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 as desirable. Their single status was to be regarded as
unfortunate. Weddings were taking place in public in church instead
of privately. 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 married. In 1753 a marriage statute
required licenses to marry, the consent of parents or guardians
for minors to marry, the calling of banns [advance announcement so
that anyone could give a reason why the marriage should not take
place], and four weeks residence in the parish where the license
was given by bishop or other authority. These requirements
addressed the problems 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, pinmaking, 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; glassmaking;
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 6 a.m. to 8 p.m.
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 to
prevent its spread, the king was authorized by Parliament to make
regulations for prohibiting the removal or sale of cattle and for
the burial of distempered cattle. Later, the king was authorized
to prohibit the killing of cow calves. No one was to sell any ox,
bull, cow, calf, steer, or heifer until he had possession of such
for forty days or else forfeit ten pounds, 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, in which land was cultivated in common. Enclosures of land
were still taking place. 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 two-field crop rotation with fallow periods was often
displaced by the three-field system rotating grain crops, legumes, and
fallowness. 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.
In 1738, John Wyatt, a ship's carpenter who also invented the
harpoon shot from a gun, patented a spinning machine whereby
carded wool or cotton was joined together to make a long and
narrow mass. One end of this mass was drawn in between a pair of
rotating rollers, of which one surface was smooth and the other
rough, indented, or covered with leather, cloth, shagg, hair,
brushes, or points of metal. From here, the mass went between
another set of rollers, which were moving faster than the first
pair. This stretched the mass and drew it into any degree of
fineness of thread by adjusting the speed of the second pair of
rollers. Then the thread went by a flier, which twisted it. After
this the thread was wound off onto spindles or bobbins, whose
rotation was regulated by the faster pair of rollers. Or the mass
could be drawn by rotating spindles directly from one pair of
rollers. This machine was worked by two donkeys and was tended by
ten female workers. Because of bankruptcy in 1742, the invention
was sold to Edward Cave, the editor of "Gentleman's Magazine". He
set up a workshop with five machines, each fitted with fifty
spindles and worked by water wheels. Carding was done by
cylindrical carding machines invented by Lewis Paul.
In 1764, the plant was bought by carpenter and weaver James
Hargreaves. He was watching his wife spin when the spinning wheel
tipped over onto its side. It continued to revolve, while the
thread, held between two fingers, seemed to be spinning itself,
even though the spindle was in a vertical instead of a horizontal
position. It occurred to him that a large number of vertical
spindles arranged side by side could be turned by the same wheel
and that, therefore, many threads could be spun at once. He named
his machine the "the Jenny" after his wife. This "spinning Jenny"
could spin a hundred threads at a time. He patented it about 1770.
The machine consisted of a rectangular frame on four legs. At one
end was a row of vertical spindles. Across the frame were two
parallel wooden rails, lying close together, which were mounted on
a sort of carriage and slid backwards and forwards as desired. The
cotton, which had been previously carded, stretched, and twisted
passed between the two rails and then was wound on spindles. With
one hand the spinner worked the carriage backwards and forwards,
and with the other he turned the handle which worked the spindles.
In this way, the thread was drawn and twisted at the same time. The
jenny did the work of about 30 spinning wheels. No longer did it
take ten spinners to keep one weaver busy. But manufacturers
refused to pay him royalties for his invention. He was offered
3,000 pounds for his rights in the jenny, but refused it. The
courts held that the model of his jenny had been used in industry
before it was patented and any rights he may have had were declared
to have lapsed. Nevertheless, he made over 4,000 pounds. The
spinning jenny was used in many homes.
Richard Arkwright came from a poor family and was taught to read
by an uncle. He became a barber and made wigs. He taught himself
crafts necessary to invent and patent in 1769 a spinning frame
worked by a water wheel, which he called a" water frame". He
strengthened cotton thread by adding rollers to the spinning
process which were able to strengthen the cotton thread and make it
of even thickness so that it could be used instead of costly linen
as the warp. With capital from two rich hosiers, he set up a
workshop next to a swift and powerful river running down a narrow
gorge. Then he turned his attention to weaving this thread with
multiple spinning wheels in the first practical cotton mill
factory. In 1773, he set up weaving workshops making pure cotton
calicoes which were as good as Indian calicoes. He confronted the
problem of a statute of 1721 which proscribed wearing or using
printed, painted, stained or dyed calicoes e.g. in apparel, bed,
chair, cushion, window curtain, and furniture, except those dyed
all in blue, or else forfeit 20 pounds by a seller, 5 pounds by a
wearer, and 20 pounds by other users. The purpose was to provide
wool-working jobs to the poor, whose numbers had been increasing
excessively because of lack of work. Arkwright argued that the
statute should not include printed or painted cloth made in Great
Britain in its ancient tradition of fustians with an all linen warp
(for strength) and a cotton weft (for fineness). This statute was
so "clarified" in 1735. When wool-weavers had expressed their
opposition to imported printed cottons and calicoes by tearing them
off people, a statute of 1720 provided that any one who willfully
and maliciously assaulted a person in the public streets or
highways with an intent to tear, spoil, cut, burn, or deface the
garments or clothes of such person and carried this out was guilty
of felony punishable by transportation for seven years. The
prohibition against the manufacture and wearing and using of pure
cotton fabrics came to an end in 1774 on arguments of Arkwright
made to Parliament that his pure cottons would bleach, print, wash
and wear better than fustians. This was the first all-cotton cloth
made in England.
In 1775, Arkwright added machines to do work prefatory to
spinning. Raw cotton was first fed by a sloping hose to a feeder
that was perpetually revolving. From here it went a carding
machine of three rollers of different diameters covered with bent
metal teeth. The first, with teeth bent in the direction of its
revolution, caught up the cotton fibers. The second, revolving in
the same direction but much faster, carded the fibers into the
requisite fineness by contact with the third, whose teeth and
motion were in the opposite direction. Next, a crank and comb
detached the carded cotton so that it came off as a continuous
ribbon. Then the ribbon went into a revolving cone, which twisted
it on itself. Eventually Arkwright became rich from his creation
of the modern factory, which was widely imitated. He established
discipline in his mills and he made his presence felt everywhere
there, watching his men and obtaining from them the steadiest and
most careful work. He provided housing and services to attract
workers.