Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

‘proprietor of the gasworks’. 332
The new manufacturing town was not chartered to hold a
market, but at some time, (probably around 1800), Saturday became its unofficial market
day, perhaps replacing the Saturday markets in Feckenham and Alvechurch. 333 The 1841
census lists a couple of ‘market-women’ in rural parts of Feckenham parish, who may
have worked at a market or carried produce to various market towns. Although
permanent retail outlets and the wider range of goods they now offered for sale began to
change the nature of the traditional fairs in this zone, other fairs and unofficial markets
probably grew up in the nineteenth century to serve the growing communities. 334
Several families in the Feckenham Forest had traditionally worked as carriers
within the Droitwich salt-trade. 335
Before 1750 many such ‘salters’ appear in the records,
suggesting quite an extensive involvement in the trade by local families, especially in
Feckenham parish. Probate documents shed some light on the salters’ trade. When
Humphrey Berrick died in 1682, he was described as a yeoman.
His farming
involvement was minimal, but his ‘three little mares, four old bags and two pannells
(panier bags)(£2-10s)’ indicate his family’s occupation of delivering salt, presumably by
packhorse. 336
Three of his sons are described as salters in Feckenham parish register, and
he leaves his ‘salt-bags’ to one of the three, Francis Berrick, later described as both
husbandman and ‘salt-carrier’. Francis Berrick’s ‘two mares, three pair of traces,
pannells, baggs, collars and holmes’ (worth £4-12-0) suggest that, like his predecessors,
332 Bradford, Old Redditch, pp. 38-39. WoRO, 1851 census and Slater’s Worcestershire Directory 1850.
333 Kelly’s Worcestershire Directory 1892 mentions this unchartered market, but earlier directories
overlook it.
334 The Cherry Wake in Headless Cross and a market in Astwood Bank, (which were both taking place by
1900), may have started before 1850.
335 Large, ‘Economic and social change in North Worcestershire during the seventeenth century’, p. 132.
Perhaps numbers of salters had been greater before the disafforestation (c. 1630) reduced the amount of
common grazing on the waste in Feckenham Manor by three-quarters.
336 WoRO, probate of Humphrey Berrick, Feckenham , yeoman, 1682, £14-13-8.
317