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