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Reviews
| The Textile Industry of South-West England: A Social Archaeology. By Marilyn Palmer and Peter Neaverson. Stroud, Gloucestershire, England: Tempus Publishing, Ltd., 2005. 160 pp., illus., bibl, indices. £17.99 pb (ISBN 0-7524-3133-I).
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The woolen industry was the economic mainstay of the counties of Devon, Dorset, Somerset, Wiltshire, and Gloucestershire in southwestern England from the medieval period until the 19th century. Because many of the structures associated with the industry—and the production of other fiber products such as silk, linen, lace, rope, and sailcloth—were built of stone and were adaptable to multiple uses over time, the landscapes of these five counties are still studded with buildings in which textiles were made for centuries. Because form followed function in these structures, authors Marilyn Palmer and the late Peter Neaverson maintain in this lucid, well-illustrated book that much can be learned from these buildings about how the industry evolved and how it impacted the region socially and economically.
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In the late-12th century, some aspects of cloth making began to be an industry—activities were carried out outside the home, in quantities that exceeded the needs of one household, by people who were paid in some form for their work. The horizontal loom came into use at this time and, soon after, the broad loom. These innovations made it possible to weave larger and more elaborate pieces of cloth and made high-status clothing available to more people, although certainly not everyone. This rising demand met the rolling grasslands and moors of the southwest—a perfect place to raise sheep—and made that part of England one of the foremost producers of woolen cloth in Europe.
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The same period also saw the introduction into England of the water-powered fulling mill. (Fulling is a process of trampling or beating wool fabric in a mixture of water and clay and gypsum [fuller's earth], which felts the fibers and makes them less visible and the cloth stronger.) The southwest's many fast-flowing streams encouraged quick acceptance of this innovation. This set the stage for much of the subsequent development of the textile industry in the countryside and villages, rather than in towns. It also gave rise to a class of entrepreneurs (who were usually town dwellers) known as the clothiers.
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In Yorkshire and other northern regions, the clothier was a landowner who made cloth from wool from sheep he raised on his own land. By contrast, the clothier of the southwest was a capitalist who organized the various aspects of making and marketing cloth: he bought the wool, hired out its processing and weaving, fulled it in his own mills or commissioned a fuller to do it, and sold it to a cloth house in London. Many clothiers became wealthy and showed off their affluence by building and renovating churches, public buildings, and large homes. They also bought up land; by the early-18th century, the clothiers were among the landed gentry of the southwest.
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On their country estates, most clothiers kept a close watch on the source of their wealth by building workshops adjacent to their homes. The authors examined many 18th-century insurance policies. They show the extent to which the clothiers brought parts of their operations under one roof or at least under roofs clustered in one spot. The policies list warehouses, wool lofts, drying rooms, fulling mills, shearing shops, and dye houses. Weaving, however, remained a home-based activity until well into the 19th century in the region.
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Water-powered mechanization of some processes like carding, spinning, and winding did not begin until around 1790. This change triggered major renovations and alterations in many older textile workshops and the construction of new ones. However, the home-based weavers resisted being brought into the new powered mills until the mid-19th century. Rather than upset what was a relatively smooth-running and profitable system, many southwest clothiers chose to build weavers' terraces—small rows of shallow houses with large windows—that were rented to weavers who sold their production to the clothier.
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Even after the inexorable advent of the power loom doomed the home weaver, the textile mills of England's southwest were not the "dark, satanic mills" of the 19th-century north. The need for adequate light meant that mills were tall and narrow, with ranks of large windows. Buildings were clean and attractive; brick superseded stone as the building material of choice.
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By the late-19th century, the woolen industry in southwestern England could not compete with the economies of scale of the vast northern mills. Many mill owners switched to making other kinds of textile products: silk, knitted goods, and lace, for example. Other mills were given over to woodturning industries—shaft-driven machines could make walking sticks and umbrella handles as well as cloth. In recent decades, many former mills have been converted to other industrial uses or into residences. The textile industry persists on a small scale in each of the counties today.
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| Marilyn Palmer is an industrial archaeologist and recently retired head of the School of Archaeology and Ancient History at the University of Leicester. She and her late colleague and co-author, Peter Neaverson, worked together for more than 20 years as the editors of Industrial Archeology Review. They co-authored several books, including the authoritative Industrial Archeology: Principles and Practices. |
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