SHIKK. 



SHODDY MANUFACTURE. 



6U 



cation was tho object of Captain Manby's attention, and hii name 

 u intimately associated with the history of thii part of the sub- 

 ject He had, in 1 783, thrown a line, by means of a nuall mortar, 

 orer Downham Church, in Norfolk; and it struck him jhat ho 

 might, by the same meuu, throw a line over a stranded*! 1 umu\. 

 During many subsequent yean he made repeated experiment*; his 

 main difficulty consisted in securing the shot to the rope ; iron chains 

 were liable to break on the discharge ; but at length he found that 

 stout strips of closely-plaited raw hide would answer the purpose. 

 The rocket apparatus u now thoroughly effective, and many thousand 

 lives have been saved by means of the rojws thrown out to stranded 

 ships, through the agency of mortar-rockets. There are upwards of 

 200 places on the shores of the United Kingdom, where such apparatus 

 U kept, mostly under the charge of the coast guard, who, from the 

 peculiar nature of their other duties, are well adapted for this kind 

 of service. . 



SHIKE, from the Saxon uJtyraH, .to divide (whence also to thtar), 

 is the name of districts into which the whole of Great Britain is 

 divided. The word shire is in most cases equivalent to county, a name 

 often substituted for it in Great Britain, and always in Ireland. The 

 origin of this distribution of the country cannot probably now be 

 ascertained. It has been customary to attribute it to Alfred, upon the 

 authority of a passage in Ingulphus, the monk of Croylaud, who wrote 

 about a century and a half after the reign of that king. Asser, how- 

 ever, the biographer of Alfred, does not mention this most important 

 fact, and the unsupported statement of Ingulphus is of little value. 

 In truth, shires were certainly known before Alfred's time. Sir Francis 

 Palgrave shows them to be identical, in many cases, with Saxon states; 

 thus Kent, Sussex, Essex, Norfolk, Suffolk, Middlesex, and Surrey, 

 were ancient kingdoms : Lincolnshire, under the name of Lindesse, 

 was an independent state, and Worcestershire (1/nicccw) was the juris- 

 diction of the bishop of Worcester. Shires of another class were 

 formed out of larger divisions, either for the sake of more easy 

 management when the population of the particular ..district had 

 increased, or for the sake of giving territory to on earL Yorkshire 

 was part of the kingdom of Deira, and Derbyshire of Mercia. Lanca- 

 shire was made a county subsequently to the Conquest. On the other 

 hand, some shires have merged in others; Winchelcombeshire is a 

 port of Gloucestershire ; and in the Act for abolishing the palatine 

 jurisdiction of Durham (6 & 7 Will. IV., c. 19) no less than five 

 shires are mentioned, namely, Craikshire, Bedlingtonshire, Norham- 

 shire, Allertonshire, and Islandshire ; which hod long ceased to possess, 

 if indeed they ever enjoyed, separate jurisdictions. 



The uses of the division into shires may be learnt by an enumera- 

 tion of the principal officers in each : 1, the lord lieutenant, to whom 

 is entrusted its military array [LORD LIEUTENANT] ; 2, the custos 

 rotulorum, or keeper of the rolls or archives of [the county ; this 

 officer U appointed by letters-patent under the great seal, and is now 

 always identical with the lord-lieutenant, except in counties of cities, 

 where the high steward is usually custos rotulorum ; 3, the sheriff, or, 

 as he is often called, the high sheriff [SHERIFF] ; 4, the receiver- 

 general of taxes, who is appointed by the crown, and accounts to it 

 for the taxes levied within his district ; 5, the coroner [CORONER] ; 6, 

 the justices of the peace, whose commission extends only to their 

 own county, and who, assembled in sessions, have jurisdiction over 

 many offences, and control over the county funds [SESSIONS] ; 7, the 

 under-sheriff, who is appointed by and performs nearly all the duties 

 of sheriff; and 8, the clerk of the peace, an officer (almost always an 

 attorney) appointed by the justices in quarter-sessions, whose duty it 

 is to file and produce recognisances, returning them, when forfeited, 

 to the sheriff to be levied [RECOGNISANCE] : he likewise prepares or 

 files indictments to be tried at the sessions or assizes, and in general 

 acts as the officer of the justices in quarter-sessions. 



County-rates are assessments made by the justices in quarter- 

 sessions assembled, according to estimates laid before them. The 

 principal objects of these rates are : the building and repair of bridges, 

 jails, shire-halls, and courts of justice, and of late years lunatic 

 asylums; the repair of roads; the payment of the salaries of the 

 coroner, clerk of the peace, high and special constables, jailers, Ac. ; 

 the expense attending the apprehension, conveyance, and prosecution 

 of persons accused of crime; and under this head is included the 

 remuneration to witnesses for their loss of time and expenses ; the 

 maintenance of prisoners, and their transportation. The rates are 

 levied by collectors, and enforced by the sheriff. 



The judicial tribunals in each county ore the assize court [ASSIZES]; 

 the old schyremote or county-court held for the election of knighta of 

 the shire, and the hundred courts, and courts-Ieet. [COURTS.] These 

 hundred courts and courts-leet have long been almost entirely obso- 

 lete, and the county court statutes accordingly contain provisions for 

 their surrender to the crown. 



The principal subdivision in a county is the hundred, a district 

 which in its origin bore relation rather to the population than to any 

 uniform geographical limits. Mr. Hallam considers it to have been a 

 district inhabited by 100 free families, and that a different system pre- 

 vailed in the northern from that of the southern counties ; in proof 

 of which he contrasts Sussex, which contains 65 hundreds, and 

 Dorsetshire, which contains 43, with Yorkshire, which contains only 26, 

 and Lancashire, only 6. In the counties north of the Trent, this sub- 



division is often called a wapeutake. That the division into hundreds 

 was known among the Germans, even in the time of the Roman inva- 

 sion, U argued from two (passages in Tacitus (' De Mor. Germ.,') " ex 

 omni juventuto delectos ante aciem locant Definitur et numerus ; 

 rcnttni ex singulis ]ngis sunt." And again, " Centeni singulis (princi- 

 pibus) adsunt ex plebe comites, consilium simul et auctoritas." 

 "Nihil nisi armati agunt;" and hence Spelman infers the identity of 

 the vxipenidch, or military array (taking of weapons) and the hundred 

 court. Sir Francis Palgrave says that the burgh was only the enclosed 

 and fortified resort, the stockade of the inhabitants of the hundred. 

 The subdivision of the hundred was the tithing, composed, as it is 

 alleged, of ten free families, and having for on officer the tithing- man, 

 a head constable. 



Whether in the barbarous times to which it is attributed, so elabo- 

 rate a system as we have sketched could have prevailed, is at least 

 most doubtful'; but the theory is that somewhere about the time of 

 Edgar (A.D. 950), the county was divided into tithings, of which 12 

 made a hundred for the Saxon hundred meant 120, and hence per- 

 haps the frequent use of the number 12 in .our legal processes. These 

 hundreds were presided over by their decanus, or head borough, or 

 hundred-man, and were represented in the shiremote ; and this aggre- 

 gate body, the shire, presided over by its earl and bishop or sheriff, 

 conducted its own internal affairs. 



There are three counties-palatine, the earl of which had within his 

 shire all the fiscal and judicial powers of the crown : Chester, created 

 by William the Conqueror; the duchy of Lancaster, created by 

 Edward III. these two have been long annexed to the crown ; and 

 Durham, formerly governed by the bishop, but annexed to the crown 

 in 1836. In this year a part of the see of Ely, which had been a 

 royal franchise, was annexed to the crown, as Hexhamshire in 

 Northumberland had been in the reign of Elizabeth. [PALATINE 

 COUNTIES.] 



SHODDY MANUFACTURE. This has recently become a large 

 and important branch of industry in the West Riding of Yorkshire. 

 Shoddy and mungo are the strange names given to two varieties of rag- 

 wool ; the one being obtained from old blankets, carpets, flannel, and 

 worsted stockings ; and the other from tailors' cuttings and worn-out 

 woollen garments. In both cases, the pieces are torn up fibre from 

 fibre, constituting a kind of dirty short-stapled wool. There is a third 

 variety called extract, obtained from " union " or " mixed " goods, in 

 which cotton is woven up with wool ; rags of this kind are exposed 

 to the action of strong chemical agents, which completely dissolve 

 away the cotton, and leave the wool behind. 



So far back as half a century ago, cloth manufacturers began 

 to mix a little rag-wool with new wool in the making of cheap 

 cloth ; but it is only in recent years that a large and distinct branch 

 of industry has resulted therefrom. At the present day, Batley 

 and Dewsbury are the centres of the trade, giving employment to 

 many thousand persons in several mills in producing shoddy and 

 mungo from rags, in sorting and preparing rag-wool imported from 

 abroad, or in spinning the old with the new wool into yarn for weaving 

 into cloth. Besides the two towns here named, the manufacture is 

 distributed throughout the whole of the surrounding district in 

 Ossett, Mirfield, Morley, Earlsheaton, Heckmondwike, Gomersal, 

 EUand, Stainland, and other places scarcely known even by name out 

 of Yorkshire, but gradually rising from mere villages to the dignity of 

 towns. The trade is a very dirty one. The rags have gone through a 

 long period of service, and are unavoidably soiled and stained in 

 various ways. There are sorters, whose business it is to classify the 

 rags into as many kinds and colours as possible, in order that manu- 

 facturers may be able to select the varieties which best suit their 

 purposes. There ore also cutters, whose employment consists in cut- 

 ting off knots and seams, which would otherwise interfere with the 

 operations. The disentanglement of the rags into rag-wool is effected 

 chiefly by a machine called a wift. This consists of a revolving 

 cylinder, set with iron-toothed plates ; the rags are fed in at one point, 

 and are torn into fibres by the action of the teeth. Some of these 

 machines contain 14,000 teeth, perform 700 revolutions per minute, 

 and are employed in grinding up good woollen rags into mungo ; others, 

 with fewer teeth and a slower motion, tear up old worsted rags into 

 shoddy. Each machine produces on an average about,1000 Ibs. of rag- 

 wool per day. In the township of Batley alone, it is estimated that 

 there are now from 12 to 14 million pounds produced annually ; about 

 an equal amount in various places within four miles of that town ; and 

 again an equal amount in places beyond that limit in round numbers, 

 60 million pounds of woollen and worsted rags are disentangled into 

 40 million pounds of mungo and shoddy. Of the whole quantity, 

 about one-third is mungo, of an average worth of Gd. per pound ; and 

 two-thirds shoddy, worth -id. This amounts to the large sum of nearly 

 800,OOOJ. a value wholly superadded to that which relates to new 

 wool A great portion of this is absolute saving to the community : 

 for woollen rags possess only a very small per-centage of this value, 

 when applied to other manufacturing uses. 



Mungo and shoddy are not used alone in making woollen goods, 

 New wool is added to them, to give them the felting property and 

 strength of fibre. The very commonest goods may have eight or ten 

 times as much rag-wool as new wool ; in medium goods the ratio may 

 be nearly equal ; in a higher doss of goods there may be eight or ten 



