Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

industry. 80
Some of these factors are relevant to the economic story of the study area and
are discussed below in Chapters 4 to 8.
In the early modern period ‘proto-industrial’ settlements often sprang up in woodpasture
areas such as West and South Yorkshire, the clothing region of East Somerset,
West Wiltshire and parts of Gloucestershire, and the Black Country. 81
In the study area
Zones C and D were both wood-pasture areas, but of these only Zone D can be said to
have industrialised to any extent. 82
The study area, like much of the kingdom, was badly affected by dearth and war
in the mid-seventeenth century, which created pressures on the regional and national
economy? 83
During the Civil War many local families must have lost possessions and
breadwinners and many employers their labour force. Although the study area (unlike
London) did not suffer badly from the 1665 plague, unfortunately, just as the economy
was picking up, the population was hit by an epidemic in the mid-1680s. 84
Thereafter it
appears that the area’s economy settled and thrived (for the most part) until the next great
epidemic of the late 1720s.
In Period A probate and marriage licences have been used for analysis; other
primary sources available for reference include property deeds, quarter sessions records,
estate accounts, manor records and from 1695 a handful of parish registers which give
80 Zell, Industry in the Countryside, p.229.
81 Ibid., p. 230.
82 These zones are discussed in Chapters 6 and 7.
83 P. Tenant in R. Bearman, ed., The History of an English Borough – Stratford upon Avon, 1196-1996,
(Stroud, Sutton Publishing, 1997), p. 119, discusses the frequency of troop movements in the area. S.
Hindle, ‘Dearth and the English revolution: the harvest crisis of 1647-50’, Econ. Hist. Rev., 61, (2008),
discusses poor harvests and consequent dearth in the period 1647-50, e.g. in Gloucestershire, p. 65 and
Worcestershire, p. 67.
84 This can be seen from the increased number of probate documents at the time. E. A. Wrigley in R. Floud
and P. Johnson, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. 1, (Cambridge, CUP,
2004), p. 64 shows a fall in the national population between 1681 and 1686.
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