Oranges Plummer 1972

The Ordinances for the regulation of the Weavers’ gild, as ratified in 1577, provided for a body of sixteen men - two Bailiffs, two Wardens (usually referred to as ‘the Officers’ or ‘the Four in Place’) and twelve Assistants. The four Officers held office for one year and were seldom re-elected to the same office in the ensuing year. The day of St James the Apostle, 25 July, was (and still is) election day, on which the two present or out-going Bailiffs nominated a person to be the Upper Bailiff, or Master, of the Company for the coming year; and the Wardens and Assistants, usually with some forty or fifty Liverymen assembled in a Common Hall, nominated another person for the chief office. Whichever candidate had the ‘most voices’ in the assembly was accepted as ‘chief and principal Bailiff to rule and govern for one whole year then next ensuing’. The unsuccessful candidate, it seems, with another nominee of the two out-going Bailiffs, was then put before the Common Hall for election to the office of second or Renter Bailiff. Next the two out-going Bailiffs, with the assistance of any ‘ancients that were present and which have been Bailiffs’,² proceeded to choose from among the Liverymen two new Wardens - an Upper and a Renter Warden - to serve for the ensuing year. Usually, but not invariably, the Bailiffs’ nominees were elected; but if the Liverymen were displeased with the out-going Bailiffs, or a major issue was causing dissension within the Company, the discontented Liverymen could show their teeth by rejecting the Bailiffs’ nominees and voting for other candidates.

The sixteen had self-renewing powers, for they or ‘the most parte of them’ were enjoined to fill any vacancy among the Officers or Assistants by electing a member of the gild within fourteen days. This Court had to perform a variety of administrative, financial and even judicial functions, some important, some trifling; some calling for technical knowledge, others for wisdom in human relationships. It had to ensure good order and governance within the craft and to check encroachments and illegal practices from without. Its jurisdiction extended two miles from the City gates; an area which included not only Cripplegate, Clerkenwell, Bishopsgate Without, Norton Folgate, Spitalfields, Bethnal Green, Shoreditch and Whitechapel, but also Hoxton, Haggerston, Hackney, Homerton, Old Ford, Stepney, Cambridge Heath, Shadwell, Southwark, Bermondsey, and much of Islington and Canonbury.

The development of silk weaving during the Tudor period gave to the London weaving industry a new impetus, strongly reinforced during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by newcomers from overseas, who swelled the numbers of weavers in the liberties and suburbs, and by their artistic talents and special skills in the weaving of figured silks, helped to raise the silk industry to a position of importance in the national economy. But the influx of foreigners and strangers was a never-failing source of new or revived disputes and discontents, with many of which the Weavers’ Court of Assistants had to cope.³

Over the years the Company had come to accept the impossibility of excluding foreigners and strangers. Some gilds of native craftsmen joined forces in an attempt to keep the strangers out;⁴ but the London Weavers, with greater wisdom, evolved several different membership grades or categories to meet the circumstances of various types of craftsmen ‘using the art of weaving’ (see Table 2.1). The highest grade was, of course, the freeman who had served a full term of legal apprenticeship, or had been admitted by patrimony or redemption.⁵ Such freemen, when they had become also freemen of the City, could use the proud description - ‘Citizen and Weaver of London’. The lesser grades, usually referred to as ‘admissioners’ or ‘foreign brethren’, seem to have been three in number:

1 Foreign Masters,⁶ whose qualifications were fully approved by the Company and who were allowed to take apprentices;

2 Foreign weavers allowed to work independently but not to set up as ‘householders’;

3 Journeymen; weavers who had proved their apprenticeship or capability in the craft, but were not permitted to work except as journeymen.

A master weaver’s status and seniority determined the number of looms, journeymen and apprentices he might legally employ, though the evidence suggests that infringements were neither few nor infrequent, especially in times when trade was good.

	Number of.
	Single looms not exceeding	Journeymen not exceeding	Apprentices not exceeding
Denizens or foreigners
in first year after admission	5	1	1
in second year after admission		2	2
in third and subsequent years		2	3
Strangers (aliens)
in first year after admission		1	1
in second and subsequent years	4	2	2

Liverymen	6	not stated	4

Bailiffs, Wardens, and past Bailiffs and Wardens were each allowed to have not more than seven single looms⁷ and five apprentices. The omission of a limit on the number of journeymen to be employed by Officers past and present and by Liverymen may well indicate the possibility that they could employ an unlimited number of journeymen as out-workers. As the putting-out system became more and more prevalent, so did the employment of unqualified journeymen and apprentices, many of whom worked ‘secretly’ in obscure holes and corners, difficult for the Company’s officers to locate. Many of the admitted journeymen weavers could scarcely rank as skilled craftsmen, for they could not do more than throw a shuttle on plain work. Some hired a loom and ‘loom-standing’, or helped another journeyman at busy times. Their earnings were, one need hardly say, among the lowest in the trade. At the other extreme were the highly skilled intelligent craftsmen-householders. The weaving of flowered or figured silks, damasks, brocades and velvets called for a high degree of knowledge and skill possessed by comparatively few, whose earnings were consequently high, and could be very high in the busiest times, when the weavers commonly worked a fourteen-hour day.

3 Brett-James, London, p. 224; Weiss, French Protestant Refugees (trans. 1854), p. 253; G. B. Hertz, ‘The English Silk Industry in the 18th Century’, English Historical Review, XXIV (1909), pp. 710-27. During the half-century 1664-1713, according to Hertz, the volume of the English silk trade increased twentyfold.

5 Patrimony: the right or privilege of exercising a craft or trade transmitted from a father to his child by inheritance.

6 The word ‘foreign’ in this context means a person who had migrated to London from the provinces or from overseas: see MS. 4647, f.365.

The Company’s traditional attitude to the membership and employment of women as weavers is naturally linked with its restrictive regulations on the teaching of the craft, for in the absence of strict control of the latter, women and maids could have been taught, with little difficulty, all but the most skilled branches of weaving. But the male weavers well knew that this would have had the effect of depressing the prices and wages paid for their work; hence the long-standing policy of keeping women and girls out of the looms.⁸³ For example, in 1649 Richard Simpson was fined 20s. for having six looms ‘and two maidens at work in two of the looms’; he was ordered to pull down the looms and not to set any more maidens at work on weaving. Four years later, John Hogg was in trouble for keeping a wench at work for a whole year contrary to the Ordinances, ‘for which the Company ordered him to discharge the wench forthwith, and if after she be got work by his means upon any woven work then he to pay £5 to the Company’. In 1664 a weaver was fined twenty nobles and ordered to discharge forthwith four wenches who were working in his looms. Attempts were sometimes made to pass off a wench as the master weaver’s own daughter, but if the deception was discovered the Company would order ‘that the maid be put away’. Even daughters-in-law were not allowed to weave. The Court minutes for May 1667 record that ‘Ann White who uses ye trade now appeared, saith her father was a weaver at Manchester & she served him as an apprentice & this attested by John Leach, weaver of London; ordered she procure Certificate thereof out of ye Country within a month’. In the same year a weaver summoned for employing a girl replied that ‘she work not in ye loom but was bound to wind silk and [do] other house business’; and another accused of a similar offence pleaded that he had employed her ‘out of Charity her husband having beaten her, but she is now returned [to him] who is a freeman; ye Court satisfied’. But the Court was not satisfied with Richard Ainton who, when told to dismiss a woman employee, called them ‘a Company of fools’. And even worse was George Chiefe who, having been accused of employing two girls, became ‘very refractory and quarrelsome’ in the Court Room, and ‘being ordered to withdraw he went away and damn’d the Court, and John Chapman and John Daniel heard him’.⁸⁴

Weavers summoned by the Court and sensing trouble ahead, sometimes pleaded sickness and sent their wives to face the music or to plead their case, as did a certain Valentine who, having been fined £5 for ‘setting up 6 looms contrary to a late order’, sent his wife to the Hall with the money. What she said to the Court we shall never know, but the outcome after further questioning was a verdict of ‘not proven’ provided that Mrs Valentine would agree to put 10s. into the poor’s box. Her triumphant return to her husband with £4. 10s. in hand is not difficult to imagine.⁸⁵

So long as they did not invade the looms, women and children were readily accepted as ancillary workers on warping and quilling for the weavers, or by the throwsters on the spinning processes; all at rates of pay far below those of the weavers. This state of things seems to have been quite usual throughout the textile industries of England. The verse describing John Winchcombe’s famous early factory refers to,

‘Pretty boys’ did the quilling, while carding, spinning and such-like tasks were done by

The narrowly restrictive ninth item of the London Weavers’ Ordinances of 1596 states tersely that ‘no woman or mayd shall use or exercise the Arts of weaving ... except she be the widow of one of the same Guilde’. During the ensuing century, however, some minor modifications were made in practice, if not in strict theory.⁸⁶ Girls could be formally apprenticed to weaving and the Company would enrol them and in due course admit them to the freedom as they did Anne Archer, who was apprenticed to Edward Tiplady, Citizen and Weaver, in 1695, and made free of the Company ‘upon the report of her Mistress and Edward Barns, Laceman’, in 1703; but actual examples are few - probably not much more than 1 per cent of all apprentices bound at the Hall. An even smaller number of daughters of free weavers were admitted by patrimony, ⁸⁷ like Martha Marriott, daughter of Thomas Marriott, Citizen and Weaver, who was made free of the Weavers’ Company in 1712 ‘upon the report of Samuel Erle, Clothworker’ and three other citizens.⁸⁸

Alexander Hosea’s legacies account (1686-1766) shows that he employed a number of female lace-makers,⁸⁹ and in the eighteenth century there are several records of girls serving their apprenticeships with freewomen of the Weavers’ Company who were in business not as weavers but as milliners.⁹⁰

The position early in the eighteenth century is defined in the Weavers’ new By-laws and Ordinances of 1708: no weaver ‘shall keep, instruct, set to work or bring up in the use, exercise or knowledge of... weaving (except to warping) any damsel or woman whatsoever (except the wife, widow or unmarried daughter of a Weaver who shall work for the maintenance of her father or mother)’, upon pain of a penalty of £1 a month.

The Weavers, like other craft gilds, regarded a wife as a trade partner having the right to succeed to and carry on the business after her husband’s death. Widows, in fact, took over all the rights, privileges and liabilities of their deceased husbands, for example as to the proper number of looms, journeymen and apprentices.⁹¹ Alternatively, a weaver’s widow having turned over her apprentices, if any, could go to work for another weaver.⁹² If a weaver’s widow remarried, unlike a stationer’s widow, she could neither retain her rights nor transfer them to her new husband; which meant that if she married another weaver, her rights (looms, journeymen, apprentices, etc.) could not be added to those of her husband. Many such cases appear in the Company’s records. For example in 1683 Mrs Fall, a weaver’s widow, ‘being charged with marrying a cabinet maker, and yet keeping the weaving trade she confessed the same and this Court ordered her to clear her looms and discharge her Apprentices in a fortnight, the which she promised to do’.⁹³ In 1666 and 1667 two weavers’ widows who married seamen were ‘ordered to desist’ and to leave the trade; and an information was laid against Widow Abel in Coles Alley in Shoreditch ‘who had married a Smith [but still] works at ye trade of weaving and employs another woman’.⁹⁴ Widow Gosford, having married a dyer, lost her right to keep her apprentices at work in her looms and had to undertake to ‘assign them over within a week’. ⁹⁵ Non-members of the Company who married weavers’ widows and then attempted to ‘use the trade of weaving’ were told ‘to desist or be prosecuted’. When Widow Goodale was challenged, in 1667, as to her right to exercise the trade, she declared that her late husband had a good right to his trade, and it was ‘ordered she make it appear next Court’. Instead of doing so, however, she ‘gave bad words’ saying, with more spirit than tact, that ‘she will use the trade in spite of ye Company’. The Court promptly reacted by ordering her ‘to put away her maid and sister out of ye loom’ and to come with her journeymen to the next Court ‘to show their right’ to use the trade.⁹⁶ Mary Cowardine’s use of the weaving trade was questioned because, although she was a weaver’s daughter, her parents were dead and she was married to a tinman. Her rejoinder was that her husband ‘had withdrawn himself and was married to another woman ... and had not lived with her (Mary) but 10 days in 10 years’. The Court of Assistants insisted that she give up weaving, but allowed her three months’ grace. It is a little surprising that in this case the Court did not grant its ‘special favour’, as it did when Mary Burdge of Petticoat Lane, a glover’s widow, was found to be weaving for her father, and on another occasion when a ‘foreign journeyman’ having married the daughter of Mr Elmer, ‘late of the Livery’, was admitted a foreign master at the ‘earnest suit’ of the bride’s mother.⁹⁷

The rank and file of the male weavers looked with considerable suspicion and hostility upon any tendency on the part of the Assistants to admit women more willingly than in the past. Their views were expressed in some doggerel verses printed in 1727-8 under the title ‘The Weavers’ Complaint against the Masters of the Hall’

The Company’s quarterage books from 1681 onwards contain nominal rolls of the Officers, Livery and Commonalty, which include the widows remaining in membership and therefore probably still working in the weaving trade. Their numbers rose remarkably in the halfcentury 1681-1730, from 103 to 217, but decreased sharply during the decade 1731-40 to 123 and continued to fall steadily until, in 1790, only two widows’ names appear in the book. Even at their most numerous the widows were never more than a tiny part of the whole membership: slightly less than 2 per cent in 1681 and no more than 3.5 per cent at the peak in 1730.

Another factor, essential to the preservation and progress of any craft, remains to be studied: the recruitment, training and welfare of apprentices. To this we now turn.

83 MS. 4655/2, ff.92, 131, 167; MS. 4655/4, passim. Among many complaints about the employment of women and girls in looms was one in 1667 against John Mustard, who promised the Company that he would ‘dispose of ye girl out of ye loom’ ; and another against George Clark, who was fined 40s. in that year for employing no fewer than five women, contrary to the Ordinances. One weaver was fined 10s. for ‘countenancing his apprentice to teach a girl the trade of weaving’, and in 1674 George Clark was again in trouble for teaching a girl to weave. Despite his admission that this had been going on for ten weeks, he proved defiant and was ordered to be brought before the Lord Mayor (MS. 4655/7, ff.65, 70; MS. 4655/11, f.285b).

84 MS. 4655/2, ff.10, 21, 29, 67; MS. 4655/3, ff.43b, 159b; MS. 4655/4, ff.47, 88b; MS. 4655/11, ff. 116, 219b; MS. 4655/13, f.32.

86 The Book of Prices (i.e. piece rates) printed in 1769 is markedly restrictive as to the employment of women and girls, except in wartime.

87 MS. 4656/4, 11 October 1703; MS. 4655/3, f.162b; MS. 4655/4, passim; MS. 4648/1, June 1670; MS. 4648/5, ff.7, 8b, 13b, 15b, 22b; MS. 4647, f.553; MS. 4655/15, ff.87, 355. Sarah Brown, executed in 1718 for murder and theft, said she was born in Spitalfields where she learned to weave ‘and might by it have got a pretty livelihood’ ; quoted in George, London, p. 181.

90 Lace was much in demand for gentlemen’s ruffles, ladies’ lappets and trimmings of many kinds, and the lace bills of people of fashion were enormous. Thus many thousands of women and girls were employed, but poorly paid. The orris weavers made gold and silver lace and braids. London had two weekly lace markets: at the George Inn, Aldersgate Street, and at the Bull and Mouth by Aldersgate. ‘A Lace-Man’, said Campbell in 1747, ‘must have a well-lined pocket to furnish his shop; but his Garrets may be as meanly equipped as he pleases. His chief Talent ought to lie in a nice Taste in Patterns of Lace, &c. He ought to speak fluently, though not elegantly, to entertain the Ladies; and to be Master of a handsome Bow and Cringe; should be able to hand a Lady to and from her Coach politely, without being seized with the Palpitation of the Heart at the Touch of a delicate Hand, a well-turned and much exposed Limb, a handsome Face. But, above all, he must have Confidence to refuse his Goods in a handsome manner to the extravagant Beau who never pays....’ London was also a great market for the gold and silver buttons worn in large numbers in the world of fashion. The London button-makers worked mainly for lacemen who provided the gold and silver thread and all other materials except the moulds. By the mid-eighteenth century the craft was in the hands of a crowd of women and girls whose numbers reduced average earnings to a low level. The milliners of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not confine themselves to the making and sale of women’s hats; they dealt in a great variety of goods - holland, cambric, ribbons, lawn, lace of all sorts - by the piece or made up into smocks, tippets, neckties, ruffles, handkerchiefs, gloves, caps, hats and hoods; also cloaks and mantuas in plain or figured silk and velvet, trimmed with gold, silver or black lace. Some even sold riding-habits and ‘dresses for the Masquerade’ (I. Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution (1930), pp. 203-5, 230-1; A. Clark, Working Life of Women in the 17th Century (1919), pp. 141-4; Campbell, Tradesman, pp. 147, 207).

91 MS. 4647, ff.506, 537, 545. Ann Pierce, having formerly given a bond with a £60 penalty not to weave unless duly qualified, in fact became qualified by marrying John Munday, who was free of the Weavers’ Company, and the bond was then cancelled (MS. 4655/9, f.5b. (1683)).

93 MS. 4655/9, f.11. Presumably, ‘discharge’ in this context means ‘turn-over’. The trade rights of a stationer’s widow were not lost to her when she re-married, but could be shared by her new husband; this was a valuable asset in the marriage market (E. Arber, Transcript of Register of Stationers’ Company (1876, V, Intro.).

97 MS. 4655/2, f.65; MS. 4655/8, f.93b, MS. 4655/11, f.137b. Similar cases in the eighteenth century are recorded in MS. 4655/4, passim.

Industry in the seventeenth century was organised in small local units, of which the most typical was the master craftsman’s household, with its living, working and storage accommodation for the family, the apprentices and, perhaps, a young journeyman or two. We have seen that the Weavers’ ordinances permitted master weavers to take not more than certain prescribed numbers of apprentices according to their standing as members of the Company, but no limits were placed upon the number of children under fourteen years of age who could be employed on sundry simple but essential tasks. Many master weavers employed young boys ‘brought up to the trade’ to attend upon them and their journeymen (if any) ‘to help him pick his silk clean, to fill his quills, and in a flowered work to draw up the figure.¹ Some of these things these boys are able to do at the age of six or seven, for which they receive 2s., 3s., 4s., or 4s. 6d., a week, which is a great help to their poor fathers and mothers. This they continue till fourteen, at which time they seek for a master and masters also seek for such boys.’² The Weavers’ records confirm this generalisation. For example, in 1617, Thomas Davie, a master weaver, was eager to employ his boy-servant in the loom, but the Court of Assistants ordered him to keep the boy ‘as a winder with him and not to be set to the loom above 14 days before he is bound apprentice to him or some other’.³ From the eighteenth century comes another example in which a weaver working in Moorfields ‘having entertained Jacob Dehorne, a poor lad upwards of 12 years of age who is willing to be bound apprentice but not being of age sufficient, is permitted to keep him until he attains to the age of 14 and then to bring him to be bound’.⁴ Such boys, between six and fourteen years of age, with the apprentices and journeymen, all under the direction and supervision of the master weaver, formed the typical industrial unit.

The social importance of apprenticeship was great, for, at best, it provided both technical instruction and moral training throughout late childhood and early adolescence. From the Ancient World to the Augustan Age, as Unwin remarked, the workshop was the only technical school.⁵ The importance of the apprentice’s inclusion as a member of his master’s household, where this was a sober, respectable establishment, can hardly be over-estimated. And when, in the eighteenth century, the taking of ‘out-door’ apprentices, who were much less under their master’s eye, became more and more usual, it was widely deplored as likely to result in ‘young lads being left upon the town’ and thus subjected to greatly increased temptations to drinking, gambling and disorderly conduct.⁶

By tradition and long usage the craft gilds were regarded as largely responsible for the craftsmanship of their members. This was the ideal, but because of human frailty it was, too often, not achieved. ‘It is but too common’, wrote Campbell in 1747, ‘that they [the master craftsmen] think they have their apprentices for mere slaves, and are under no obligation to spend any of their time in compleating them in their business.... Some conceal the secrets of the business designedly, to keep the Apprentice in dependence on them; and others out of mere sullenness and ill-nature.’⁷The Weavers’ Company tried to secure adequate instruction and a proper standard of competence in the weaving trade by careful investigation of all complaints of ‘insufficient instruction’ of apprentices and by insisting upon certificates from the civic authorities when apprenticeship had been served outside its jurisdiction. If an apprentice’s father could prove that his son was not being properly treated and taught, the Court of Assistants usually ordered the master ‘forthwith to give sufficient surety unto the father ... for the boy’s good usage and his true instruction in his trade’, otherwise the apprentice would be transferred to another master.⁸ When William Spillmore, apprentice to Richard Sparrey, came to the Court in 1685 and complained of want of sufficient instruction, alleging that he was employed only upon the making of stripe silks, the Court’s considered judgment was: (a) ‘Richard Sparrey is an ancient and good workman, he having made free [of the Company] 4 apprentices, who were good work-men’; (b) ‘the learning to make Stripe Silks is a sufficient instruction [for] most works in the weaving trade, and is always understood as a full discharge of the covenant in the indentures of apprenticeship’; (c) the Complaint is ‘vain and frivolous and grounded upon the humour of the apprentice’s Mother’.⁹

As a rule an apprentice was bound on the initiative of his father or legal guardian, but a minority were apprenticed by the parishes. The famous Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601 (43 and 44 Eliz. I, c. 2) gave churchwardens and overseers power to bind as apprentices any male children likely to fall into evil ways ‘till such man child shall come to the age of 24 years’. This, of course, covered foundlings, who were the responsibility of the parish in which they were found. Some typical examples taken from the Weavers’ records for the middle of the seventeenth century are:

23rd April 1655. John Clark, son of a tapster of Croydon, apprenticed to a London weaver for ten years by ‘Samuel Barnett, Doctor of Divinity, Thos. Morton, Esquire, and others of the Governors of the said parish of Croydon’.

19th December 1659. Nathan Andrews, ‘foundling of ye parish of St Andrew-Undershaft’, apprenticed to a weaver for eight years.

7th March 1659. ‘Stephen Brookes of the Parish of St Stephen’s, Walbrook, foundling’ apprenticed to a weaver for ten years, ‘by the Churchwardens of the Parish’.¹⁰

Very few girls were apprenticed to weaving in London, either by their parents or the parish; but we have a record of Susannah Blackbrow, ‘a poor girl of the parish’, who was apprenticed to a gold and silver orris weaver in December 1739, and was made a freewoman of the Weavers’ Company by servitude in July 1748.¹¹ Another girl ‘was turned by her original master to a weaver who lived with a Billingsgate fishwoman. She sometimes wound quills for the man, but always went to market with the woman, and was also sent out alone to cry periwinkles and crabs, and, at night, radishes.’¹²

In eighteenth-century London the Bridewell apprentices, with their blue coats and white hats, were often to be seen in the streets.¹³ Shortly before his untimely death in 1553 the boy king, Edward VI, had given his palace of Bridewell to the Corporation of London to be used partly as a ‘house of correction’ for ruffians and masterless men and dissolute women found lurking in alehouses, cock-pits, skittle alleys, gambling dens and other ‘suspicious houses’, and partly as a training school in which boys from Christ’s Hospital and former patients of St Thomas’s Hospital could be apprenticed and taught certain useful trades. After a long period of delay and experimentation there emerged a training establishment for the children of poor freemen as well as young vagrants. In the seventeenth century there were between seventy and a hundred Bridewell apprentices, and about 140 in the eighteenth century, who served terms of from eight to ten, or even twelve years, in the crafts of shoemaking, gloving, feltmaking, weaving and tailoring. Their instructors, called ‘artsmasters’, were usually poor freemen of the appropriate gilds or companies, who received from the Bridewell Governors living quarters and workshops, and a capitation grant for each apprentice. But not every arts-master was poor or ‘decayed’, as appears from the complaint made in 1618 by John Hare, a freeman of the Weavers’ Company, that Robert Cotchett, in Bridewell, keeps fourteen looms, ‘which he [John Hare] findeth himself agrieved at’.¹⁴ Over a century later the Weavers’ records show that Gabriel Bestman, Upper Bailiff in 1727-8, was a Bridewell arts-master, and so was Daniel Nipp, one of the Assistants at that time.¹⁵ A traveller from Germany, Zacharias von Uffenbach, visited Bridewell in 1710 and watched with interest the weaving of plush, plain and flowered velvet, taffeta, damask, woollen curtains and cords, silk girdles, gauze ribbons and silk handkerchiefs.¹⁶ Finished goods from the Bridewell workshops were sold to shopkeepers and exporters in the City. The hours of work in Bridewell, as elsewhere, were long, the fare Spartan, and ‘correction’ frequent and sometimes severe, though the Governors, it seems, discouraged any outright cruelty on the part of the arts-masters. Doubtless many of the boys were ‘hard nuts’. Often they absconded; and even those who stayed came to be looked upon as one of the terrors of the London streets, quick to start a disturbance or join a mob on the slightest pretext.¹⁷ Some of them bided their time until the end of their apprenticeship, when they received gifts of new clothes, tools and money, and then immediately decamped, sold the tools, spent the money and sank into some ‘mean occupation’ such as portering.¹⁸ The steady ones who became freemen were given £10 ‘to set them up in their trade’.¹⁹ The aims of Bridewell were, indeed, worthy: to prevent cime and mendicity by giving poor children a trade and the chance of making an honest living; and success was often achieved, as many entries in the Weavers’ records show, e.g.

20th November 1648. Thomas Gill, son of a waterman who had died when the boy was very young, was apprenticed to weaving for twelve years and ‘was made free upon the report of Mr. Henry Isackson, treasurer of the said hospital’ of Bridewell. No admission fees were charged by the Weavers’ Company in this case.²⁰

21st August 1654. An apprentice (apparently an orphan) who came from Oxfordshire, was apprenticed for twelve years and thereafter granted his freedom upon the certificate of the Governors of Bridewell.²¹

2nd November 1668. Robert Smith, apprentice, to Edmond Silvester, Weaver, Arts Master of Bridewell, for ten years from Easter 1656 to Easter 1666, ‘as was Certified by ye Treasurer of that hospital, made free and paid 3s. 4d’²²

1st June 1752. ‘William Edwards, living in Bride Lane, Weaver, who was bound Apprentice at Bridewell Hospital the 11th April 1745 to James Smith, Citizen and Weaver of London, is made free by Servitude upon Certificate from Robt. Alsop Esqr., Alderman of London, Treasurer of the said Hospital. ²³

The ‘Act Touching Divers Orders for Artificers, Labourers, Servants of Husbandry and Apprentices’ passed in 1563,²⁴ and usually called the Statute of Artificers, provided that all apprentices must serve ‘seven years at the least’. How far did this minimum period become, in practice, the norm? The Weavers’ records for the seventeenth century show that more than one-half of the apprentices bound at the Hall served for seven years; more than one-third served for eight years; while rather less than one-tenth served for nine years or more. The actual percentages are shown in Table 4.1

years	%	years	%
7	55.3	10	1.6
8	35.2	11	0.3
9	7.5	12	0.1

Reductions in the lengths of apprenticeships were sometimes made. For example, John Willey, who had been bound for eight years in 1608, was transferred to another master (reason not stated) and allowed by the Weavers’ Company to serve only seven years in all; ‘the eighth year is remitted unto him’.²⁵ In 1619 it was ‘ordered and agreed between Robert Lowe and Thomas Hopcroft, his apprentice, that whereas he was bound for ten years and to have at the end of his term double apparel and a cloak and £3. 6s. 8d. in money, the said Robert Lowe is contented and agrees to remit ... the last year’s service ... in consideration that the money and cloak shall be remitted’.²⁶ Also, in the same year, an apprentice who had been bound for eleven years was allowed to cancel the last two years.²⁷

Apprenticeships for more than seven years seldom occur in the eighteenth century, and terms exceeding eight years are very rare indeed. On the other hand, after 1749 men who had served in the army or navy could obtain special concessions, like Joseph Banks of Bethnal Green, ‘who served ... on board the Rupert, Man of War, from 4th September 1740 to 24th November 1748, as by Certificate of Captain Edmund Horn appears’, and had been instructed in weaving by James Newman, Weaver, of Virginia Row, Bethnal Green, since leaving the navy (i.e. a little less than two years), and was admitted to the freedom of the Weavers’ Company in 1750 under the statute 22 Geo. II which enabled ex-service officers and other ranks discharged after ‘the late war’ to ‘exercise Trades’. Another applicant, Joseph File, had served aboard H.M.S. Cambridge and produced the City Chamberlain’s certificate to prove it.²⁸

No records of apprenticeship premiums appear in the books of the Weavers’ Company until 1730, although such payments were customary long before that date. Table 4.2 shows the result of an examination of over 1,500 entries recorded between 1730 and 1795.

Sources of premiums		No premiums paid	Total entries examined
Charities and parishes	Private
241	202	1,080	1,523

The parishes and other charitable trusts usually paid from £2 to £5 for each apprentice. For example, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the parish of St Stephen, Walbrook, paid £2. 10s. to apprentice a boy to weaving, and for another boy All Hallows, Lombard Street, paid five guineas. Christ’s Hospital made frequent grants of £5 a head, and Francis Bancroft’s and Henry Dixon’s charities, administered by the Drapers’ Company, made grants of £4 for each apprenticeship. The Weavers’ Company administered Richard Jervies’s charity which provided that £2 could be spent annually to apprentice the son of a poor weaver of St Leonard’s parish, Shoreditch. When this was done the transactions were shown in the Renter Bailiff’s accounts, e.g.

18th January 1742. Pd. the Churchwardens of Shoreditch for putting out James Alsuxe apprentice to Thos. Ventiman, being the Gift of Richard Jervies, £2.

6th July 1747. Paid Jervies’s gift for putting out John Vanner apprentice to Wm. Norton. Bound the 4th May last ... £2.²⁹

Certain corporations and special groups appear in the records from time to time: e.g., in 1748-50, the Dutch Church in Austin Friars (£10); the French Hospital (£17. 10s.); the French Church in London (£1. 10s.);³⁰ the Corporation of Clergymen’s Sons (£20); and ‘The Cockneys of Shoreditch, charity money from the Cockneys’ Feast’, two apprenticeship premiums each of £5.

2 The Just Complaints of the Poor Weavers (1719), quoted in George, London, p. 181. cf. Nicholas Barbon, Apology for the Builder (1685), p. 18.

10 MS. 4657B. Sometimes the names given to these infants reflected the name of the parish in which they were found; e.g. Lawrence Aldermanbury and Stephen Coleman.

13 According to H. A. Harben’s Dictionary of London (1918), this distinctive costume was abolished in 1755.

15 MS. 4661/27, opp. f.l. The house-of-correction part of Bridewell, reconstructed after the Great Fire and completed in 1676, included ‘a public whipping room, draped in black and having a balustraded public gallery ... and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the public was admitted to watch the flagellation as one of the more sophisticated London delights’ (E. de Maré, Londons Riverside (1958), pp. 81-2).

17 E. G. O’Donoghue, Bridewell Hospital (1923), I, Chap. XVIII; II, pp. 69-71, 168.

20 MS. 4655A; see also MS. 4655/2, f.51: e.g. thirteen Bridewell apprentices were made free of the Weavers’ Company in the three years 1703-6, and a century later the numbers were nearly double; see MS. 4656/4, passim; MS. 4655/19, passim.

27 MS. 4655/1, f.94. ‘Double apparel’ meant one suit for holy days and one for working days fit for a journeyman weaver.

30 In 1742 Philip Jackson, Master Weaver, was summoned for having an apprentice not bound at Weavers’ Hall. He said he had lately taken an apprentice ‘put out by Charity from the French Church and bound by their Agent’, but the boy was only thirteen years nine months of age. As soon as he reached fourteen he would be properly bound at Weavers’ Hall; the matter was, therefore, deferred for three months (MS. 4655/15, f.150).

In London, where the situation contrasts sharply with that in the north-west, Midlands, and west of England, one sees a marked failure to move with the times, followed by all the symptoms and consequences of decline concentrated within a relatively small, close-built urban area. The boundaries of ‘Spitalfields’ in the middle of the nineteenth century ran from St Leonard’s Church, Shoreditch, along the Hackney Road to the Regent’s Canal, along the line of the canal to the Mile End Road; then westwards through Whitechapel to St Botolph’s Church, Aldgate; thence along the length of Houndsditch to St Botolph’s Church without Bishopsgate, and finally, turning northwards along Norton Folgate, to the starting point at Shoreditch Church. Within this irregularly shaped area, known universally as ‘Spitalfields’, although it included parts of Bethnal Green, Shoreditch, Whitechapel and Mile End, large numbers of silk weavers were concentrated.²¹ It was, therefore, a community district extremely vulnerable to any and every kind of set-back in the silk trade.

Even supposing that the Weavers’ Company had succeeded in retaining and enforcing its rights as a craft gild in the London silk industry, it would have had little enough to control by the middle of the nineteenth century. Ample evidence comes down to us from the journeymen hand-loom weavers and their masters; from qualified medical men and experienced social investigators, all of whom paint the same sombre picture of ‘a crying national tragedy’, a doomed and dying industry. Richard Cray, a Bethnal Green silk weaver who had been driven to Radicalism and Chartism by excessive labour and hard times, tells of a master silk manufacturer - Mr Newberry of London Wall - who had ‘about 200 looms at work in 1824', but ‘now in 1838 he has about 12, the rest of his work he has made in Exeter by the power Looms where he has a few boys at work at 3 shillings and 2 shillings per week’.²² William Brunskill, who manufactured broad silks in Spitalfields and ribbons in Coventry, had become a considerable importer and dealer in foreign silk goods ‘since the ports have been opened’. Giving evidence before the Select Committee on the state of the silk trade since the legislation of 1824, he said that foreign imports had beaten many Spitalfields fancy fabrics out of the market, which caused more manufacturers and weavers to turn to plain fabrics, and greatly intensified competition for employment in the plain section. The formidable competition of the Manchester silk manufacturers was also mentioned, and the lamentable fact that many of the smaller Spitalfields manufacturers had gone out of business, ruined.²³ Barrett Wadden, another witness, had been a silk manufacturer for nearly ten years in Spitalfields and for fourteen years before that in Dublin. Before the repeal of the prohibition on foreign silk goods he had employed 300 weavers: by 1832 he employed, on an average over the whole year, only 60-70, because he now found it ‘a very unprofitable trade’. ‘I have had’, he said, ‘some opportunities of seeing the weavers at their own houses ... many of them have their bed gone to the pawnbrokers ... in very many instances, the midnight lamp has no longer oil in it...’ even ‘the shuttles are gone to pawn ... nothing in their room but a loom and a pallet on the floor; no table, no chair’. He thought that the majority of the weavers were mainly employed - when they were employed at all - on ‘plain low-priced goods made from inferior silks’.²⁴ It is significant that, at this time, one London Board of Guardians, accustomed though they were to extreme poverty and privation, resolved to apprentice no more children to the silk weavers.²⁵ In this period, too (1829-32) ‘Mr. Hanbury, the Secretary of the Spitalfields Soup Society’ was appealing for funds ‘for the relief of the distressed Manufacturers and others in that district’.²⁶ James Phillips Kay, M.D., an Assistant Poor Law Commissioner (who later became Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth), stated in Appendix B to the Annual Report of the Poor Law Commissioners for England and Wales, 1837, that the Spitalfields weavers had but a meagre diet, scanty clothing and ‘a very low amount of household convenience’. Trade depression had halved the industry’s output, one-third of the 14,000 looms being totally unemployed, while many of the remainder were only partially in use. This was disastrous where whole families relied upon the earnings of two, or perhaps three, looms. Some weavers took to portering at the docks or Billingsgate market ‘during seasons of distress’, but ‘a considerable number ... are reported to be too feeble for great bodily exertion.... The children at such periods are also hired at a market (held at Bethnal Green every Monday) by shopkeepers in all the adjoining parishes, as nurses of children, errand boys and girls, etc., and earn 2s. 2d. or 4s. 2d. per week.’²⁷ According to Richard Cray, the silk weavers’ piece-work rates in 1839 had fallen to between 50 and 60 per cent of the 1824 level, i.e. ‘before the introduction of French silks and the repeal of the Spitalfields Act’.²⁸

Ample confirmation came, shortly afterwards, from the famous Reports on the condition of the hand-loom weavers throughout the country. The report on Spitalfields (1840) was written by Dr James Mitchell, an Assistant Commissioner, but we know that W. E. Hickson, one of the four Commissioners, also made a thorough investigation in the district. He it was who took a statement from William Bresson of Daniel Street, Spitalfields, a velvet weaver and loom-broker, and a great-grandson of Raymond Bresson, a French Protestant refugee who settled in London in the seventeenth century.²⁹ William Bresson, born in 1786, had been in the silk industry all his life. As a loombroker he let out looms to other weavers, charging from 3½d. to 4d. a week. The value of each loom was about £1, and, said he, ‘I should do very well, as I have about 200 looms out, if I could get my money; but the fact is I lose half of it. I am obliged, of course, to take security, but the neighbourhood is so poor that security and all are often good for nothing. When, however, the trade prospers, I prosper. . . .’ Evidence was taken from a number of journeymen weavers. Thomas Heath, for example, had been a sailor for twelve years, but in 1816 he said, ‘I took to weaving [and] worked at plain satin for 12 months, until I got acquainted with the loom, and then I took to figured work, and have been at it ever since....’ Doubtless he had a natural flair for the craft, for he was thought to be one of the best silk weavers in Spitalfields in 1839. Another self-taught weaver was John Druce, who said that, although his father had made woollen cloth, ‘I was never taught weaving by anybody, and in 1802, being then 16 . . . I tried silk weaving and succeeded’ in various branches, but ‘many men never get beyond the plainest work.... Whenever the trade is brisk men come to it from other employments and begin at the simplest work. . . . The weavers bring up their families to be weavers from a desire to get something from their [children’s] labour as soon as possible.’ A note in Lardner’s Treatise on the. Silk Manufacture (1831) cites the case of a family consisting of husband, wife, and ten children, all of whom, excepting the two youngest, were organised like a small factory.

The father, assisted by one of his sons, was occupied with a machine ... punching card slips from figures which another son, a fine intelligent lad about thirteen years of age, was ‘reading on’. Two other lads, somewhat older, were in another apartment, casting, drawing, punching, and attaching to cords the leaden plummets or lingos, which form part of the harness for a Jacquard loom. The mother was engaged in warping silk with a machine.... One of the daughters was similarly employed at another machine, and three other girls were in three separate looms weaving figured silks.... An air of order and cheerfulness prevailed throughout this busy establishment ... and, with the exception of the plummet-drawers, all were clean and neatly clad. The particular occupation wherein each was engaged was explained readily, and with a degree of genuine politeness, which proved that amid the harassing cares attendant upon daily toils of no ordinary degree, these parents had not been unmindful of their duty, as regards the cultivation of their children’s minds and hearts.³⁰

James Hoyles, who came of an old-established weaving family, had begun at an early age, as was usual, by winding quills; then from eleven to eighteen he worked at fancy trimming, but left it because of slack trade. At eighteen he took up silk weaving and, under his father’s instruction, became proficient in twelve months. He estimated net weekly earnings as follows:

Charles Cole and a committee of weavers handed in the names of twenty plain weavers, who used, with their families, a total of 37 looms, and averaged net weekly earnings of 8s. 6d. per loom.31 Table 17.1 shows weavers’ earnings on the cheaper fabrics, allowing a deduction for their expenses of approximately 3s. a week, averaged, over the year’s work and taking slack with busy times.

Material	s.	d. per week
Plain lutes	8	1 (to 6s. 9d.)
Plain garment silk	7	5
Light satins	5	11
Plain sarsenet	4	1

Thomas Heath, one of the most skilful weavers in Spitalfields, produced 40 samples of his own work - ‘exceedingly beautiful’ figured silks. His detailed records of his earnings for upwards of eight years showed a weekly average of 15s. gross (or 11s. to 11s. 6d. net after deduction of his expenses) to which he added his wife’s earnings of about 3s. a week. ‘I have been as fortunate as most of the trade’, he told the Commissioners; ‘I have never been discharged altogether; I have always been attached to some warehouse, but then I have had a great deal of play [unemployment], as others have had. I have not been able to buy a coat for these five years.’³²

The engine-loom weavers, who made narrow goods such as ribbons, hatbands, edge-bindings and laces, were also suffering from ‘the loss of their Book of Prices’, the introduction of power looms in the North, and a disastrous reduction of their earnings. For example,

Charles Leagoe was engaged in making double ribands. Before 1824, he got £1. 8s. 4d. a week; in 1826 the work was done for 18s., and in 1831, for 15s., and that work is now [1839] paid only 13s. 4d., and, deducting is. for extra rent and 9d. for candles, the net earnings of the weaver is about 1Is. 7d. a week. In this branch the weaver must wind his own quills, as a child cannot be trusted. Of this work there is now but little, and the weavers engaged in it suffer from ‘play’. The trade is gradually becoming extinct.

For the past seven years this man had been employed chiefly on galloons,³³ and he estimated his net earnings from his loom at 5s. 9d. a week, adding that ‘even at those wages there is often little to do’. To supplement these meagre earnings he went out ‘attempting to sell tin-ware’, while his wife took his place in the loom, and he earned a little more by working ‘at the Borough market from 4 to 12 on the Saturday afternoon’. Thus he managed to scrape together a total income of 11s. 6d. a week for himself and his family. He could see no prospect of relief apart from ‘getting out of the trade to something else’, and he would certainly not let his children enter it. He shrank from accepting parish relief, and had never had such help except when he and his whole family were ‘laid up by the typhus fever’. Leagoe’s evidence was fully corroborated by other witnesses.³⁴

Even the highly skilled and somewhat more highly paid velvet weavers had little real security. At times when velvets were in vogue, they prospered; but ‘should a change come in public taste (which a few months may bring about), and velvet dresses, mantillas, velvet bonnets, shawls, collars and waistcoats go out of fashion, some thousands of the best paid class of weavers would suddenly be reduced below the common level’.³⁵ Nevertheless, their plight was, on the whole, less desperate than that of the plain and narrow weavers, and ‘the contrast between the two classes of operatives was most observable when on Saturdays, the general pay-day, they were to be seen waiting about the doors of the various manufacturers’ offices to receive their weekly “draw” of wages’.³⁶

the silk weavers in the manufacturing districts [of the North] work for lower wages than the weavers of Spitalfields and Bethnal Green, they are on the whole in better circumstances than the latter. In the suburbs of Manchester house room is much cheaper than in Spitalfields; a weaver being able to obtain a small house, with four rooms, for the rent of one room in London. Provisions also are somewhat cheaper ... but the most important advantage is cheap fuel. Next to bread, perhaps, in this cold and damp climate, the most important necessary of life is fuel; [and] ... I doubt whether anything can prevent the rapid decline of all the principal London manufactures, by their removal to the northern counties, unless means can be devised to cheapen here [London] the supply of fuel.

During the hard winter of 1838 the Manchester weavers were paying 9d. a cwt. for coal, while the Spitalfields weavers had to pay 2s. 2d., with the thermometer at zero and three-quarters of the looms idle. ‘Often, Sir, and often,’ said a Spitalfields weaver’s wife, ‘were we obliged, when half starving, to go without a pennyworth of bread, and buy a pennyworth of coals, or take the children over to a neighbour’s to borrow a warm at their fire, or put them early to bed shivering and crying with cold.’³⁷

22 B.M. Add. MS. 34,245B, ff.3-16. See also below, Appendix 2. Richard Cray was one of the earliest members of the London Working Men’s Association (founded in 1836), and was chosen by that body, with two other members, James Watson and Charles Cole, to investigate the state of the Spitalfields silk weavers (B.M. Add. MS. 37,773, f.7). Watson was a well-known Radical bookseller and publisher; Cole was secretary of the (unofficial) journeymen weavers’ committee which collected and presented evidence to the Hand-loom Weavers’ Commission.

23 W. E. Hickson said that the Spitalfields weavers were threatened less by foreigners than by their own countrymen in the North, ‘and this competition is so formidable that, had the book prices been maintained, in all probability the trade would long before this (1838-9) have left London altogether’ (Hand-loom Weavers, vol. 24, p. 15).

24 Select Committee on the Silk Trade (1832), Evidence, vol. 99, pp. 18, 319, 338, 648, 652-5.

33 Galloon is a narrow close-woven braid, of silk, gold, silver or cotton used for binding. Furniture fringes, braids, gimps, galloons, etc., were known collectively as passementerie.

37 There was at this time a tax of is. 1d. a ton on all coals consumed in London and Westminster and within twenty miles thereof; all other coal was untaxed. This tax, introduced in 1667 to help the city after the Great Fire, was not finally abolished until 1890 (1 & 2 William IV, e. 76; Hand-loom Weavers, vol. 24, p. 17).