Industrial organisation and location

Abstract

THE entrepreneur who organised the market for the manual worker at his loom was known during the sixteenth century in southern England, including East Anglia, as the clothman or clothier. Increasingly often he delivered the yarn to the weaver and perhaps also owned it. He might well have owned the wool even before it had passed over the spinning-wheel. But his crucial responsibility lay in the delivery of the cloth to the London market and finding a purchaser there. In good times he might find his reward in the accumulation of profit, in bad times he risked bankruptcy or otherwise going to the wall. The details of organisation were never clear-cut nor uniform and varied greatly in time and place. At the moment when the independent Halifax weaver was trudging to the local market to sell his cloths, the weaver of the west country was more accustomed to deliver his to his neighbour the clothman, who might seem little more than a glorified carrier. But if the neighbour also took the opportunity to consign yarn for the next batch of cloths, and entered into any sort of contract or even understanding with the weaver, then their relationship was evidently edging towards that of employer and employee — especially if it were recognised that yarn and subsequently cloth alike belonged to the clothier, as he was increasingly called, to the exclusion of the old-fashion term ‘clothman’.