6 SCIENTIFIC SURVEY OF NOTTINGHAM AND DISTRICT 



which employed many thousands of workers in the villages and towns of 

 the Midland counties, and the number was continually growing. The 

 industry clamoured for cheap labour; women's labour, children's labour, 

 anybody's labour, skilled and unskilled. By the middle of the eighteenth 

 century the gild regulations were outgrown and labour was free. 



Industrial technique kept pace with these changes. In 1759 the Derby 

 Rib machine was invented by Jedediah Strutt, the first important modifi- 

 cation of the original frame and the greatest. From this source flowed a 

 bewildering succession of mechanical innovations by which the stockinger 

 progressively mastered the art of producing almost every known mesh 

 by mechanical means. The result was the rise of Nottingham lace, the 

 work of an army of obscure mechanics — Flint, Rogers, Hammond, Hayne 

 — who paved the way for the triumph of Heathcoat and Levers in the 

 early nineteenth century. 



But perhaps the greatest influence exerted by the stocking industry was 

 in the encouragement it gave to mechanical spinning. Hargreaves and 

 Arkwright were only the most prominent of the inventors who were 

 floated by the finance of local tradesmen, bankers and hosiers on Notting- 

 ham's chief industry; Hargreaves came probably in 1768; Richard Ark- 

 wright followed the same year. The mechanical power was, at first, a 

 horse gin, but by 1771 Arkwright had set up his mill at Cromford on the 

 Derwent and similar factories, driven by wafer power, sprang up along 

 the Leen and the Dover Beck. The death knell of the water-mill sounded 

 almost as soon as it was born. In 1785 the first power mill in the world 

 was established at Papplewick, another at Nottingham in 1790, and the 

 transference of the industry to the sources of labour supply in the town 

 began. 



Nottingham was thus edged nearer and nearer to the rapids of the 

 Industrial Revolution. But two circumstances operated to check the 

 speed of descent; the first was the swift decline of cotton spinning in 

 competition with Lancashire, the second was the persistence of the do- 

 mestic structure of the Hosiery Industry. Although a circular frame was 

 invented by Brunei in 1816, it was not applied, in an improved form, until 

 the '40's and even then for another twenty years the hand-frame main- 

 tained an unequal fight with the factory. To this day it is possible to 

 see frames at work in a few cottages in Calverton (where the frame 

 originated) and other centres; and the stockingers' windows in town and 

 village of the Midlands attest the wide distribution of the industry, and 

 the obstinacy with which it died. 



But the most spectacular aspect of the changes was the growth of 

 population. 



From 10,000 in Deering's time it grew to 28,861 at the first census in 

 1801, by 1821 it was 40,415 and in 1831 it was 50,680. By the standards 

 of the time this is not a phenomenal increase ; other towns can show an 

 even more rapid rate, but it was accompanied by a circumstance that 

 was very rare, perhaps unique. While growing so rapidly in numbers, 

 the town remained almost stationary in area; fifty thousand people now 

 occupied a site very Httle larger than that which a century earlier had 

 housed ten. 



