Middlemen in English Business 319 



ib) Hosiery. 



There are several historians of the hosiery manufacture.^ Its 

 early seat was Nottingham, where one Lee invented the stocking 

 loom in 1589. Pococke found Bala in Ireland a considerable stocking 

 market, also, in 1750.- Hosiery made little progress in England 

 until the midst of the seventeenth century. Cromwell incorporated 

 the London Company of Framework Knitters in London, and gave 

 them a monopoly of regulating all framework knitters in England and 

 Wales.^ Nottingham, Leicester and Derby possessed, according to 

 enumerations of frames in 1714, most of the midland-county frames. 

 The knitters of these shires contested the regulation by the London 

 Company and broke away in 1730. The Company made a spirited 

 fight in 1740-51 for restoration of their control, but their appeals 

 were refused by the House of Commons.* The petitions of the frame- 

 work-knitters sent to the Commons give the location of the industry 

 and somewhat the organization. Nottingham, and Surrey towns — 

 as Godalming, Guilford, Whitley, etc. — ^were petitioners; the hosiers 

 and manufacturers of London and Westminster also petitioned. The 

 hosier provided the knitters with materials — silk and cotton — which 

 they knitted on their own machines as a rule and returned the finished 

 hose to him and received pay for their labor. But about 1720 certain 

 "employers and shop-keepers . . . got into the hose business;" 

 they simply bought frames and let them out to knitters and received 

 hose back. Letting out frames to any but members of the Company 

 was prohibited by by-law. Between 1730 and 1751 three "of the 

 principal Hosiers" kept ''100 Frames each." Sometimes persons 

 who had no other interest in the trade bought and let frames out to 

 the knitters.^ The hose were carried to London and sold to the city 

 dealers. There are named in the Commons Journal five " considerable 

 Dealers in the aforesaid Manufactures ... all of the City of 

 London . . . who employ (ed) great Numbers of Manufacturers 

 in different Parts of England" in 1730.^ There was a gradual migra- 

 tion, about this date and onwards, of the industry from London to 

 Nottingham.'^ In 1750 there were fifty manufacturers, employers 



1 See Thoroton, Deering, Blackner, Henson, and Felkin. 



- Pococke, I, 235. 



5 Glover, I, 240-1. See statement of powers in J. H. C, XXVI, 779, 790-4. 



^ J. H. C, XXVI, 779-88. 



5 Felkin, 435. 



6J. H. C, XXVI, 787. 



■ Blackner, Hist. Xott., 215. 



