ABSTRACT
Domestic spinning and weaving penetrated the lowland countryside and remote upland areas, as well as towns in many regions of eighteenth-century Britain and persisted through the 70 to 80 years from the beginning of sustained factory production of yarn to the effective supremacy of factories in all branches by 1850. Maps 11.1-4 depict two such areas where a significant proportion of the male population was engaged in textiles. The Craven district of Yorkshire retained many workers in woollen, worsted
11.1-4 Textiles employment in Northamptonshire, 1777, and Craven, 1803
and cotton goods. Because it was on me periphery of the Lancasmre and Yorksmre factory zone it passed through the painful transition from domestic weaving to factory production in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. In contrast, by the 1840s the woollen and hosiery trades of Northamptonshire had completely succumbed to competition from areas further north. In many parts of early modern rural Britain, men and women were, in varying degrees, dependent upon some kind of textile processing, from yarn and cloth to the making of buttons, stockings, nets and ropes. Historians can be wise after the event, but contemporaries in such regions did not see the inexorable rise of the main areas of nineteenth-century production as spelling the inevitable decline of their own textile industries. Nevertheless, such regional shifts, with distressing consequences for uprooted families, were as much a hallmark of the so-called industrial revolution as the rapid and sustained growth of the Victorian mill towns was its post-revolutionary product. If any phase of growth in the textile industry can be called revolutionary it is that for which we lack adequate maps.
