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1689-1714.J

CLOTHING TRADE OF THE WEST.

this cause may be chiefly attributed its comparative superiority in wealth and population.

In the days before steam-power, and the application of chemical science to manufactures, natural advantages wholly determined the localisation of trades. The same principle must always prevail to a great extent in the most advanced stage of manufacturing industry. The clothing trade of the West was created by the adaptation of the district to sheep pasturage. On the grassy downs and wide plains of Wiltshire, innumerable flocks of sheep had yielded the fleece before the time when Stonehenge and Abury were mysterious ruins. The fleeces of the long-woolled sheep of the Cotswold Hills were famous in the fifteenth century; and Camden describes the substantial cotes with which this hill-district was covered, to shelter the flocks from the winter storm or the keen winds of the lambing season. The Mendip Hills supported a short-woolled breed, whose wool was as fine as that of Spain, which entered so largely into our woollen manufacture. The supply of wool was thus at hand for the clothiers who dwelt in the valley of the Lower Avon. The waters of that river, with its many branches, were especially fitted for fulling and dressing and dyeing cloth. The finest cloths were here fabricated. Frome, Bradford, Trowbridge, Devizes, with many adjacent towns then of great importance, were the seats of this " prodigy of a trade.”* Frome had added ten thousand to its population in thirty years, and was considered to have more inhabitants than Bath or Salisbury. The clothing towns were surrounded with their tributary villages and hamlets, in which the work of spinning was performed by women and children. To the cottages where the hum of the wheel was ceaselessly heard, the clothiers of the towns sent their pack-horses laden with wool, and brought back the spun yarn, ready for the weaver's loom. The operative weaver was also in many cases a domestic worker. In the fulling and dyeing processes was combined labour alone necessary. The forgotten poem of John Dyer, "The Fleece "--which Johnson disdained on account of "the meanness naturally adhering and the irreverence habitually annexed to trade and manufactures -gives us many accurate as well as pleasing pictures of the weaving labours of the valleys of the Avon, the Air, and the Stroud. The young man, entering upon his career of industry, sets up his own loom; he stores his soft yarn; he strains the warp along his garden walk, or by the highway side; he drives the thready shuttle from morn to eve; he takes the web to the fulling-mil near some clear-sliding river, where tumbling waters turn enormous wheels and hammers; the wet web is often steeped, and often dragged by sinewy arms to the river's grassy bank; it is hung on rugged tenters to brighten in the fervid sun; the clothier's shears and the burler's thistle skim the surface; and lastly, the snowy web is steeped in boiling vats, where woad or fustic, logwood or cochineal, give their hues to the purple of the prince, the scarlet of the warrior, and the black of the priest. There can be no greater contrast than that of the Woollen trade of the West, a century and a half ago, with a Cloth factory of the North in our own times; where, with the gigantic aid of steam, wool from every quarter of the

* Defoe's "Tour," vol. ii. p. 35, ed. 1738.

See Dyer's "Fleece," book iii.

+ Ibid. p. 34.

6

FOREIGN TRADE.

[1689-1714. habitable globe is carded, spun, woven by the power-loom, fulled, sheared, and dyed, in buildings one of which would turn out more cloth than a dozen old clothing-towns, with their tributary villages. The contrast between the semi-pastoral state of the great staple of England, and its factory perfection, is equally remarkable as regards the moral condition of the people. The old loom is passing away and so is the weaver of Kidderminster, who had his book before him as he threw the shuttle, and had "time enough to read: er talk of holy things.'

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The Gloucestershire clothiers of Stroud and the neighbourhood were especially famous for their fine cloths of scarlet and other gaudy hues, to which the purity of their streams was held as much to contribute as the skill of the dyer. It was the fineness and brilliancy of the English broad-cloths which gave them a value beyond their own silks and brocades to the Persian and the Turk, 66 even for their habits of ceremony." It was their intrinsic goodness to preserve which so many statutory regulations had been prescribed for centuries-which recommended them to Spaniards and Portuguese, to Venetians and Italians, to the Greeks of the Levant and even to the Moors of Africa.+ But this foreign trade was greatly straitened by circumstances and opinions. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the trade with France was gone. In 1674 a jealousy of that trade was the paramount idea of the commercial legislator; for England sent France only about eighty thousand pounds' worth of woollen manufactures, and imported ten times that value of linen and silk manufactures, besides wine, brandy, paper, and many toys and luxuries. The difference, in the economical language of that day, was called the "Balance gained by the French from us yearly." When, after the accession of William and Mary, the nation was at war with Louis XIV., all trade and commerce with France was prohibited; and it was declared that it had been found by long experience that the importation of the commodities of France" hath much exhausted the treasure of this nation, lessened the value of the native commodities and manufactures thereof, and greatly impoverished the English artificers and handicrafts."§ The same proposition was repeated in the same terms in 1704. || To compensate for the loss of the French trade, the North American colonies and the West Indies had become important customers for our woollen manufactures. The ports of Bristol and of North Devon thus continued to prosper; Liverpool was growing into importance; but many of the smaller ports of the Channel were ruined. The towns of Weymouth and Lyme, that drove a flourishing trade with France before the Revolution of 1688, fell into decay. Lyme once sent large cargoes of woollen goods to Brittany, and its "Cobb" was busy with little vessels laden with imports of French wines and linens. In 1709, the cobb-dues were under fourteen pounds, and the houses were fast falling into decay. Ships were employed in foreign trade of a larger tonnage than was fitted for small ports. Great towns alone became the seats of external commerce.**

Such a port was Bristol at the commencement of the eighteenth

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century-the famous port of the West-the only port that could pretend to enter into competition with London, and to trade with an entire independence of the capital. The Bristol shopkeepers were also merchants-" wholesale men "—and they conducted an inland trade through all the Western counties by means of carriers, and extended their traffic through the midland districts, even to the Trent. Roger North had observed that at Bristol all the dealers were engaged in adventures by sea ;-" a poor shopkeeper that sells candles will have a bale of stockings, or a piece of stuff, for Nevis or Virginia." + There was too much truth in his notice of one portion of the Bristol commerce- —" rather than fail, they trade in men." The planters with whom the Bristol traders corresponded wanted labour, and in exchange for rum, and sugar, and tobacco, men were sent-wretched outcasts who had been kidnapped, or "small rogues" who were threatened by the justices with the extreme penalties of the law, and were instructed to pray for transportation "before any indictment was found against them." Bristol had this dishonour in the days of Charles II., as it was the last to cling to the dishonour of the slave trade in the days of George III. The Bristol traders, moreover, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, had to bear a reproach, which even the noble charities of one of their great merchants, and their old reputation for hospitality, which earned them the title of "the courteous Bristolians," § could not outweigh. Defoe, in general no illiberal judge, complained of the inconveniences of Bristol-its narrow streets, its narrow river, and “also another narrow-that is, the minds of the generality of its people." He recommends them to travel to London-" from the second great trading town to the first; and they will see examples worth their imitating, as well for princely spirit as for upright and generous dealings." || At that period Bristol was cursed with a very exclusive prosperity; and its uneducated freemen, amongst whom strangers were jealously forbidden to settle, indulged, when their adventures were prosperous, in that vulgar display which is the general accompaniment of sudden riches. It was also cursed with an exclusive municipal government. From this great port of the Severn, Sebastian Cabot, "a Bristol man born," went forth in 1497 to set his foot upon Newfoundland. Two centuries later Bristol was the great emporium for American produce, and Dampier, with other bold buccaneers, sailed from the Avon to come back rich with Spanish prizes. A century and a half later, the "Great Western" steamed down between the narrow rocks of St. Vincent, on her first voyage to New York, caring little for tides and adverse winds, for she had a self-contained power which took away the uncertainty of maritime communication, and made time and space of small amount in commercial calculations. The difference between the Bristol of Cabot and the Bristol of Dampier, is not greater than the difference between the Bristol of William III., whose statue was worthily raised in Queen Square by her citizens, and the Bristol of Queen Victoria. The Avon is now far too narrow for the mighty vessels, crowded amongst the diminutive, that steam to her quays from South Wales and Ireland, from Africa and America. But the old

* Defoe's "Tour," vol. ii. p. 249. +"Life of Lord Guilford," vol. i. p. 250. Ibid. and vol. ii. p. 24. § Fuller's "Worthies." "Tour," vol. ii. p. 250. Defoe perhaps wrote under the influence of some personal slight. Bristol when under pecuniary difficulties; and was there pointed at as

He sought a refuge in "the Sunday gentleman."

WATERING-PLACES OF THE COAST.

[1689-1714

commerce of wool and woollen manufactures, of which Bristol was the seat, is gone. The North has carried away the woollen manufacture from the West, to a very considerable extent. South Wales has far more productive industry than the making of flannels. The hearth-money returns of Bristol show little above five thousand houses, which would give a population not much exceeding twenty-five thousand. Defoe says, "Bristol is supposed to have a hundred thousand inhabitants within the city, and within three miles of its circumference." This is a material increase in less than forty years. A later writer observes that "Bristol, the second city in England, next to London has made the largest improvements since the Revolution, of any one place in the kingdom, unless Manchester shall be thought an exception to this." *

The great woollen manufacture extended itself in the eighteenth century still further west. At Taunton, Defoe found eleven hundred looms at work for the weaving of common stuffs; and he was told that there was not a child in the town of above five years old who could not earn its own bread. At Honiton he first saw the serge manufacture of Devonshire, which occupied the whole county. At Exeter, a city then full of trade and manufacture, he looked with admiration upon the serge market, where the people assured him that serges to the value of a hundred thousand pounds were sometimes sold in one week. The port of Topsham was then one of the most considerable amongst the smaller ports of England; and the woollen manufactures of Devonshire were thence largely exported to Holland, to Portugal and Spain, to Italy. The commerce of the Exe is now comparatively small. Devonshire has still its scattered woollen manufactures, which give employ to fifteen hundred males and two thousand five hundred females; and five hundred males, and eight thousand five hundred females, are now connected with the production of gloves and lace. But new populations have been created by circumstances of which the Devonians of a century and a half ago had no conception. It was for modern times to behold all the bays of the south-western coast, where the myrtle is unharmed by the winter gales, transformed into flourishing towns, where a few fishermen once earned a precarious livelihood. The rush to the coast for sea-bathing and sea-air was a fashion unknown in the middle of the last century. Still less was it the fashion to locate the invalid under the shelter of hills and promontories, where the south-west breeze might give its soft but invigorating freshness to those who were held to have been perishing in the crowded city. Torquay was then a name for a few huts. Even more rare was the fashion of travelling for pleasure through scenes which we now call beautiful, but which our forefathers held to be horrible wastes. In the days of almost impassable roads, and when wheel conveyances were nct common, the hills of Devonshire and Derbyshire, the mountains of Wales and Westmorland, were left to their primitive occupants, unsought by the tourist, and hated by the business traveller. No one sailed down the Wye and the Dart for pleasure; the Dove and the Wharf were known in their inaccessible beauties only to the solitary angler. When the companion of Charles Cotton rides with him near Ashbourn, the Essex man exclaims, "Bless me, what mountains are here!" and when told that the hills bred

* Smith's "Memoirs of Wool," 1747. Vol. i p. 263.

1689-1714.1

TRAVELLING FOR PLEASURE.

and fed good beef and mutton, ejaculates, "They had need of all those commodities to make amends for the ill landscape." To the eyes of Defoe, Westmorland was a country eminent only for being the wildest, most barren, and frightful of any that he had passed over in England, or even in Wales itself. He talks of the terrible aspect of the hills, and laments that all the pleasant part of England was at an end.† Gray was the first who looked at Windermere and Borrowdale, at Skiddaw and Saddleback, with the eye of the poet. Whateley was the first who described the Wye; and Gray, who followed him, is in raptures with its "succession of nameless wonders." Such a change in the tastes of the present and the past century may be accounted for without imputing to our predecessors an indifference to the beauties of nature. Travelling was to them weary work. The most populous districts, with the least execrable roads, were to them the most attractive. The only inns were in the great thoroughfares. The chance hospitality of a cottage on a mountain side was not to their tastes. Long after the middle of the eighteenth century good roads were the exception. Turnpikes had done something to amend the evil. But up to 1770, when Arthur Young wrote, the roads of the North, and especially of Lancashire, were mostly execrable; so that,

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speaking of the turnpike road from Preston to Wigan, this shrewd observer says, "Let me most seriously caution all travellers who may accidentally purpose to travel this terrible country, to avoid it, as they would the devil."§ The love of the picturesque was not sufficient to bear the ordinary tourist through such difficulties.

In the West was the most celebrated watering-place of England. From the earliest times the hot springs of Bath had been the resort of the invalid.

"Complete Angler," Part ii.
"Works," vol. iv. 1836.

"Tour," vol. iii. p. 18.

"Six Months' Tour in the North of England," vol. iv. p. 580.

VOL. V.-126.

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