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,