Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

your new shoes from the village cordwainer you could now visit the shoe-dealer in
Redditch and choose from a wider variety.
After 1800 the Needle District, (now with Alcester on board), may have specialised
in the manufacture of needles and associated items, but in other ways the occupations on
view in the study area were more varied than in earlier times, as discussed in this brief
survey of different parishes below.
Communities of different sizes and different types
Although tables in Chapters 4 to 7 analysed occupational structure in different
zones, the structure for individual parishes was mainly confined to comments in the text.
Here I will briefly examine different communities and their respective occupational
structures and discuss some of the reasons for differences between communities. Patten
noted that ‘increasing settlement size tended to be accompanied by increasing numbers [of
occupations] and increasing specialization of function.’ 17
As various writers have
indicated, this begs the question: how self-contained was each settlement and how much
did it rely on its neighbouring towns and villages for certain services? 18
Tables 8.9 to 8.12 show the number of different male occupations in the parishes of
the study area in probate 1660-1858. They are grouped in geographic zones but population
totals from the 1801 census are included. 19
Although of course the parishes grew at
17 J. Patten, ‘Village and town: an occupational study’, Agric. Hist. Rev., 20, (1972), p. 8.
18 For example, Patten, ibid., p. 16. Brown in Dyer, The Self-contained Village?, pp. 114-137, and Mills,
Rural Community History from Trade Directories.
19 Billesley (population 27 in 1801) is included with its neighbour, Haselor, (population 306).
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