Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

osy picture than Rowlands of the metalworker’s lot in the first half of the eighteenth
century. She suggests that the metalworkers’ concentration on their trade and loss of
commonland and consequent loss of income from farming caused them to lose their
earlier security. They became more vulnerable to falling piecework rates and
commenced the downward journey into the poverty and squalor noted by Engels a
hundred years later. 99
The sources available in the previous period are still available in Period B, but are
now joined by newspapers, inland revenue apprenticeship books and an increasing
number of parish records relating to apprentices, settlement and the poor. Occupational
information is consistently given in the registers of a handful of parishes up to 1708 and
in Studley and Coughton registers to 1769. Probate inventories continue throughout this
period, but by the final decade are becoming less detailed and less consistent and
therefore less useful to the historian.
Period C: 1750-1799
This period includes what used to be regarded as the take-off point for the classic
years of the Industrial Revolution. Although the industrial workforce had been wellestablished
and growing in earlier periods, in the second half of the eighteenth century
sustained population growth, a more developed infrastructure, commercial enterprise and
other factors allowed the national industrialisation process to move up a gear. 100
Commerce thrived as better communications spread. The cross-fertilisation of ideas was
99 P. Frost, ‘Yeomen and metalsmiths: livestock in the dual economy in South Staffordshire 1560-1720’,
Ag. Hist. Rev., 29, (1981), p. 41.
100 J. Mokyr in Floud and Johnson, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. 1, pp. 1-27.
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