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Appleby History > Alan Roberts > Early Modern Villagers > Craftworkers

Appleby Families: Villagers in Early Modern Times

Part 5: Traditional and Cottage Craftworkers

by Alan Roberts

The register shows that by 1700 about a third of Appleby householders were craftsmen, engaged either in trades connected with agriculture or cottage craft production for the domestic market.  Families who had lived in the parish for three or more generations monopolised the traditional trades of blacksmith, wheelwright and carpenter.  More than half of the cottage craftworkers on the other hand were 'new arrivals'.  By 1700 Appleby had a growing diversity of new occupations. The proportion of craftsmen rapidly increased after 1660. By 1700 only about a third of the non-agricultural craftsmen in Appleby had lived there three generations.  Most of these ‘new arrivals’ worked as pieceworkers in the clothing and leather trades.

Craftsmen were scattered in a broad band across the social spectrum however the most important social division within their ranks was between the established traditional tradesmen and the cottage craftworkers.  Traditional craftsmen usually came from well-established smallholding families.  The village blacksmith was prominent in the craft hierarchy.  The Wathew family in Appleby were smiths for at least five generations.  Richard Wathew [Watha] passed on his hearth and blacksmith's tools to his son Robert in 1586.  His great-great grandson, John Wathew. did not relinquish the smithy until 1734. Other long-established craftsmen families in Appleby were the wheelwrights (Spencer), butchers  (Jorden), masons (Mould) and tailors (Crossland and Letherland). 

The setting up of cottage craft industries was part of a general diversification from agriculture to subsistence manufacturing taking place throughout the midlands from the mid seventeenth-century onwards. Agricultural parishes in the throes of enclosure, like Appleby, offered temporary employment in seasonal hedging and ditching of the new enclosures, and more permanent work in cottage craft workshops set up by entrepreneurial clothiers and shoe manufacturers. Appleby clothworkers and shoemakers would have provided finished goods for retailers in Ashby, where some two-thirds of the population were engaged in non-agricultural activities connected with the clothing and leather trade, and Tamworth where there was also a growing demand for cloth and leathergoods

Cottage craftworkers usually came from the ranks of the labouring population, although some were smallholders who combined part-time crafts with husbandry as is shown in the Austrey register in the 1560s which variously describes Richard Martin in one entry as a day-labourer and in another as a thatcher and John Snape as a day-labourer and a fletcher.  Some described as day-labourers around 1600 probably worked as agricultural labourers in the harvesting season and cottage craftworkers in winter.  The listing of spinning wheels, looms and stocks of flax, wool and yarn in husbandmen's inventories provides evidence of part-time domestic cloth production, a tradition which continued well into the seventeenth century.  Henry Erpe's inventory identifies him as a smallholder with his own team and a crop of corn in Appleby field (1622).  But it also reveals a substantial quantity of woollen and linen towelling together with 'weavinge cloathes' in his front parlour.  John Ashmore, whose landholdings were sufficiently dispersed to require his will to be proved in Canterbury, refers to ‘a loume, commonly known by the name of a Bastard Loume' when drawing up his will in 1657. 

Hereditary association was one of several factors which determined a craftsman's place in the village social hierarchy. Another, perhaps even more important, was his relative prosperity.  No appreciable differences were found between the inventory wealth of traditional and industrial craftworkers: both left on average between £30 and £40 worth of goods.  While there was a considerable range of valuations within each occupational category craftsmen were better housed than day-labourers, although neither needed or had as much storage space for agricultural produce and implements as husbandmen.  Although the small number of surviving inventories precludes any firm conclusions, it appears that labourers tended to remain in small one or two-roomed cottages while craftsmen usually had four or more rooms including a workshop. Possession of a workshop set the independent traditional craftsman apart from the cottage craftworker.  Roughly half of the craftsman's inventories refer to shops of one kind or another.  Shops attached to the dwellings of William Flavell and Henry Cooper of Appleby in the early Stuart period identify both of them as craftsmen.  William's precise trade is uncertain.  His entire goods were worth £71 of which two-thirds were in livestock and grain, and another tenth in 'goods in the shop' The 'irne and toales' listed in Henry Cooper’s workshop suggest that he might have been a blacksmith, wheelwright or cooper. The 'shops' were probably workshops rather than retail outlets although some might have been selling goods. A proliferation of retail shops in country townships prompted one unidentified writer to blame shopkeepers for the decay of trade in market towns since the Civil War: 'for now [1681] in every country village where [there] is... not above ten houses, there is a shopkeeper'.

The combined evidence from wills and inventories shows that although traditional tradesmen like the Wathews weathered economic crises through their investments in farming, stocks and bonds, the fortunes of the immigrant craftworkers were far more precarious.

Sources and Notes

L.R.O. wills, Richard Watha, 1587137, John Wathew, 1681/44, John Wathew, 1734, Henry Erpe, 1622/52.

P.R.O.  will John Ashmore, PROB 11/268/391; the loom had presumably been modified.

Ashby and Tamworth both specialised in cloths and leathergoods, although the principal midland cloth markets were at Kingston, Oswestry and Shrewsbury, and the main leather markets were at Congleton and Northampton: Everitt, AHEW IV, 466-592.

Moxon, Ashby thesis, 37; Woollen clothworkers in Ashby are recorded in Nichols III, 615; For details of the 'putting out' system adopted by Coventry clothiers and shoemakers see VCH Warws VIII, 167-8.

L.R.O. inventories,  William Flavell, Henry Cooper PR I/55/122, I/55/155

William may have been related to George Flavill, a clothworker; Cf. George Flavill, son of John Flavill, weaver, married at Norton in 1586: Norton Parish Register.

Ref. To shopkeepers in [Anon.], 'The State of England Revived' in Thirsk and Cooper (eds.), Seventeenth Century Economic Documents, 397.

©Alan Roberts

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