Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

‘to learn the art and mystery of a spinster’. 94
The 1841 census still reveals a few females
in the textile trade: for example, a wool-carder and an eighty year-old spinner, but they
belonged to a dying breed of domestic textile workers hereabouts. 95
Despite the rarity of references to flax and hemp in probate inventories, they were
grown in the parish. 96
Throughout the two centuries of this study Alcester had its own
rope-makers, hemp-dressers and flax-dressers. In 1698 the flax-dresser Joseph Alcox
dealt over a wide area, with stores of flax as far away as Dudley. 97
Another flax-dresser
cum hemp-dresser, William Edkins, had a good supply of hemp and flax in his warehouse
and shop. He also owned two houses in Bleachfield Street, which lay away from the
town centre with access to the river and may be where he retted his flax and hemp. 98
In the 1750s one ropemaker doubled as a sacking-weaver, while Joseph Tilsley
advertised that he ‘makes and mends all kinds of netts’. 99
In 1830 Thomas Averill, rope
and twine manufacturer and flax-dresser, also dealt in cotton, worsted and lamb’s wool,
94 WaRO, DR360/79/15, Alcester apprentice indenture of Ann Lowder, 1694, to Henry Harbach, Alcester,
shoemaker. Presumably to learn from Harbach’s wife.
95 The lace-maker, Phoebe Day, was not born in Warwickshire; she may have learnt her trade where lacemaking
was more widespread, for instance in Bedfordshire. The 1851 census lists a female brace-maker
and another lace-maker.
96 Hemp was often grown in small plots, known locally as plecks. There are several references to
‘hemplecks’ which may suggest cultivation of hemp, but could be a corruption of ‘hen-pleck’. Although
regulations required certain crops to be mentioned in probate inventories, flax and hemp did not have to be
listed. However, WoRO, probate of Thomas Green alias Lyes, Alcester, flax-dresser, 1700, £81-10-0, does
mention twenty acres of flax growing (£80).
97 WoRO, probate of Robert Matthews, Alcester, hempdresser, 1662, £16-10-0, and of Joseph Alcox,
Alcester, flax-dresser, 1698, £228-6-6, who had flax stored at many places and also some ‘rye hemp’.
98 WoRO, probate of William Edkins, Alcester, flax-dresser/hemp-dresser, 1729, £118-10-9. J. Gover, et
al, eds., The Place-Names of Warwickshire, (Cambridge, CUP, 1970), p. 194, explains one of Alcester’s
street-names, Bleachfield Street, as a place where linen was left out to be bleached by the sun in medieval
times, suggesting the town’s long association with the linen industry. The Arrow and its tributary the Alne
were probably both used for retting flax and hemp.
99 WaRO, DR360/79/27 describes Thomas Nicholls as a sacking weaver, while WoRO, marriage licence of
Thomas Nicholls, July 1750, describes him as a ropemaker. He presumably utilised the same raw material,
hemp, for both sacks and ropes. He also kept a public house. Joseph Tilsley, barber and perukemaker,
advertised in Berrow’s Worcester Journal 10 February 1757 when he was moving his business from
Alcester to Evesham. It is not clear whether he meant all types of hair-nets or nets for other purposes too.
93