The Story of England, page 41
On Monday, 30 March 1795, the Mayor of Leicester was brought word that a large number of men who were working on the Union Canal had assaulted a detachment of Leicester ‘Fencibles’ (these were temporary home guard units called up during the war). Having liberated two deserters being held by the soldiers, the navvies were now rioting in Kibworth. The mayor promptly summoned one Captain Heyrick and ordered him to organize a military response. Between three and four that afternoon, as the Leicester Journal reported, Heyrick blew a horn in summons and the Leicester troop of Volunteer Cavalry duly formed up, armed and equipped, in the town’s marketplace. Having been informed of the situation and given their orders, the troop rode off for Kibworth with bayonets fixed, while an infantry detachment followed shortly afterwards armed with muskets. When they reached the turnpike at Oadby, word reached them that a group of the rioters, along with the two liberated deserters, had moved on to Newton Harcourt, a small hamlet to the north-west of Kibworth which was also on the line of the canal earthworks. Arriving there the troops traced a group of the rioters to the Recruiting Sergeant public house, where they appeared defiantly at the door armed with long pikes and ‘seemed determined to resist’. The local JP, Justice Burnaby, who had been summoned to the scene, read out the Riot Act – the measure of 1713 which allowed local authorities to order any group of twelve or more to disperse or face punitive action. For the process to be lawful the text had to be read accurately, audibly and in full:
Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assembles. God Save the King!
Once the Act had been read, a group of cavalrymen were ordered to dismount and to search the public house for the two deserters, who were not found, though four of ‘the most desperate’ of the rioters were seized and sent to Leicester under armed guard. The remaining cavalry then scoured the neighbouring country, following the line of the canal south-east to Fleckney, Smeeton and Kibworth, where they met up with the infantry detachment at around seven o’clock in the evening. The following day the cavalry again rode along the canal route, accompanied by a sergeant and another of the Fencibles who had been injured during the fighting in Kibworth the day before (and so knew their men). Nine more of the rioters were identified and apprehended: ‘amongst them was Red Jack and Northamptonshire Tom, two fellows notorious for being a terror to every country they have resided in.’ All taken were examined on the Thursday before Justice Burnaby, when nine were freed and four – Jack and Tom presumably among them – committed.
The Union Canal became operational from Leicester to Kibworth in 1797, when the nearby Debdale Wharf officially opened for business, though not until 1814 was the full Union project completed, with the opening of the huge staircase of ten canal locks at Foxton, south-east of Kibworth – one of the most dramatic engineering projects of the canal age. In general those canals built earlier than 1790 were more successful than the many conceived afterwards in what has been described as ‘a spirit of excited optimism’. In Leicestershire the subsidiary side canals in the north of the county were almost all failures. However, the main north–south line, linking London, Birmingham and Leicester with the Trent – a key element in the massive network which now linked the capital with the booming industrial cities of the north-west – was ultimately important enough to pay dividends and had a lasting impact on the local economy. The ‘fuel famine’ which had for so long held back the development of this part of the Midlands was resolved by regular, and cheaper, supplies of coal; and even the back kitchens of Kibworth houses were now stacked with lumps of ‘Derbyshire Bright’. The population of Leicester itself began to rise rapidly, from just under 17,000 in 1801 to 30,000 in 1821, and it continued to grow at the rate of 10,000 per decade until 1850. In town and country, industrial England was on the move.
The Industrial Revolution comes to Kibworth
The effect of the canals on Kibworth itself was dramatic too. As we have seen, the village had been one of the most populous in the area since the eleventh century; it had had perhaps 600 people in 1381 and by 1670 the village population had returned to its highest medieval level. In the early eighteenth century there were 150 families in the parish – perhaps 750 people – but from then on like many places in England it experienced a steep rise. The 1801 census, which is not a complete record, gives a population of 1,232 people, and this almost doubled in the next century. And yet again the story of national historical change is mirrored at this point in the life of the village as the old agrarian world is transformed and industrial society begins to enter the village with small-scale industry, brick works, textile factories and especially framework knitting.
Framework knitting had begun with the invention of the knitting frame in the Midlands in the 1590s. Strongly concentrated in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, it became a massive industry during the Napoleonic Wars, employing nearly 100,000 workers, not counting children. Their product was not only plain and fancy hose, but also gloves, braces, mitts, blouses, pantaloons, cravats and miscellaneous articles. Leicester itself was a centre of fine work – ‘spider net’ blouses, fancy hose and best gloves. In Kibworth basic hosiery was produced both in private houses and later in small factories, whose remains are still dotted around the closes and back lots of the village. These were confined to the ‘open’ villages of Beauchamp and Smeeton. Across the road the closed village of Harcourt resisted such inroads: farms, cottages and coaching inns still characterized that part of Kibworth.
The reason why Beauchamp and Smeeton in the south of the parish became so heavily a part of the hosiery industry, but not Harcourt, lies in their different histories. As it had been since 1270, Merton College was still the owner of the fields and many of the houses in Harcourt, and it was still an agricultural place, a ‘closed’ village, as indeed it was until very recently. Smeeton’s seven manors had broken up in the early modern period into private holdings open to speculation; and Beauchamp was a proletarian place where an underemployed workforce was ripe for industrial exploitation. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to think this pattern an old one. In Beauchamp in the fourteenth century there had been twenty-four villein families, three cottagers and eighteen families of serfs – a population of well over 200 unfree or semi-free peasants. The pattern continued. In the late-fourteenth-century poll taxes there was still only one free couple, Thomas and Amice Swan, but already there were thirty-one married couples who were former villeins now holding the land as tenants ‘at will’, along with seven servants, a ‘labourer’, a ‘craftsman’, eight cottagers and a widow, Juliana Ward (whose descendants still lived in the village in the seventeenth century, when there were forty-five families in the 1664 Hearth Tax). So Beauchamp’s history from early times suggests a dependent landless proletariat: not freeholders, but tenants and workers. Here in the early nineteenth century widespread unemployment after enclosure and new production opportunities led to the growth of an industry which would change Kibworth for ever, turning it into what was almost a small town, with cottage industries and workshops, and eventually, in the mid-Victorian age, working men’s clubs, pubs and small factories.
The adoption of framework knitting spread fast in the first decades of the nineteenth century, pushed by the demands of the war abroad and the fashions of the rising middle class at home. By 1850 it was the major source of employment in Kibworth. The reasons are not hard to see: after the enclosure of the common fields, once the stopgap of labouring on the canals had dried up, the lack of work in the village fields became severe. If direct employment on the land in Kibworth declined as a result of increased pasturage, however, the rearing of sheep in ever-growing numbers in Leicestershire did indirectly create new jobs. ‘With regard to the collective interest of the nation, and not the particular benefit of the parish,’ Eden wisely noted, ‘I much doubt whether the wool now produced from the Leicestershire inclosures does not employ more hands (though not perhaps in Leicestershire) than its arable fields did formerly.’ In fact, as Eden would have seen had he returned to Kibworth a couple of decades later, some at least of the additional jobs did remain in the parish.
The fleeces of Leicestershire sheep had long been prized, as John Leland had remarked back in the 1540s. While on his famous tour of Great Britain in the 1720s, Daniel Defoe observed that the sheep bred in Leicestershire were ‘without comparison, the largest, and bear the greatest fleeces of wool on their backs of any sheep in England’. Since Queen Elizabeth’s day shifting fashions had seen an increasing demand for long stockings or ‘hose’ – silk for those who could afford it, wool or later cotton for those who couldn’t. Initially they were knitted by hand, but the invention of the stocking frame – generally credited to William Lee of Calverton in Nottinghamshire – created a large-scale industry which came to be concentrated in the East Midlands from the late seventeenth century. (Initially, in what would be a recurring pattern, this technological innovation was angrily resisted by hand-knitters, who feared for their livelihood; when the first frame was brought to Leicester in the 1680s it is said to have been operated in secret in a cellar for fear of retribution.) While its Midland neighbours focused on silk (Derbyshire) and cotton (Nottinghamshire), Leicestershire in particular specialized in products made from worsted (fine-combed woollen) cloth. Daniel Defoe visited Leicester in 1705–6 and wrote two decades later in the account of his tour:
A Considerable Manufacture carry’d on here, and in several of the Market Towns round for Weaving of Stockings by Frames: and one would scarce think it possible so small an Article of Trade could employ such Multitudes of People as it does; for the whole County seems to be employ’d in it: as also Nottingham and Derby.
In Kibworth it was the poor families of the parish, once the field labourers, who took up this cottage industry which could be carried out at home, with the frame being rented. Knitting occupied the whole family: the father operated the frame with its heavy treadles, the mother seamed together the stockings, and the children assisted by winding the threads – though they might themselves be put to work the frame from the age of ten or eleven. Some at the time romanticized this employment in which all the family worked together, but the reality was anything but romantic: as one framework-knitter retorted, for all members of a family to be engaged in order to scrape a meagre living was a sign of poverty and wretchedness rather than well-being.
At the time of his survey a few years after the enclosure, Eden did note ‘a little stocking weaving’ in Kibworth Beauchamp, but this was clearly the sort of old-fashioned hand-knitting or weaving which women customarily practised to supplement a family’s income, while the spinning of worsted thread which he also recorded as a ‘principal employment of the women’ involved the preparation of the raw material rather than the finished clothing. A few decades later, however, much had changed. In his survey of Leicestershire of 1831, the curate John Curtis reported that many of Kibworth Beauchamp’s 1,372 inhabitants were employed at framework knitting. By the gazetteer of 1850 ‘the majority’ of Kibworth Beauchamp’s people were engaged in the industry, and the character of the village had been changed for ever. Even today the visitor to the village (and to Smeeton) will see the distinctive weavers’ cottages with enlarged upper-storey windows which admitted enough light to work the frame.
After a relatively good period for wages in the late eighteenth century, much harsher conditions after the Napoleonic Wars led to deep social unrest, and the struggle of the framework-knitters played a key role in what has been called the ‘Making of the English Working Class’. In this Leicestershire was an important part of the story – it is no coincidence that Ned Ludlum (Ludd), who gave his name to the Luddites, came from just outside Leicester. After the Napoleonic Wars conditions for workers in the industry were often poor and sometimes perilous. A huge increase in the number of frames for hire, demand that fluctuated with fashion, a faltering economy and an uncertain international situation all conspired to put the individual worker and his family in the hands of the capitalists. Grievances especially turned on the ways in which unscrupulous hosiers sought to economize on labour and cheapen production, particularly by the hated practice of ‘trucking’, in which payment was not made in money but in supplies, or tokens redeemable only in shops of the owners (which were often not a fair equivalent). The frames were substantial – the height of an upright piano, if a little narrower; they were generally hired and the frame rents had to be paid consistently, regardless of the work available. Hosiers or their middlemen, for whom such rents constituted a substantial portion of their income, were suspected of deliberately hiring out more frames than were needed for the available work. Between 1812 and 1844 the number of frames in use in the East Midlands doubled to almost 50,000.
A serious deterioration in the industry took place from the late 1830s and this struck the village very hard. In 1840, at the worst point of the depression, a third of the frames in Leicestershire were said to be unused, and in Kibworth Beauchamp the dire situation saw many single men queuing up once more at the old weekly hiring fair on the Bank, and a flood of applications to the local Poor Law board, many from bemused older workers who had never experienced such cut-throat work practices. Three years later a petition was presented to Parliament signed by over 25,000 framework-knitters in the three Midland counties, which led to the appointment of a Royal Commission to look into the industry in 1844. The subsequent detailed report by R. M. Muggeridge largely confirmed the petitioners’ belief in worsening conditions and gives fascinating detail on the conditions of workers in Kibworth.
Among the witnesses whose interviews were transcribed in the report were five framework-knitters from Kibworth and Smeeton. John Mawby of Beauchamp reported that he worked for seventeen or eighteen hours a day to make two dozen pairs of hose a week, for which he was paid 4s 3d a dozen – but he had to pay frame rent and seaming costs as well as for the candles he needed to work by night, and the soap or oil with which to grease the worsted. His eldest, crippled, child did a little seaming, and his nine-year-old daughter he had already put to operate a second frame, though she struggled to cover the cost of renting it. Thomas Iliffe was another (he came from an old Beauchamp family prominent in the village in the seventeenth century, and even earlier in Saddington). Iliffe declared that he had recently been seriously ill for a year and able to work only at a fraction of his normal rate, but he had been allowed no reduction in his frame rent: ‘the master stated that the frame had stood still while he wanted the work, and that being the case, he should not take any rent off.’ Job Johnson of Smeeton similarly bemoaned the rental burden: ‘I think it is a very extravagant price we have to pay for frame-rents.’ He worked fourteen hours a day to keep his wife and five children, whom he could not afford to send to school, a misfortune similarly lamented by John Lover, also of Smeeton:
There is no race of people under the sun so depressed as we are, who work the hours we do, for the money we get. It would be my delight to bring my family up to a school; I cannot bear the thought of bringing a family up in ignorance so as not to read a little.
The report had critical words about the use of trucking. This had evidently continued to be a serious problem, even after the Truck Act of 1831 had outlawed the practice. It affected a fifth of town workers, the report estimated, but as many as four fifths of those in the country. In the parish of Kibworth the problem seemed to have eased only in recent months in the wake of prosecutions of offending hosiers. Job Johnson claimed to have been paid ‘nearly all in goods’ until the Christmas past; goods which, as John Lover made clear, they were ‘obliged to receive at a price, I believe, extortionate to what the other shops were selling them’. Lover would, he thought, ‘have been completely starved this winter, if that system had not ceased before Christmas’. Many of them reported relying for food on potatoes grown on allotments they had been granted by the parish, a system which ‘had always proved a very good thing’. (The allotments incidentally are still there, and very actively tended, below the former workhouse and the frameworkers’ tenement at Smeeton Terrace.)
Real wages had declined significantly since the war years. Middlemen increasingly interposed themselves between the local knitters and the hosiers in Leicester: they saved the knitters from travelling to and fro, but spread the work too thinly and it was felt took rather more than a fair cut. One manufacturer who lived in Smeeton, William Ward, freely agreed that these ‘undertakers’ or ‘bagmen’ were having a highly pernicious impact; the hosiers, he said, used such middlemen to beat down prices when demand was a little flat:
They know those are the men to do it; they do not like to do it with the single hands themselves, and so they do it through them … [The undertakers] know that things have been so middling lately that the poor people are obliged to work at any price, or else they would have nothing to do … When the hosiers could not have the barefacedness to offer it themselves, they get those men to do it for them.
That this sort of man-powered work continued at all in a village like Kibworth might seem surprising given that in other parts of the country the production of textiles had become mechanized and factory-based. The knitting and seaming of stockings had been, however, relatively resistant to steam power, with the result that the Leicestershire hosiery industry in the early nineteenth century did not share in the dynamic growth (albeit combined with deplorable working conditions) experienced in Lancashire. Moreover technological innovation, when it came, continued to be treated with the utmost suspicion and hostility by frameworkers, who saw in it only a further reduction in their chances of employment. Back in 1773 a stocking frame reputedly capable of producing a dozen pairs of hose at once, when put on exhibition at the Leicester Exchange, was destroyed by a crowd of workmen who obliged the hosiers to promise not to introduce such a machine. An invention for mechanized spinning of worsted yarn had led to serious riots instigated by the hand-spinners in 1787. (The fact that many large-scale manufacturers in the region came from the dissenting community led to a widespread rallying cry: ‘No Presbyterians, no machines.’) The Luddite machine-breakers of the 1810s were busy in Leicestershire, smashing many hundreds of stocking frames inspired by the now legendary Ned Ludd.
