Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

together the 1841 census has a figure of 6.2% of adult males for this zone compared with
5.2% in baptisms 1813-1840. 64
Most references to masons are in the quarrying parishes, but members of the
Yates and Smith families served the Pebworth community as masons, slaters and
plasterers over many generations. 65
Perhaps they accessed their building-stone from
Bidford and Cleeve Prior. In the 1770s Rudder describes how Pebworth had houses
‘chiefly of wattling and some of brick and fewer of stone, but there is not a good house in
the village.’ Stone was also scarce in neighbouring Dorsington, so the ‘few houses in this
village are either brick or wattled.’ Perhaps the newer buildings were of brick, as a fire in
the 1750s had destroyed several houses and the church. 66
The road-labourers and road-makers listed in Bidford’s 1831 census no doubt
made use of local stone and its by-products, perhaps transporting them outside the parish
to mend roads at some distance.
Entrepreneurs were ever hopeful of finding mineral wealth however lacking their
geological expertise at the time. Unsuccessful attempts to mine coal were made in
Salford Priors, where there was also a salt-spring. 67
The middle lias stratum of much of
this zone contains clay, but there is no documentary evidence of clay or marl extraction
here in the seventeenth century, although Salford Priors was home to a bricklayer in the
64 See Tables 5.6 and 5.8 above. In Table 5.6 (baptisms) the figures are extractive 3.7% and building 1.5%,
while those in Table 5.8 (1841 census) are extractive 0.7% and building 5.5%. The baptism registers
suggest stagnation or slight decline in the percentage of quarrymen and brickmakers in the 1830s. Perhaps
certain local quarries and clay-pits had been over-exploited, while improved transport links began to make
it economically viable to import better raw materials into the area from further afield. However, it may just
be that more extractive workers were subsumed under the term ‘masons’.
65 For example, WoRO, marriage licence of Henry Yates, Pebworth, mason, June 1721. GlosRO, marriage
licence of Edward Smith, Pebworth, slatter (slater), Aug. 1797. WoRO, BA9202/6, Pebworth
churchwardens’accounts, June 1760: ‘Thomas Smith, plaister his bill’.
66 Rudder, A New History of Gloucestershire, p. 413. The church was re-built in brick.
67 VCH Warwickshire, iii, p. 158. There is no evidence that the salt-spring was ever exploited
commercially as were the salt-springs at Droitwich and Stoke Prior.
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