact, the worsted smallware weavers had had some form of combination for some years. In 1756 their articles contained regulations concerning their trade which dated back to 1747. The articles show that there were two main classes engaged in the trade: first, the manufacturers, who were the real employers; second, the undertakers, journeymen, and apprentices. Their aim was to protect the interests of the latter class, particularly of the undertakers. The difficulties they were intended to meet are revealed in The Worsted Smallware Weavers’ Apology issued in 1756,[144] and the Apology also throws light on the development of the trade during the preceding thirty years.

Before that time the work had been performed in a single loom, but, about that time, this loom was displaced by a Dutch loom,[145] which, instead of weaving one piece at a time wove twelve or fourteen, and also improvement took place in the character of the product. In 1756, the weavers asserted, there were three times as many Dutch looms in use in Manchester as there ever had been single looms. As a consequence of the improvements, the scope of employment had widened and many of the poorer sort of people had entered the trade, while the generality of manufacturers had acquired such large fortunes as enabled them to vie with some of the best gentlemen in the county. With the weavers the case was different, owing, they asserted, to their own conduct in taking too many apprentices on any terms, and for any length of time, and also, for a small sum of money, taking persons into the trade who were immediately recognised as journeymen. As a result, the trade had become overcrowded with labour, and many who had entered it had gone back to their old occupations, while others had turned to day labouring in the summer and returned to the loom only in the winter, when they were content to work on any terms, which soon became the general rule. Moreover, men who had served only a year or two lowered the standard of workmanship, as in such a short time they were unable to learn the theory of the trade.

The first article, dated 1747, laid down that no undertaker should take apprentices for less than seven years, unless they were fifteen years of age, when they might be taken for six years. Masters taking apprentices had to enter them in the weavers’ register-book, twopence to be paid on entry, and, when an apprentice had served his time, a blank had to be taken out for which fourpence had to be paid. Afterwards the apprentice was free to work either as a journeyman or as an undertaker. In a later article it was agreed that if any member went to work, or undertook work, for any master that had never made goods before 1st January 1753, “the same shall not be accounted one of us.” Later in the year, it was agreed that no undertaker should take more than three apprentices, and, in the next year, it was further agreed that every undertaker should demand a blank from any journeymen or journeywomen when they came to work with him, and if an undertaker failed to comply with this regulation he must forfeit five shillings to the box. In the last article, dated 11th August 1753, it was agreed that any undertaker bringing up his sons or daughters to the trade should enter them in the register at twenty years of age, when they should receive a blank which would enable them to work as journeymen or undertakers for any master in the trade.

There are several points of interest in these articles. In the first place, it is evident that the master manufacturers as well as the weavers took apprentices, and that the weavers wished to bring them under their control. In the second place, it appears that women were recognised in the trade as subject to the same conditions as men. Thirdly, the increasing stringency of the articles suggests either that the combination was developing, or that the articles were not attaining the end in view. Probably both suggestions are correct.

In 1756 the problem of remuneration had become acute, and the organisation was evidently on the point of taking an active interest in the matter. This increased activity was the beginning of trouble which culminated at the Lancaster Lent Assizes in 1760. To understand the position during these years it will be advisable to glance at the general situation in the country.

As early as 1753 there had been serious disturbances consequent upon a rise in the price of food. At Bristol it had been necessary to call out the military to prevent the plundering of corn vessels in the harbour, and similar measures had been adopted to maintain the peace at Manchester and Leeds, which was only accomplished with loss of life.[146] At the beginning of the year the price of wheat in Manchester ranged from 18s. to 20s. per load—20 Winchester pecks—and other cereals in proportion. Then there began a rise which in August had brought the average price of wheat to 25s. to 26s., which continued throughout 1754.[147] Early in 1755 the prices had come down, and remained almost without change at 21s. to 22s. for more than twelve months. From about May, 1756, prices began to rise again. In June they stood at 27s. to 28s., in December at 34s. to 36s., in February, 1757, at 39s. to 40s., and in July at 43s. to 45s. Then they began to fall, reaching 30s. to 31s. in December, and in October, 1758, the old price of 21s. to 22s. had been regained.

Reports of rioting in every part of the country began in the autumn of 1756, and were constantly repeated until the end of the following year,[148] and the distress extended to Scotland and Ireland, the King subscribing £20,000 for relief in the latter country.[149] At Liverpool in November, 1756, it was decided to buy several thousand pounds’ worth of grain, at the expense of the town, to be retailed to the poor at cost price, and a subscription list was opened at Manchester in the following month for a similar purpose, when between £700 and £800 were immediately subscribed.[150]

In the view of the populace the evil was due to the action of trading middlemen engrossing and holding back supplies, and in Manchester, as in other places, when a riot broke out, in which a number of colliers from Clifton took part, the object of attack was certain corn dealers, who vainly protested that, instead of engrossing, they had imported corn from remote parts of the kingdom and thus lowered prices.[151] A proclamation of the King against the forestalling, regrating and engrossing of corn was issued in Manchester,[152] and apparently in every other town in the country, while threats of prosecution, of which the gentlemen of the town were prepared to bear the expense, were issued against the guilty persons, could they be discovered.[153]

It was in these circumstances that the worsted smallware weavers of Manchester began to show a greater activity than hitherto, and issued their Apology. They complained of the rise in the prices of provisions and asserted that, eighteen or twenty years before, undertakers could have kept five apprentices for what it now cost to keep three. In 1756 they had commenced to hold meetings once a month. The hands employed by each manufacturer were regarded as a “shop.” Each shop appointed a person to represent the whole shop, and when the representatives met once a month they formed the trade society.[154] Already the manufacturers suspected that the proceedings were to their detriment, and the weavers were aware that they were likely to meet with a great deal of censure and scornful sneers, but they consoled themselves with the thought that they were as the Nazarenes, and those who held them in contempt were as the Jews.

The next evidence of the existence of the society appears in January, 1759, when the following notice was issued in The Manchester Mercury[155]:—“Whereas all combinations and meetings among Weavers or other handicraft workmen or servants to consult how to raise wages, or make other rules or orders among themselves that have a tendency to ruin and destroy the trade in which they are employed is contrary to the Laws of the Kingdom. And whereas there is at this time in and about this town an unlawful combination among the Worsted smallware weavers, under the name of being members or being connected with or payers to a Box. This is to give notice that all persons who are in any ways concerned in those unlawful combinations, or are in any ways aiding or assisting thereto, will be prosecuted to the utmost rigour of the law; and that no weavers will be taken to work that are in any ways concerned in those unlawful combinations.”

The next important act in the life of this association was performed at Lancaster Assizes in the following year, when a number of worsted smallware weavers answered to an indictment for a combination to raise wages. The prosecution was not proceeded with as the defendants handed in the following submission, which was read in the open court, and afterwards signed by them. “We do hereby, each for himself, and as far as we can for the other weavers of the same Trade agree to work for the prices already agreed upon with our respective masters, or such other wages as the circumstances of the Trade make reasonable for the time being. We hereby promise and engage, each for himself that we will never enter into, or promote, or encourage any Combination whatsoever, for the raising wages, or any other unlawful purpose whatsoever. And we declare against, and will oppose, any agreement or Combination ... or that any money shall be applied ... to the support of any person, or persons, who shall refuse to work for reasonable, or the usual wages, being able and requested so to do, or in any wise whatsoever towards the forming or supporting any combination to raise wages or other unlawful purpose whatsoever. That the Box or contribution may be permitted till the debt already incurred be discharged and the defendants promise to produce the Box and show their accounts therein, to any of the Masters in any part of Manchester upon a reasonable notice for that purpose, and that when the Debt is discharged, the contribution shall cease and the Box be destroyed, and in the meantime, the Indentures shall be delivered to the Parties thereto if they desire it.”[156]

The combination of the worsted smallware weavers was not the only one in the Manchester district in the late fifties of the eighteenth century. As already mentioned, the check-weavers had also combined. So acute had the position become that at the Autumn Assizes held at Lancaster in 1758 Lord Mansfield “had been informed of great disturbances in Lancashire, occasioned by several thousands having left their work and entered into combinations for raising their wages, and appointed meetings at stated times, formed themselves into a committee at such meetings, and established Boxes and fixed stewards in every Township for collecting money for supporting such weavers as should by their Committee be ordered to leave their masters, and made other dangerous and illegal regulations; that they had insulted and abused several weavers who had refused to join in their schemes and continued to work; and had dropt incendiary letters, with threats to masters that had opposed their designs; his Lordship sensible of the pernicious consequences of such illegal proceedings as being not only destructive of Trade and Manufactures, but of the Peace of the Public adapted his charge to the occasion, and strongly urged to the Jury the necessity of suppressing all such combinations and conspiracies on any pretence whatsoever; gave them an account of all the attempts of the like nature that had been made at different times and in different parts of the kingdom, and told them that an active and vigilant execution of the Laws in being, had always been sufficient to suppress such attempts, and, if properly executed, would have the same effect upon the present that it had always met with on similar occasions.” As the judge had spoken without notes, he could not oblige the Grand Jury with this charge in writing, as they requested, but he issued a warrant for the apprehension of nineteen stewards concerned in the combination, and prosecutions were recommended against others as being equally culpable.[157]

The judge’s charge was intended, no doubt, to be of general application, but it appears that it had particular reference to the check-weavers. The story of their combination can be gathered from the pages of The Manchester Mercury, supplemented by A Letter to a Friend: occasioned by the late Disputes betwixt the Check-makers of Manchester and their Weavers, written by Thomas Percival[158] in 1759. Mr. Percival had been mentioned to the judge as one who had assisted the weavers in their efforts to combine,[159] and his letter was a pungent reply to the charges. It appears that originally there were two main points of dispute between the check manufacturers and the weavers: first, the question of a standard length of cloth for weaving, and second, the question of “unfair weavers.”[160] Ultimately these questions led to a combination and a turn-out of several weeks in which the weavers in Manchester and for many miles around were involved.

According to Mr. Percival’s account, he was approached by some of his neighbours, check-weavers, about a year before he wrote his letter, when they informed him that they had been solicited to enter a Box to oppose the unlawful practices of their masters. At the time he advised them not to do so, but some of them became members and later the dispute became an open breach.[161]

In April, 1758, a notice was issued in The Manchester Mercury drawing attention to the fact that “Weavers employed in manufactures carried on in Manchester and neighbouring towns, had formed themselves into unlawful clubs and societies, and had entered into combinations and subscriptions,” and that anyone who would not enter, or would withdraw, would be protected and employed.[162] This notice had not the desired effect, and it seems probable that the turn-out began in May or at the beginning of June. Early in July the situation had become acute and the weavers of Ashton sent to ask Mr. Percival whether they were doing right, to which he replied that “if they were doing what the world said, they were doing excessive wrong.”[163]

About this time the weavers met at Manchester, and put forward a set of proposals for a settlement of the dispute, which was followed by two other sets, one drawn up at Ashton, and the other by Mr. Percival himself.

In the first, the weavers proposed that a statute length of eighty yards should be fixed for check, and of sixty yards for cotton hollands, cotton linen and similar articles, and that, if the length was different, the price paid for weaving should vary in proportion. Also, that the masters should not employ unfair weavers, so called because they would not subscribe to the charity stock to assist poor weavers and to prosecute offenders. The weavers insisted that they had no other object in view but to support and maintain their trade with experienced and honest workmen, and to bring it under the statute 5 Eliz.[164]

It appears that, about this time, a suggestion was made that the dispute should be referred to the country gentlemen for settlement, or to Mr. Percival alone, and also that he saw the above proposals, and that he disapproved of them.[165]

In any case, a second set of proposals was addressed to him from Ashton by the weavers, with the request that, if he thought proper, he would put them into form and make such alterations as he might find necessary for bringing about an accommodation between the parties.[166] In these proposals, it was suggested that seven men should be appointed by each side, including one or two magistrates, and that the magistrates should choose (presumably from among those who had been thus appointed) four persons who had been in the trade, but who had no present connection with it, to settle the differences. Cases of spoiled work, which the master and weaver concerned could not settle, were to be referred to two persons chosen by them, both parties to submit to their decision. The masters were to allow the weavers to keep a charity box, and the weavers were to have liberty to take two or more apprentices, but not for a shorter period than seven years, and no person was to be acknowledged as a weaver unless he or she had served that time, although all weavers then engaged in the trade were to be recognised. The weavers still asked that a standard length of eighty yards should be fixed for certain kinds of goods, but the length of other kinds was to be fixed by the committee, and wages were to be agreeable to the times as heretofore.[167]

Evidently Mr. Percival did not consider that these proposals would effect a settlement, and proceeded to draw up a set of his own. Generally, his proposals did not differ from the proposals from Ashton, except in the vital point of the “box.” He proposed that a box should be kept up for the relief of poor weavers, and for the prosecution of offenders, but that the funds should not be used to the detriment of the masters. To disarm the suspicion of the masters, he proposed that they should become contributors to the box, and that no money should be taken out of it (except for the relief of the poor) without the knowledge of at least two of them, which arrangement the weavers thought very hard, and Mr. Percival himself was afraid that they would not agree to it, but they did so.[168] A further proposal made by him was that an Act of Parliament should be moved for, on the joint-petition and at the joint-expense of the masters and weavers, to fix the lengths and breadths of cloth, and to enforce a seven years’ apprenticeship in the trade.[169]

Mr. Percival’s proposal as regards the box, and also the proposals from Ashton, will be best understood by noticing the masters’ case as it was stated in a letter addressed to him by one of them. In this letter it was claimed that it was impossible with justice to fix a standard length of cloth as the weavers proposed, but that the masters were willing to agree upon a length “as near as possible.” Further, it was insisted that the weavers must give up their combination, and sign a paper to that effect, and that the masters must not be obliged to turn off unfair weavers. Apparently, the master who wrote this letter was an extremist, as Mr. Percival expressly excepts from his indictment some masters who did not take up this attitude concerning the combination.[170]

The paper which the weavers were required to sign appeared in The Manchester Mercury on the same date as the letter sent to Mr. Percival, and ran as follows:—

“We whose names are hereunto subscribed being members of the Weavers Society, and contributed or promised to contribute to their Box, do hereby engage that we will quit the said Box; and neither by ourselves or (sic) any person for us, pay towards supporting it, nor have any further concern therein.”[171] In the following month the charge already referred to was delivered by Lord Mansfield, and in October a notice was published setting forth that “The Manufacturers in the Check Trade having found on Enquiry that the principal Boxes are destroyed, and the collections or contributions ceased, Work will now be delivered throughout the Town, and the Weavers may apply where they choose as usual.”[172]

In the meantime, however, it appears that the threatened apprehensions had been effected, and at the Lancaster Spring Assizes in 1759 thirteen check-weavers from Manchester, two from Pendleton, two from Salford, and one from Rusholme, were charged with “having unlawfully met and assembled together and illegally and unjustly combined and confederated that they would not work at less than 2s. the piece above the usual wage or price of eighty yards check.”[173] At the trial a plea for lenity was put in, and, as the weavers conducted themselves in a correct manner, the only penalty imposed was a fine of 1s. each. In his address to them, Lord Mansfield suggested that they had been drawn into the combination by designing men, and pointed out the danger of combinations in raising wages above what had been customary and what the trade would bear, thus driving capital away. His remarks on the apprenticeship clauses of the Elizabethan Act deserve notice, seeing that they were made more than half-a-century before the clauses were repealed: “If none must employ, or be employed, in any branch of trade, but who have served a limited number of years to that branch, the particular trade will be lodged in few hands, to the danger of the public, and the liberty of setting up trades, and the foundations of the present flourishing condition of Manchester will be destroyed. In the infancy of trade, the Act of Queen Elizabeth might be well calculated for public weal, but now when it is grown to that perfection we see it, it might perhaps be of utility to have those laws repealed, as tending to cramp and tie down that knowledge it was first necessary to obtain by rule.” In conclusion, the Judge admonished the check-weavers to “Go home and sin no more lest a worse thing happen unto you.”[174]

This account of these two combinations in Manchester and district in the fifties of the eighteenth century is of considerable interest in several respects. Mr. and Mrs. Webb have drawn attention to the fact that, in these years, we get the final breakdown of the mediæval authoritative system of regulation of industrial relationships, and the above account supports their view.[175] Also they have shown that from the early years of the century combinations of wage-earners were coming into existence in various trades. Such combinations were especially prominent among the West of England textile workers[176]: it is evident that the textile workers in Lancashire were proceeding on similar lines. But even more interesting is the link which these Manchester combinations provide between the older forms of association on the one hand and the modern trade union on the other. The proposals put forward by Mr. Percival, which the check-weavers reluctantly accepted, would have involved almost exactly the same arrangements as those described by Professor Unwin as existing between the members of the Yeomanry Organisations and the members of the Livery Companies.[177] As the arm of the law intervened, it is not likely the proposals came to anything, but this does not necessarily mean that the law quashed the combinations. Judging from the later history of the smallware weavers, it appears that they gained in strength. The next glimpse we get of their combination is in 1781, when a dispute was in existence which certainly continued for more than two months. The first evidence of it is a notice which the weavers delivered to their employers, in which it was stated that the whole trade had unanimously resolved that if they did not set their men to work, agreeable to a list of prices accompanying the notice, no smallware weaver in Lancashire would ever work for them again.[178] On their side, the masters asserted that they were willing to adjust wages, but insisted that the real difficulty was that the weavers had adopted the “extraordinary” step of “swearing two masters out of the trade,”[179] which, they claimed, was contrary to all law and equity. Ultimately the masters delivered the following proposals to the weavers, which are interesting not only as an indication of the respectful way in which the weavers had to be dealt with, but also as the reference to the “shop” suggests that even if there had been a break in the life of their combination, re-establishment had taken place on the same basis of organisation as that of twenty-five years before: “It is hereby mutually agreed between the smallware manufacturers and their weavers (the masters and one of each shop having subscribed the same) that all differences are settled and adjusted, and that all the said weavers look upon and esteem all their said employers as fair and upon an equal footing in the Trade, notwithstanding whatever may have been inconsiderately said or done during our late difference or dispute; and we the said weavers on behalf of the whole trade consider every workman at full liberty to take work for any of the said employers without exception.” Apparently these proposals were not altogether satisfactory to the weavers, who replied that it had been unanimously determined by the whole trade that no other notice except one that they transmitted should be published: “By mutual agreement betwixt the Smallware Manufacturers and their Weavers the differences respecting prices subsisting between them are amicably settled to the satisfaction of both parties.”[180] The masters seem to have been equally reluctant to accept this notice, but as no others appear we may assume that the dispute was near its end.

Sometimes it is implied, particularly in popular writings, that the transition from the domestic system, as it existed in the early eighteenth century, to the factory system involved a great change in economic relationships, almost that it marked the emergence of capitalist employers. If disproof of this view were required, this account of the disputes in the smallware and the check trades in Manchester, a generation before factories definitely appeared in the district, would do something to supply it. The fact is, of course, that the domestic system was a system of capitalist employers, and the typical workpeople were in every essential respect related to these employers in the same way as after the factory made its appearance. In the domestic system the employer’s capital was mainly embodied in the materials that were given out to workpeople, and they received a wage remuneration from him for the operations they performed upon them. Between the journeymen and apprentices, and the employer, there frequently intervened persons such as the “undertakers” mentioned in connection with the smallware trade, but these men were essentially employees, even though in many cases, no doubt, they might own three or four looms. In the factory, the workpeople, who previously had been scattered over a more or less wide area, were drawn together under one roof, and their operations supervised by foremen and managers; the capital of the employers was now embodied in materials, buildings, plant and machinery; the least change was seen in the economic relationships between employers and workpeople. If it is true that labour became more dependent upon capital, it is equally true that capital became more dependent upon labour—on both sides the dependence involved was one of a greater co-operation in the processes of production.

But there was an important social change, closely connected with the decay of authoritative regulations which had been proceeding from the seventeenth century. As these regulations disappeared, the way was opened for the workpeople to begin to organise themselves as a new social class. Along with the development of the system of organisation which became dominant from the eighteenth century, the modern trade union movement was born, and through the greater part of the century it was also developing. Unfortunately, before the end of the century, under the stress of conditions consequent upon the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, its natural growth was checked, and it did not begin to thrive again until these conditions had passed away.

III

To complete this brief account of the organisation of the Lancashire textile industry before the coming of the factory and the rise of the new cotton manufacture, it is necessary to say something of the ways in which the manufacturers were connected with their workpeople, and also of their connections with the markets for raw materials and for finished products.

As regards the first point, it must be borne in mind that, while Manchester was the centre where the greater number of manufacturers were situated, a large number, particularly in the fustian branch, lived in the surrounding smaller towns and country districts. A glance at the following tables and the accompanying map will show that the country fustian manufacturers formed an outer semicircle of Manchester, with three outstanding points at Leigh, Bolton and Oldham. The country check-makers formed an inner circle, while the crofters (bleachers) were distributed in another circle, with a tendency to concentrate in the neighbourhood of the town.

Owing to this distribution of manufacturers, it is evident that most of the workpeople would be within easy reach of an employer, and probably the most usual thing was for them to fetch their materials from his house, or warehouse, and after working upon them, to return the product. The smaller manufacturers no doubt performed the “putting-out” function themselves, but the larger manufacturers employed men for this purpose, as the frequent advertisements for “putters-out” show. Also we can gather from the same source that in some cases “putters-out” for the town manufacturers lived in the country, and that country manufacturers sometimes worked on commission for men in the towns.[181] That some of the manufacturers were men of considerable wealth may be surmised from the frequent mention of their marriages into prominent families, and to ladies possessing “genteel fortunes.” In this way it is not unlikely that much capital found its way into the Lancashire textile industry, and proved useful in enabling the manufacturers to extend their concerns.[182]

In the seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries, as at the present day, little of the raw material used in the Lancashire textile industry was produced in the county; one way in which wool reached the worsted manufacturers is given in a quotation below.[183] But more important than wool were linen-yarn and cotton. Until the West Indian colonies and South America became important sources of the supply of cotton, it was chiefly imported through London, indeed it was not until cotton-growing had developed in the United States that London lost its position to Liverpool as the chief port of entry.[184] Early in the eighteenth century, however, much was imported by Liverpool merchants, and it was also imported through Whitehaven and Lancaster, both these ports having an important trade with the West Indies in the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth.[185]

Of the linen-yarn used, some was spun in this country, and Scotland also contributed to the supply, and, as already noticed, in the reign of Henry VIII., merchants from Ireland carried on a trade in linen-yarn with Manchester, which they sold to the inhabitants on credit.[186] In the eighteenth century, that country with the Continental towns of Hamburg, Bremen, Dantzig, and Königsberg had become the important sources of supply, so far as the Manchester district was concerned, where English and Scotch yarn were little used.[187] The finest quality was Irish web-yarn, which was used in the Blackburn manufacture, Drogheda yarn and Sligo yarn occupying the second and third places, with Hamburg and Bremen yarn as substitutes; fine Sligo yarn was also used as weft for African goods and for handkerchiefs.[188] The yarn from Dantzig and Königsberg (known as Ermland yarn from the bishopric of Ermland) was used in the manufacture of sheeting, and this yarn and Derry tow yarn were also made into checks and other goods for exportation.[189]

Both cotton and yarn reached the manufacturers through cotton merchants and yarn merchants, of whom there were many in Manchester.[190] Trading connections with Germany were maintained through travellers who sought orders from Manchester merchants and manufacturers, and German houses had branches in the town; also, Manchester tradesmen went to Germany themselves.[191] In addition, both cotton and yarn were sold by Manchester shopkeepers, who advertised these commodities along with such incongruous articles of merchandise as Dr. Daffey’s elixir, Anderson’s pills, tea, toys, jewellery, fiddle-strings, etc.[192]

As the raw materials reached the manufacturers through Manchester merchants, so did the finished products reach their markets.[193] In the case of the Chethams at the beginning of the seventeenth century, as we have seen, one part of their establishment was in Manchester and the other in London, and the same system was in vogue with firms in the eighteenth century. The Chethams appear to have confined themselves to home trade, mainly to that with the London market, although they had dealings with Irish manufacturers and sent goods to the Irish markets.[194] In the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, however, Manchester goods were exported to foreign countries, and during the first part of the next century considerable progress appears to have been made particularly in trade to the British Plantations.[195]

The statement of Aikin that in the first decades of the eighteenth century the trade was carried on through wholesale dealers at London, Bristol, and other ports, is probably correct, and there is also evidence of the accuracy of his later statement that, during the twenty or thirty years before he wrote (1795), “the increase of foreign trade has caused many of the Manchester manufacturers to travel abroad, and agents and partners to be fixed for a considerable time on the continent, as well as foreigners to reside in Manchester.”[196] The fact that, in 1770, a group of Manchester merchants were sufficiently interested in the effects of a destructive fire at Antigua Island to open a subscription for the relief of the sufferers, suggests important trading connections with the West Indies, and in considering how these connections were maintained, an announcement in the previous year of the death of a Manchester merchant at Jamaica is significant.[197]

As already noticed, cotton goods were manufactured for the African trade about the middle of the eighteenth century, and Guest informs us that about that time fustians began to be exported in considerable quantities to Italy, Germany and North America.[198] Writing of the time prior to the great changes in the cotton industry, Radcliffe states that the Manchester manufacturing merchants either themselves, or through merchants at London, Bristol, or Hull, carried on a large trade with the Levant, sending goods as “adventures” to the fairs of Asiatic Turkey which afterwards reached the markets in the interior of Asia. But, according to Radcliffe, the most important trade, particularly in fustians, “the old staple, by which these manufacturing merchants were raised to their princely rank,” was that with the North of China, carried on through Russia, a portion being “sent up the Black Sea, or overland from Smyrna by the Turkey Company,” and “another portion found its way, in modern times, through Leipsic to Moscow, and down the Volga to the Caspian Sea.”[199]

An indication of how Manchester goods were distributed about the country at the beginning of the eighteenth century is given in two petitions presented to the House of Commons from some of the inhabitants of Manchester and Stockport in 1704.[200] The petitioners protested against their being regarded as hawkers and pedlars under an Act passed a few years previously, whereas in reality they were wholesale dealers who distributed goods to many parts of the kingdom by means of horse carriage. Aikin’s account of the position at this time supplements their statement: “When the Manchester trade began to extend, the chapmen used to keep gangs of pack-horses, and accompany them to the principal towns with goods in packs, which they opened and sold to shopkeepers, lodging what was unsold in small stores at the inns. The pack-horses brought back sheep’s wool which was bought on the journey and sold to the makers of worsted yarn at Manchester, or to the clothiers at Rochdale, Saddleworth, and the West Riding of Yorkshire.”[201]

The pack-horse method of carriage was not peculiar to Manchester trade, but obtained generally. The system of travelling merchants was, however, especially characteristic of the Lancashire and Yorkshire cloth area, and these merchants were known as “Manchester men.”[202] In view of the fact that they were frequently men of considerable wealth, it is easy to understand why they disliked being regarded as hawkers and pedlars subject to duties on account of their particular kind of trade. From Leeds these “‘Manchester men’ used to go with Droves of Pack-horses loaden with ... goods to all the fairs and Market-towns almost all over the Island, not to sell by Retale, but to the shops by Wholesale, giving large credit. It was ordinary for one of these men to carry a thousand pounds worth of Cloth with him at a Time; and, having sold that, to send his Horses back for as much more; and this very often in a Summer.”[203] In all probability the description is generally true of Manchester in the early eighteenth century. But, at this time, the public carrier was beginning to displace the pack-horse,[204] and consequent upon his emergence, the particular class of merchants referred to ceased to travel with their goods, instead, they carried patterns and solicited orders, and afterwards dispatched the goods by the carriers. Thus there arose a class of men known as “riders-out,” and after the middle of the century advertisements for them become very frequent in The Manchester Mercury. “It was during the forty years from 1730 to 1770 that (Manchester) trade was greatly pushed by sending these riders all over the kingdom.”[205]

But this system could not develop fully until improvements in communications had been effected. So far as Lancashire was concerned, a start was made in 1720 with the Mersey and Irwell Navigation Act, though the contemplated scheme for a navigable waterway between Manchester and Liverpool was not completed until nearly twenty years later.[206] In the early fifties, road improvements were attracting much attention in Manchester, and the next twenty years witnessed a great advance in this direction in all parts of the country.[207] This development in road communication was accompanied by further development in water communication, the Act for the construction of the canal from Worsley to Manchester in 1759 marking a new starting-point. In 1762 the Act was passed for the canal from Manchester to Runcorn, where it joined the Mersey to Liverpool, and when it was completed the two towns were doubly linked by the old and the new navigations. The extent to which Manchester was connected with the rest of the country by road in 1772 may be seen from the number and the destination of the regular carriers in the town at that time.[208]

With these developments the system of travelling about the country with goods, although it had changed its character somewhat, had not lost its importance, nor did it lose it for a long time. It was carried on by “petty chapmen,” and it was to such men that the terms hawkers and pedlars now applied. In the eighties of the eighteenth century a controversy arose, or rather one that had been simmering through the century reached the boiling point, which shows that men, thus designated, were still of great importance in inland trade.

As a result of the Seven Years’ War, and the American War of Independence,[209] the country was faced with a financial crisis out of which the egregious “Sinking Fund” emerged, and many new taxes were levied to raise the required revenue. None raised such opposition in Manchester as the “fustian-tax” and the successful efforts to obtain its repeal were celebrated by an annual dinner for many years afterwards.[210] But the agitation against this tax was local, compared with that which arose in 1785 in connection with a tax on shops, and a proposal to repeal the licences of hawkers and pedlars, which was intended to make the shop-tax palatable. The proposal was carried into effect to the extent that additional duties were levied on hawkers and pedlars and their trade was regulated.

Before the proposal had taken the form of a Bill the manufacturers of Manchester entered a vigorous protest against it, as they did on other occasions after the Bill had become an Act.[211] For four years petitions and counter-petitions rained upon the House of Commons from all parts of the country, occupying a considerable portion of its Journals until 1789, when the shop-tax was repealed, and the Act relating to hawkers and pedlars amended.[212] The chief arguments of the shopkeepers against the itinerant tradesmen do not require recapitulation as they are still vigorously maintained. The minor arguments, that they dealt in smuggled and stolen goods and that they corrupted the minds and morals of the younger part of the community, may be attributed to the shopkeepers’ zeal in controversy.[213] What the hawkers and pedlars—or petty chapmen—did, in fact, was to perform the useful function of linking up the country districts with the manufacturing and trading centres. In the first Manchester petition the chapmen were described as carrying goods from house to house in the country villages and districts remote from towns. It also referred to their great number in Lancashire, Staffordshire, Derbyshire, Yorkshire and Cheshire, and stated that their purchases were more considerable than had been apprehended, which no doubt was true. The manufacturers of Glasgow attributed to the chapmen no small part in the extension of manufactures in England and Scotland, through their introducing goods into places where otherwise they would not have been sent.[214] The best witness to their importance at this time is the multitude of petitions presented in their favour from the manufacturers and traders in every considerable town.

From these petitions the organisation of the trade can be clearly visualised. The custom was for the chapmen to obtain their goods from manufacturers and traders on credit, and then to sell them on credit. In this way a considerable amount of capital was used in the trade. The hawkers and pedlars of Halifax and neighbourhood asserted that they had outstanding debts to the amount of £40,000, and that they again were indebted for large sums to merchants and manufacturers in London, Glasgow, Manchester, Leicester, Nottingham, Carlisle, etc.[215] But there were also capitalist traders in some parts of the country who, apparently, were solely engaged in supplying the chapmen with goods on credit.

This appears to have been the case with a member of “The Society of Travelling Scotchmen of Bridgnorth” who claimed to have £5000 employed in the trade.[216] His method was to buy goods from manufacturers in different parts of Great Britain and Ireland, and to supply them to the chapmen on credit, and, at the time, he had £3000 owing to him, while they had £1500 owing to them. Two members of a similar society at Shrewsbury, who pursued the same method, claimed to have £20,000 in the trade, with outstanding debts to the amount of £16,000, while the chapmen whom they supplied were in a similar position to the amount of £10,000.[217] Even allowing for some exaggeration in the petitions, there can be little doubt of the importance of the trade thus carried on at this time.[218] Possibly it was of more importance than some branches of trade of a more spectacular character, which, for that reason, often attract more attention.

In the preceding chapter it has been shown that a textile manufacture, which could be called a cotton manufacture, had become established in Lancashire certainly by the beginning of the seventeenth century. From what has been said so far, it will be apparent that the manufacture was by no means in a state of stagnation during the century and a half before 1770. Economically and politically, the period was a favourable one for development. The turmoil of the seventeenth century had an economic as well as a political significance. It marks the time when the opportunist regulations of industry and commerce, which are sometimes regarded as constituting part of a positive policy to further the welfare of the national community, definitely failed, notwithstanding much futile effort which continued into the next century.[219]

Consequently, the cotton manufacture was comparatively unhampered by such regulations, and it is not surprising that, particularly from the early years of the eighteenth century, development was taking place in all directions. Quite apart from the remarkable inventions of machinery and the discovery of a new source of power, it is more than probable that the latter years of the century would have witnessed considerable changes. Before these events, the developments in industrial and commercial organisation, and in communications, pointed to the fact that a wider economy was emerging. It was in such conditions that a new cotton manufacture made its appearance in Lancashire.

ANALYSIS OF CERTAIN TRADES IN MANCHESTER IN 1772

All the following tables have been compiled from the first Manchester Directory

In the fustian list there are 22 partnerships, in the check list 20, in the smallware list 11, in the silk and linen list 9, in the woollen list 2, and in the merchants’ list 2.

COUNTRY TRADESMEN WITH WAREHOUSES IN
MANCHESTER IN 1772

Fustian Manufacturers

Check Manufacturers

Miscellaneous

CROFTERS OR WHITSTERS IN THE MANCHESTER
AREA IN 1772[232]

Map showing the location of Manufacturers and Crofters in the Manchester area in 1772

The figures correspond with those in the preceding tables e. g. Manchester, 55 Fustian Manufacturers.

REGULAR CARRIERS FROM MANCHESTER IN 1772

One stage-coach ran to London, and one to Liverpool, each on three days of the week.

On the Old Navigation between Manchester and Liverpool 21 vessels were engaged. On the New Navigation between Manchester and Warrington 9 vessels were engaged, also a number of open vessels called Tuns, and between Warrington and Liverpool 11 vessels were engaged. A 40 Tun Boat sailed between Manchester and Altrincham three days a week, and coal boats arrived in Manchester from Worsley every day.

CHAPTER III
THE COMING OF MACHINERY: KAY TO ARKWRIGHT

I

The statement made at the close of the last chapter, that a new cotton manufacture arose in Lancashire in the latter years of the eighteenth century is justified, notwithstanding the fact that goods made entirely of cotton had undoubtedly been manufactured in the county before, possibly to a larger extent than there is positive evidence to show. From 1770 the cotton industry, as it is now known, began its growth, and this event must always be attributed in large measure to the inventions associated with the names of James Hargreaves, Richard Arkwright, and Samuel Crompton. Their inventions represent a culmination of a series of endeavours to improve the processes of cotton manufacture which reach back to the thirties of the eighteenth century—the time, it may be noticed, when the “Manchester Act” was secured. Generally these endeavours had reference to spinning and the processes preparatory to it, but it was in weaving that the first invention appeared which attained much success.

At this time, in the Manchester district, there were two types of loom in use, the “Dutch” loom and the ordinary hand-loom. The first was introduced, apparently about the beginning of the century, for narrow fabrics of which it could weave several at once.[233] In this loom the shuttle was sent through the warp by the action of cog-wheels, which was a slow and cumbrous process, and unsuitable for the weaving of wider fabrics.[234] In the ordinary hand-loom, the shuttle was sent to and fro through the warp by hand. The invention referred to was that of the “flying shuttle” by Kay, of Bury, for which he took out a patent in 1733.[235] This invention, which was for use in the ordinary hand-loom, consisted mainly of a “picking-peg” contrivance, by means of which the weaver could jerk the shuttle through the warp, using only one hand.[236]

Although exceedingly simple, the invention, when combined with other improvements, was of great importance, as it enabled the weaver to work more quickly, with a less expenditure of effort, and weave a width of cloth which had required two weavers before. For some reason, the invention does not appear to have been used much in the cotton industry for about thirty years after its appearance, although it was used in the Yorkshire woollen industry, regardless of the claims of the inventor.[237] Besides his invention of the “flying shuttle,” Kay effected a considerable improvement in the reeds for looms, and in 1745 took out a patent for a power-loom, and also applied his ingenuity to carding and spinning, but in these latter efforts he apparently attained little success.[238] In 1760 his son Robert effected another improvement in the loom by his invention of the “drop-box,” which enabled the weaver “to use any one of three shuttles, each containing a different coloured weft, without the trouble of taking them from and replacing them in the lathe.”[239] In 1764 the elder Kay made an appeal to the Society of Arts for recognition of his work, and claimed to have many more inventions that he had not put forward, owing, as he said, to the treatment he had received from those engaged in the cotton and woollen industries, and from Parliament. The story of his difficulties, of his emigration to France, and of his death there, is so well known as not to require repetition.[240]

The inventions of the flying shuttle and the drop-box, with the introduction of Dutch looms, were the most important developments in weaving in the first part of the eighteenth century. But there was another development which should be noticed, referred to by Ogden, which, he states, gave rise to a new and important branch of trade in the Manchester district. Owing to the greater variety of patterns attempted in figured goods, a more complicated loom became necessary, as well as the employment of a boy to manipulate the treadles for the raising and lowering of the warps which was required in the weaving of such goods. The goods produced were consequently known by the name of “draw-boys.” But the complicated loom was also more expensive, and it is significant that, at this time, weavers were having “looms mounted for them at great expense which the employers advanced.”[241]

With this progress in weaving, and with an expanding market, it was inevitable that efforts would be made to effect improvements in the methods of preparing the raw material, and in spinning. In 1736, before the Committee of the House of Commons which reported in favour of the petition to allow printed fustians to be freely manufactured, the statement was made that four spinners were required to supply one weaver with material, and all the authorities substantiate the statement and emphasise the difficulties which existed owing to the discrepancy.[242]

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, in this country, the only thing that could be called a machine used in the operations necessary in transforming raw cotton into yarn was the spinning-wheel. One or other of two wheels was commonly used for cotton-spinning: the “Jersey” wheel or the “Brunswick” wheel, the latter differing from the former mainly in the fact that it had a treadle, so that it could be worked by the foot. On these wheels only one thread was spun, and the spinning was intermittent with the winding of the spun thread. The “Saxony” wheel was an improvement upon these, but was most commonly used for flax and wool spinning. With this wheel there was a contrivance known as a “Flier” which enabled the processes of spinning and winding to proceed simultaneously, and sometimes two spindles were attached to it, the spinner thus forming a thread with each hand. The “Saxony” wheel, however, was not so suitable for cotton-spinning as the others.[243]

The cotton, before spinning, was cleaned by hand or, at most, by lightly beating it with a cane, while the carding operation was performed by means of hand-cards.[244] These cards were little more than two brushes with wire bristles, the cotton being placed on one brush, and by the other being drawn over it, the fibres were straightened out ready for the next process. Some progress was made in carding by increasing the surface of the cards, making one a fixture, and hanging the other round a pulley with a weight to balance it. Thus the workman was left with the task of moving this card to and fro over the cotton on the fixed card as required. These cards were known as stock-cards as distinguished from the hand-cards.[245]

It was particularly to carding and to spinning that the inventors gave their attention, and during more than thirty years before Arkwright took out his first patent numerous efforts were made to discover improved mechanical means of performing the operations. Apart from the invention of the “spinning-jenny,” which, though not patented until the year following Arkwright’s patent, was in use some years before, the most notable efforts were those of Lewis Paul, whose title to fame is enhanced by his friendship with Dr. Samuel Johnson.[246]

It is now generally accepted that, in the patent taken out by Paul in 1738, the idea of attenuating cotton by rollers was embodied, so that question need not be discussed.[247] Evidently Paul was born in London and died there, but during part of his life he lived in Birmingham, and it appears that the invention was carried through at this place, with the assistance of John Wyatt as workman.[248] Whatever the merits of the invention may have been, it is clear that in the hands of Paul and his friends it did not attain much success. None of them appears to have possessed the push and business instinct of Richard Arkwright, and it may have been to this lack, as much as to lack of inventive genius, that the non-success was due.

Certainly there was faith in the invention, and Paul himself claimed that, in the course of twenty years, he made more than £20,000 out of it as patentee.[249] It was used in at least one factory at London, in one at Birmingham, and in one at Northampton. The machinery at Birmingham was turned by animal-power, and at Northampton by water-power, and at the latter place fifty hands were employed in the factory.[250] It seems evident, however, that, whatever the reason, when the term of the patent expired in 1752 faith in the invention had also largely expired, and Paul attempted to get it introduced into a Foundling Hospital in London.[251] During the next six years he made improvements in the machine, and in 1758 obtained another patent for it, but shortly afterwards he died, and the honour of carrying the use of rollers in spinning to a successful issue was left to others.[252]

But it is not only in connection with spinning that Paul’s name has to be remembered. Whatever failings he may have had, he was certainly a man of an inventive turn of mind. It is recorded that in 1742 he granted a licence in consideration of £200, for the right to use a “pinking” machine he had invented.[253] But more important in relation to the cotton industry was his invention of a carding-machine, for which he secured a patent in 1748.[254] Earlier in the same year a man named Daniel Bourne had also taken out a patent for a carding-machine,[255] and after a time the principal processes of the two machines were combined in one machine, though it is to Paul’s invention that the most important method of carding the finer qualities of cotton at the present day is traced.[256] Both these machines, however, were lacking in that they had no “doffing” arrangement, which prevented continuous working, but the deficiency in this respect was afterwards removed by Arkwright with his crank and comb device, while others improved the imperfect feeding arrangement.[257]

Paul’s carding-machine did not find its way into Lancashire until about 1760, when it was introduced by a man named Morris, who lived in the neighbourhood of Wigan.[258] Soon afterwards it was adopted, or one based upon it made, by the founder of the famous Peel family at Blackburn, who, in carrying on his experiments, employed James Hargreaves, best known in connection with the “spinning-jenny.” For a long time it was supposed that the credit for the crank and comb was due to Hargreaves, but later it was recognised that it more properly belonged to Arkwright.[259]

By 1760 the need for improvements in spinning had become more than pressing, and this decade marks a period of great activity and great achievements, though, as already suggested, it was not so much a period of new achievements as one in which efforts extending over more than a generation attained success. In 1754 a patent for a spinning-machine had been taken out by a man named Taylor, but it does not appear to have come to anything.[260] In 1761 the Society of Arts issued an advertisement offering rewards “for the best invention of a machine that will spin six threads of wool, flax, hemp, or cotton at one time, and that will require but one person to work and attend it,” and several were forthcoming, but apparently none was completely satisfactory. One six-thread machine, however, was examined by the Committee of Manufacturers in 1763 and a reward granted to the person who had presented it.[261]

In the year following the grant of this reward, James Hargreaves is supposed to have conceived the invention of the “spinning-jenny,”[262] though it did not become prominent before 1767 and was not patented until 1770. In the meantime, Arkwright had brought the method of spinning by rollers to a stage at which he could apply for a patent, which he obtained in 1769. When the two methods of spinning are compared, it may be seen that spinning by rollers was the greater departure from the customary method of spinning cotton.

When cotton has been carded, its transformation into yarn consists in gradually attenuating the cotton and twisting it into a thread. In the eighteenth century, the whole process could be definitely divided into two stages. In the first, the carded cotton was made into a continuous but comparatively thick cord called roving; in the second, the roving was attenuated and spun into yarn. The spinning operation was therefore a continuation of the roving operation, and with the ordinary spinning-wheel both were performed in essentially the same way. In spinning, the roving was attached to the spindle, and the spinner with one hand extended the roving, and with the other turned the wheel, which caused the spindle to revolve, and thus gave the necessary twist to the attenuated roving. When this operation had been performed, the spinner, with one hand, again turned the wheel, the spindle again revolving, this time to wind the yarn upon it, while the other hand was engaged in giving in the yarn for the winding. Clearly this system admitted of only one thread being spun at a time.

In the invention of the “jenny” the action of that hand of the spinner which attenuated the roving and gave in the yarn for winding was mechanically reproduced, but instead of the spinner being able to operate only one spindle, as many could be operated as could be conveniently introduced. The bobbins round which the rovings were coiled, and the spindles, were fixed in a frame. The ends of the rovings were attached to the spindles, passing between a clasp arrangement which formed part of a movable carriage. While the clasp was open, the carriage was first drawn out from the spindles until the required length of rovings for spinning had passed through. Then the clasp was closed, and the rovings, thus gripped, were attenuated by the carriage being drawn further out. Simultaneously, the wheel, which caused the spindles to revolve, was turned to give the required twist to the thread. Then, as the carriage was moved back to its first position, the wheel was again slowly turned, this time to wind the spun thread on the spindles. Thus the action of one hand of the spinner remained the same, but the other was now used in opening and closing the clasp and in moving the carriage to and fro.

From the beginning, the effect of this invention was to multiply many times the amount of yarn that could be spun by a spinner, and the size of the jenny was soon increased. In 1767 it was said to contain eight spindles; when Hargreaves took out his patent in 1770 the specification mentioned sixteen or more; in 1784 the number had increased to eighty; and ultimately as many as one hundred and twenty are said to have been introduced.[263] Although the jenny did not make the rovings, and its movements depended upon hand power, it represented a great advance in spinning, and its mechanism was so simple that it could be worked by children.[264] The thread it produced, however, was not completely satisfactory for the warp in cotton goods, as it was not “capable of giving that hardness of twist and fineness which was necessary to form the threads of the warp.”[265]

This defect was supplied by the invention of spinning by rollers patented by Arkwright—the water-frame as it came to be called—as the characteristic feature of the yarn thus spun was its suitability for the warp. The jenny and the water-frame, therefore, were complementary rather than substitutional machines. When the patent for spinning by rollers was taken out in 1769, as with the jenny, it was still intended that the rovings should be made on the spinning-wheel. But with Arkwright’s method, instead of the rovings being attenuated by a long stretch, the operation was performed by their passing between rollers moving at different velocities, which had the same effect. For the twisting and the winding of the thread the “Flier” spindle mentioned in connection with the “Saxony” wheel was utilised. Consequently, the spinning and winding operations proceeded simultaneously, whereas with the jenny they were intermittent.[266]

Before Arkwright obtained his second patent in 1775, sometimes called the “carding” patent, the roller method had been extended to the rovings, and as he and others had effected the improvements, already mentioned, in the carding machine, the whole of the operations required in transforming the raw cotton into yarn could be performed by machinery.[267]

In the 1769 patent Arkwright provided for the machinery to be driven by horse-power. Two years later he erected his factory at Cromford, where water-power was available. But at this time another power to drive it was in preparation, Watt having taken out his patent for his steam-engine in the same year as Arkwright obtained his first patent.[268] It was not, however, until the last decade of the eighteenth century that Watt’s steam-engine was much used in the cotton industry, its first application in this direction being made at Papplewick in Nottinghamshire in 1785, and it was not introduced into Manchester until 1789.[269] There had been earlier efforts to utilise steam, as in 1783 Ogden could state that in Manchester a factory had been erected in which “Mr. Arkwright’s machines are setting to work by a steam-engine, for carding and spinning of cotton.”[270]

The new spinning machinery was not introduced into use without opposition, but the opposition to its use was small, compared with the opposition to the patents granted in connection with it. Before the patents were taken out, both Hargreaves and Arkwright had left Lancashire for Nottingham. As already mentioned, Hargreaves did not obtain his patent until 1770, and his removal to Nottingham followed upon a machine-breaking episode in 1767, when the jenny was the object of attention. Arkwright removed in the following year, and his machinery appears to have been immune from attack until 1779—ten years after he had obtained his first patent.

In that year a rising took place in north-west Lancashire, when an attack was made upon the factories in the neighbourhood of Chorley, particularly upon one at Birkacre, owned by Arkwright and his partners, and the machinery destroyed. Afterwards the mob intended to proceed to Bolton, Manchester, and Stockport, and finally to reach Cromford, breaking the machinery as they went along.[271] Consequently, it is hardly surprising that the inhabitants of Manchester were alarmed, and called a meeting of magistrates, merchants, and gentlemen, when it was resolved “to embody and arm a sufficient number of soldiers and proper persons to defend the town and neighbourhood.”[272] Fortunately their services were not required, as the rising terminated at Bolton. In the next year, one of Arkwright’s partners petitioned the House of Commons for redress for the destruction of the factory at Birkacre, claiming that he had suffered loss to the extent of £4400, owing, as he insisted, to lack of protection from the civil and military authorities.[273]

In the references to the risings which took place in Lancashire against machinery, there is usually an implication that they were largely due to the effects of its introduction upon the position of the operatives. Neither in 1767, nor in 1779, nor on other occasions when such risings occurred, is this implication strongly justified. Invariably, a satisfactory explanation requires attention to be paid to conditions prevailing at the time, due to entirely other causes, and at this point a slight digression may be permitted for a glance at the general situation.

II

It is not too much to say that the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756 marks the beginning of a century of unrest in England, in which economic causes have to be regarded as the effects of political causes. No sooner had the Seven Years’ War concluded than the conflict with the American colonies began, and was a constantly disturbing factor until long after peace was signed in 1783.[274] Scarcely was there time to recuperate from this conflict, when the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars commenced, which left a dreadful aftermath the gathering of which required more than a quarter of a century after the battle of Waterloo. The position attained by the average workman in 1750 was not reached again until the end of this period. The price of food suffered great fluctuations, and at times rose to an enormous height, while remuneration lagged behind, and employment was uncertain.[275] At various times the unrest broke out into open riots, and in these riots resentment against economic changes was an incident.

Mention has been made earlier of the conditions in the late fifties. These conditions were matched in the sixties, and in the seventies. At the beginning of 1759 the price of wheat had fallen to the neighbourhood of 20s. a load in Manchester, at which it remained until the spring of 1762, when it began to rise again, reaching an average of 25s. 6d. in 1763. In 1764 there was a further increase to more than 30s., which continued through 1765 and into the following year.

With the rise of prices the agitation against forestallers and engrossers revived, and at least one preacher in the Manchester district took as the text of his sermon: “He that withholdeth corn the people shall curse him: but blessing shall be upon the head of him that selleth it,”[276] but more than admonition was considered necessary. In 1762 a riot took place in Manchester in which people from Oldham, Saddleworth, Ashton, etc., joined, which was regarded as so serious that the King offered his pardon to any two persons who would turn informers.[277] Early in 1764 Parliament instituted an inquiry regarding the high price of provisions, when the conclusion was arrived at, that the evil was due to forestallers and engrossers. Apparently, however, it was not easy to find a remedy, as a few months later the King, by the advice of the Privy Council, offered a reward of £100 for the discovery of any unlawful combination to raise prices, and in Derbyshire, the miners, finding wheat at 8s. 4d. a bushel, decided to take matters into their own hands, and fixed a price of 5s., at which they cleared the market.[278]

At the beginning of 1766 Parliament again took action by allowing the import of prohibited cereals, and prohibiting the export of others. In September, in answer to the numerous petitions which had been presented, three proclamations were issued: one, which enforced the sixteenth-century laws against forestallers and engrossers; another, which laid an embargo on all vessels loaded with wheat and flour in any port of Great Britain and prohibited distillation from wheat; while another prolonged the embargo and extended it to vessels having on board barley or malt.[279] In November of the same year, an Assize of Bread began to be issued in Manchester, and was continued weekly for some months.[280]

In February, 1767, riots were again reported from Derbyshire, and two months later the Mayor and Corporation of Chester were threatened with murder if they did not prevent forestalling. In July, a statement appeared that, although provisions had been imported into the country, food was no cheaper, and with pathetic insistence the cause was still sought in the trading activities of “harpies who prey on the vitals of the public.”[281]

During this year an agricultural society came into existence for the Hundred of Salford, and another in Manchester whose activities extended over a radius of twenty miles from the town.[282] Both these societies were exceedingly active for a long period in encouraging improvements by the offer of premiums, and articles on various aspects of agriculture became a common feature in The Manchester Mercury. That the distress during these years was widespread is shown by similar accounts to those mentioned, from all parts of England, from Ireland and Scotland, and from the Continent as well.[283]

The rise in the price of food was no doubt an important factor in the distress of this time, but as a fundamental cause it had no more relation to the distress than the manipulations of traders had to the rise. The fundamental cause was to be found in the conditions created by the Seven Years’ War and the succeeding trouble with the American colonies and the consequent dislocation of trade. The conclusion of the Seven Years’ War was followed by a crisis in which a large number of commercial houses in Amsterdam, Hamburg, and other German towns, came to the ground.[284] “The failures were by some ascribed to the large sums owing by the British and French armies, and by others to the vast quantity of base money issued by the German princes during the war, for which the merchants expected to receive the value, or at least a considerable part of the value it was issued for. It is reasonable to believe that both these causes operated, and that even the peace, by suddenly drawing off the trade enjoyed by those neutral places during the war might be instrumental in producing a derangement in the affairs of those concerned in it.”[285] Owing to the action of the authorities in issuing something of the nature of a “moratorium” in favour of the merchants, and to the assistance of the “Lombard houses,” in Amsterdam and Hamburg, the acute period of the crisis does not appear to have been of long duration. To assist the recovery, British merchants were obliged to extend their credits to their correspondents, and to send them remittances, and in turn they were supported by the Bank of England.[286] In these circumstances it is not surprising that on account of the failures trade on the Continent was said to be at a stand.[287] The conditions in England are sufficiently indicated by what has been said, and by the petitions presented to the House of Commons complaining of high food prices and of the decay of trade.[288]

With the passing of the crisis, conditions might have improved but for the trouble with the American colonies, which hampered trade more than almost anything else could have done. This was inevitable owing to the character of the trade with these colonies. The northern colonies imported much from Great Britain, but exported little directly to this country. The imports were paid for by the colonies exporting to the West Indies and to the Continent, and by their carrying trade. Thus a check to American trade dislocated the circle of commerce and imposed a check all round.[289] The trade was so important that during a considerable part of the period over which the trouble extended it was carried on regardless of prohibitions, which, rather than lessening the volume of the trade, checked its expansion, and increased its uncertainty.[290] When the position was more serious, as in the months intervening between the passing of the Stamp Act in 1765 and its repeal in the following year, Parliament was belaboured with petitions from the trading and manufacturing towns, in which attention was drawn to the character of the trade, to the derangement caused by its stoppage, and to the effect upon the working population already in a state of rebellion owing to the high cost of living.[291]

Such were the general conditions when the jenny was introduced into the cotton manufacture, and, in the circumstances, the attack made upon it is not difficult to understand. A riotous and destructive spirit was abroad, engendered by the conditions of the time. To smash a machine, which apparently would reduce the demand for labour, must have appeared to a disinterested spectator almost as a praiseworthy act.

When the attack was made upon Arkwright’s machines in 1779, the conflict with America and its consequences still dominated the situation. In a petition of cotton spinners in and adjoining the county of Lancaster, presented to the House of Commons in April, 1780, and in the evidence given before a Committee of the House two months later, the position was described in detail.[292] In the petition it was stated that before the beginning of the dispute with the American colonies the cotton manufacture in Lancashire had employed thousands of men, women and children, but of late years it had much decreased, and the workpeople were destitute of employment and in extreme distress. When Spain entered the war, exports to that country and to its dependencies had been prohibited; trade to the West Indies and Africa had been checked; and British ships had been excluded from the Mediterranean ports.

In addition to the stoppage of trade from these causes, an evil of great magnitude had arisen in the cotton industry through the introduction of patent machines and engines, which, with the other events, threatened the workpeople with total loss of employment, and had reduced them to despair. It was owing to these facts that, in the preceding September, several thousands had assembled and demolished one of the largest patent machines and a number of smaller ones, and in order to appease them, the magistrates, inhabitants, and manufacturers of Wigan had held a public meeting, and had engaged to lay their grievances before Parliament. In the meantime the use of the machines and engines worked by water and horses for the carding, roving, and spinning of cotton had been suspended. Still further, it was claimed that the goods thus produced were inferior to those produced by hand, and this, it was feared, would diminish trade still more, as the reduction of price was not equal to the difference of quality. Moreover, the machines were a monopoly for the advantage of patentees and proprietors, to the loss and detriment of the public, and Parliament therefore was asked to grant relief.

Evidently this petition was an ex parte statement, in which the antagonism to Arkwright’s patent of others besides workpeople engaged in the cotton trade found expression. Shortly afterwards a counter-petition was presented by the agent for cotton manufacturers in the town and neighbourhood of Manchester, in which it was insisted that, if the previous petition received favourable consideration, evil consequences would follow, as the patent machines and engines would be used in the cotton manufacture abroad.[293]

At this juncture, the questions at issue were considered by the above-mentioned Committee of the House, and in the evidence the assertions of the first petition were repeated, with additions. Referring to the stock hand-cards which had been in use before the patent machines were introduced, it was claimed that they not only performed better work, but that they found more employment, as it required nine persons working by hand to do as much as one with a patent machine. From the evidence, it appears that by 1780, although the larger jennies were still regarded with disfavour, the jennies containing twenty-four spindles had come into favour, and were set against the patent machines to show that they were not required, particularly as there were many looms unemployed, and as people were generally out of work in winter. Possibly the reason for the partiality shown to the smaller jennies was contained in the assertion that they were in the hands of the poor. As regards remuneration, it was stated that sixteen years before, a woman with a single spindle could earn 10d. to 15d. a day, but then only 3d. to 5d.; those on jennies of twenty-four spindles could earn 8s. to 9s. a week, but then, only 4s. to 6s.

As may be expected, this evidence was not accepted without question by witnesses on the other side, although some of it was not altogether controverted. It has to be recognised that the first effect of the introduction of the new spinning machinery was not to improve the position of the spinners so much as that of the weavers, and just as one side stressed the case of the spinners, the other stressed the case of the weavers. It was, therefore, admitted that the earnings of spinners had varied of late years, and that in the preceding year a spinner with a single spindle could earn only about 3d. or 4d. a day, but it was claimed that by working on the jenny, at the time the evidence was given, 2s. to 2s. 6d. a day could be earned. Further, the argument of the opposing witnesses that the Poor Rates had increased was admitted, but this increase, it was asserted, was due to various causes unconnected with machinery.

More positively, it was stated that during the preceding ten years the cotton manufacture had doubled, that the number of looms had trebled, that the wages of weavers had increased, and that if more looms existed they could be employed.[294] Owing to the introduction of the patent machines by which cotton warps could be produced at a lower price, a calico manufacture had been established and the manufacture of quiltings improved, and without the machines it would be impossible to meet the demand for these warps. The complaint regarding quality was altogether repudiated; on the contrary, the opposite was strongly affirmed, and a great expansion was anticipated, as the patent cotton warp had been found to answer as well as linen warp for many goods other than those for which it was then used.

The evidence in favour of the patent machines so impressed the Committee that the gist of it was embodied in a series of resolutions, and agreed to by the House without opposition—indeed there was no other reasonable course. The evils complained of in the first petition were due to the use of the patent machines only in a small degree; they were much more the social consequence of the conflict proceeding at the time.

CHAPTER IV
THE OPPOSITION TO THE PATENTS

The episodes of 1767 and 1779 were the two most important direct attempts to obstruct the use of the new spinning machinery, and there is no reason to think that they were in any degree effective.[295] As already mentioned, more important opposition was directed against the patents granted to Hargreaves and Arkwright, and this came from those who wished to use the machinery without complying with the rights the patents conferred. Any opposition of this class to its use was secondary to their opposition to the patents, and as the patent of Hargreaves was never upheld, the machine to which it referred was always freely used.

As regards Arkwright’s machinery, the nearest approach to obstruction of its use took the form, first, of refusing to use the yarn made by it, which led Arkwright and his partners to utilise it themselves in making cotton calicoes, thus giving rise to a new branch of manufacture; and secondly, when it was found that this manufacture was hampered by the Acts passed in 1714 and 1721, by opposing their efforts in 1774 to secure modification of the Acts.[296] By the 1714 Act, calicoes had been made subject to an additional excise duty of 3d., making 6d. in all, and by the 1721 Act the wear or use of printed calicoes had been prohibited. The 1736 Act, it will be remembered, had modified the 1721 Act only in so far as goods made with a linen warp were concerned. The modifications requested by Arkwright and his partners were the removal of the additional duty, and of the prohibition, and as their efforts were successful, goods made wholly of cotton, even though printed, were henceforth on the same footing as mixed goods.[297]

The patent granted to Hargreaves was opposed immediately it was obtained. Arkwright was more fortunate in his patents, although they were certainly infringed. It was not until 1781, however—twelve years after the grant of his first patent, and six years after the grant of his second—that he began a series of actions for infringements.

Hargreaves’ patent “for the more expeditious spinning, drawing, and twisting cotton” was dated 12th July 1770.[298] On 17th July 1770, and for some weeks following, a notice appeared in The Manchester Mercury from James Hargravs (sic.) & Co., informing the public of the fact, and offering a reward of ten guineas for information as to “Persons who shall make, use, or vend, or in any ways imitate the said machines or engines.” On 25th September another notice appeared, drawing attention to the one from Hargreaves, and pointing out that “there are several and various sorts of wheel-machines or engines made and used in and about the Town of Manchester for the more expeditious spinning, drawing, and twisting of cotton” and inviting manufacturers and others concerned in these operations to a meeting at the Bull’s Head Inn, on 2nd October, “to consider of several matters relating to, and concerning the advertisement and the machines above mentioned.”

What happened at this meeting it is impossible definitely to say. Baines’ account of the matter is that Hargreaves “Finding that several of the Lancashire manufacturers were using the jenny ... gave notice of actions against them: the manufacturers met, and sent a delegate to Nottingham, who offered Hargreaves £3000 for permission to use the machine; but he at first demanded £7000, and at last stood out for £4000. The negotiations being broken off, the actions proceeded; but before they came to trial, Hargreaves’ attorney (Mr. Evans) was informed that his client, before leaving Lancashire, had sold some jennies to obtain clothing for his children (of whom he had six or seven); and in consequence of this, which was true, the attorney gave up the actions in despair of obtaining a verdict.”[299]

This account was based upon information obtained in Nottingham nearly seventy years after the event, the informant, apparently, being the son of Hargreaves’ partner, then in his eighty-third year.[300] The account may be correct, and it is impossible definitely to disprove it, but, from the tone of the notice calling the meeting in Manchester on 2nd October, it seems hardly credible that an offer of the kind mentioned would be made at that time, neither is it likely from the general attitude of the manufacturers to patentees that it would be made at any other time. Some months later, however, another notice appeared calling a meeting of manufacturers of cotton, again at the Bull’s Head Inn, to consider “special affairs” relating to their trade.[301] But, at this meeting, it is extremely probable that the “special affairs” had reference not to Hargreaves but to the famous Thomas Highs, who at this time had left Leigh for Manchester, and who, according to Guest, was the original inventor both of the spinning-jenny and of the method of spinning by rollers patented by Arkwright.[302]

In a well-known passage Guest states that in addition to his other achievements Highs “constructed what may be termed a double jenny,” which “was publicly worked in Manchester Exchange in 1772 ... and the manufacturers on that occasion subscribed 200 guineas, and presented them to Highs as a reward for his ingenuity.”[303] As a matter of fact, the exhibition took place in 1771 and was advertised in The Manchester Mercury in the following terms:—“Mr. Hayes’s new invented machine for Spinning Cotton is now fix’d up in the Exchange where all persons concerned in the Manufacturing of Cotton will have an opportunity of viewing it.”[304]

This notice appeared on 2nd July, two weeks after the notice calling the meeting just referred to, and the connection between the two notices seems fairly clear. It is a reasonable assumption that the “special affairs” discussed at the meeting were the question of purchasing the machine of Highs, which may well have been, as Guest suggests, an extension of the principle of the jenny then in use, for there can be little doubt that the jenny was widely in use at this time.[305] Evidently something was known of it before Hargreaves left Lancashire, and if it is true that he had also mounted and sold some jennies, it is probable that by 1770 it was well known, and that it was included among the “machines and engines made and used about the town of Manchester” mentioned in the notice calling the meeting shortly after he obtained his patent. If such was the case, the opposition to the patent and Hargreaves’ failure to uphold it can be easily understood.

But, as already mentioned, Guest claims that the original machine was not the invention of Hargreaves, but the invention of Thomas Highs, and that Hargreaves’ relation to it was that he added a considerable improvement. The evidence put forward by Guest on behalf of Highs rests mainly on statements made by old men sixty years after the event, and considerable suspicion of such evidence is excusable particularly when it has been elicited by an ardent man out to establish a case.[306] Moreover, it is a remarkable fact that no one—not even Highs himself—appears openly to have put forward the claim until Guest published his first book in 1823, although the controversy over Arkwright’s patents, in which Highs figured so prominently, afforded many opportunities.

Yet, notwithstanding these difficulties, it is not easy to put aside as baseless all the evidence adduced by Guest in support of his case. That Highs was a man with an extraordinary aptitude for invention is undoubted, and it is not improbable, in the activity to discover improved methods of spinning in the sixties of the eighteenth century, that he did experiment with a machine at least similar to the jenny. At the same time, it is scarcely less probable that others did likewise.[307] As already pointed out, the jenny reproduced mechanically the hand operations necessary in spinning with the wheel, and a machine of the character of the jenny was the obvious line of advance. Although Highs was a man in whose mind the idea of the jenny was likely to originate, it is impossible, on the evidence, to say that it did so. What does seem clear is, that it was in association with Hargreaves that the jenny became a practicable machine, although when it left his hands it was not a perfect machine and quickly underwent improvements.[308] Nevertheless, it had made possible the spinning of weft with a facility before unknown, and it maintained its position in the cotton industry for a long period, when it was largely superseded by the “mule.”

Probably, as M. Mantoux suggests,[309] Hargreaves did not at first realise the importance of what had been achieved, which would explain his tardy application for a patent. Doubtless the application in 1770 was induced by the increasing use of the jenny, and by the fact that Arkwright had been sufficiently enterprising to obtain a patent for his machinery in the preceding year. That Hargreaves was unfortunate in his patent need not be questioned, but it is some satisfaction to know, on the authority of Baines and others,[310] that in his business at Nottingham, where he and his partner, Thomas James, are claimed to have established the first cotton-mill in the world,[311] he was at least moderately successful.

Whatever Hargreaves’ success may have been, there can be no question of the success attained by Richard Arkwright. That Arkwright was a great inventor may be disputed, but that he was a great man of business it is impossible to deny. It may be stated with some confidence that, had his name not been associated with the invention of machinery, he would have gained a prominent place in the early stages of modern industry. All that is known of his career supports the view. It was pre-eminently this characteristic which distinguished him from his less fortunate contemporaries. Whether the idea of spinning by rollers was his own or not, it is clear that when he left Preston for Nottingham in 1768, he realised that he had in his possession an invention which, with the aid of capital, would bring him material success, and he was able to convince others of the fact. His association with Samuel Need and Jedediah Strutt[312]—particularly with the latter—was the tactical point in his career in the cotton industry. Strutt, by previous inventions, had already shown his ability as a mechanician[313]; he was also an established business man and a capitalist, able to realise the possibilities of Arkwright’s machinery. In every respect he was an ideal partner for Arkwright, and there can be little doubt that, if all the facts were known, much of the improvement of the machinery would have to be ascribed to him: the recorded instance of his rubbing the spinning rollers with chalk to prevent the cotton sticking to them is significant.[314]

With Arkwright thus established, with his machinery with its potentialities, in the very district where silk-mills—the precursors of cotton-mills—had begun to arise more than a generation before,[315] the modern cotton industry organised on the lines of the factory system was inevitably born. It should be borne in mind that in the twelve years during which the privileges of the patents were enjoyed Arkwright and his partners did not merely hold the patents and draw premiums from them. In 1771 they erected their factory at Cromford in which, eight years later, three hundred workpeople were said to be employed. This was followed in 1773 by another at Derby, erected for the specific purpose of carrying on the new manufacture of calico. In 1776 another factory was erected at Belper; about the same time the one at Birkacre was established; and in 1780 the one at Manchester was erected, which was said to have cost £4000, and to be sufficiently large to contain six hundred workpeople.[316]

In 1782 it was estimated by Arkwright and his partners that they had £30,000 embodied in factories, while licences for the use of the patent machinery had been issued to “adventurers” in the counties of Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, Worcester, Stafford, York, Hertford and Lancaster, in connection with which these men had invested at least £60,000. Altogether, at this time, it was claimed, the cotton industry thus organised employed “upwards of five thousand persons, and a capital on the whole of not less than £200,000.”[317] According to Arkwright’s statement, “it was not till upwards of five years had elapsed after obtaining his first patent, and more than £12,000 had been expended in machinery and buildings, that any profit accrued to himself and partners.”[318] This date would roughly coincide with the Act they obtained relating to the manufacture and sale of calicoes, and with the grant of the second patent.

Witness to the progress that was being made after this date is borne by the infringements of the patents, which led to the institution of nine actions by Arkwright, only one of which came to trial in 1781. It is quite certain that privileges such as Arkwright enjoyed were not viewed with favour in Manchester. Since February, 1774, a Committee for the Protection of Trade had existed in the town, and continued to exist until July, 1781, when it was succeeded by another, representative of the Cotton and Linen, the Silk, and the Smallware Manufacturers of Manchester and District.[319]

Judging from the frequent notices published in the newspapers by the first committee, its activities seem to have largely consisted in keeping the inhabitants of the town on tenterhooks regarding the presence of foreigners, who had come for the purpose of carrying away trade secrets, and who, apparently, adopted the most dramatic methods to discover them. However, the committee was interested in other matters, among which was the question of patents. In 1776 a notice appeared warning the public against infringing a patent which had been granted to a man named Wolstenholme, for the manufacture of cotton velveteen. Before very long the committee also issued a notice expressing the opinion that the invention to which the patent referred was not new, and that any person might safely manufacture the cloth without being liable to damages.[320] There can be little doubt as to the side on which the sympathies of Manchester manufacturers lay when Arkwright instituted his actions in 1781.

In February of that year a notice appeared[321] drawing attention to the fact that Arkwright had served several persons in Manchester and neighbourhood with writs for infringing one or both of his patents, and inviting those concerned to attend a meeting. In the following month[322] another meeting was called of merchants, manufacturers, and others, interested in the cotton trade of the town and neighbourhood, to consider the most effectual means of obtaining free and general use of the engines and inventions for the manufacturing of cotton, and for opposing attempts to obtain a monopoly. The leader in this movement was Mr. Robert Peel, later Sir Robert Peel, the father of the statesman, who, at the time, was building up even a greater concern than Arkwright’s, and to whom a revocation of the patents meant much.[323] To meet the expense of the ensuing legal proceedings a subscription was raised, twenty-two firms subscribing at the rate of 1s. a spindle employed by them.[324]

The action tried in 1781, in which a Colonel Morduant was the defendant, had reference to the infringement of the 1775 patent—the carding patent. The defence put forward was that the specification relating to it was insufficient, and on this ground the verdict went against Arkwright.[325] In the following year he drew up his Case, in which he admitted the obscurity of the specification, but claimed that his object was to prevent the introduction of his machines into other countries.[326] The main point of the Case, however, was the request it contained. Arkwright’s second patent had been declared invalid, and normally the term of the first patent would expire in July, 1783. He now requested Parliament, as a reward for the services he had rendered to the country, to consolidate the two patents, and to allow them to run for the remainder of the normal term of the second patent—until the end of 1789.[327] This request, if granted, would have preserved to him the second patent for its normal term, and have extended the life of his first patent for six and a half years.