been at the beginning. It is improbable that more was included in the purchase of July 1784 than the house, stabling, and offices, and a piece of land to be used for extensions, and it would seem that these premises served both as a residence and a warehouse from October 1784, when Oldknow moved to Stockport, till 1786, when he built a house at 'Heaton'. During these two years he was still an eminent master-manufacturer of the old style, differing in no essential respect from the draper or clothier of sixteenth-century England or of fourteenth-century Ghent or Florence. It is therefore desirable that we should bring together such facts as the new records furnish about the organization of his business in its simpler form before the fundamental changes that followed the crisis of 1787–8.
First and foremost he was an employer of weavers. When he moved his head-quarters to Stockport he had no intention of abandoning his warehouse at Anderton, or of relinquishing the assistance of the muslin weavers he had trained there. The list grew from sixty-nine in 1783 to over one hundred and fifty in 1786, of whom all but eighteen were muslin weavers, and from May to November 1785 an average of 370 pieces a month was being dispatched to Stockport by Thomas Swift, the manager at Anderton. At that time the output at Stockport was not so good, either in quantity or in quality, but by the close of 1786 it had reached four times that amount (about 1,600 pieces a month), and the Anderton weaving diminished till, in 1793, there were only forty weavers on Oldknow's list as compared with 340 at Stockport. As, however, the Anderton branch kept up a connexion with from fifty to a hundred small spinners in the Bolton district the value of the yarn sent monthly to Stockport grew from £50 in 1785 to £200 in 1788, and £300 in 1790. The small spinners of the Stockport district (to the number of about fifty) were producing about £400 worth a month in 1786–7 to Oldknow's account, but he must have been getting by that time from Arkwright and other big spinners more than twice the amount of twist and weft supplied by all the small spinners combined.
It was the relation of the master-manufacturer to the small spinners and the weavers that constituted the characteristic feature of the old industrial regime. He was their employer in the sense that he supplied them with practically all their raw material. All the weavers and most of the spinners thus employed were themselves manual workers with a standard of life comparable to that of the modern wage-earner. The weavers had long been organized in friendly societies which were in effect trade unions,[1] and the journeymen spinners had lately followed
- ↑ Daniels, pp. 44–55.
