Living Through the Industrial Revolution

Stella Davies

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415378406
• eBook ISBN: 9781136585944
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

First published in 1966, this revealing study looks closely into the lives of the men, women and children working in mines, workshops, factories and farms during the industrial revolution. It investigates the inventors whose new machines made the industrial revolution possible, and reflects on the new type of employer whose enterprise and energy in linking machine and labour power formed a new society.

Where possible, contemporary accounts, letters, diaries and reports have been used so that the words of those living through this remarkable time can be heard - the words and thoughts of masters, workpeople, apprentice children, 'improving landlords' and farm labourers illuminate the prevailing attitudes of the period. An introductory chapter outlines previous methods of living and working and shows the first movements towards the industrial revolution.

Describing successes and failures, lives of impoverishment and hardship, fortunes made and, sometimes, lost, and the effects of the new society, this enlightening study investigates how early struggles to cope with almost overwhelming problems are now seen as the beginnings of the comparatively comfortable conditions we benefit from today.

I

Making, Buying and Selling

FOR most people who earn their living, the working day begins with the sound of an alarm clock, a hurried breakfast and a journey. By train, bus, car, bicycle or on foot vast throngs of people make their way to factories, shops or offices, where they work in association with others to produce, distribute or sell the goods which society requires. This is so usual that we take it for granted but it was not always so. That these conditions exist today is the consequence of certain changes which took place during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Perhaps the greatest change was the use of power to drive machines, for this meant that a mounting volume of goods became available instead of the thin trickle previously made by hand. Moreover, the use of power-driven machines made far-reaching changes in ways of living.

Other changes in production took place. In agriculture, mining, iron and steel making, textiles, machines were introduced and improved; transport was made quicker and easier; new methods of organization were evolved. There is no precise date for these advances but in the years between 1760–1830 change was so rapid that the period became known as that of the Industrial Revolution. It is not a happy description, for revolutions suggest an overthrow or destruction of the past and a starting again on entirely new lines. This was far from being so during the industrial revolution. Many changes had taken place over previous centuries which led up to it and made it possible. After 1830 methods of production continued to evolve and there were profound alterations in society, many of them the direct result of the industrial revolution or of the need to deal with the problems of which it was the cause. So, in order to understand what happened in those fateful seventy years which have influenced our lives to the extent that we live in their aftermath, it is necessary to look both forwards and backwards from them. Let us first look backwards.

In small and simple societies, most of the things that are needed are made on the spot, using materials that are to hand or which can easily be transported. There is little division of labour except between men and women for nearly everybody can make the articles which are in common use. For example, the making of furs into clothing was the job of all Eskimo women, there was no special dressmaker or tailor; hunting reindeer or walrus was the job of all the men. Nevertheless, even in primitive societies, tools and weapons came to be made by specialists who became skilled by concentrating on a particular job. When men learned how to mine and fashion gold, tin, copper and iron, specialization was essential, for the processes of manufacturing metals are long and intricate and the ores which contain them are not found everywhere. They have to be sought and transported. This can best be done if the metal-workers are not concerned with growing their own food. A further division of labour followed: farmers grew food and exchanged some of it for the products of the metalworkers’ craft. Other specializations arose: pot-making, wood- and leather-working, for example. Because the work was done with simple tools and equipment, the craftsman could work alone or in a small group and did not need elaborate premises. For many hundreds of years, clothes, furniture, tools, weapons and most of the things in use were made by craftsmen and their apprentices in workshops attached to their homes or in the home itself.

Most craftsmen lived in towns or in large villages where there was a market. Their customers came to them, ordered a chair, a pair of boots or a length of cloth. The craftsman bought the material required, made the commodity and was paid by the customer. Craftsmen organized themselves in guilds according to their craft in order to strengthen their bargaining power over merchant and customer, to maintain the standard of their work and also to help each other in times of distress. In the late Middle Ages the guild system and with it the craftsman-customer relationship began to be superseded and today it has almost disappeared in England. It can still be found over much of Asia and Africa and also in eastern Europe. Near the Acropolis in Athens, surrounded by blocks of modern flats, there are streets where tailors, shoemakers, smiths and carpenters make their goods by hand and to order at the back of open-fronted shops, much as was done when the Acropolis was built over two thousand years ago.

Luxury goods, such as silk, high quality woollen cloth, dried fruits, sugar and spices were brought into England by foreign merchants and were sold at fairs which, as distinct from markets, were not held weekly but only on special occasions. In Shakespeare’s play, The Winter’s Tale, one of the characters on his way to a fair says to himself, ‘What am I to buy for our sheepshearing feast? Three pounds of sugar, five pounds of currants, rice—what will this sister of mine do with rice? … I must have saffron to colour the pies; mace, nutmegs, seven, a race or two of ginger, four pounds of prunes.’

Home-produced goods which were only needed from time to time, such as pots, pans, horses and cattle, were sold at fairs; week-to-week requirements were bought in the local market unless they were purchased directly from the producer. Except in London and a few other large towns there were no retail shops as we understand the term. Many country towns still hold markets, often in the centre of the town. Before the advent of the motor car, the main thoroughfare was a good place for people to congregate. It is often called ‘Market Street’, even if the market is no longer held there.

Towards the end of the Middle Ages and increasingly afterwards, many goods which had been previously imported were made in England. The most important of these was woollen cloth which the English weavers had learned to make to a high quality and in great variety. Large areas of land which had hitherto been forest, heath or moorland, frequented by deer, were turned into pasture for sheep in order to increase the supply of wool. Rather than being allowed to wander over a large area, sheep do better and pasture is improved if the sheep are restricted to a limited area until the herbage is eaten and then moved to another place where the process is repeated. Also, when managed in this way, they are easier to control. Forest, heath and moorland were divided into fields by walls built with the stones which lay on the surface. This was the origin of the stone walls which climb up the hills of the Pennines, Dartmoor, the Cotswolds, the Lake district and other parts of England where rock and sheep are present.

In the sixteenth century, the enclosed fields did not reach much higher than the flanks of the hills but, as the demand for wool increased, the walls were built higher and higher, leaving less and less room for the deer. Hunting deer for food and sport, which had been very popular in the Middle Ages, was no longer easy or enjoyable; it fell out of fashion and the diminished herds were placed in deer parks where their descendants can still sometimes be seen. The enclosure of land for rearing sheep and the parkland of the Tudor gentry were the beginning of a new type of landscape in the English countryside.

Most people know that the Chancellor of England sits, in the House of Lords, on a woolsack as an acknowledgment of the value of wool to England during the Middle Ages. The making of woollen cloth was even more profitable because the value of the labour involved in making an article increases its value over that of the raw material. When London Bridge was rebuilt in the sixteenth century, the piers of the bridge were founded on woolsacks. They made a firm yet elastic base and they were also regarded as a symbol of the importance of wool to the port of London. England benefited greatly by the trade in woollen cloth and many people grew rich as a consequence. The comfortless medieval house with little privacy, hardly any furniture and a fire in the middle of the one large room fell into disuse. Tudor halls with glass windows, oak panelling, ornamental fireplaces set in chimneys, joined tables instead of trestles and four-poster feather beds were built for sheep farmers and cloth merchants. The great landlords no longer lived in grim stone castles but in mansions set about with gardens and orchards.

The function of the merchant developed and altered during the Tudor period. In addition to importing goods from abroad, he had always been concerned with getting the goods to the customer by buying them from the producer and arranging for their transport. This side of his work grew as more home-produced goods became available. Although many producers of woollen cloth took their ‘piece’ to the local market and sold it themselves, others lived in districts remote from centres of population so more cloth was made than could be absorbed locally. The bulk of cloth made by one weaver was small; a merchant was needed to collect a sufficient number of pieces to make transport to London an economic proposition. In London, the demand was greater and cloth could be shipped abroad.

The need for a merchant was particularly great in areas like the Pennine country which had been very thinly populated before the sixteenth century. With the introduction of cloth-making, the north of England began to fill up but the pattern of settlement was different from that made in earlier times. In the Middle Ages, most people lived either in towns or in villages as they do now though, by modern standards, both towns and villages were very small. The isolated dwelling or tiny hamlet was exceptional. From the sixteenth century onward, farm-houses and hamlets of half a dozen or so cottages were built on the heaths, on the edges of the mosses, in clearings in the woodlands and on the slopes of the hills.

Wool from the sheep on the newly enclosed pastures about the isolated settlements was spun and woven in the farm-houses and cottages. Farming in the north was mainly concerned with cattle and sheep, for climate and soil made corn-growing difficult. In arable country, threshing corn with a flail by hand kept farm-workers busy in the winter. Cattle and sheep needed little attention for all but the breeding stock were slaughtered and salted in November. A home industry provided work in winter and the money earned paid the rent.

The demand for wool soon outstripped the local supply, even for the weavers on the farms and more so for the cottagers who had little or no land. Merchants responded to local shortages by buying wool in other districts and selling it to the weavers. By the seventeenth century they were bringing wool into the Pennine country from Wales, Ireland, the Lake district and from the Cheviot hills on the borders of Scotland. Finished cloth needs many more processes than spinning and weaving. Merchants arranged for the transport of unfinished cloth from the weaver to the fuller, the dyer and the shearers, who cut the surface to produce a nap. Cloth often travelled a considerable distance and passed through a number of hands.

A London merchant would come to Lancashire ‘to provide and bespeak the making of the cloths he wanted, employing an agent to receive the cloth so ordered, get it fulled at Middleton, dressed by the shearmen at Manchester and Salford’ and forward it to London. The agent bought the cloth in the hamlets and villages in the country to the north of Manchester. This complicated organization of the cloth trade was reported in the seventeenth century. It was based on small groups of people working in their homes as in earlier times but now these units of production were scattered over the countryside. The producers depended increasingly on merchants for their supply of raw material and for the disposal of the goods they made.

Merchants were called by various names, all meaning much the same thing: middlemen, traders, clothiers, chapmen, factors, tackmen. The term ‘merchant’ was commonly used to describe those in a large way of business; the other terms were used for the smaller men who worked on their own account or as go-betweens for the large merchants and small producers. This method of making and selling goods is called the ‘Domestic System’. The scattered groups of workers used tools or simple machines which were operated by hand or foot. Quantities of goods were made and marketed in this way between the reign of Queen Elizabeth I and the end of the eighteenth century. The domestic system was adopted not only for cloth-making but for many other commodities and in some instances it lasted into modern times.

The history of the Mosley family shows clearly how the system worked in relation to the merchants. The Mosleys were originally tenant farmers in Withington, a village about five miles from Manchester, which, in the sixteenth century, was also a village though a large one. The Mosleys had some arable land and, near to their farm, there was a large stretch of uncultivated grassland called Barlow Moor and here the villagers pastured their sheep and cattle. The first Mosley of whom there is any record was called Jenkyn and, in 1465, he married a wife who brought £50 to the marriage as a dowry, at that time quite a substantial sum for a farmer. Jenkyn had several sons; some of them continued to farm; three of the younger ones became merchants, travelling the countryside round Manchester, buying cloth from the weavers.

A grandson, Oswald, built a house with a warehouse on the banks of the Medlock, now a murky stream but then pleasant enough to have a garden and orchard running down to it. His brother, Nicholas, organized the collection of the cloth and Oswald arranged for its transport to London where another brother saw to its sale. In 1567, when Nicholas was about forty years of age, the London brother died, so Nicholas went to London and took over the selling side of the business, leaving Oswald to run the buying side from Manchester. The Mosleys prospered. Oswald became an important local figure and held many offices in connection with local administration. He was, at one time or another, overseer of the fountains which supplied Manchester with water, tax collector, supervisor of the cleansing of the ditch which ran through the town and Reeve, that is, representative of the people at the Lord of the Manor’s court.

Nicholas had a stand in Blackwell Hall, the great cloth market in London. Towards the end of his life he was made Lord Mayor of London. Many merchants attained this honour from lowly beginnings, thus giving rise to the legend of Dick Whittington. Nicholas went back to Manchester for his last years. He purchased the manors of Manchester and Withington. He built, on the outskirts of Withington, a handsome stone hall with mullion windows, an ornamented roof, gardens and an orchard. Here he died at the age of 85. While his body was being prepared for burial, £400 in gold was found in his feather bed. He had a large family and provided well for them, leaving his eldest son £1,000 a year and to the others proportionately.

Oswald also lived to a great age. He moved from the house on the bank of the Medlock to a large hall which he built in Ancoats, then a pleasant country district, now a slum. An interesting pair of brasses in Manchester Cathedral commemorate Oswald and his wife and family. One shows Oswald and his wife, his five sons and three daughters; the other shows Oswald’s eldest son, also named Oswald, his wife and also five sons and three daughters. In their lives, Nicholas and Oswald almost spanned the sixteenth century. During this time Manchester, from being an obscure agricultural village, developed rapidly into an important centre of industry.

Not all merchants did as well or operated on as large a scale as the Mosleys. With goods and money passing through so many hands many middlemen had difficulty in collecting debts and so fell into debt themselves. Richard Heywood, of Little Lever, was the son of a carpenter who also had a farm which supplied most of their food. Richard and his father, as well as attending to the farm and carpentering, also wove fustian, a cheap coarse cloth made of a mixture of wool and linen. Their work did not lack variety. Richard married when he was 19 years old and set up as a trader. Soon, he was heavily in debt and had to ‘skulk in holes and flee’. For a year he and his wife lived in hiding for fear of his creditors, who had obtained a summons against him for his arrest. Richard was helped by his father and ‘many other friends whom he raised up beyond expectation’ and after a while he was able to pay some of his debts and start trading for a London merchant. All went well for a time. Richard completed the payment of the money he owed, educated two of his sons for the Church and gave his four daughters £60 each as a dowry. He bought a house and some land and invested some of his money in ‘colepits’, small coalmining ventures which were just beginning in Lancashire and Cheshire.

When he was nearing 60 years of age, his London merchant began to get behind with the payments for the cloth sent to him by Richard. Again Richard found himself in serious difficulties. His son, Oliver, from whose diaries this account is taken, wrote, ‘This, together with his son’s prodigality, his own old age and forgetfulness but chiefly by the hand of God, he was cast into debt of £1,200; but by the blessing of God and the pains of some relations he got wrestled through and paid to the full the most considerable debts and sold most of his land.’

The affairs of a Rochdale middleman were even more unfortunate. In this instance three people were concerned: a London merchant called Bernard Emott, a Manchester agent and a Rochdale factor. The factor collected the pieces of cloth from the weavers, the agent arranged for the pieces to be finished and the London merchant exported them. The Rochdale factor died and his widow tried to carry on the business. In 1647, she contracted through the agent to supply Emott with five packs of cloth, each pack to contain seven pieces, at £23 15s. a pack. The cloth was delivered by instalments but the widow was unable to obtain the money from Emott. The widow pled that ‘she, but a woman and living distant from there, should be at great stress to get her money, she not being able to travel to London’. She already had £120 ‘laid forth’ in payment to the weavers. She employed a lawyer to bring pressure on Emott but he does not seem to have been successful for four years later the widow was still unpaid.

The difficulty in getting their money, experienced by Richard Heywood and the Rochdale widow was often repeated but, in general, the majority of people must have honoured their obligations or the credit system would have broken down. Society cannot hold together unless most of its members keep the rules. Sometimes, in credit transactions, a pledge would be demanded, such as a silver cup or a gold ring or a mortgage might be taken on house or land. When the weaver’s reputation for honesty was well established, the factor would deliver the wool ‘on trust to the buyer without speciality or witness and only enter the same in their books’.

An amusing example of belated honesty is shown in the following quotation from the will of a farmer-weaver: ‘To the woolman in respect that I bought a pack of wool from him which, when I weighed it, I found was more by a stone than I bought.’ The weaver had not been able to bring himself to tell the wool dealer of the mistake, though evidently it weighed on his conscience. Nevertheless, as restitution was only to be made after his death, it would be his heir and not he who would foot the bill.

Experience in making goods for the market and in buying and selling grew steadily until, by the eighteenth century, there were large numbers of people who earned their living, or part of it, in this manner. The way was eased and a springboard was provided for the immense expansion of trade and industry which resulted from the industrial revolution. Over large areas of the English countryside the population was no longer engaged only in agriculture. They were making many different kinds of things to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Author Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• 1 Making, Buying and Selling
• 2 The Domestic Industries
• 3 A New Method of Transport
• 4 The New Machines
• 5 The Giant, Steam
• 6 Men of Iron
• 7 Farms and Farmworkers
• 8 The Fight for Reform
• 9 An End and A Beginning
• Appendices
• Index of Persons And Places