The Boot and Shoe Trades in London and Paris in the Long Eighteenth Century

Company petitioned the House of Lords for the enforcement of an Act of James
I preventing curriers from selling small pieces of leather, 94 as they were
"executing the trade of a shoe-maker by cutting leather". 95 However, the
company was not united. Many poorer cordwainers and most of London small
shoemakers supported the curriers' counter-petition, arguing that:
It is plain that the drift of the rich shoe-maker is to engross the business of shoe-
making in the hands of a few to the prejudice not only of the publick, but of
thousands of their own trade, who will, in all likehood, be under the necessity of
leaving their families to their respective parishes, to travel foreign countries for
bread, to the great detriment of the British nation?
The opposition of the curriers and small shoemakers was so strong that
Parliament, after long hesitation, in 1739 decided to pass a bill that repealed Jac.
I, c. 22, leaving the co-existence of small and large producers to the market.97
The example of journeymen trying to exercise the trade as small independent
shoemakers illustrates some of the problems and contradictions associated with
the status of journeymen. Under the family system the journeyman was a
member of a social and affective environment. 98 Traditionally a journeyman
was not simply a wage earner, but a member of the trade and, with his master,
of a community of tradesmen. 99 To understand the shifting roles of journeymen
in production as well as in the labour market, we need to remember that the
status of journeyman had traditionally been a transitional phase between
apprentice and master.'°° However, by the mid-eighteenth century this situation
was rapidly changing. In 1747 the Lord Major of the City decided to license
century England, the 'virtuous trade' was the part of shoemaking still controlled by the
Cordwainers' company.
1 Jac. I, c. 22 (1603).
The case of the cordwainers in behalf of themselves, and other manufacturers of leather in
this kingdom: humbly offered to the Right Honourable the House of Lords (London?, 1738). See
also M.D. George, London Life in the eighteenth century, cit., p. 197.
The Case of the middling and poorer sort of master shoe-makers.
12 Geo II, c. 25, sect. 7. GL. MS 7353: Worshipful Company of cordwainers, cit., vol. V
(3Øth April 1739). See also W.M. Stern, 'Control v. freedom in leather production', cit., pp. 441-
2.
R.S. Smith, 'The London apprentices', cit., pp. 157-61.
I.J. Prothero, Artisans and politics in early nineteenth-century London (Folkstone, 1979), p.
4.
100
1K. Ben-Amos, 'Failure to become freemen', cit., pp. 154-72. Ben-Amos, however,
underlines that since the fifteenth century an increasing number of journeymen did not become
masters.
81