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Rh vegetable fibre, since otherwise “manufacturer of cottons” would have been a more natural designation. But the proof of the will of one cotton manufacturer establishes very little.

The next earliest known reference to the cotton industry proper occurs in a petition to the earl of Salisbury, made presumably in 1610, asking for the continuance of a grant for reforming frauds committed in the manufacture of “bambazine cotton such as groweth in the land of Persia being no kind of wool.” But a far more valuable piece of evidence, discovered by W. H. Price, is a petition of “Merchants and citizens of London that use buying and selling of fustians made in England, as of the makers of the same fustians.” Its probable date is 1621, and it contains the following important passages:—

“About twenty years past, divers people in this kingdom, but chiefly in the county of Lancaster, have found out the trade of making of other fustians, made of a kind of bombast or down, being a fruit of the earth growing upon little shrubs or bushes, brought into this kingdom by the Turkey merchants, from Smyrna, Cyprus, Acra and Sydon, but commonly called cotton wool; and also of linen yarn most part brought out of Scotland, and othersome made in England, and no part of the same fustians of any wool at all, for which said bombast and yarn imported, his majesty has a great yearly sum of money for the custom and subsidy thereof.

“There is at the least 40 thousand pieces of fustian of this kind yearly made in England, the subsidy to his majesty of the materials for making of every piece coming to between 8d. and 10d. the piece; and thousands of poor people set on working of these fustians.

“The right honourable duke of Lennox in 11 of Jacobus 1613 procured a patent from his majesty, of alnager of new draperies for 60 years, upon pretence that wool was converted into other sorts of commodities to the loss of customs and subsidies for wool transported beyond seas; and therein is inserted into his patent, searching and sealing; and subsidy for 80 several stuffs; and among the rest these fustians or other stuffs of this kind of cotton wool, and subsidy and a fee for the same, and forfeiture of 20s. for putting any to sale unsealed, the moiety of the same forfeiture to the said duke, and power thereby given to the duke or his deputies, to enter any man’s house to search for any such stuffs, and seize them till the forfeiture be paid; and if any resist such search, to forfeit £10 and power thereby given to the lord treasurer or chancellor of the exchequer, to make new ordinances or grant commissions for the aid of the duke and his officers in execution of their office.”

Here the date of the appearance of the cotton industry on an appreciable scale—it is questionable whether any importance should be attached to the expression “found out”—is given by those who would be speaking of facts within the memory of themselves or their friends as “about twenty years past” from 1621, and the annual output of the industry in 1621 is mentioned. Moreover, it is established by this document that for a time at least the cotton manufacture was “regulated” like the other textile trades. The date assigned by the petitioners for the first attraction of attention by the English cotton industry may be supported on negative grounds.

Baines assures us that William Camden, who wrote in 1590, devoted not a sentence to the cotton industry, though Manchester figures among his descriptions: “This town,” he says, “excels the towns immediately around it in handsomeness, populousness, woollen manufacture, market place, church and college; but did much more excel them in the last age, as well by the glory of its woollen cloths (laneorum pannorum honore), which they call Manchester cottons, as by the privilege of sanctuary, which the authority of parliament under Henry VIII. transferred to Chester.” It is significant too that in the Elizabethan poor law of 1601 (43 Elizabeth), neither cotton-wool nor yarn is included among the fabrics to be provided by the overseers to set the poor to work upon; though, of course, it might be argued that so short-stapled a fibre needed for its working, when machinery was rough, a skill in the operative which would be above that of the average person unable to find employment. However, a proposal was made in 1626 to employ the poor in the spinning of cotton and weaving wool.

Prior to Mr Price’s discovery of the petition mentioned above, the earliest known notice of the existence in England of a cotton industry of any magnitude was the oft-quoted passage from Lewes Roberts’s Treasure of Traffic (1641), which runs: “The town of Manchester, in Lancashire, must be also herein remembered, and worthily for their encouragement commended, who buy the yarne of the Irish in great quantity, and weaving it, return the same again into Ireland to sell: Neither doth their industry rest here, for they buy cotton-wool in London that comes first from Cyprus and Smyrna, and at home work the same, and perfect it into fustians, vermillions, dimities and other such stuffs, and then return it to London, where the same is vented and sold, and not seldom sent into foreign parts.”

Despite Lewes Roberts’s flattering reference, the trade of Manchester about that time consisted chiefly in woollen frizes, fustians, sackcloths, mingled stuffs, caps, inkles, tapes, points, &c., according to “A Description of the Towns of Manchester and Salford,” 1650, and woollens for a long time held the first place. But before another century had run its course cottons proper had pushed into the first rank, though the woollen industry continued to be of unquestionable importance. In 1727 Daniel Defoe could write, “the grand manufacture which has so much raised this town is that of cotton in all its varieties,” and he did not mean the woollen “cottons,” as he made plain by other references to the industry in the same connexion; but it was not until some fifty years later that the ousting of the woollen industry from what is now peculiarly the cotton district became unmistakable. As a rule the woollen weavers were driven farther and farther east—Bury lay just outside the cotton area when Defoe wrote—and finally many of them settled in the West Riding. Edwin Butterworth even tells of woollen weavers who migrated from Oldham to the distant town of Bradford in Wiltshire because of the decline of their trade before the victorious cotton industry. Much the same fate was being shared by the linen industry in Lancashire, which was forced out of the county westwards and northwards. The explanation of the three centralizations, namely of the woollen industry, the cotton industry and the linen industry, is not far to seek. The popularity of the fabrics produced by the rising cotton industry enabled it to pay high wages, which, indeed, were essential to bring about its expansion. This a priori diagnosis is supported by contemporary analysis: thus “the rapid progress of that business (cotton spinning) and the higher wages which it afford, have so far distressed the makers of worsted goods in that county (Lancashire), that they have found themselves obliged to offer their few remaining spinners larger premiums than the state of their trade would allow.” The best operatives of Lancashire were attracted sooner or later to assist the triumphs of art over the vegetable wool. At the same time the scattered woollen and linen workers of Lancashire were suffering from the competition of rivals enjoying elsewhere the economies of some centralization, and the demand for woollen and linen warps in the cotton industry ceased after the introduction of Arkwright’s water-twist. When the factory became common the economies of centralization (which arise from the wide range of specialism laid open to a large local industry) increased; moreover they were reinforced by the diminution of social friction and the intensification of business sensitiveness which marked the development of the 19th century. Once begun, the centralizing movement proceeded naturally with accelerating speed. The contrast beneath is an instructive statistical comment:—