Identifier: cu31924014023463 (find matches)
Title: The cottages and the village life of rural England
Year: 1912 (1910s)
Authors: Ditchfield, P. H. (Peter Hampson), 1854-1930 Quinton, A.R
Subjects: Cottages Villages
Publisher: London, J.M. Dent & sons ltd. New York, E.P. Dutton & co.
Contributing Library: Cornell University Library
Digitizing Sponsor: MSN

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od had blessed with most children did by means of this occupationso order them that when they were come to five or seven yearsof age they were able to get their own bread. Therefore it wasnot without cause that clothiers were both honoured and loved. This cloth trade gave employment to the people in the villagesas well as in the towns, where there were spinners and carders andsheremen and fullers and dyers and shuttle-makers and tearersand weavers and a host of others. Before the dissolution ofthe monasteries the sleepy old towns of the Cotswolds wereprosperous clothing centres. In the churches there are memorialsof worthy merchants and woolmen; and evidences of the bountyof the clothiers are seen in restored and rebuilt churches, incharities and almshouses. As one of them piously exclaimed, I thank God, and ever shall; It was the sheep that paid for all. In old towns such as Coventry, and large villages, you can stillsee the long rows of windows on the second floor of the houses, 166
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LIFE OF RURAL ENGLAND so built in order to give light to the weavers as they worked attheir looms. They remain still at the old-world village of Kersey,which gave its name to a kind of cloth woven there, and of whichour artist gives a drawing. In the beautiful Stroud Valley thecloth trade lingers on, but it was a sad day for our southernclothiers when steam was invented, for steam-power requires coal,and coal can only be procured in certain districts, and the northernclothiers were crafty men who found out many inventions, spinning-jennies, carding-machines, and suchlike things ; hence the tide ^of fortune turned elsewhere, and the hand-loom is as dead as Queen Anne. In the days of my youth I well remember seeinghand-looms in cottages, but these were used for weaving silk,about which much could be said if we had space. The tradedoes not seem to have been much practised in England before1585. James I. was very eager to promote it, and silk-weavingand the knitting of silk stockings were

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