Differing Responses to an Industrialising Economy - eTheses ...

of labour and communities’. 121
The transformation of English society did not progress
smoothly. The Napoleonic Wars, food shortages, social unrest and bank failures caused
periodic checks to the accelerating drive towards urbanisation and industrialisation.
In the west midlands region large and small firms introduced similar technologies,
thus restructuring the labour process and increasing the intensity of labour, ‘which
provoked major unrest in the 1830s and 1840s.’ 122
The early nineteenth century saw an increase in sources of use to the historian.
Although probate inventories are not available for this period, other records allow us to
build up a much more accurate picture of occupational structure, at least among adult
males. Alcester was the only parish covered by a trade directory in the previous period,
but all Worcestershire parishes are covered by Lewis’s 1820 Directory, and
Warwickshire parishes by the PO Directory of 1845. 123
The use of probate and marriage licence data allows comparison with earlier
periods, but from 1813 until 1840 baptism registers (now furnishing occupations of
fathers for all parishes) provide by far the most comprehensive source for male
occupational information so far. The information about labourers in the 1831 census is
projected on to the baptism data to allow us to surmise the relative share of agricultural
and non-agricultural labourers in the workforce from 1813.
General occupational information from the censuses of 1801 to 1831 is used to
provide a background to the occupational picture from other sources. The 1841 census,
despite its limitations, reveals information hidden in earlier sources, for example the role
121 Berg, The Age of Manufactures, p. 282.
122 Hudson, The Industrial Revolution, p. 126.
123 Some Warwickshire parishes apart from Alcester are referred to in earlier directories, but we have to
wait until the 1850s for coverage of the Gloucestershire parishes. Trade directories consulted for this study
are shown in Sources and Bibliography.
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