PROJECTED REVIVAL OF THE FLAX INDUSTRY 601 



There was a revival of English flax-growing about 1850 but 

 development was arrested by the greatly enhanced price of 

 corn, so that for the time being flax was outclassed as a farm 

 crop. Furthermore, following the Treaty of Paris in 1856 and 

 peace with Russia, very large quantities of cheap Russian fibre 

 came to British markets ; and this seems to have been the blow 

 from which English flax production has never properly re- 

 covered, although various attempts have been made to restart 

 the industry. 



The custom of working large farms and the increased value 

 of produce requiring less attention and less skilled labour 

 occasioned a decline in the area devoted to flax and a marked 

 disinclination on the part of the agriculturist to do more than 

 grow the crop and harvest it. The establishment at this time of 

 depots at which the straw was received and worked up into 

 fibre mark a new stage in the history of English flax. 



The adoption of the system of centralising the after-pro- 

 cesses led to a revival of the industry about i860, when con- 

 siderable quantities of flax were grown : in fact, in 1870 the area 

 devoted to flax in Great Britain was 23,957 acres, the greatest 

 area occupied by the crop in any year on record. About 1875, 

 a succession of bad seasons was experienced in England ; this 

 circumstance and the keen competition of foreign flax fibre and 

 Manilla hemp, as well as the high price of wheat, caused many 

 farmers to cease growing flax and soon afterwards several works 

 were closed down. In 1876 flax works were established at 

 Long Melford (Suffolk) and continued working during about 

 twenty years ; several smaller attempts were made to revive 

 the industry in Suffolk prior to 1888 but without success. To 

 judge from the quantity of straw dealt with annually, the most 

 prosperous mills were those at Selby and Staddlethorp in 

 Yorkshire. At the former, the crop from nearly 2,000 acres 

 was handled successfully but the quantity raised fell off con- 

 siderably, until in 1896 not more than a 500-acre crop was 

 dealt with at Selby and the mills at Staddlethorp had the crop 

 from barely 200 acres. It is, however, significant that both the 

 mills surviving in 1896 were conducted as central retteries and 

 that the principle of retting in tanks of warmed water had been 

 adopted. Since that time, flax has been grown as a fibre crop 

 only to a very small extent : small areas have been seen from 

 time to time both in Yorkshire and in Somerset ; in the latter 



