INDUSTRIES 



733 women, and 33 children are employed in 

 the hemp industry,'^ but this is probably an 

 understatement. All Bridport is directly or in- 

 directly dependent on the mills, except for the 

 few people attracted there to supply the needs of 

 the agricultural district round the town, while 

 the women in the surrounding villages habitually 

 or occasionally supplement their husband's or 

 father's wages. The handicraft is also practised 

 by the widows of agricultural labourers who 

 wish to keep themselves and their children out 

 of the workhouse, but their earnings are usually 

 augmented by outdoor relief. In the town the 

 workers earn their living at the mills, but in the 

 country the earnings are only supplementary to 

 agricultural wages, and though the netting in- 

 dustry is of great value to the villages it has no 

 pretension to being anything more than a by- 

 industry. 



The goods which are made in Bridport and 

 its neighbourhood are sent all over the world. 

 Perhaps the most important are nets and fishing- 

 tackle, but other twine and goods are also ex- 

 ported, and numbers of government contracts 

 are executed in the town. The industry neces- 

 sarily fluctuates with the fishing seasons, and the 

 workers are usually busier from January to June 



than from July to October. Bridport receives 

 every kind of order, from government contracts 

 to orders for twine from the old-fashioned fisher- 

 men who make or mend their own fishing or 

 rabbit nets. 



Some of the present houses of business have 

 almost continuous records from 1813 to the 

 present day, and before 1813 occasional records 

 which carry the practical history of the industry far 

 back into the eighteenth century. Briefly the his- 

 tory of the nineteenth century seems to have been 

 that when the manufacturers lost their monopoly 

 in Newfoundland they opened up other markets 

 all over the world, so that Bridport twine is used 

 everywhere. When they were hard pushed bv 

 machine-made nets they developed the industn' 

 of hand-made nets, which already existed in the 

 thirteenth century, and as competition has be- 

 come more and more severe they have tended 

 to develop each in an individual direction, so 

 that while they all supply twine and nets of 

 every description, each has a branch of the 

 manufacture to which he devotes special atten- 

 tion. The whole industry is flourishing and 

 seems to owe its success to its old-fashioned 

 methods which can be maintained, but scarcely 

 initiated, in the twentieth century. 



FISHERIES 



The fisherman's craft has had a numerous 

 following among Dorset men from a very early 

 date,^ although the records of the industry have 

 been somewhat overshadowed by the neighbouring 

 fisheries of Devon and Cornwall, one branch 

 at least of the ancient Dorset fishing, that of the 

 pilchard, formerly caught in considerable quanti- 

 ties off the coast, having actually passed almost 

 exclusively to the last-named county.^ 



The returns^ belonging to the year 1340, 

 known as Inquisitiones Nonarum, show that the 

 Dorset fishing industry was of considerable im- 

 portance. In Portland * the fisheries were worth 

 /lO, 'in qua proficuum dicte ecclesie maxime 

 consistit,' and the surveyor, forsaking for a 

 moment his dry official fashion of setting down 

 the returns, tells us further, ' also the said parish 



" Population Returns, Dors. 190 1, p. 8. 



' We are told in Domesday Book that at Lyme, which 

 belonged to the church of Salisbury, the fisheries 

 tenants rendered 1 5/. to the monks in respect of 

 their fish {ad pisces). An early grant of King Athel- 

 stan to the monks of Abbotsbury of certain ' waters ' 

 adjoining their monastery, seems to a Weymouth 

 historian to suggest the ancient repute and abundance 

 of the fishing there. Ellis, Hist. Weymouth, 5. 



' Ibid. 242. 



' For this and the five following paragraphs Mr. 

 C. H. Vellacott is responsible. 



' Inj. Non. 50<J. 



has been burnt and destroyed by the enemies of 

 England and the sheep and other belongings 

 {catalla) carried away.' Again, in the adjacent 

 district of Wyke and Weymouth, ten fisheries 

 were valued at ^^3, and at Preston also the sea 

 fisheries were considerable. Further east, in the 

 Isle of Purbeck, the tithes of the fishery at Corfe 

 Castle reached 12^., in Studland 2j., and the 

 same amount at Worth with Swanage. At 

 Wareham fisheries also flourished,' but the tithes 

 are classed with those of other products. In Holy 

 Trinity parish, however, tithes of fish and salt 

 together reached half a mark. It is a fair in- 

 ference from these returns that the vigorous 

 export trade in marble and stone from Ower 

 naturally attracted the best enterprise and skill of 

 the Isle of Purbeck. The fisheries at Port- 

 land and Wyke were then of more economic 

 importance than the quarries — for the heyday of 

 the Portland stone trade was yet to come. As 

 the marblers' craft declined in the late fifteenth 

 century, Corfe, which had been famous all over 

 England for its marble, found new associations 

 for its name, and the Customs Accounts often 



' We know that Wareham herrings were of great 

 repute. Many of the tenants on the manors of the 

 abbey of Shaftesbury were bound to carry herrings 

 from Wareham as the rental of that house clearly 

 shows. See Introd. re ' Salt.' 



353 



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