Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

worked in metal. 426
Circa 1700 Coughton and Sambourne’s inhabitants pursued a
considerable number of secondary sector trades. 427
However, in the first quarter of the
eighteenth century the needle trade’s dominance emerged in this zone and then continued
for two centuries. Weavers and nailmakers retreated as the local economy specialised.
However, the need to feed Birmingham’s hardware district perhaps led to more intensive
grazing of the commons, thus limiting the spread of cottage industrial workers. 428
Agriculture remained an economically viable use of land in this zone, bereft as it was of
iron ore and coal.
Lacking mineral resources, this zone contained no Whickham. 429
More research
would be needed in order to ascertain exactly why somewhere like Sambourne became
the focus of early industrialisation. Yes, it was a wood-pasture settlement with a large
tract of commonland on which incomers could settle, but there must have been other
factors. 430
Zell comments that the Wealden’s gavelkind inheritance system encouraged
its occupants to seek out non-agricultural by-employments. 431
Perhaps Sambourne’s
Borough English inheritance customs were a factor. 432
Be that as it may, from
Sambourne and Studley the needlemaking phenomenon spread to outlying parts of
Feckenham and Tardebigge parishes including the hamlet of Redditch. The success of
426 From the three parish registers of the time which yield occupational information we find the following
percentages of the male workforce working in metal: Coughton 20%, Studley 10% and Feckenham 6%.
Even in Coughton less than half of the secondary (industrial) sector worked in metal. This shows that
specialisation was not as pronounced as in some parishes noted by Buchanan between 1600 and 1650, e. g.
in Belbroughton 70% of industrial workers were metal workers and in Dudley 90%. (Buchanan, ‘Studies
in the localisation of seventeenth century Worcestershire industries’, 19, pp. 47-53.)
427 In Coughton (with Sambourne) baptism register 1696-1707 needlemakers form 7.2% of the adult male
workforce, nailmakers 7.8%, blacksmiths 7.8% (perhaps making nails and needles as well?), bakers 5.9%,
weavers 4.6%, tanners 4.6% and besom-makers 3.3%. See also Table 7.18.
428 P. Large, ‘Urban growth and agricultural change in the West Midlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries’, in P. Clark, ed., The Transformation of English Provincial Towns,1600-1800, (London,
Hutchinson, 1984), p. 173, shows this happening in nearby Bromsgrove, Clent and Belbroughton.
429 D. Levine and K. Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society, (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991).
430 As discussed earlier in this chapter.
431 Zell, Industry in the Countryside, p. 232.
432 In the Borough English system the youngest son inherited from the father.
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