Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

Various sources show the presence of other woodworkers too, although they were
not as universal as the carpenters. Table 7.6 (baptisms 1813-1840) shows a figure of
2.7% for this group, while the 1841 census has 2.4%. 164
In the late Stuart period the Coughton Court steward’s accounts reflect the
importance of the woodlands. At a time when many animals were free to roam and graze
over a large area of commonland it was important to stop them browsing in the woods, so
payments were made for hedging, ditching and ‘railing the coppice’ and mending the
wood-gates. Some who cut the wood and worked ‘about the coppice’ may have been
specialist woodmen, but many were labourers, such as John Awkin, mentioned above.
The coppices, underwoods and heaths were harvested for rods for building and
rails for fencing and much else besides. Besom-makers, sieve-makers and teugerers (lathsplitters)
also sourced their raw materials there. 165
Such workers tended to be of labourer
class and did not figure in probate records, but their trade was well enough established to
warrant taking on apprentices. 166
The lath-splitting and sieve-making skills of the pauper
Kendrick family had been passed down from time immemorial. 167
The Kendrick family
of teugerers are not mentioned after 1770 and it could be the enclosure of the commons at
this time put paid to their free or cheap access to raw materials. The term ‘teugerer’
164 These percentages seem realistic, although individual parishes sometimes had higher concentrations of
wheelwrights, etc.
165 WaRO, Coughton parish register, 1698-1749, and WoRO, Feckenham parish register, 1703-5. I am
indebted to Michael Farr, former archivist at WaRO for the explanation of ‘teugerer’. J. Wright, English
Dialect Dictionary, vol. 6, (Oxford, OUP, 1961), p. 260, does not define ‘teugerer’, but states that ‘tugers’
were rods used in thatching (Herefordshire). I have found ‘teugerers’ in the eighteenth century from
Cheltenham and Tewkesbury in the south to Bewdley and Warwick in the north.
166 TNA, IR1/47, John Duggins, Feckenham, besom-maker, 1722, and IR1/52, George Kendrick,
Sambourne, sieve-maker, 1756.
167 For example, WoRO, marriage licence of Joseph Kendrick, Coughton (Sambourne), ‘splent-maker’,
March 1755. WaRO, Coughton baptisms 1757, refers to him as a teugerer. Both terms mean lath-maker.
WaRO, Coughton parish register 1704-1764 also refers to members of this family as sieve-makers. Other
members of the family pursued the trade in Droitwich, and WoRO, probate of Richard Kendrick,
Bromsgrove, ‘sugar’, 1592, lists his stock of wood and ‘sugar staves’.
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