84 RISE AND PROGRESS OF THE HOSIERY MANUFACTURE. 



tion. That great monarch was, unhappily, soon assassinated ; his 

 minister retired from puhlic life, and all Lee's bright hopes were at once 

 destroyed. Again having been flattered and disappointed, his fortitude 

 forsook him and he fell into a deep melancholy. An alien, almost an 

 outcast, he sickened, and sent for his brother James from Kouen ; but 

 it was too late. -After twenty-two years of deferred hope and severe 

 effort, he died alone, of a broken heart, at Paris, in 1610. " Many a 

 heart has been broken upon the wheel whose revolutions have made the 

 fortunes of thousands." James Lee returned to England, leaving one 

 frame at Rouen, and set up the others at Old Square, London, where 

 they were soon sold to a merchant of Italian extraction, and the trade 

 became established in that city. Mead, an apprentice of James Lee, was 

 sent with a machine to Venice. For want of tools, needles, sinkers, and 

 workmen, the manufacture failed there in 1620. Leaving London, 

 James Lee settled in Nottinghamshire, and with the money he had re- 

 ceived for the frames he had sold, and 5001. for cancelling Mead's in- 

 denture, he began to construct others, and so established the business of 

 frame-work knitting in that county ; from thence it spread over the 

 counties of Leicester and Derby. Aston, a miller of Thornton, Notts, 

 joined James Lee, and they added the "lead-sinkers, thumb-plate, and 

 lockers " to the machine, which greatly simplified it, and have been in 

 use ever since. In 1670, " trucks " were placed on the " solebar," by 

 Needham, a London workman. In 1711, the " caster back and hanging- 

 bits " were added by Hardy, of London, and are still used. W ith these 

 improvements, the stocking-frame seemed to have reached an almost 

 perfect state as to the quality and rapidity of construction. It was com- 

 posed of 2,066 pieces, and required eleven movements to form one course 

 of loops. No increased power or facility of operation was acquired by 

 any subsequent contrivance until towards the middle of the present 

 century. London continued for ages to be the , centre of the hosiery 

 manufacture. A Frame-work Knitters' Company was established by 

 royal charter, dated 19th August, in the fifteenth year of Charles II. 

 This still survives, but is powerless for any useful trade purposa Its 

 arms are a stocking -loom, supported on the right hand by a clergyman, 

 and on the left by a woman presenting a knitting-pin. 



The stocking-frame soon spread in great numbers all over France — 

 there are now at Troves 5,000 or 6,000 — Spain, Austria, Saxony, in which 

 latter kingdom there are at present upwards of 30,000 frames at work. 

 Th^se still continue to furnish employment to many industrious mecha- 

 nics. In 1669, there were 660 English frames, 400 of which were in 

 London, and three-fifths of the whole wrought upon silk. 100 only of 

 these frames were then in Notts. In 1695, there were 1,500 frames in 

 London, of which 100 were destroyed on account of disputes about 

 wages. These had increased in 1714 to 2,500 in London, 600 in Leicester, 

 and 400 in Nottingham. Altogether there were about 8,600 in this 

 country. The trade soon began to escape from the London Company's 



