592 REVIEWS OF BOOKS October cloths (p. 411). The acts of this period, which provided for numerous searchers, worked for a time ; but by 1765 slackness had supervened. Yet there was a final, and gigantic, control act in that year, which set up whole armies of officials ; but within forty years its machinery had ceased to work (p. 416). The mountain of old acts regulating manufacture was blown up in 1821. Labour regulation was but little more successful. The famous and much-quoted rule of 1563 about the employment of one journeyman to every three apprentices was ' in practice . . . disregarded ' (p. 107) by Yorkshiremen. The well-meaning act of 1603, which excluded clothier- justices from the bench when wool- workers' wages were under discussion, was intended to be a minimum wage act ; but in 1647 the West Riding justices are found assessing maximum wages under it (p. 111). From 1672 the justices never again assessed wool-workers' wages at all (p. 315). As the worsted trade only grew up in Yorkshire late in the seventeenth century, it was always held to lie outside apprenticeship law. In cloth manufacture proper apprenticeship became an economic habit, but ' the justices . . . never seem to have attempted to enforce the full demands of the Act of 1563 ' (p. 309). Apparently apprenticeship — but for five years, not seven — was maintained in the eighteenth century more by the rule that unapprenticed clothiers might not frequent the Leeds cloth-halls than by any respect for a nearly forgotten law. So again official suspicion and condemnation of the wool middleman, the ' brogger ', never suppressed him — for, though no doubt he often cheated, he met a need — until finally he developed into the most respect- able wool-stapler of Hanoverian times, the ' Sheet- Anchor of Great Britain ' as the London Tradesman called him in 1757 (p. 329). Although the ulnager did not control all cloth-making in the fourteenth century, the use which Mr. Heaton makes of his accounts (pp. 75 ff.) to illustrate the relative importance of the various parts of England as makers of marketable cloth is of the greatest value. The figures have been used before, but never so exhaustively. Again, Mr. Heaton's intimate and, so to say, personal knowledge of innumerable clothiers of all ages, enables him to show more clearly than has ever been shown before that there was at no time a sharp line between ' domestic ' and ' capitalist ' clothiers : there was an infinite gradation of intermediate types. His earlier publication of the letter-books of Joseph Holroyd and Sam Hill had prepared us for a much fuller discussion than has previously been furnished of the origins of the worsted industry in the West Riding. But on one point connected with this matter he seems not perfectly consistent. Early in the book (p. 97) he records, from a will of 1576, that a Leeds clothier owned seven pair of wool-combs. A note says : ' In view of the fact that worsted cloths were not made in the West Riding until a century later, it is difficult to decide the use to which these combs were put.' Yet on pp. 265-6 he allows that the old Yorkshire coverlets had been made of combed (i. e. worsted) yarn, and that worsted fabrics were used in Yorkshire, as the wills show. Is it not probable that the ' household ' workers had always employed the comb ? It is known that very primitive — I believe prehistoric — wool fabrics show traces of it.
