eight shillings each per week; but the great sheet anchor of all cottages and small farms was the labour attached to the hand wheel … it required six to eight hands to prepare and spin yarn … for one weaver—this clearly shows the inexhaustible source there was for labour for every person from the age of seven to eighty years … to earn their bread, say one or two shillings per week, without going to the parish.[1]
The idyllic effect of this account is marred by the reflection that a father and two sons earning 24s. a week would require a family of at least eighteen—wives, children, and aged parents—to card and spin for them, and that the maximum earnings of such a patriarchal group of twenty-one persons would be 60s. per week.
In the second period—from 1770 to 1788—'cotton was become the almost universal material'; the hand-wheels were displaced by jennies, the carding for all but the finer yarn was done upon engines, and the fly-shuttle was generally adopted on the looms, which would thus have a greatly increased output, even though their number (as Radcliffe thinks was the case) did not itself increase during this period. Of the family income at this time Radcliffe tells us nothing, but though the 'inexhaustible demand' for infant and aged labour was gone those engaged in carding and spinning would be earning at least twice the wages of their predecessors. The opening of the third epoch in 1788 was due to 'the mule-twist coming into vogue for the warp as well as weft', which
put all hands in request of every age. … New weavers' cottages with loomshops rose in every direction, all immediately filled and when in full work the weekly circulation of money as the price of labour only rose to five times the amount ever before experienced in this subdivision, every family bringing home weekly 40, 60, 80, 100 or even 120 shillings per week.[2]
There are strong a priori reasons for treating these figures with critical caution. Writing as a disappointed old man in a time of extreme depression for hand-loom weavers, Radcliffe could scarcely fail to exaggerate the prosperity which had undoubtedly existed in his youth. Whilst our records confirm his recollection of a great boom in textiles for two or three years following 1788, they do not tend to substantiate his retrospective estimate of rise in family incomes, and they show that the boom was succeeded by a severe depression. William Radcliffe, it should be added, was born at Mellor and began his career by supplying warps to Oldknow's weavers.
The Stockport ledger account shows 73 weavers in regular
