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AUSTREY VILLAGERS

Craftsmen and Labourers

Traditional trades and cottage craftworkers

The register shows that by 1700 only about a fifth of Austrey householders were craftsmen, engaged either in trades connected with agriculture or cottage craft production for the domestic market.  Families who had lived in the parish for three or more generations monopolised the traditional trades of blacksmith, wheelwright and carpenter.  The cottage craftworkers in contrast seem to have been leaving the parish: there were no third generation clothworkers or cordwainers by the end of the century. The most noticeable losses were in the clothing industry.  Families of tailors (Swanne, Taylor, Archerd, Snape and Heward) and weavers (Arnold and Orton) disappear completely from the Austrey register after 1680.  Indeed between 1695-1705 only one clothworker and two cordwainers registered baptisms in Austrey, whereas at least 14 clothworkers and 6 cordwainers recorded baptisms in Appleby in the same period.

Craftsmen were scattered in a broad band across the social spectrum however the most important social division within their ranks was between the established traditional tradesmen and the cottage craftworkers.  Traditional craftsmen usually came from well-established smallholding families.  The village blacksmith was prominent in the craft hierarchy.  The Austrey blacksmiths, Richard Cooke and Philip Smith, may have shared the same working premises, the blacksmith’s shop and ‘fire’ that Richard left to his godson in 1642. Both came from families settled in the parish in the early Tudor period, although neither of these families appear to have survived in the parish after 1660.

The setting up of cottage craft indiversification from agriculture to subsistence manufacturing taking place throughout the midlands from the mid seventeenth century onwards. Agricultural parishes in the throes of enclosure offered temporary employment in seasonal hedging and ditching of the new enclosures, and more permanent work in cottage craft workshops set up by entrepreneurial clothiers and shoe manufacturers.  There was a growing demand for cloth and leathergoods in Ashby and Tamworth.

Cottage craftworkers usually came from the ranks of the labouring population, although some were smallholders who combined part-time crafts with husbandry as is shown in the Austrey register in the 1560s which variously describes Richard Martin in one entry as a day-labourer and in another as a thatcher and John Snape as a day-labourer and a fletcher.  Some described as day-labourers around 1600 probably worked as agricultural labourers in the harvesting season and cottage craftworkers in winter.  The listing of spinning wheels, looms and stocks of flax, wool and yarn in husbandmen's inventories provides evidence of part-time domestic cloth production, a tradition which continued well into the seventeenth century

Hereditary association was one of several factors which determined a craftsman's place in the village social hierarchy. Another, perhaps even more important, was his relative prosperity.  No appreciable differences were found between the inventory wealth of traditional and industrial craftworkers: both left on average between £30 and £40 worth of goods.  John Heward, described as a tailor in the Austrey register, was worth considerably more than the other tailorsrecorded in the parish.  At his death in 1606 he was worth £120, of which £80 was in outstanding debts.  In contrast, John Derrie (1647), another tailor, was worth a mere £6.5.8 a The disparity of wealth suggests that Heward may have been a middle man or clothier rather than a cottage craftworker.

While there was a considerable range of valuations within each occupational category craftsmen were better housed than day-labourers, although neither needed or had as much storage space for agricultural produce and implements as husbandmen.  Although the small number of surviving inventories precludes any firm conclusions, it appears that labourers tended to remain in small one or two-roomed cottages while craftsmen usually had four or more rooms including a workshop.

 Possession of a workshop set the independent traditional craftsman apart from the cottage craftworker.  Several Austrey craftsman's inventories refer to shops of one kind or another.  In the early 1600s, John Heyward, the wealthy tailor, Robert Broomfield, a carpenter, Thomas Erpe, a wheelwright, and Margaret Milner, a carpenter's widow, all had ‘shops’. These  were probably workshops rather than retail outlets although some, like John Heyward, might have been selling finished goods such as broadcloths. A proliferation of retail shops in country townships prompted one unidentified writer to blame shopkeepers for the decay of trade in market towns after the Civil War: 'for now [1681] in every country village where [there] is... not above ten houses, there is a shopkeeper'.

The combined evidence from wills and inventories shows that although traditional tradesmen and wealthy tailors such as John Heyward                 might weather economic crises through their investments in farming or trade, the fortunes of the immigrant craftworkers were far more precarious. A survey of four generations of the Arnold family of Austrey, who set up as weavers in the parish, reveals that cottage craftworkers without land or family connections came near to joining the ranks of the labouring poor. The earliest inventory is that of Robert Arnold who died in 1633 leaving goods worth £9.2.8, including his looms and gear in the shop appraised at 8s. Not much is known about Robert's sons, Richard and Thomas, who left no wills or inventories.  But Robert's grandson, Richard, was worth only a few shillings more than this amount in 1709, even though the looms had increased in value to £2.3.8. Richard's son, who died in 1717 left goods valued at £13.4.8, the looms 'with all other instrewments belonging' being valued at £3. While the value of the looms and weaving gear had increased more than sevenfold, the value of household goods and chattels rose only twenty per cent in 83 years. Handloom weaving appears to have provided the family with only a bare subsistence.

Sources and Notes

                 Ashby and Tamworth both specialised in cloths and leathergoods, although the principal midland cloth markets were at Kingston, Oswestry and Shrewsbury, and the main leather markets were at Congleton and Northampton: Everitt, AHEW IV, 466-592.

Moxon, Ashby thesis, 37; Woollen clothworkers in Ashby are recorded in Nichols III, 615; For details of the 'putting out' system adopted by Coventry clothiers and shoemakers see VCH Warws VIII, 167-8.

Ref. to shopkeepers in [Anon.], 'The State of England Revived' in Thirsk and Cooper (eds.), Seventeenth Century Economic Documents, 397.

L.J.R.O. inventories, Robert Arnold, 1634, Richard Arnold, 1709, Richard Arnold, 1717.

The labouring population - 'a poor beggarly sort of people'

Agricultural day-labourers shared the bottom rungs of the status ladder with the itinerant poor.  By 1700 they comprised about a quarter of the Austrey householders in the register. The actual proportion of labourers living in the parish was seasonally increased by casual labourers, pieceworkers and servants in husbandry.  Professor Everitt has suggested that at least a third of the inhabitants of midland parishes worked as agricultural labourers at one time or another. Economically there was little to distinguish between poor husbandmen, cottage craftsmen and day-labourers.  Under the Statute of Artificers of 1563 all males between the ages of twelve and sixty who did not belong to one of a number of specifically defined occupational categories were regarded as wage labourers.  This occupational title therefore functioned as a convenient tag for all those who had no other livelihood to fall back on.

Labouring was an age-specific occupation.  Smallholder's sons hired themselves out as labourers while waiting to inherit the family holding, or to acquire sufficient capital to set themselves up as husbandmen and some retired farmers became 'labourers' when they disposed of their lands. Henry Prinsepp and William Cater of Austrey were both described as labourers despite considerable wealth in lands and livestock. Henry, who was worth a comfortable £87.9.7 in 1622, had common field land in Austrey and Newton parishes, a flock of 115 sheep and £13 in ready money.  Creditors owed him an additional £32.  William's household goods and chattels, appraised in 1632, came to £106.13.4 of which £26.13.4 was in ready money and credit, and £30 in livestock. Obviously, these men were no ordinary day-labourers.

Hearth tax exemption certificates confirm a later impression of labourers in the midlands as 'a poor, beggarly sort of people apt to run in Arrears'. Between 1561 and 1580 over forty per cent of Austrey householders recording baptisms were labourers. In 1670 at least 9 of 15 exempt householders listed in the parish were labourers. Few labourers had the requisite £5 worth of goods and chattels to warrant drawing up an inventory when they died. Those few labourers' inventories that have found their way into the archdeaconry court files testify, almost invariably, to a frugal existence. 

The relegation of labourers to the bottom rungs of the status hierarchy is suggested by their growing physical isolation from the landholders.  Constables' accounts and quarter sessions orders reveal that poor, itinerant labourers commonly found refuge on the waste ground on the outskirts of open-field villages.  The hearth tax returns for 1671 record nine Austrey householders 'that receive weekly collection and live upon the common'  encamped upon No Man’s Heath. Typical perhaps was Thomas Robinson. A quaker descended from a family of Austrey smallholders he was described in 1670 as a ‘pauper’, exempted from paying hearth tax. Between 1679 and 1695 he and his family were repeatedly hauled before the quarter sessions’ bench for non-attendance at church. When he died in 1694 he was again described as a labourer, his widow being forced to ‘renounce the burden’ of his estate to his principal creditor.

Apart from servants and apprentices, who moved where they could find work, labourers were the most geographically mobile group in the parish. A precarious living encouraged frequent short-term migration between parishes in search of work or charitable support. In the period 1640 -1700 the Austrey register reveals that seven new labouring families were living in the parish. However, none of them are represented in the probate records from this period.  Even the 'established' labouring families were comparatively new arrivals.  Only about a third of them can be traced in the parish before 1600.  Conversely only two of the nineteen labouring families entered in the Austrey register between 1558-80 (a period in which occupations are fairly consistently recorded), are represented by families of the same surname after 1600. These were presumably the descendants of Richard Smith and William Milner.

Sources and Notes

Everitt cites Coleman's estimate that 47% of the population of England in 1700 were either labourers, cottagers or paupers: AHEW IV, 399; Cf. 17 of the 41 Austrey householders recording baptisms between 1561-80 (41.4%) were labourers.

Cf. 17 of the 41 Austrey householders (41%) recording baptisms between 1561 and 1580 were labourers.

L.J.R.O. inventories, Henry Prinsepp, 1682, William Cater, 1632.

Ref to 'beggarly sort' by a midland surveyor (c. 1700) cited in B.K. Roberts, Rural Settlement in Britain (London, 1977), 194.

'Squatter settlements' provided fertile recruitment for radical religious sects before 1660: See A. Everitt in Thirsk, AHEW IV, 411; cf. further references to squatters in C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (Oxford, 1975), 282, 290.

WCR Hearth Tax Returns, 10; P.R.O. E 179/332, E 1791347

Quarter Sessions Indictments VII, 141, 148, 180-1.