Weaving
 A Witney handloom weaver seen at the end of the 20th century.
His loom, and probably his working conditions, would have been
almost unchanged from the beginning of the 18th century, except
for the introduction of the flying shuttle.
In the Witney blanket industry weaving was always carried out on
handlooms until about 1860. Blanket handlooms were large
machines, well over 12 feet wide, and before the introduction of
the flying shuttle around the year 1800 they needed two weavers,
who would throw the shuttle across the loom to each other. One
was the senior weaver (often the master weaver) and the other
was an assistant or apprentice. They would also work together to
press the pedals that raised the healds; these lifted alternate
threads allowing the shuttle to pass the weft between the warp
threads.
The Witney master weaver was generally much more than his title
suggests: he was in fact both a working craftsman and a trader
who bought the wool, sorted and blended it himself, sent it out
to be spun into yarn, collected it, wove his own cloth (or
supervised the weaving) and then sold it on. The only operation
master weavers did not usually carry out was fulling, but often
they were responsible for tentering and drying. Weavers usually
owned their own loom; some had several looms and employed
journeymen to work them but many owned only one and employed
just one apprentice [1]. The weavers at this time were
entrepreneurial craftspeople who held little stock or capital,
nor were they wage earners because they owned the raw materials,
weaving equipment and finished goods themselves [2].
This way of working is interesting because it was very different
to the woollen industry in the rest of the West of England where
manufacturers were not themselves craftsmen but employed a
number of specialists(of whom weavers were just one class) and
controlled the manufacture and sale of cloth through all its
stages.
Dr Robert Plot writing in circa 1677 records that Witney at that
time had about 60 'blanketeers' (master weavers) who owned at
least 150 looms between them and employed 3,000 poor people,
from children of eight years old to the elderly. If this is
accurate it is likely that most of those people would have been
employed as carders and spinners [3].
Clare Sumner
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