8 June 1561: A York official explains why textile manufacturing has left his city for the West Riding
Herbert Heaton. 1920. The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries, from the Earliest Times Up to the Industrial Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Get it:
.Unedited excerpt
The excerpt in the book is shorter, edited and, where applicable, translated.
The cause of the decay of the … weavers and looms for woollen [cloth] within the said city as I do understand and learn is the lack of clothmaking in the said city as was in old time accustomed, which is now increased and used in the towns of Halifax, Leeds, and Wakefield, for that not only the commodity of the watermills is there nigh at hand, but also the poor folk as spinners, carders, and other necessary work-folks for the said weaving, may there beside their hand labour, have rye, fire, and other relief good cheap, which is in this city very dear and wanting. [York Corporation Minute Books, xxiii, f. 20 a, June 8, 1561]
Comment
Comment
York Corporation minute books, 8 June 1561.
The watermills are fulling mills, which were present on the Aire and the Calder and at Burnley, Colne and Manchester before Edward III. Cloth manufacture in the West Riding did not originate with the Flemish weavers invited by him, but York and other corporate towns (Beverley, Hull, Ripon and Pontefract) long dominated both manufacture and trade. A sign of this is the far greater antiquity of the York craft guilds and their mystery plays vis-à-vis Wakefield’s guilds and Towneley plays, which were derivative and may actually have been performed elsewhere (Crump 1935).
I take it that “fire” refers to coal. Chapter II of Crump and Ghorbal’s history of the Huddersfield woollen industry deals with the physical setting principally from an 18th century perspective, but in the mid-16th century wood was increasingly scarce and domestic hearths were well able to cope with coal, and the following works pretty well transposed back a couple of centuries before the Industrial Revolution:
The well-watered but otherwise barren and inhospitable country of the Grits proved itself fitted to nurture the weaving of wool; only it needed to be in contact with the Coal Measures to create a woollen industry. No conclusion emerges from the history of the industry more clearly than that its distribution has been dependent upon the contiguity of the Lower Coal Measures and the Millstone Grits. Both had abundance of soft water and of forest; but the Coal Measures possessed greater wealth of ironstone and coal, there elevation was less, their soil deeper and habitable sites less bleak. So natural advantages weighted the scales in favour of the villages set on or near the fringe of the Lower Coal Measures. They became possessed of churches and their parishes ran far up into the hills, annexing all the Grit country with its smaller villages and townships. They became market towns and grew to be “clothing” towns – the centres of the cloth trade of their own wide parishes. With slight individual variations Huddersfield, Halifax, Bradford and Leeds on the one side, Rochdale, Bury, Burnley and Colne on the other have all risen in this way (Crump 1935).
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Tags
Tags are assigned inclusively on the basis of an entry’s original text and any comment. You may find this confusing if you only read an entry excerpt.
- 📌Bradford (73) W/G ·
- Burnley (4) W/G ·
- Bury, Greater Manchester (1) W/G ·
- Carding (3) W/G ·
- Coal measures (3), coal-bearing part of the Upper Carboniferous System, here generally underlain by Millstone Grit, W/G ·
- Coal mining (27) W/G ·
- Coal (18) W/G ·
- Colne (4) W/G ·
- Edward III (1312-1377) (5), ruled 1327-1377, noted for military successes, restoration of royal authority, evolution of parliament, Black Death W/G ·
- Fuel (1) W/G ·
- Fulling (1) W/G ·
- 📌Halifax (43) W/G ·
- 📌Huddersfield (29) W/G ·
- 📌Leeds (249) W/G ·
- Millstone Grit (4), coarse-grained Carboniferous sandstones, once frequently used for millstones in watermills W/G ·
- 📌Rochdale (8), old Lancashire mill-town at the foothills of the South Pennines in the dale on the River Roch, 9.8 miles (15.8 km) northeast of Manchester W/G ·
- Rye (7) W/G ·
- Spinning (textiles) (5) W/G ·
- Textile manufacturing (59) W/G ·
- Theatre (24) W/G ·
- Wakefield or Towneley Mystery Plays (2), a collection of thirty-two Biblical mystery plays including some of the best-known examples of medieval English drama, probably performed around the Feast of Corpus Christi, but probably not in Wakefield W/G ·
- 📌Wakefield (37), cathedral city on the River Calder in the West Riding/West Yorkshire W/G ·
- Watermill (5) W/G ·
- West Riding of Yorkshire (151) W/G ·
- Wood (2) W/G ·
- Wool (28) W/G ·
- Woollen (21) W/G ·
- York Mystery Plays (3) W/G ·
- 📌York (164) W/G ·
Comment
Comment
York Corporation minute books, 8 June 1561.
The watermills are fulling mills, which were present on the Aire and the Calder and at Burnley, Colne and Manchester before Edward III. Cloth manufacture in the West Riding did not originate with the Flemish weavers invited by him, but York and other corporate towns (Beverley, Hull, Ripon and Pontefract) long dominated both manufacture and trade. A sign of this is the far greater antiquity of the York craft guilds and their mystery plays vis-à-vis Wakefield’s guilds and Towneley plays, which were derivative and may actually have been performed elsewhere (Crump 1935).
I take it that “fire” refers to coal. Chapter II of Crump and Ghorbal’s history of the Huddersfield woollen industry deals with the physical setting principally from an 18th century perspective, but in the mid-16th century wood was increasingly scarce and domestic hearths were well able to cope with coal, and the following works pretty well transposed back a couple of centuries before the Industrial Revolution:
The well-watered but otherwise barren and inhospitable country of the Grits proved itself fitted to nurture the weaving of wool; only it needed to be in contact with the Coal Measures to create a woollen industry. No conclusion emerges from the history of the industry more clearly than that its distribution has been dependent upon the contiguity of the Lower Coal Measures and the Millstone Grits. Both had abundance of soft water and of forest; but the Coal Measures possessed greater wealth of ironstone and coal, there elevation was less, their soil deeper and habitable sites less bleak. So natural advantages weighted the scales in favour of the villages set on or near the fringe of the Lower Coal Measures. They became possessed of churches and their parishes ran far up into the hills, annexing all the Grit country with its smaller villages and townships. They became market towns and grew to be “clothing” towns – the centres of the cloth trade of their own wide parishes. With slight individual variations Huddersfield, Halifax, Bradford and Leeds on the one side, Rochdale, Bury, Burnley and Colne on the other have all risen in this way (Crump 1935).
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Similar
9 June 1758: Entry into law of the first dedicated railway enabling act, for Richard Humble and Charles Brandling’s wagonway from Middleton Colliery to the Aire at Leeds
Comment
Comment
The image of a hurrier used in Scriven’s report (Fig. 1) and in the First report of the commissioners (Children 1842) may be of a boy or girl and is more realist:
Denise Bates summarises the sensationalisation of the reports (Bates 2012/10/03).
Scriven comments of Kershaw:
This girl is an ignorant, filthy, ragged, and deplorable-looking object, and such an one as the uncivilized natives of the prairies would be shocked to look upon … A deplorable object, barely removed from idiocy. Her [large] family receiving £2 19s. 6d. per week… In the Booth Town Pit, in which Patience Kershaw … hurries 11 corves a day, I walked, crept and rode 1800 yards to one of the nearest “faces.” The most distant was 200 further. The bottom or floor of this gate was every here and there three of four inches deep in water, and muddy throughout.
Denise Bates:
She was from Northowram, the daughter of John and Elizabeth Kershaw. Her siblings were William, Sarah, Hannah, Alice, Sybil, Caroline, Bethel, Solomon and James. After leaving the mines, Patience became a wool comber at Illingworth, and then a servant and then a washerwoman. During 1867 she entered the workhouse in Halifax. In December she was admitted to the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum, where she died in Quarter 1 1869 (Bates 2015).
I think, but haven’t checked, that original scans of the Halifax material appear here. Source information here.
Joseph Stocks was the colliery owner who originally supplied the wealthy lesbian diarist Anne Lister with information about the profits to be made from mine owning (Rafa 2021). I don’t know what life was like for women in her mines, and doubt she would have cared. Scope for some lurid fan fiction, surely.
The Unthanks perform a cover of Frank Higgins’ 1969 song, “The testimony of Patience Kershaw”:
From the lyrics:
I praise your good intentions, Sir, I love your kind and gentle heart
But now it’s 1842, and you and I, we’re miles apart.
A hundred years and more will pass before we’re standing side by side
But please accept my grateful thanks. God bless you Sir, at least you tried.
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