Last year, in a post titled Apprentices and their boxes, I wrote about plans to give visitors to Quarry Bank a better understanding of what it was like to be a child worker living in the Apprentice House during the early industrial revolution (c.1784-1834). One of the ways that we will be doing this is by telling the stories of individual children through an examination of their personal possessions, and specifically by recreating apprentices’ boxes and their contents. Some of the main items that will go into these boxes will be items of clothing.

We know that it was likely that apprentices had at least two sets of clothing each (though since stays – a precursor to the corset which would have been worn by older girls over their shifts – were expensive, older girls who worn them probably one only one set of these). A letter from a mill manager to parish authorities in 1817 concerning the supply of 12 ‘young girls’ of 10 to 12 years of age from the workhouse specified that they should be sent to the mill with ‘clothing sufficient to keep the children … say 2 shifts, 2 pairs stockings, 2 frocks or bedgowns, 2 brats or aprons and two guineas to provide them other necessaries’.[1] The shift was the basic form of undergarment for all women and girls, and was a simple linen or cotton garment with sleeves. These would have been worn under clothes during the day and on their own for sleeping in at night. A frock was either an outer garment for indoor wear that consisted of a bodice and skirt, or something more like a gown (or dress), that opened at the front and was worn over the shift. Bedgowns were also day wear, and covered the top of the body like a modern tunic, while a petticoat (more like a modern skirt) would be worn to cover the lower body. Both gowns and bedgowns would have been worn with an apron or a brat (a brat being a form of overgarment that resembled a pinafore).

What did boys wear? One boy housed at the Apprentice House, Joseph Sefton, gave evidence to Middlesex magistrates in 1806 after running away from the mill in which he described getting ‘clean shirts every Sunday’ and ‘new clothes for Sunday once in two years, we had working jackets new when these were worn out and when our working trousers were dirty we had them washed, some had not new jackets last summer but they were making new ones when I came away’.[2] For boys, shirts were the main undergarment, worn under clothes and at night, hence the need to wash them regularly, as was also the case with girls’ shifts. Since other items of clothing would have been laundered less often (if all all) it seems likely that at any one time, one set of clothing would either be being laundered (most likely in the case of shifts for the girls, and shirts for the boys), or be stored in an apprentice’s box.

In the detailed account books for the Apprentice House we see spending listed between 1787 and 1819 for a variety of textiles to make clothes: woollen cloth, waistcoating, broad cloth, calico and dyed calico and striped cotton, plus cloth to make girls’ aprons and gowns and cloth for boy’s waistcoats and coats. Money was also spent on thread and buttons for boy’s jackets. Many of these materials would have been made into clothing by the female apprentices, who were taught to sew in the Apprentice House and were employed in making clothing for themselves and for the male apprentices in the evenings. In addition, payments in the Apprentice House accounts show that expenditure was laid out for ready made breeches (or short trousers), shoes and the mending of shoes (almost certainly clogs with wooden soles and leather uppers[3]), girls’ stockings (opaque and made of cotton or wool), hose (like stockings, worn by males and females), boys and girls hats, ‘Silk & linings for girls hats’ (which suggests that the girls had a form of ‘chip’ hat, made of either straw or chip straw), girls’ caps, girls’ capes, stays and hankerchiefs (which might have been worn instead of caps or hats, or round the neck, and in the north were described as often being red in colour[4]). In line with most of the rest of the population, there were no signs of either boys or girls wearing anything approaching modern undergarments or drawers, though boy’s breeches may have been lined. It was common practice for poorer people not to wear the sorts of garments that we would understand as underwear until at least the mid nineteenth century.[5]

But though we have these important details about apprentice clothing from the Quarry Bank archive, the descriptions provided in these sources are not detailed, and do not tell us what such clothing would have looked like (nor what it would have been like to wear). For this we can turn to contemporary images of workers’ clothing and to surviving examples of clothes from this period held in the Gallery of Costume, Platt Hall, Rusholme in Manchester. George Walker’s Costume of Yorkshire (1814) is a particularly useful source of visual information for our purposes. His book provides us with this image of ‘factory children’, noting that ‘A great part of the West Riding of Yorkshire abounds with cotton mills, cloth manufactories, and other large buildings appropriates to trade’ in which such children worked. Walker’s picture shows a boy and girl walking either to or from work with a basket of food for the day. Both wear a brat over their clothes. The girls is wearing what looks like a bedgown and blue petticoat, and the boy has on a brown linen shirt, brown breeches and round felt hat.

Walker’s image of a woman spinning wool shows us what older girls and women might wear, and also has a young girl behind the main figure, stirring the cooking pot. Both are wearing aprons, rather than brats over their gowns, and the young woman is wearing a white linen or cotton cap, a bedgown, green petticoat and a pink and white squared neckerchief. The girl behind her is wearing what looks like a shift and frock with her apron. Note that Walker consistently depicts younger labouring girls with short haircuts, whilst older girls and women are shown wearing caps over longer hair. Vivienne Richmond, in her study of poor people’s clothing in the nineteenth century, notes that for teenage girls, wearing longer skirts and wearing one’s hair ‘up’ was often the first public step towards womanhood.[6]

Walker’s book also provides us with an image of a boy working in another branch of the Yorkshire textile industry, ‘The preemer boy’. Such boys were described as ‘the drudges of the [cloth] dressing shops’. He is depicted here wearing what appears to be a felt hat, shirt, waistcoat and jacket, with clogs in his feet. While his legs are partly obscured, his adult co-workers are shown more clearly wearing breeches and blue stockings or hose (coloured, rather than white stockings, would have been the norm for the labouring classes[7]).

This picture of potters from William Pyne’s Costume of Great Britain (1805) also shows boys and men working in similar dress, with the men sporting leather aprons and red neckcloths.

It was not uncommon for the masters or mistresses of runaway apprentices to advertise in local newspapers in the hope that they would be returned, and such adverts can contain information about clothing. Though no adverts for those apprentices who absconded from the Apprentice House have been located, one for James Locket, an apprentice to a stone mason in Kelshall, Cheshire, which appeared in the Chester Chronicle, 7 June 1791 described the same sort of dress that has already been discussed: his main garments being ‘a blue coat, fustian waistcoat and breeches’.

Neither Pyne’s nor Walker’s working children are wearing much in the way of outer garments such as cloaks or coats (or outside hats on top of their caps in the case of girls). However, the Apprentice House accounts show that girls were bought capes (a cloak with a hood), and that both boys and girls wore hats. A cape from around 1800-1820 can be found amongst the collections of the gallery of Costume in Manchester:

This one is quite a fine example, and was said to have been worn for a wedding in Mobberley in Cheshire. Though we might imagine the clothing of the poor as being particularly drab, this was not necessarily the case, and other contemporary images in addition to the ones reproduced here show greens and blues, as well as reds, much in evidence.[8] Red cloaks like this were worn by all classes of women, especially in rural areas, and they were often noted by foreign visitors as being traditional English dress.

We also know from the Quarry Bank records (and described in my earlier post in a post Apprentices and their boxes) that individual apprentices sometimes borrowed money on account from their wages to buy other – apparently less utilitarian – items of clothing, such as a new gown or slippers for girls, and a watch for one boy.[9] Manchester’s Gallery of Costume also has objects that might resemble some of the clothing that some apprentice girls bought.

These slippers, from 1800-1810, were no doubt much finer than Quarry Bank’s child workers could afford, but they give an idea of the type of footwear that constituted a slipper in the early nineteenth century, and which were a world away from the sort of clogs that the children would have worn to protect their feet at other times.

This cotton dress from the last years of the eighteenth century shows us the sort of bright and relatively cheap gown that labouring women might buy (this one had formerly belonged to a domestic servant, though again, might be finer than the one a mill-worker would have bought, especially as we know that servants typically were given the hand-me-downs of their employers).

The watch that one apprentice boy bought would have been a pocket watch. Warrington Museum has a good example of this sort of timepiece, made by local watchmaker James Carter between 1823 and 1824. This would have been kept in a fob pocket in either the boy’s breeches or his waistcoat, with a hanging watch chain the proud sign – even when it was not in use – of his ownership of what was both a prestigious form of male jewellery and a practical tool for measuring the time.

 

REFERENCES

[1] Copy of letter from J. Barton from unspecified parish authority, to Samuel Greg, c. 21 February 1817, C5/8/9/2, Quarry Bank Archive.

[2] Examination of Joseph Sefton, 2 August 1806, Greg papers, C5/8/9/5, Manchester Archives.

[3] John Styles, The Dress of the People: Everyday Fashion in Eighteenth-Century England (2007), p. 25

[4] Vivienne Richmond, Clothing the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (2013), p. 34.

[5] C. Willett and Philis Cunningham, History of Underclothes (1951).

[6] Richmond, Clothing the Poor, pp. 25-6.

[7] Styles, The Dress of the People, p. 40.

[8] See, for example, image by Henry Wigstead reproduced in Styles, The Dress of the People, p. xii.

[9] Stoppage ledger (children), 1815-47, Quarry Bank Archive.

 

The child workers who lived at Apprentice House received a small amount of formal education. A teacher was employed from as early as 1788 to provide a basic education to the apprentices, though this seems to have been only for the boys. When the Apprentice House superintendents were quizzed by the Factory Commission in 1833, Elizabeth Shawcross claimed that ‘the [Greg] ladies teach the girls [on Sunday afternoons], and the schoolmaster the boys, 3 nights a week from eight to nine o’clock generally’. Additionally, Mrs Shawcross described teaching sewing to the girls in the evenings, whilst the girls not only made all of their own clothes but the boys’ shirts as well. When Joseph Sefton, an apprentice who had run away, was interviewed by Middlesex magistrates in 1806, he complained that ‘I was obliged to work overtime every night but I did not like this as I wanted to learn my book’. He suggested that the boys only had one lesson a week from the schoolmaster, and noted that though ‘we had a school every night’, individual boys ‘used to attend about once a week (besides Sundays when we all attended) … 8 at a time I wanted to go oftener to school than twice a week including Sundays but Richard Bamford [the mill manager] would not let me go’.

Though we do not know what the boys were taught, it was likely to have taken the form of reading, writing and arithmetic, and may have included other subjects such as geography, though since time was short – with Joseph Sefton’s account suggesting just an hour a week – the education was likely to have been very basic. Books such as Joseph Collyer’s The Parent’s and Guardian’s Directory, and the Youth’s Guide, in the Choice of Profession or Trade (London, 1760), described the necessary education for apprentices in terms of teaching deference, obedience and a love of God, along with a ‘common education’ that focused on practical learning and the skills needed in trade, and specifically the three Rs.

Unitarians, such as the Gregs, tended to favour education for all social classes, and Unitarians were active in promoting schooling for working-class children throughout Britain. Unitarian women were particularly involved in Sunday schooling, where the focus was firmly on religious education.[1] Both boys and girls at Apprentice House would have attended Sunday school, and at least in the early years of the nineteenth century, their religious education was supplemented by the efforts of the Hannah Greg, the mill owner’s wife, with her daughters joining in later years, as described in Elizabeth Shawcross’s account above.

Two manuscripts survive amongst the Quarry Bank archive that were written by Hannah, and at least one of these was explicitly directed at the children at Apprentice House, and was entitled ‘Sermons for the Apprentices’. These sermons appear to have been delivered during 1819, with some repeated the following year. Based on stories and psalms from the Bible, they were intended to impart important life lessons for the children. Proverbs 22, ‘A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches’ was said to teach the children that whilst ‘we may work hard all our lives and never become rich’, everyone could aspire to have a good name and could secure this ‘by diligently performing every duty which belongs to the situation in which God has placed them’.

This lesson was echoed in another sermon on Psalm 9, which reminded the children that the best use of one’s time was to ‘cheerfully and diligently [follow] our several employments in life’, whilst warning them that the ‘slothful and unprofitable servant’ was liable to be ‘cast into outer darkness where was weeping and gnashing of teeth’. The virtue of humility was mentioned in more than one of Hannah Greg’s sermons, and though Unitarians were a sect that encouraged children to think and to reason for themselves, it is hard to escape the conclusion that one of the purposes of her teaching was to promote docile and obedient workers.

Hannah’s sermons on the wonders of God’s creations as evidenced by the human body, and the edicts to ‘love one another’ and to please God by acting with ‘love, wisdom and goodness’, may seem fairly benign. But the children were also reminded that God was ‘ever present with you in every moment of your lives’, and that bad conduct could result in being dispatched into Hell Fire. A similar tone was apparent in a work she wrote in 1800 entitled ‘catechisms of safety & health’. Despite its title, this appears to have been written with her own children in mind, yet though she described the benefits to their constitutions of horse riding, cricket and fencing, she also asserted that poor conduct would lead to physical ill health, so that the answer to the question ‘What painful operations must children often submit to if they are disobedient, imprudent, inattentive, intemperate, passionate &c?’ was said to be ‘They may be obliged to have Blisters, Leeches. Emetics, teeth drawn, bones set, cupped, amputation &c, tied in bed blinded &c &c &c’.

[1] Ruth Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England, 1760-1860 (London, Gender, Power and the Unitarians (1998).

Last month I wrote about my work at the Apprentice House at Quarry Bank Mill and my idea for representing the lives of former child workers there by recreating the boxes in which they kept their possessions. This month I’ve been given an entirely different brief at Apprentice House: deciding how to present a room currently described as the Shawcross’s parlour.

George and Elizabeth Shawcross were employed as managers of the Apprentice House between 1811 and George’s death in 1834 (after which, Elizabeth carried on alone for a year before handing over to the Timperleys). George was paid an annual salary of £40 for his and his wife’s labours, and he received an additional £10 a year for his work in the village shop. This rate of pay means that the Shawcrosses were by no means rich, but it places them in the same income bracket as many small tradesmen and women in this period, so that it is not surprising that their son, William, was a butcher and their daughter, Hannah, married a hat maker.[1]

The room is currently fairly sparcely furnished: with white distempered walls, three wooden chairs, a corner cupboard, a side table and a small rag rug on the flagstone floor.  Because space is required to seat visitors on guided tours, much of the rest of the room is taken up with wooden benches (not shown on the image above). There are some ornamental touches: dried flowers in a vase, a china tea set on display, a copper kettle and other possessions, but it still feels a little empty, even for a couple of fairly modest means. When I first entered the room, I was reminded of the comments made by the Manchester grocer, George Heywood, upon moving into a shop and house on Old Millgate in 1815, when he complained in his diary that with only a set of chairs and a carpet downstairs, plus a single bed upstairs, he and his business partner ‘have little to come to’, with their house made more miserable because the walls upstairs were ‘naked’.[2] Though the Shawcrosses parlour suggests that they had more possessions than this, the lack of furniture and the white walls do not feel right to me.

The Shawcrosses might not have stretched to affording wallpaper, but they may have selected a coloured distemper for their walls. This is something that could be explored by a specialist analysis of the house’s decorative finishes.[3] But what of the contents of the room? With nothing surviving from the period in the house, and George Shawcross’s will devoid of any detail on his personal possessions, I’ve decided that the best approach is to look for examples of comparable individuals whose belongs were better documented. I’m using the same method that I undertook with Jane Hamlett in my current research project on north-west trading families in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, by examining inventories.

Early modern historians have long used probate inventories – the formal lists of a person’s possessions produced after their death – to determine spatial organisation, room naming, and the variety and distribution of goods within households: though it has also been pointed out that inventories must to be used with care.[4] Georgio Riello, for example, has shown some of the pitfalls of the inventory for the historical researcher, most notably the subjectivity of the inventory maker and the frequent absence of non-valuable items from these lists.[5] Far fewer inventories survive for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as the custom of exhibiting inventories in court and retaining them in the administrative records, if not of making inventories themselves, declined from the 1720s.[6] However, inventories were often preserved in Cause papers relating to disputed wills.[7] This means that a handful do survive for individuals in trade in northern England during the closing decade of the eighteenth century and first quarter of the nineteenth who look to be broadly comparable in social status and income to the Shawcrosses.

Within the limitations of what survives, I have narrowed down my examination to the inventories of a Newcastle-under-Lyme hatter (1811), a Cheadle butcher (1797), a Liverpool butcher (1795), a Cheshire miller (1797), a Doncaster shopkeeper (1818) and a butcher from Batley in Yorkshire (1824). Two things have struck me when looking at these inventories: first, that they list many more items of furniture in their main living rooms than are present in the current interpretation of the Shawcross’s parlour, and secondly, that rooms such as this are usually not described as a parlour, but rather as a ‘house place’, ‘house part’ or simply ‘house’. Some of the inventories I am looking at list a ‘parlour’ as well, but these rooms seem to have been less well furnished and not the first room in the house. Weatherill notes that before 1760, house place, house part or hall were commonly used to describe the main living room in small English households.[8] By the second half of the eighteenth century in most regions, and in some places even earlier, the kitchen seems to have replaced the house place.[9] However, the older name, was still used by tradesmen and women into the nineteenth century in the north of England.[10] So it seems that I might be in charge of decorating and furnishing the Shawcross’s house place, rather than their parlour.

Moreover, this room is likely to have more in it than it does now: perhaps in line with the possessions of the Batley butcher, William Spedding. An inventory of his goods taken in 1824 listed the ‘house’ as containing a mahogany desk and bookcase, 1 elm and 4 mahogany chairs, 1 mahogany card table, a small stand, a walnut desk, dressing glass (mirror), 3 Japan waiters (decorated trays), 2 brass candlesticks, 7 pictures, ‘birds in case’ (presumably stuffed), a wine glass and 4 tumblers, a metal tea pot, 6 pitchers, a pitcher and basin, 3 vegetable dishes and covers, 3 basins, 2 jugs, 3 oval dishes, a tureen, 5 pie dishes, 2 glass bottles and ‘sundry 3 small pots’.[11] Other inventories list clocks, dinning tables and sofas and suggest rooms that were pleasantly cluttered and more welcoming than the Shawcross’s parlour in its current incarnation: in which case, I think I need to get ready to do some shopping.

[1] I am grateful to Danika Grace Lloyd, a QBM volunteer, for her painstaking research on the family history of the Shawcrosses.

[2] John Rylands Library, Diary of George Heywood, Eng MS 703, fo. 76.

[3] Work such as this is carried out by Patrick Baty who has a fascinating website on his various projects.

[4] For a summary of these surveys before 2000 see Tom Arkell, ‘Interpreting Probate Inventories,’ in Tom Arkell, Nesta Evans and Nigel Goose (eds) When Death Do Us Part: Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early Modern England (2000).

[5] Giorgio Riello, ‘“Things Seen and Unseen: The Material Culture of Early Modern Inventories and Their Representation of Domestic Interiors’, in Paula Findlen, ed., Early Modern Things: Objects and their Histories, 1500-1800 (2013). See also see Mark Overton, Jane Whittle, Darron Dean and Andrew Hann, Production and Consumption in English Households, 1600-1750 (2004), pp.14-18; John Bedell, ‘Archaeology and Probate Inventories in the Study of Eighteenth-Century Life, ‘Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 31, no. 2, (Autumn 2000), pp. 239-240.

[6] Jeff and Nancy Cox, ‘Probate 1500-1800: A System in Transition,’ in Arkell, Evans and Goose (eds), When Death Do Us Part, p. 27; John S. Moore, ‘Probate Inventories: Problems and Prospects,’ in Philip Riden, ed., Probate Records and the Local Community (1985), p. 27.

[7] Moore, ‘Probate Inventories,’ p. 17.

[8] Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660-1760 1996), p. 10.

[9] Ursula Priestley and Penelope Corfield, ‘Rooms and room use in Norwich, 1580-1730’, Post-medieval Archaeology, 16 (1982), p. 106; Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour, p. 150; Margaret Ponsonby, Stories from Home: English Domestic Interiors, 1750-1850 (2007), p.105.

[10] Susan Denyer, Traditional Buildings and Life in the Lake District (1991), p. 18; Ponsonby, Stories from Home, pp.105, 136.

[11] Probate account of William Spedding, Batley, Yorks, Borthwick Test CP 1824/1: you can find other Yorkshire inventories by searching the Borthwick Cause Papers.

I am lucky enough to be working with the National Trust at Quarry Bank on the Styal estate in Cheshire as a Historic Advisor. The Quarry Bank team have just embarked upon a £9.4m expansion project that will incorporate opening-up several buildings at Styal that are currently closed to the public, as well as reworking the way some existing sites are presented and interpreted. As a social historian who researches the use of domestic and work space in the north west of England in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, this is, of course, very exciting.

The first building we have in our sights is the Apprentice House, built to house Quarry Bank mill’s child apprentices in the mid 1780s.

There would have been up to 100 children living here during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, aged between 8 and 17 years old. One room that I am particularly interested in is the girls’ dormitory. Currently the room is laid out with simple beds and bedding in a style likely to have been used around the late eighteenth century – complete with uncomfortable straw-filled mattresses. Marks and indentations on the walls have been used to help decide how many beds were in the room and where they were positioned, though the need for modern-day visitors to move around the space means that it is not nearly as rammed full of beds as it must have been when it housed around 60 girls, two to a bed. The walls are whitewashed and the floorboards bare, again, as would likely have been the case when the building was in use originally, and there are some chamber pots placed under the beds, containing straw and a non-specified liquid to evoke the sights (if not the smells) of the original toilet arrangements. A few cloaks and hats also hang on the wooden hooks on one wall to show the types of outer garments that the apprentices would wear.

One of the things I would like to do in Apprentice House is to give visitors a clearer sense of what it was like from the point of view of the original occupants: that is, the child apprentices. So, for me, this room as it is currently presented is too airy, too roomy and far too quiet. And more than this, it gives very little sense of the individual children who have lived here – not even their names appear. In the weeks and months to come, along with the fantastic National Trust interpretation, learning and archival team at Quarry Bank, I’ll be exploring what we can do about this: how we can turn this quiet, still space into something that gives more of a sense of its earlier, noisier, smellier and more cramped past, when it was full of children.

One way that I am thinking of achieving this transformation is by examining the material culture of the apprentices, or put less technically, the things that surrounded them. Specifically, I want to explore the possibility of introducing apprentices’ boxes into the room, and by doing so, telling the individual children’s stories. Amanda Vickery’s work on privacy in eighteenth-century London has shown how even the most lowly of inhabitants in the capital, such as servants and other mobile employees, would have a portable locking box to keep their personal possessions safe.[1] The same source that Vickery used in her examination, the records of the Old Bailey Proceedings, provide ample evidence that London apprentices commonly had their own box, which was usually described in court either as the hiding place for stolen goods, or the site from which items were stolen. Thus in 1794, the court was told that the tailor, Richard Packer, had forced his apprentice, John Piper, to open the locked box which he kept in his room, in which was discovered sewing silk which had been stolen from his master.[2] On 14 September 1808, 13 year-old William Green was sentenced to a year in the house of correction for stealing 39 shillings worth of goods from his master, the shopkeeper, John Wheeler, to whom he had been apprenticed since he was 8.[3] Some of the goods concerned had been found in Green’s locked box. Conversely, in 1821, the plaster’s apprentice, Thomas Harris, accused his own brother, James, of stealing a coat from Thomas’s box that he had subsequently pawned for half a crown.[4] We can find similar cases outside of London as well, with the tailor, John Martin, reporting at the Huntingdonshire Court of Quarter Sessions in 1827 that he had found stolen buttons and cloth in the box of his apprentice.[5] Likewise, the Caernarfonshire Court of Quarter Sessions was told in 1836 that a stolen book had been discoverd in the box of Robert Thomas, apprentice to the printer, Josiah Thomas.[6]

Though no equivalent records have been found for apprentices at Quarry Bank, we do know that it was likely that they each had at least two sets of clothes,[7] and that they sometimes borrowed money from their employer to buy other items, such as a new gown, shoes, a sliding rule, a flute and even a watch.[8] In addition, though some of the Apprentice Indentures (the formal agreements between the mill owners and the apprentices’ parents) at Quarry Bank show that apprentices were provided with clothing by the mill owners, others were paid higher wages (9d or pence a week instead of 1d between 1786 and 1796, the period for which records survive), but that these higher paid apprentices appeared to have to buy their own clothes.[9] These facts – coupled with the ubiquity of apprentices’ boxes in other records – makes it very likely that the Quarry Bank apprentices also had their own boxes, perhaps stored under their beds, in which to keep their possessions. Recreating some of these boxes and their contents, alongside providing details of the lives of their owners using Quarry Bank’s rich archival holdings, will give us a much stronger sense of these children’s experiences working and living at Quarry Bank. I hope it will help visitors to feel both a closer connection with these child workers and develop a clearer sense of what being an apprentice at the mill would have been like.

[1] Amanda Vickery, ‘An Englishman’s Home Is His Castle? Thresholds, Boundaries and Privacies in the Eighteenth-Century London House’, Past & Present, No. 199 (May, 2008), 147-173, pp 163-7.

[2] Old Bailey Proceedings (OBP: available online at www.oldbaileyonline.org), 16 July 1794, John Piper, t17940716-56.

[3] OBP, 14 September 1808, William Green, t18080914-28. For other similar cases, see OBP, 12 September 1804, Hammond Chapman, t18040912-55; OBP, 29 October 1806, Charles Hogg, t1806129-6; OBP, 1 November 1809, Robert Carter, James Furneaux, Robert Shipley, 18110710-76; OBP, 10 July 1811, Joseph Baylis, James Winks, t18110710-76; OBP, 18 February 1818, Henry Wood, t18180218-61.

[4] OBP, 14 February 1821, James Harris, t18210214-141. For other similar cases, see OBP, 17 September 1794, James Brazier, t17940917-54; OBP, 25 October 1797, John North, t17971025-43; OBP, 30 October 1806, John Percival, t19051030-20; OBP, 12 April 1820, Ann Anderson, t18200412-59.

[5] HCP/1/11, Huntingdonshire Archives.

[6] XQS/1836/69, Gwynedd Archives, Caernarfon Record Office.

[7] Copy of letter from J. Barton from unspecified parish authority, to Samuel Greg, c. 21 February 1817, C5/8/9/2, Quarry Bank Archive.

[8] Stoppage ledger (children), 1815-47, Quarry Bank Archive.

[9] Apprentice Indentures, 1786-1796, Quarry Bank Archive.