SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



Those who, under the newly inaugurated system of poor relief, had to 

 provide work for the unemployed naturally turned their attention to spinning, 

 and an industry already carried on by the women and children in cottages 

 all over the county was represented in the cloth centres by a considerable 

 amount of semi-pauperized labour.^™ The children of Christ's Hospital, 

 Ipswich, were taught to card and spin wool at an early age : under an order 

 of 1590 every clothier was compelled to have at least half his wool carded, 

 spun, woven, and shorn by the poor of the town ; for the other half he 

 might procure labour outside if he wished.'"' The Bury Articles""' already 

 quoted ensure that the work thus compulsorily provided should be properly 

 carried out. Every spinner was, if possible, to be provided with 6 lb. of 

 wool every week, and to bring home the same every Saturday night. If the 

 task was not completed the clothier had liberty to inform the constable, that 

 punishment might be inflicted. 



The spinners, probably owing to the fact that the industry was to such 

 a great extent carried on in scattered homes, never seem to have been 

 organized, and were peculiarly liable to oppression, ' not only through low 

 wages, but also through payment in kind and the exaction of arbitrary 

 fines.'*"" Throughout the 17th century the regulation of the spinners' 

 wages was one of the problems of poor-law administration. When the 

 cloth sales began to fail, and the looms to stand idle, they were the first to 

 suffer. In vain the Privy Council instructed the justices of Suffolk to urge 

 upon the clothiers the necessity of finding work for the poor. With 

 exhausted capital and cloth to the value of thousands of pounds returned 

 upon their hands, they were compelled to reduce the numbers of their 

 workpeople. In 1629 the Privy Council replied to a question of the 

 Suffolk justices that a tax might permissibly be levied on the inhabitants 

 of a parish for their lands per acre ' to employ the poor.' '"* In East Berg- 

 holt, one of the chief clothing towns, the sum raised for poor relief had to 

 be doubled.'"^ In 1630 malting was prohibited in the county in order to 

 increase the supply of barley for the poor.^°* The Orders in Council for the 

 sale of corn under cost price are too numerous to be detailed here. To the 

 growing depression of the cloth trade must be added such minor causes of 

 distress as the frequency of disastrous fires (hardly a town in Suffolk appears 

 to have escaped) and of epidemics of plague and small pox. The long 

 struggle of the coast towns (where fire was but too apt to follow in the 

 wake of tempest) against the invading sea was drawing to a close in defeat. 

 Southwold, Blythburgh, Walberswick, Dunwich, in particular, were in a 

 pitiable condition of poverty, while the decay of the fisheries followed 

 inevitably upon the shifting and silting of their havens. A petition of the 

 inhabitants in 1652'"^ speaks of 'our poor town of Walberswick, now one of 

 the poorest towns in England, not being able to repair our Church or 

 Meeting place, which at the first was reared up by the Inhabitants at their 

 only Cost and Charge, and the many poor widows and fatherless and mother- 

 less children and at this present not above one man living in the town that 

 has £^ per year of his own.' 



^ r.C.H. Suff. ii, 258. »' Ibid. »" Hist. MSS. Com. Ref. x\r, App. viii, 139. 



«» r.C.H. Suff. ii, 258. •»' E. M. Leonard, Early Engl. Poor Relief, p. 178. "» F.C.H. Suff. ii, 266. 

 "* E. M. Leonard, Early Engl. Poor Relief, p. 179. "' Gardner, Hist, of Dunwich, 176. 



677 



