Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

fathers in Period D. The 1841 census records some 3% of adult males as shoemakers. 112
Both probate and marriage licence data suggest a fall in other leatherworkers after 1800,
while in baptisms the percentage continues to fall between 1813 and 1840. 113
As may be expected, in the earlier periods tanners were more numerous in this
woodland area than in Zone B, making use of the local availability of oak-bark, lime and
hides. Although listed in probate in 1676 as a yeoman, Moses Mansell was also a tanner.
A wealthy man, with links far afield, he financed various people locally and served the
parish in various capacities. 114
Rather than possessing expertise in tanning it may be that
some yeomen families with capital and space to spare invested in what was an
established, lucrative, rural industry at the time. 115
In 1750 another tanner, Henry Ballard, left property in trust for his daughter
without her husband, Oliver Williams, tanner, ‘intermeddling’. The house and tanyard
and a £25 a year estate, were advertised to be let the following year. 116
References to
tanners had decreased since 1750, and the son-in-law, Oliver Williams, was apparently
the last tanner in this sub-district. 117
After 1775 the tanners had disappeared, or, if they
were farming tanners, farming was now prioritised and so references to tanning cease.
Skinners and glovers, abounded in these woodland parishes in Stuart times,
probably employing many more unrecorded men and women, (for example sewing the
112 Table 6.8. Also 1.9% of younger males with known occupations were in the shoe trade.
113 Tables 6.2, 6.4 and 6.6. Table 6.8 (1841 census) shows only 0.1% of adult males in leather trades other
than shoemaking.
114 WoRO, probate of Moses Maunsell, Inkberrow, yeoman, 1676, £407-14-0. R. Hunt and R. Jackson, The
Inkberrow Book, (Inkberrow, R. Jackson, 1974), p. 39, (quoting the parish charity report of 1847), refer to
him as a tanner and indicate that he left money for loaves to be distributed annually to poor widows of the
parish. Other families of tanners include Walford, Ballard and Cowley.
115 Buchanan, ‘Studies in the localisation of seventeenth century Worcestershire industries’, 18, p. 40,
shows that Inkberrow was one of the principal leather working parishes in the county from 1600-1650.
116 WoRO, probate of Henry Ballard, Abbots Morton, tanner, 1750. Berrow’s Worcester Journal 14 March
1751.
117 Berrow’s Worcester Journal 2 Feb 1775 shows that he was now a tanner in the market town of
Bromsgrove. He was selling off property in Abbots Morton.
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