502 PARLIAMENTARY COLBERTISM improbably undertaken with the same prospect of retaining individual independence’. In the eighteenth century there were Yorkshire proprietors who found it was distinctly to their advantage to encourage the development of the weaving trade in its domestic form? Sir Walter Calverly improved his estate immensely by erecting a fulling mill on the Aire? and catering for a class of tenants who could combine domestic industry with pasture farming. There were, therefore, good reasons why the cloth industry, as it spread through the West Riding, should be domestic in character, even though capitalism was becoming dominant in other areas. In the latter half of the eighteenth century the domestic system appears to have had advantages of its own, which counterbalanced the economic conditions that were favourable to capitalist employers. The industrial im- provements in the weaving trade of the eighteenth century sonsisted in the introduction of new implements, or of machines that went by hand-power, rather than of expensive machines that involved the use of water or of steam power, and rendered concentration in factories inevitable. The flying shuttle, which was patented by Kay in 1733, enabled a weaver to do his work without assistance and more quickly; it tended to put all the work in the hands of the best men. which Though the wage-earners of the Eastern Counties® objected wage: wa tO it, since it left some men unemployed, the domestic onis weavers of Yorkshire took it kindly®, They were also able A.D. 1689 1776. Vorkshire proprietors found it profitable to en~ sourage domestic WEAVETS. and they adopted labour saving tm- plements, 1 The movement affected the domestic weavers of Devonshire, however, 8s well as others, and was probably connected with the dearness of living of which Westcote complained at the beginning of the seventeenth century. View of Devonshire, p. 62. 2 There is an excellent account of the development of the domestic system in Yorkshire in Mr Graham’s evidence before the Committee of 1806 (Reports, 1806, mx. 1058 p. 444). He had built cottages on an estate near Leeds with 5, 6, 7, 8 or 10 acres of 1and attached. » E. Laurence, Duty of a Steward to kis Lord (1727), 86. } On other artificers who cultivated land as a by-occupation, see p. 564 below. 5 The Eastern County spinners continued to use the distaff, and had not adopted the wheel in 1780. T., Letters on Utility and Policy (1780), 14 [Brit. Mus. T. 220 (7)]. 8 The weavers both in Colchester and at Spitalfields were strongly opposed to the introduction of the flying shuttle; and John Kay was forced to give up the business he had established at Colchester, and to migrate to Leeds; his shuttle xas readily adopted by the Yorkshire weavers, but not his power-loom. Woodcroft,