Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

domestic servants’ jobs are specified in various sources, such as footman and stablemaster
to the Earl of Plymouth. Charwomen in the censuses appear under a variety of
local spellings. 421
Throughout the two centuries travellers occasionally feature in local records,
which sometimes describe their means of earning an honest crust. 422 From 1720 to 1750
the term ‘sojourner’ appears, someone resident in the parish for longer than the average
traveller, but not legally settled there. 423
By the mid-nineteenth century so many
different occupations are now in evidence, but there were still those like John Boswell of
Mappleborough Green, ‘no occupation, blind’. 424
Summary for the Northern (Needle) District 1660-1840
In Periods A and B this zone’s farmers and craftsmen served the local populace,
but they also produced many items in large enough quantities to sell outside the zone:
cheese, cattle, corn, malt, textiles, wooden products such as ploughs and carts, leather,
shoes, gloves, nails and needles. The conversion of watermills to industrial use had
begun with the papermills on the Arrow, probably in the seventeenth century.
This zone, the least densely populated of the four zones in the seventeenth
century, attracted incomers. As in Skipp’s nearby Arden parishes, the rapidly growing
population was prepared to try a variety of by-employments to survive or thrive. 425
Settlements such as Sambourne were becoming small industrial communities, wellplaced
to partake in the midland hardware district boom, but by no means all its artisans
421 WaRO and WoRO 1841 and 1851 censuses list ‘chairwomen’, ‘charewomen’ and female ‘chairers’.
422 WaRO, Studley parish register 1716, baptism of the child of John Floyd, tinker, ‘born at William
Banks’s’. Floyd may be an attempt at showing the Welsh pronunciation of Lloyd. Several travellers seem
to have Welsh names. ‘Tinker’ here probably means a travelling mender of pots and pans.
423 For example, WaRO, Studley parish register, 1721, mentions Thomas White, sojourner.
424 WaRO, Studley baptisms 1813-1816 and QS76, jurors’ lists.
425 As is evident from the parish registers of Feckenham, Coughton and Studley circa 1700.
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