SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY Those who, under the newly inaugurated system of poor relief, had to provide work for the unemployed naturally turned their attention to spinning, and an industry already carried on by the women and children in cottages all over the county was represented in the cloth centres by a considerable amount of semi-pauperized labour.^™ The children of Christ's Hospital, Ipswich, were taught to card and spin wool at an early age : under an order of 1590 every clothier was compelled to have at least half his wool carded, spun, woven, and shorn by the poor of the town ; for the other half he might procure labour outside if he wished.'"' The Bury Articles""' already quoted ensure that the work thus compulsorily provided should be properly carried out. Every spinner was, if possible, to be provided with 6 lb. of wool every week, and to bring home the same every Saturday night. If the task was not completed the clothier had liberty to inform the constable, that punishment might be inflicted. The spinners, probably owing to the fact that the industry was to such a great extent carried on in scattered homes, never seem to have been organized, and were peculiarly liable to oppression, ' not only through low wages, but also through payment in kind and the exaction of arbitrary fines.'*"" Throughout the 17th century the regulation of the spinners' wages was one of the problems of poor-law administration. When the cloth sales began to fail, and the looms to stand idle, they were the first to suffer. In vain the Privy Council instructed the justices of Suffolk to urge upon the clothiers the necessity of finding work for the poor. With exhausted capital and cloth to the value of thousands of pounds returned upon their hands, they were compelled to reduce the numbers of their workpeople. In 1629 the Privy Council replied to a question of the Suffolk justices that a tax might permissibly be levied on the inhabitants of a parish for their lands per acre ' to employ the poor.' '"* In East Berg- holt, one of the chief clothing towns, the sum raised for poor relief had to be doubled.'"^ In 1630 malting was prohibited in the county in order to increase the supply of barley for the poor.^°* The Orders in Council for the sale of corn under cost price are too numerous to be detailed here. To the growing depression of the cloth trade must be added such minor causes of distress as the frequency of disastrous fires (hardly a town in Suffolk appears to have escaped) and of epidemics of plague and small pox. The long struggle of the coast towns (where fire was but too apt to follow in the wake of tempest) against the invading sea was drawing to a close in defeat. Southwold, Blythburgh, Walberswick, Dunwich, in particular, were in a pitiable condition of poverty, while the decay of the fisheries followed inevitably upon the shifting and silting of their havens. A petition of the inhabitants in 1652'"^ speaks of 'our poor town of Walberswick, now one of the poorest towns in England, not being able to repair our Church or Meeting place, which at the first was reared up by the Inhabitants at their only Cost and Charge, and the many poor widows and fatherless and mother- less children and at this present not above one man living in the town that has £^ per year of his own.' ^ r.C.H. Suff. ii, 258. »' Ibid. »" Hist. MSS. Com. Ref. xr, App. viii, 139. «» r.C.H. Suff. ii, 258. •»' E. M. Leonard, Early Engl. Poor Relief, p. 178. "» F.C.H. Suff. ii, 266. "* E. M. Leonard, Early Engl. Poor Relief, p. 179. "' Gardner, Hist, of Dunwich, 176. 677
