A ravelled skein : the silk industry in south west Hertfordshire 1790-1890
Abstract
Cotton and wool have long dominated studies of the English textile
industries, relegating silk manufacture to no more than a minor role in the British
economy. Regional studies have likewise tended to concentrate upon areas
dominated by a single feature or single industry. This thesis aims to address the
economic and social impact of a silk industry established in the predominantly
rural area of South West Hertfordshire. Here the indigenous population had other
opportunities for employment, agricultural labour of various kinds forming the
greatest occupational group. The straw plait absorbed female and child labour in
the districts of Berkhamsted and St Albans, in direct competition to the silk mills,
while the rag factories supplying the paper industry offered competition to the silk
mills of Watford and Rickmansworth.
Any industry dependent upon imports is especially vulnerable to external
pressure, and an overview of the national situation regarding the silk industry in
England, and of the particular problems besetting manufacturers during the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is therefore essential to an understanding of
the situation in the rural semi-industrial districts. The chapters of this thesis
therefore follow the story of silk production from the wider context of the national
industry to the specific mills of Hertfordshire, asking first, why the establishment
of an English silk industry was so important. Themes explored in later chapters
are already discernible in the early history of the silk industry: the high
involvement of women; the apprenticeshipo f children; the interventionist role of
government; and the problem of the poor.
The extent to which these factors impinged upon the relationship between
master, worker, and the local district, and ultimately upon the viability of the
Hertfordshire mills, form the central core of this study.
Publication date
2002Published version
https://doi.org/10.18745/th.14044https://doi.org/10.18745/th.14044