Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

Textiles, clothing and paper
Ramsay states ‘Clothmaking was an occupation almost as ubiquitous as baking
and brewing: weaving perhaps only a little less, spinning rather more so.’ 74
Everitt
calculates that in early Stuart England the woollen industries may have occupied a
quarter of the cottage-farming population in England and nearly a half in the midlands. 75
As noted from the 1608 muster, the textile trade was present in the Gloucestershire
parishes of the study area, some families plying their trade for several generations. 76
The
unit of production was indeed the family, and the industrial organisation in
Gloucestershire (and no doubt the rest of the study area) was the domestic or putting-out
system ‘generally prevalent throughout the English woollen textile industry’. 77
In the late seventeenth century probate records give some pointers as to the
weavers’ status; some owned their home, while others rented. 78
John Bodily owned
‘two loomes for a weaver trade’ worth £1-2-0. However, the main part of his inventory
value (£34 out of £38-7-0) was ‘land in the feilds with appurtenances thereunto
belonging’, a reminder that most village craftsmen at the time were still heavily involved
in agriculture, in which they often invested more capital than in their craft. 79
In the same
village we find a poor cloth-worker, but many textile workers were too impoverished to
74 G. Ramsay, The English Woollen Industry, 1500-1750, (London, Macmillan, 1982), p. 32.
75 A. Everitt in J. Thirsk, Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1500-1640, vol. IV, (Cambridge, CUP,
1967), p. 425.
76 See Appendix 9.
77 Ramsay, The English Woollen Industry, pp. 26-7. WoRO, marriage licence of Samuel Smith, Badsey,
1681, was witnessed by his father, Anthony Smith, Badsey, clothworker, and also by Richard Morse,
Cirencester, clothier. Badsey lies just outside this zone. This suggests links between local textile workers
and those of Cirencester and South Gloucestershire.
78 Glos RO, probate of Richard Wells, Welford, weaver, 1672, (no inventory), and of Thomas Battersby,
Welford, weaver, 1685, £28-13-0.
79 Glos RO, probate of John Bodily, Pebworth, (no occupation given), 1684, £38-7-0.
161