Manchester in the 1740s. |
By the early 1640s the area’s textile industries were firmly established. Cotton yarn (imported via Ireland) was woven with linen yarn made from flax to make sturdy ‘fustian’ cloth.
Families like the Chethams, Mosleys and Tippings became very wealthy buying and selling woollen cloths, linens, cotton yarn, and fustians. The wholesalers and master-manufacturers of Manchester became famous. As these ‘Manchester men’ became richer they built fine homes and large warehouses for their goods.
In the early 1700s pretty, light all-cotton calicoes imported from India and the East threatened to wipe out Britain’s woollen industry. An act of 1721 banned the wearing of, weaving or selling of any printed all-cotton ‘stuffs’ or ‘calicoes’ whether imported or made in Britain. However, ‘fustians’ were exempted, to protect Manchester’s workers. Woollen and worsted weavers petitioned parliament to ban fustians, too, but the ‘Manchester Act’ of 1736 upheld the exemption. All-cotton printed goods remained banned, however.
Handloom weaving. |
During the 1740s, Manchester merchants bought the warps and raw cotton and gave the materials to weavers who worked in their own homes aided by their families. The raw cotton was carded (the fibres were straightened to form a long, fluffy ‘roving’), the rovings were spun into yarn, the yarn was wound onto bobbins, and finally woven into cloth on a loom.
John Kay’s flying shuttle (1733) made hand-weaving easier. Then several key inventions speeded up first the spinning, then weaving of cotton. Lewis Paul and John Wyatt had the idea of thinning out cotton fibre using rollers, and James Hargreaves’s machine, the ‘spinning jenny,’ patented in 1770, revolutionised spinning.
Hargreaves' spinning jenny at North Mill, Belper |
Arkwright's water frame at North Mill, Belper. |
Mule spinning room |
The big breakthrough for mechanized weaving came when Edmund Cartwright patented a powered loom in 1785. In a future blog post, I’ll look at how steam power affected Manchester during the industrial revolution.
5 comments:
A very interesting article, Sue. I love to hear about how people invented new technology to meet the need to progress and create greater efficiency. We are going through a revolution now and it is getting faster. Driverless cars, more immediate communication, renewable energy and so on. Cottonopolis, made me laugh. Here in London we have two , "opolises." Albertropolis, ( The South Kensington Museums and universites) and recently in the news I discovered the London Olympic Park, because of the regeneration in the area and the new industries created in the area, is now called, Olympicopolis.
Thanks, Tony. Olympicopolis! I love it!
Interesting post - one of my Cheshire ancestors was a fustian cutter in one of the censuses and I wondered what fustian was. I knew it was some sort of cloth but for some reason thought it was more like hessian so I'm glad to be enlightened!
Hi Liz, that's interesting. Fustian cutting (it was a hardwearing fabric) was done in people’s homes as well as factories.Fustian cutters liked to take Mondays off (‘Saint Monday’) and work hard the rest of the week; their child helpers worked up to twenty hours a day towards the end of the week so that all the work could be done before they took Sunday off.
By the way, Liz, there's a video demo of fustian cutting here: https://vimeo.com/22230259
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