City were gradually being replaced by warehouses and offices. In
1757, London Bridge was widened and the houses were cleared off
it. There were lanes for carriages in the middle and for
pedestrians on each side. Its arches were also widened. Lights
were put on it to be lit all night. And watchmen were put on it
for safety and protection of passengers. (This was paid for by
tolls of 1/2 d. per horse, 1d. per carriage, and 2d.-1s. for
vessels with goods.) About 1762, a body of enterprising citizens
secured private acts of Parliament which allowed them to levy a
house tax in return for providing paving and lighting, which then
greatly improved, as did sanitation. Sidewalks were raised between
the street proper and the buildings, replacing the protective
posts which had lined the roads. Flat stones were put in place of
the pebbles on the roadway. Signs hanging in from of stores, which
had blocked the sunlight, were placed flat in front of the
buildings. This also made the streets more airy. The buildings
were given numbered addresses and street names were placed on
buildings. Loading and unloading could not exceed one hour.
Nuisances like empty carts could be removed. Cranes used in
warehouses had to be stored in unobtrusive places. One who drove
on the foot pavement had to forfeit 10s. for the first offense,
20s. for the second offense, and 40s. for other offenses. Wells
were dug and pumps erected for watering the streets. Pavements
were to be repaired on complaint. Dust boxes and dust holes were
built and had to be used for refuse awaiting pickup by the raker
or forfeit 10s. In 1762, the system of having every man
responsible for cleaning the street in front of his door, which
occasioned piles of rubbish in the central troughs of the streets
waiting for the next rain to be washed away, was abandoned. But
house occupants were required to keep the sidewalk in front of
their house clean or forfeit 2s. If one broke a light, he had to
pay damages if it was accidental, and also 20s. if willful. There
were special stands for hackney coaches, which were 12d.6d. for a
day of twelve hours. Their regulations were extended to Sundays.
Wards were to chose substantial inhabitants to be collectors for a
year at a time to collect the rates, which were not to exceed
1s.6d. per pound of rents. If one declined to be a collector, he
had to forfeit 50 pounds.
In London, the normal system of building was for builders to buy
up leases, put up a new building, and sell it before the lease
became due. The rules for party walls between buildings were made
more stringent: 2 1/2 bricks thick in cellar, 2 bricks thick to
the garret floor, and 1 1/2 bricks above the roofs or gutters.
They had to be made of brick or stone. In 1772, rain water from
roofs had to be carried to the streets in lead or other pipes that
were affixed against the side of the building. In 1774, iron,
copper, or other pipe or funnel for conveying smoke or steam were
not to be near any inside timber, or in front of most any building
or next to any public street, square, or court.
In the 1720s firefighters had to fill a tank on a wagon by hand
with buckets. On top of the bucket was a hose that could spray
water high. London parishes were authorized to place upon the
water pipes underground stop-blocks of wood with a plug and
firecocks to go into such pipe at various distances so that there
would be no loss in time in digging down to the pipes to get water
to fight fires. Parishes were required to keep at known places,
ladders and a large engine and a hand engine to throw up water to
extinguish fires including one leather hose with socket fitting
the plug or firecock, so that buckets would not be needed. The Sun
Insurance Company was incorporated for fire insurance in 1711.
Insurance offices were authorized to employ watermen with poles,
hooks, and hatchets to be always ready at a call to extinguish
fires.
No more than 12 sacks of meal, 12 quarters of malt, 750 bricks, or
1 chalder of coal per load on wagons or carts with wheels bound
with [narrow] iron tire are allowed within ten miles of London or
Westminster, or forfeit one horse. This is to prevent decay of the
roads.
For every wagon and cart in London, there must be a person on foot
to guide it to prevent the maiming, wounding, and killing of
people, especially the old and children, when drivers ride on
their wagons and carts. Later, it was required that carts must
display the name of the owner and be registered. Still later,
there was a penalty of 10s. for not having a person on foot to
guide any cart. Later still, in 1757, if a new owner of a cart did
not put his name thereon, he had to forfeit 40s., and the cart and
horse could be seized and sold to pay the forfeiture. Persons
willfully obstructing passage on streets with empty carts or
barrels or pipes shall forfeit 5-12s. or do hard labor up to one
month. The justices of London assessed rates and made regulations
for carriage of goods. Certain houses and buildings were bought
and pulled down to widen several streets, lanes, and passages.
In 1774, persons driving cattle in London, whose negligence or
improper treatment of such cattle cause them to do mischief shall
forfeit 5-20s. or else go to a House of Correction for up to one
month or be publicly whipped.
The roads around London were neither very attractive nor very
safe. Along them was land covered with water from drains and
refuse and dung heaps. Hogs were kept in large numbers on the
outskirts and fed on the garbage of the town. Smoking brick kilns
surrounded a great part of London. In the brickyards vagrants
lived and slept, cooking their food at the kilns.
Queen Anne's drinking of tea made it a popular drink, but it was
still expensive. This habit improved health because to make tea,
the water had to be boiled before drunk. Breakfast included tea
and bread and butter, and later toast with melted butter. The rich
also had coffee and chocolate. The morning newspaper was often
read at breakfast. The chief dinner dishes were roast beef, roast
mutton, boiled beef or pork, with puddings and vegetables. Roast
meat was still the basic diet of town and country gentlemen. There
were also fowls, tripes, rabbits, hares, pigeons, and venison.
Many elaborate sauces were made. The national dish was the
pudding, a compound of steak, kidney, larks, and oyster. Drinks
included ginger beer, lemonade, barley water, coffee, chocolate,
tea, and foreign wine. Port from Portugal was introduced about
1703, and rum about 1714. Rum, made from sugar, first became
popular as a medicine, well-whisked with butter. Beer was drunk by
the poorer and middle classes. The poor could afford very little
meat now, unlike 200 years ago. Their standard fare was cheese,
bread, and tea, the latter of which was usually from used tea
leaves bought from rich houses.
Households were smaller; a peer had a household of about 25-50.
The proportion of women grew to one-third to one-half. Dinner
guests sat and were served in order of rank, with gentlemen on one
side of the table and ladies on the other. Later, a fashion came
in to sit alternately by sex. Dinner was in several courses and
lasted a few hours. Toasts might be made. It was bad manners to
put one's elbows on the table, to sniff the food, to eat too
slowly or too quickly, to scratch, spit, or blow one's nose at the
table, or to pick one's teeth with a toothpick before the dishes
were removed. After dinner, the men drank, smoked, and talked at
the table. There was a chamber pot under the sideboard for their
use. Politics was a popular subject. The women talked together in
the drawing room. Later, the men joined the women for tea and
coffee. The evening often finished with card games, reading
newspapers, verse-making, fortune-telling, walks in the garden,
impromptu dancing, perhaps gambling, and supper.
The nobility and gentry became more mobile and now mixed together
at parties. At these afternoon parties, there were a variety of
simultaneous activities, instead of everyone participating in the
same activities together as a group. Guests could choose to engage
in conversation, news, cards, tea-drinking, music, dancing, and
even go into supper at different times. Sometimes a man other than
her husband escorted a lady to a party. Having lovers outside
marriage was socially accepted if discrete.
Single women were discouraged from thinking of their independent
status not as advantageous, but as regrettable. Weddings were
becoming public in church instead of private. Brides wore a white
silk or satin dress with a train. Over one third of brides who
were capable of having children were already pregnant when they
got married. In 1753 a marriage statute required licenses to marry
and the consent of parents or guardians in case of minors, calling
of banns [advance announcement so that anyone could point out why
the marriage should not take place], and need of four weeks
residence in the parish where the license was given by bishop or
other authority, because of the kidnapping of heiresses,
prostitutes trapping unwary youths after getting them drunk, and
priests performing marriages clandestinely and not in church,
which required banns. Two witnesses to the marriage were required
to sign a certificate of marriage, which was then to be registered
in the parish books. Manufactured goods relieved ladies from
baking of bread, brewing, and spinning. So they often visited with
friends, wrote letters, embroidered, and supervised the servants.
Funerals ceremonies started with socializing at the house with
refreshments, then going in a procession to the church for burial,
and finally returning to the house for more socializing.
It was possible for a woman-covert to be seized of land in fee
simple or in tail general or special to her separate use, free
from control or intermeddling of her husband.
Houses were warmed in winter by burning coal. Furniture was still
sparse. Moderate homes had tent-beds in use, with which cloth was
hung on all four sides of the bed from a light iron framework
above the bed. The beds were warmed with a warming pan heated in a
fire before use. There were often bed bugs and fleas. Everyone
wore nightcaps to bed. Pewter tableware was used, but the poor
used tinware instead. Copper, brass, and iron pots and pans were
increasingly common.
Most towns had a regular market once or twice a week. In them,
street cleaning was still a responsibility of individual
householders. Water was still obtained from wells and pumps. There
was no municipal government as such. Public works were done by
special commissions set up for particular purposes, such as
lighting, cleaning and paving the streets, night watchmen, traffic
regulation, removing nuisances, and improving local amenities.
Large towns had hospitals for the poor. In the larger
manufacturing towns, there were literary and philosophical
societies for debates and discussions. These put together
libraries for use of their members. Also in these large towns,
there were booksellers' shops, printing houses, weekly newspapers,
playhouses, concerts, and horseracing courses, the latter of which
was mostly patronized by gentlemen. Some private citizens of
various towns followed the example of London and obtained from
Parliament the right to levy a house rate for paving and lighting.
Physicians and lawyers lived in two-story brick mansions with
attics and sash windows that could be lifted up and down with the
help of a pulley. They had rectangular wood panes each with a
sheet of glass cut from a circle of blown glass. The old blown
glass was not regular, but had a wrinkled appearance. The center
of each pane of glass was thicker with a knot in the middle left
from the blow pipe. In front of the house were railings which
supported two lanterns at the doorway.
Towns tended to be known for certain specialties, such as seaside
holiday resorts, spas like Bath, cathedral towns, fashionable
shopping for gentry, and towns with certain industries like glass
and china manufacture, pin-making, pottery, tanning, manufacture
of linen, silk, cotton, and the knitting trade. Certain towns were
famous for certain varieties of wool cloth. Before 1750, a town
with more than 5,000 inhabitants was considered a large town. Shop
keeping was supplanting fairs and markets. Certain industries were
done on a large scale and required workers to be at the same site,
e.g. brewing and distilling; building ships; printing fustians;
making paper, soap (from animal fat) or candles; coal mining, iron
production, mining and smelting of tin and copper, refining of
salt, and digging of clay. Certain other industries also required
some kind of power or team work for their production, e.g.
refining sugar; finishing cloth; making bricks; glass-making;
manufacture of ropes and sails, and processing of copper and brass
into rods and sheets. Often the manufacturer's house was
surrounded by the many cottages of his workers. There the wife and
children usually were busy carding and spinning. Putting out work
and subcontracting were widespread and created many small-scale
capitalists. Workers' hours were typically 6am to 8pm.
As wood charcoal was becoming expensive, coal was increasingly
used for brewing and for brick, glass, and china manufacturing.
Mines for coal became deeper; flooding of them and of tin and
copper mines became a problem.
Drovers bought cattle in the countryside, drove them to big towns,
and sold them to fattening graziers or fatted them themselves.
Then they were driven into town and sold to the wholesale butcher,
who sold the carcass to the retail butcher, the hides to the
tanner, and the bones to the glue maker. Flocks of geese were also
driven into towns, after their feet were given a protective
covering of tar. There were also middlemen wholesalers for cheese,
butter, cloth, and iron.
There was a rage of distemper among the cattle so serious that the
king was authorized to make regulations for prohibiting the
removal or sale and for the burial of distempered cattle Later,
the king was authorized to prohibit the killing of cow calves. No
one may sell any ox, bull, cow, calf, steer, or heifer until he
has had possession of such for forty days or forfeit ten pounds,
because of distemper. Later, the king was authorized to regulate
the movement of cattle from one place to another.
The main industry of the country was still agriculture. In the
countryside, about half the arable land was under the open field
system, with land cultivated in common. Enclosure of land was
still going on. The enclosures were now done by statutory
commissions to ensure equitable allotments.
Agricultural improvements came first to enclosed land, which
comprised about half of the agricultural land. In the 1733, Jethro
Tull published a book about his 1701 invention of the seed-drill
to first pulverize the soil for cultivation without manure and
then to deposit seed at a uniform depth in regulated quantities
and in rows instead of being thrown haphazardly. Also explained
was the horse-hoe to stir the soil about the roots of the plants
to preserve moisture, promote aeration, admit warmth, and destroy
weeds. There were more horses than oxen in use now in the fields.
The horse-hoe was first used by large independent farmers on
enclosed land. Also invented was a threshing machine with a set of
sticks to replace hand threshing with flails. Under-drainage as
well as irrigation was practiced. Lord Townshend alternated
turnips, grasses, and grain in his fields, and thus provided
winter food for his cattle. The old forms of crop rotation with
fallow periods were often displaced by legume-rotation field-grass
agriculture. Independent farming gave rise to the improvement of
breeds of livestock by selective breeding.
Enclosed land produced 26 bushels of grain compared to 18 bushels
for common field land. It produced 9 pounds of sheep fleece
compared to 3 1/2 pounds for common field land. Overall, soils
were improved by being treated with clay, chalk, or lime.
Artificial pasture was extended and there was increased use of
clover, sainfoin, and rye-grass. Grain productivity was four times
that of 1200. A fatted ox was 800 pounds compared to the former
400 pounds which it weighed from the 1300s to the 1600s. The
fleece of sheep increased fourfold.
By statute of 1756, persons having rights of common in certain
land may, by the major part in number and in value of each's
tenement, enclose such land for planting and growth of timber or
underwood.
Every village had a smith, carpenter, and miller. The larger
villages also had a potter, a turner, a malster, a weaver, a
tanner, and perhaps a mercer or grocer middleman. Wheelwrights
made ploughs, harrows, carts, and wagons. Ploughs had one, two, or
no wheels. Poor farming families took up extra work in the
villages such as making gloves, knitting stockings, or spinning
yarn. Craftsmen still helped farmers at harvest time.
Much of the rural population was now dispersed over the
countryside instead of being concentrated in villages because so
many small holders had sold out due to enclosures of farm land,
especially of common land and waste land. The rural working class
lived in two room cottages, with low ceilings, small windows, and
an earth floor. Patience was required for those willing to wait
for an existing cottage in a village to be vacated. Most laborers
did not marry unless and until they found a cottage. Ancient
custom that a person could build a home for himself on waste land
if he did it in one night was ceasing to be respected. Farmers
usually preferred employing day-laborers than keeping servants.
There were many migrant workers, mainly from Ireland, for the busy
summer haymaking and harvesting.
The children of laborers and of small farmers had little schooling
because they were needed for work. They scared the birds, weeded
the fields, picked the stones, tended the poultry, set beans,
combed the wool, and collected the rushes and dipped them in the
tallow [sheep fat].
Farm people relied on well water or rain water collected in lead
cisterns. A farmhouse fireplace had pots hung from iron rods.
Saucepans sat on iron stands, which were stored above the mantel
when not in use. Spits were rotated by pulleys powered by the
upward current of hot air or by a mechanical device. Bacon was
smoked in the chimney accessible by a staircase or upper floor.
There still existed customary freeholders, who owned their land
subject to certain customary obligations to the lord of a manor.
The people displaced by enclosure became laborers dependent on
wages or paupers. Their discontent was expressed in this poem:
"They hang the man and flog the woman
That steals a goose from off the common
But leave the greater criminal loose
That steals the common from the goose."
Eventually there was some relief given to the poor workers. By
statute of 1773, wastes, commons, and fields having several owners
with different interests may by three-quarters vote in number and
in value of the occupiers cultivate such for up to six years.
However, cottagers and those with certain sheep walks, or cattle
pasture, may not be excluded from their rights of common. By
statute of 1776, the Elizabethan statute restricting locations
where cottages could be erected and their inhabitants was repealed
because the industrious poor were under great difficulties to
procure habitations.
Land could be rented out at ten times the original value. Land was
typically rented out for 7, 14, or 21 years. Great fortunes were
made by large landowners who built grand country estates. The
manufacturers and merchants made much money, but agriculture was
still the basis of the national wealth. As the population grew,
the number of people in the manufacturing classes was almost that
of the agriculturalists, but they had at least twice the income of
the agriculturalists.
The greatest industry after agriculture was cloth. Most of this
activity took places in the homes, but families could earn more if
each family member was willing to exchange the informality of
domestic work for the long hours and harsh discipline of the
factory or workshop. More wool was made into cloth in the country.
Dyed and finished wool cloth and less raw wool and unfinished
broadcloth, was exported. Bleaching was done by protracted washing
and open-air drying in "bleach fields". There were great advances
in the technology of making cloth.
Thomas Lombe, the son of a weaver, became a mercer and merchant in
London. He went to Italy to discover their secret in manufacturing
silk so inexpensively. He not only found his way in to see their
silk machines, but made some drawings and sent them to England
hidden in pieces of silk. He got a patent in 1718 and he and his
brother set up a mill using water power to twist together the silk
fibers from the cocoons into thread [thrown silk] in 1719. His
factory was five hundred feet long and about five stories high.
One water wheel worked the vast number of parts on the machines.
The machines inside were very tall, cylindrical in shape, and
rotated on vertical axes. Several rows of bobbins, set on the
circumference, received the threads, and by a rapid rotary
movement gave them the necessary twist. At the top the thrown silk
was automatically wound on a winder, all ready to be made into
hanks for sale. The workman's chief task was to reknot the threads
whenever they broke. Each man was in charge of sixty threads.
There were three hundred workmen. Lombe made a fortune of 120,000
pounds and was knighted and made an alderman of London. After his
patent expired in 1732, his mill became the prototype for later
cotton and wool spinning mills in the later 1700s. There were many
woolen manufacture towns. Clothiers might employ up to three
thousand workers. At these, the spinning was done by unskilled
labor, especially women and children in villages and towns.
Weaving, wool combing, and carding were skilled occupations.
In 1733, clockmaker and weaver John Kay invented a flying shuttle
for weaving. It was fitted with small wheels and set in a kind of
wooden groove. On either side there were two wooden hammers hung
on horizontal rods to give the shuttle and to and fro action. The
two hammers were bound together by two strings attached to a
single handle, so that with one hand the shuttle could be driven
either way. With a sharp tap by the weaver, first one and then the
other hammer moved on its rod. It hit the shuttle, which slid
along its groove. At the end of each rod there was a spring to
stop the hammer and replace it in position. It doubled the
weavers' output. Now the broadest cloth could be woven by one man
instead of two. This shuttle was used in a machine for cotton. But
the manufacturers who used the flying shuttle combined together
and refused to pay royalties to Kay, who was ruined by legal
expenses. Now the price of thread rose because of increased demand
for it. The weavers, who had to pay the spinners, then found it
hard to make a living. But the process of spinning was soon to
catch up.