Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

Stourbridge wire-drawers. 228 None of these reasons makes this district uniquely suited to
needle production. Perhaps the industry was established here simply because of William
Lee, who may have been a local man returning to familiar territory from London.
As to the spread of the industry at this period, Jones rightly speculates that there
was a large labour force anxious to supplement wages from agriculture. The extensive
tracts of waste in this Needle District certainly allowed opportunity for settlement of such
cottage workers. As far as we can ascertain, the needlemakers did congregate on the
heathland rather than in the more established settlements, which had more enclosures and
improved farmland. 229 No doubt factors such as the Civil War, the collapse of Alcester’s
knitting industry and the recent disafforestation of Feckenham Forest were also
influential factors in providing a substantial, willing labour force. There was much
poverty in this area in the mid-seventeenth century, which may have encouraged
unemployed labourers into the trade. 230
The involvement of local landlords, such as Lord
Windsor and Sir Francis Throckmorton, in the commercial production of charcoal and the
iron-trade has been discussed above. Such landlords, (keen to make money from
industrial as well as agricultural ventures), may have joined forces with parish vestries,
(eager to lessen rising poor rates), to actively encourage the needle-trade in their manors,
228 Bromsgrove had long made wire for carding in the textile industry. It may also be that Black Country
iron was suitable for needles, as it was for nails according to Buchanan, ‘Studies in the localisation of
seventeenth century Worcestershire industries’, 19, p. 48.
229 For example in Coughton parish more needlers settled in Sambourne manor with its ‘great waste’ of
heathland rather than in Coughton manor.
230 Johnson, Warwick County Records, 3, pp. 100, 155, 185, 222, 324, quoting quarter sessions 1646-1656,
discuss illegal settlement on the commons and the problem of poor in Sambourne and Studley.
295