1689-1714.] LIVERPOOL-LINEN-TRADE. 25 the traveller in the reign of Anne, having reached the flat shore in the ferry, was carried "on the shoulders of some Lancashire clown, who comes kneedeep to the boat's side to truss you up."* Liverpool, at the date of the Revolution, had no proper harbour and no quay. The trading-ships lay in the offing, and their cargoes were borne to them or from them in boats. In 1700 Liverpool had built a Dock-now known as the Old Dock. "The like of this Dock was not to be seen in any place of England, London excepted." + From the beginning of the eighteenth century the rapid progress of Liverpool may be dated. In 1709 it had eighty-four ships, and nine hundred sailors. Its Customs soon became next in amount to those of Bristol, which was only exceeded by London. Its warehouses were filled with tobacco and sugar from the Plantations. Thus Liverpool went on increasing, for a century and a half, until in 1851 it numbered three hundred and seventy-five thousand inhabitants; and the British and Foreign vessels entering the port exceeded four thousand in one year. When the detestable Slave Trade was abolished, the ruin of Liverpool was predicted. It had been engaged in that traffic from the beginning of the eighteenth century, and it strove to rival Bristol in the extent of the iniquity. Yet we must not forget that in this matter the heart of trading England was long hardened. The merchants of Lyme, in 1700, petitioned Parliament against the apprehended monopoly of the African Company; and prayed "to be allowed to trade to the plantations, and kidnap on the coast of Africa."‡ Warrington, whilst Manchester was making its dimities, was the seat of a considerable Linen trade. The table-linen, called Huckaback, was extensively made in the neighbourhood of this place. But every discouragement was given to the English linen manufacture. It was maintained that Divine Providence had appointed the especial employment of manufacturing England, and that the first acceptable sacrifice to His omnipotency was that of the flock. Ireland might grow flax and make linen, as some compensation for the injustice that had been committed towards her in absolutely prohibiting the importation of her cattle. § But let England attempt no other manufacture than the woollen manufacture, which had been for ages the support of the nation. The same dread of permitting any wear for the living or the dead but that of woollen, made the flock-masters and clothiers frantic, when printed cottons, of English production, had become not only fashionable but common in 1719. Drapers' wives, and even maid-servants and children, it is alleged, wore calicoes or printed linen, attracted by their lightness, cheapness, and gaiety of colour. The example of the gentry had corrupted the common people; and so the manufacture of light woollen stuffs would be ruined.T The result of this clamour was an Act of 1721, to preserve and encourage the Woollen and Silk Manufactures, by prohibiting the use and wear of all printed, painted, stained, or dyed Calicoes, in apparel, household stuff, or furniture.** Of course such legislation was nugatory; but here is the evidence, amongst many other proofs, of the supreme ignorance and folly of * Defoe, "Tour," vol. iii. p. 164. +Ibid., p. 168. Ibid., vol. ii. p. 195. ** 7 Geo. I. c. 7. 26 YORKSHIRE-THE CLOTHING VILLAGES. [1689-1714. law-makers, who, from the earliest days of the loom and the plough in England, have struggled to "regiment" all industry-to encourage or to prohibit-to determine what wages labourers should be paid, and what should be the profit of capitalists-to crush rising industries by taxation-to compel the people to eat dear food for the supposed benefit of the landownerand, finally, to find out that the nation was never so universally prosperous as when its industry was wholly left to the care of itself, under the guidance of God's natural laws. Yorkshire had a population at the beginning of the eighteenth century of five hundred and thirty thousand. The great woollen manufacture, chiefly of the stuffs known as Yorkshire Kerseys, had raised five centres of this manufacture, which were known as Clothing-towns-Bradford, Huddersfield, Wakefield, Halifax, Leeds. The inhabitants of these five towns are now equal to a fifth of the whole population of Yorkshire. They were, a hundred and fifty years ago, small places, but full of busy and enterprising dealers. It is noted as a remarkable proof of the importance of the commerce of this district, that a cross-post had been established to connect the West of England with the North, which post began at Plymouth and ended at Hull.* Defoe followed the course of this post-road from Liverpool to Bury, and thence to Halifax. There are few things in the books of the modern tourist that can compare with his life-like picture of this country, then in some parts almost inaccessible, but now covered with a web of railways, more complicated than in any other portion of the island. It was the end of August. The snow, even then lying on the hills, appeared alarming. At Rochdale the travellers were offered a guide; but they apprehended no danger, and went on, satisfied with a description of the land-marks. They ascended Blackstone Edge amidst a snow-storm, but the way down was a very frightful one. In the valley they had to cross a brook knee-deep. Again they had to mount a hill, and again to cross a stream; and in a journey of eight miles they repeated this labour eight times, much to their discontent. The tourist records not the picturesque beauties of these Yorkshire valleys; but he has given us a charming sketch of their industry. As he approached nearer to Halifax the houses were closer together, in every bottom and on every hill-side. After the third hill was passed, the country became one continued village, though every way mountainous; and as the day cleared up, he could see at every house a tenter, and on almost every tenter a piece of white cloth, sparkling in the sun. Every house on the hill-side had its little rill, conveyed in gutters from the springs above; and on the heights there was coal, so that the great necessaries of the manufacture were close at hand. In every house the women were carding and spinning. The men were some at the loom, some at the dyeing-vat. Not an idle person was to be seen. The corn of this region, and of other parts of the great clothing district, was supplied from the East Riding, and from Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire. In the autumn the markets for black cattle were prodigiously thronged, for the clothiers then bought as many oxen as would serve their families for the whole year, salted, and hung up in the smoke to dry. One product of Yorkshire was abundant amongst them-"the store of good ale which flows * Defoe, "Tour," vol. iii. p. 72. 1689-1714.] LEEDS SHEFFIELD-HULL. 27 plentifully in the most mountainous part of this country." The domestic system of the cloth-making villages of Yorkshire has not been wholly driven out by the factory system; but it is very different from the time when the clothier kept "his one horse to fetch home his wool and his provisions from the market, to carry his yarn to the spinners, his manufacture to the fullingmill, and, when finished, to the market to be sold." * If the inhabitants of the clothing villages are now essentially different in their mode of life, how much more striking is the difference between the Leeds of queen Anne and the Leeds that assembled a quarter of a million of people to greet queen Victoria in 1858. The great cloth-market of Leeds was, in the seventeenth century, kept upon the bridge over the Aire. As the market increased it was removed to the High-street. From the Bridge to the Market-house tressels were placed in the street, and a temporary counter was formed. The clothiers came in from the country, few bringing more than one piece of cloth; and, after the refreshment of a pot of ale, a bowl of porridge, and a trencher of beef, regularly provided for twopence by the public-house keepers, they were at their tressels by six o'clock in summer and by seven in winter. Each clothier placed his cloth lengthwise upon the counter;-"a mercantile regiment drawn up in line." The factors come; examine the cloth; and conclude a bargain in a whisper. In a short time the clothiers begin to move, each bearing his piece of cloth to the buyer's house. In an hour the business is over, and the market is left to the shoemakers, hardware-men, and other retailers. Such was the Defoe, "Tour," pp. 73-84. 28 THE GREENLAND TRADE-NEWCASTLE. [1689-1714. Cloth-market also at Halifax and Bradford, before the days of the Cloth Hall of Leeds, which was built in 1711.* The Linen manufacture of Yorkshire did not then exist. There was no flax-factory to give employment to a thousand spinners under one roof, attending upon the movements of innumerable steam-driven wheels and spindles. Yet in the small industry of the West Riding in the eighteenth century, we see the germ of its gigantic operations in the nineteenth; and we are by no means sure that in the twentieth century the mighty industry of our own day may not be looked upon as an imperfect development of the resources of English wealth and energy. Sheffield had been famous for its Cutlery from the time of Edward III. At the end of the seventeenth century it had machinery which had lent no aid to the fabrication of the whittle which Chaucer's Miller of Trumpington wore in his hose. Sheffield had one mill for turning grindstones. The "grinders" of Sheffield are now of themselves a large population. It was boasted that around Sheffield were six iron-furnaces, supplied by its neighbouring woods. How many wood-furnaces would now be required for the production of its steel, and for the almost innumerable products of this great metropolis of steel, giving employment to a population of a hundred and fifty thousand? Hull was an exceedingly prosperous port at the beginning of the eighteenth century; although it had no dock till 1788. Its commerce on the Northern shore of the Humber included shipments to London, to Holland, and to the Baltic, of the woollens of the West Riding, the hardwares of Sheffield, and the lead of Derbyshire. Its imports were of iron, copper, flax, and linen. But the exports of corn from Hull exceeded those of any other port. One trade, however, was lost to Hull at this period. An Act of 1692 recites that "the trade to Greenland and the Greenland seas, in the fishing for Whales there, hath been heretofore a very beneficial trade to this kingdom;" and the preamble concludes by saying that "the said trade is now quite decayed and lost." The Company then established had little success; and the Whale Fishery was not resumed till 1750. England had little need of oil during the first half of the eighteenth century; for London and all other towns were lighted chiefly by lanterns and link-boys. When light could no longer be dispensed with, the parliament granted a heavy bounty to all ships engaged in the Whale Fishery; and many ships were sent out "as much certainly in the view of catching the bounty as of catching the whales."+ The whales, however, shifted their course; and the Greenland fishery came nearly to an end, in spite of the Act "for the regaining, encouraging, and settling the Greenland trade." The tourist whom we have followed in his observant course, says that from Durham to Newcastle the mountains of Coal, lying at the mouth of numerous pits, gave a view of the unexhausted store which supplies not only London but all the South part of England. The people of London, he remarks, when they see the prodigious fleets of ships which come constantly in with coal for that increasing city, wonder whence they come, and "that they do not bring the whole country away." The quantity of sea-borne coal brought to London Thoresby's "Leeds" and Defoe's "Tour. + M'Culloch, "Statistics," vol. i p. 609 (ed. 1839). 4 Gul, & Mar. c. 17. 1689-1714.] CUMBERLAND AND WESTMORLAND. 29 in 1856 was above three million tons, or ten times the amount required about the end of the seventeenth century. But the foreign export of coal from the northern pits is now enormous; and large quantities are borne by railway and canal. It has been calculated that if three million five hundred thousand tons of coals were raised annually, it would require a period of seventeen hundred years to exhaust the coal-pits of Durham and Northumberland. The colliers of the Thames will not speedily "bring the whole country away." The wondrous coal-trade, and the other industries of the towns of Newcastle, Tynemouth, Gateshead, South Shields, and Sunderland, have raised up a population of nearly two hundred and fifty thousand, being considerably in excess of the entire population of Northumberland and Durham in the early part of the eighteenth century. But we must not forget that the vast expansion of mining and manufacturing industry which we have recorded in this our general view, may be dated, in great part, from a Private Bill of the tenth year of the reign of William III., entitled "An Act for the encouragement of a new Invention of Thomas Savery, for raising Water, and occasioning Motion in all sorts of Mill-Work, by the impellant force of Fire." Nor must we overlook the fact, that in the time of Charles II., Roger North describes the admiration of his brother at the ingenuity of the coal-workers of Newcastle, whose "manner of carriage was, by laying rails of timber, from the colliery down to the river, exactly straight and parallel; and bulky carts are made with four rowlets fitting these rails; whereby the carriage is so easy that one horse will draw four or five chaldron of coals, and is an immense benefit to the coal-merchant." * The population of Cumberland and of Westmorland was, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, by far the smallest of any English county. The two counties did not contain more than twenty-one thousand houses, and a hundred and six thousand inhabitants. They had increased by one-half in 1801; which number was again increased by another half in 1851. They did not contribute much more than Rutland to the Aid of 1689. The Fells of Westmorland were held to be almost impassable. Kirkby-Lonsdale and Kirkby-Stephen, Appleby and Kendal, were considered pleasant manufacturing towns; but all the rest of the district was proclaimed to be wild, barren, and horrible. Penrith was said to be a handsome market-town, and of good trade. The people made woollen cloth, as they had made from the old times when the outlaws of Sherwood were clothed in Kendal Green. Packhorses travelled about the villages with cloth; and the pedlar continued to be the principal merchant, as he was up to the days of "The Excursion." Whitehaven was a port for shipping coals, chiefly to Ireland. The copper-mines of the Derwent Fells, which had been wrought in search of gold, in the time of queen Elizabeth, had been abandoned. The Black Lead mine of Borrowdale had also been worked at that period: it continued to be worked in the days when pencils were in small demand; and it still yields its rare and valuable produce, but in quantities unequal to the demand of our own times. After the Union, the castles and great houses of the Border went most of them to ruin. Carlisle had its Cathedral, its Castle, and its Walls; but it was a small city of old buildings; and its population of twenty-six thousand had to "Life of Lord Guilford." |