River Improvement 143 



goods famous throughout the world settled down at the con- 

 fluence of the Sheaf and the Don because those streams afforded 

 them the best available means of operating their tilt-hammers. 1 



In the early stage of this transition period the streams 

 were desired and utilised solely as an aid to manufacturing 

 purposes. As the towns or the industrial centres developed, 

 however, there grew up increasing need for improved means 

 of transport supplementary to the roads of that day in 

 order, more especially, to facilitate the better distribution of 

 the commodities then being produced in ever-increasing 

 quantities. It was this need that led to the Act of 1699, 

 giving powers for rendering the Aire and the Calder navigable. 

 Petitions in favour thereof were presented by the " clothiers " 

 (as cloth-makers were then called) of various towns likely 

 to derive advantage from the scheme, and some of these 

 petitions afford an interesting insight into the conditions 

 under which the cloth industry was carried on in Yorkshire 

 and Lancashire in the closing years of the seventeenth century. 



A petition from the " clothiers " of Leeds said, " That 

 Leeds and Wakefield are the principal towns in the north 

 for cloth ; that they are situated on the rivers Ayre and 

 Calder, which have been viewed, and are found capable to be 

 made highways which, if effected, will very much redound to 

 the preservation of the highways and a great improvement of 

 trade ; the petitioners having no conveniency of water 

 carriage within sixteen miles of them, which not only occasions 

 a great expense, but many times great damage to their goods, 

 and sometimes the roads are not passable." 



The clothiers of " Ratchdale " (Rochdale) stated that they 

 were " forty miles from any water carriage " ; those of Halifax 

 said they " have no water carriage within thirty miles, and 

 much damage happens through the badness of the roads by 

 the overturning of carriages " ; and those of Wakefield said of 

 the scheme : 



" It will be a great improvement of trade to all the trading 

 towns of the north by reason of the conveniency of water 



1 In giving an account of a visit he paid to Derbyshire in 1713, 

 Dr. William Stukeley says in his " Itinerarium Curiosum " (2nd ed., 

 1776) : "At the smelting works they melt down the lead ore, and run it 

 into a mould, whence it becomes pigs, as they call it ; the bellows con- 

 tinually are kept in motion by running water." 



