But the foul grievance was this: each man had to pay a whole week’s frame rent, though he had only half a week’s work! Thus while the poor miserable weaver knew that this half-week’s work, after all the deductions, would produce him such a mere pittance that he could only secure a scant share of the meanest food, he remembered that the owner of the frame had the full rent per week, and the middleman or “master” had also his weekly pickings secured to him.
‘Again; a kind of hose would be demanded for which the frame needed a deal of troublesome and tedious altering. But the poor weaver was expected to make all the alterations himself. And sometimes he could not begin his week’s weaving until a day, or a day and a half, had been spent in making the necessary alterations. Delay was also a custom on Monday mornings. The working man must call again. He was too early. And, finally, all the work was ended. The warehouses were glutted, and the hosiery firms had no orders. This came again and again, in Leicester and Loughborough and Hinckley, and the framework knitting villages of the county, until, when a little prosperity returned, no one expected it to continue.’9
Cooper’s final hint that the low condition of framework knitters was due to more than the specific grievances already listed sets the problem in a somewhat wider perspective. The distress of the stockingers, caused by their low earnings and long periods of complete or partial unemployment, was not the result of competition between the economically dying handworker and production by power machinery. The truth was that the trade of framework knitting, like that of handloom weaving, was overstocked with labour. Only in exceptionally prosperous times was there enough work to go round. The system of frame rents directly encouraged employers to spread the work over as many knitters as possible, even though this meant that each would have less than a full week’s work, since thereby the maximum number of rents would be obtained. The organisation of the industry was well calculated to encourage overcrowding; there was, in fact, a premium on idleness. The industry was very susceptible to changes in fashion; new lines or new markets, offering higher rates than the average, attracted fresh workers, who remained to swell the numbers in the industry long after the temporary boom had gone. Entry into the trade was easy. Apprenticeship had decayed or become meaningless by the 1840s, and in any case the work was normally only semi-skilled. Youths and girls in their teens could easily manage an ordinary frame. The concentration of the industrial life of the area upon hosiery restricted alternative job opportunities, and it was customary for children to follow their fathers at the frame.
The two previous examples, stockingers and weavers, were of workers whose status and earnings had been drastically reduced. In part this had been possible because of the existence of more lowly members of the labouring poor, who in effect functioned as a reserve army of labour to depress wages. Beyond the ranks of artisans and operatives was an army of manual labourers, men whose bodily toil supplied the motive power for innumerable operations which today are done by machines. We are so accustomed to hearing about the great changes wrought by power driven machinery in certain industries that it is easy to forget how little mechanisation there was in great areas of early Victorian life. A vast amount of wheeling, dragging, hoisting, carrying, lifting, digging, tunnelling, draining, trenching, hedging, embanking, blasting, breaking, scouring, sawing, felling, reaping, mowing, picking, sifting, and threshing was done by sheer muscular effort, day in, day out. Much of this labour was arduous and uninteresting, and some of it was dangerous. It had to be performed out-of-doors with inadequate protection from the constant rain and raw cold of the British climate, or in the stifling heat and dust-laden atmosphere of the mines. It was not highly regarded: on the contrary, such labour was looked down on by all who could find alternative employment. No amount of moralising by middle class authors about the glory of work or the nobility of labour could disguise the reality. Rather was it the curse of Adam for a majority of the labouring poor. By modern Western standards labour was cheap, and it was used prodigally. Manual labouring jobs were so numerous and various that they defy any easy general description. We shall therefore, as in the case of the other sections of the labouring poor, have to confine ourselves to a few selected groups of workers.
The largest single category in any industry was the agricultural labourers. In 1851 they numbered over one million. There were also 364,000 indoor farm servants (of both sexes), making a total of nearly one and a half million wage workers in agriculture. They were employed by slightly more than half the total number of farmers, the remainder of the farms being too small to need hired labour. The number of labourers per farm and the type of job they performed varied between counties. In areas where there were many small holdings, as in south-eastern England, or in hilly areas like Wales and the Pennine counties, there were relatively fewer wage labourers than on the large farms of eastern England and south-eastern Scotland. Within the large county of Yorkshire several types of agricultural organisation existed, resulting in a difference in the proportion of labourers between one district and the next. The West Riding, although the home of the new manufactures, still contained some purely agricultural districts, and many more in which industrial and agricultural pursuits were combined. There was not only the seasonal migration of the woolcombers, for example, from Craven to work in the corn harvest in the plain of York, but also some continuation of the weaver-farmer tradition which Defoe had noted a hundred years earlier. James Caird, the agriculturist, described the small clothiers of the West Riding in 1851:
‘Besides those employed in the large mills, there is a class called “clothiers”, who hold a considerable portion of the land within several miles of the manufacturing towns; they have looms in their houses, and unite the business of weavers and farmers. When trade is good the farm is neglected; when trade is dull the weaver becomes a more attentive farmer. His holding is generally under twenty acres, and his chief stock consists of dairy cows, with a horse to convey his manufactured goods and his milk to market. This union of trades has been long in existence in this part of the country, but it seldom leads to much success on the part of the weaver-farmer himself, and the land he occupies is believed to be the worst managed in the district.’10
Such men were of more substance and independence than agricultural wage labourers, as also were the small farmers of the Dales. But they did not hire help. On the southern and eastern sides of the West Riding were larger arable farms, on which wage labourers were employed, and on a model farm in this area Caird instances wages of 14s, 13s, and 12s a week for ploughmen, according to ability.
Something of the tradition of an independent peasantry probably survived into the mid-decades of the nineteenth century in parts of the North Riding. But the custom of annual hirings in Stokesley, Thirsk, Pickering, York and the larger villages of the North Riding is alone sufficient evidence of the extent to which a large class of landless agricultural labourers existed in the district. In the East Riding this was even more so. There, in an area of rolling chalk wolds, the farms were large, anything from 300 to 1,300 acres, with large corn fields of 30 to 70 acres each; and ‘the farmers are probably the wealthiest men of their class in the county’.11 Mary Simpson, the daughter of the Vicar of Boynton and Carnaby with Fraisthorpe (an extensive parish on the eastern side of the Wolds), described such an agricultural district in a letter of July 1856:
‘This is a very scattered parish, entirely agricultural. I do not know if in any other part of England the population and customs are quite similar. Every farm (there are twelve in this parish) comprises in its household from six or seven to twenty plough lads, according to the size of the farms; their ages varying from about fourteen to twenty-four, but the greater part in their teens. These are all changed every year at Martinmas [i.e. the last week in November].’12
In this, the most purely agricultural area of Yorkshire, a landless agricultural working class formed the bulk of the population. Living in the farm houses were the ‘farm servants’, usually lads and lasses in their teens. They were hired annually at the Martinmas hirings, and usually changed farms each year. During working hours they were supervised by a foreman and (the girls) by the mistress of the house.
