514 PARLIAMENTARY COLBERTISM 
A.D. 1699 have steadily increased till 1710, when the pressure of the 
incon. WATS Was severely felt, and the journeymen drew attention to 
wetion the fact that the regulation about apprentices had been 
with frame- . . 
er. persistently neglected. The journeymen, and some of the 
oy masters, endeavoured to enforce this rule in London, but 
% pro, without success. The machines of one recalcitrant master, 
oo named Nicholson, were broken; and he, as well as two 
others, migrated to Nottingham. The London Company 
subsequently attempted to enforce the rule against the 
Nottingham masters, but they had no success. There was 
in consequence a further migration of the trade to Leicester 
and Nottingham; and the Company proceeded to frame a 
series of by-laws which they hoped to enforce, as they 
obtained the approval of the Chancellor. One of these 
regulations roused much opposition among the provincial 
masters, who appealed to the House of Commons against 
the new by-laws. A Select Committee? reported against 
the Company; and the evils it had endeavoured to check 
~ecame more and more serious. In the decade before the 
Parliamentary decision, the work in provincial districts ap- 
pears to have been largely done by apprentices bound by 
their parishes, who were in many cases badly treated. There 
was little or no employment for journeymen, and the quality 
of the output appears to have seriously declined. The con- 
ditions, which arose through the competition of capitalist 
smployers in this industry, were not satisfactory from the 
point of view either of the labourer or of the public. 
From one cause or another, organisation by capitalist 
employers? was superseding the system of independent work- 
men in one trade after another, during the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries, and this change was, generally speaking, 
inconsistent with the maintenance of the old machinery for 
regulating the quality of production and the conditions of 
.n defiance 
of the 
London 
Company, 
1 The Company considered that outsiders who bought frames and hired them 
out, but who did not themselves deal in the product, exercised an injurious 
influence on the trade. 
2 Felkin, op. cit. 80. 
8 Dr Sprague has called my attention to an interesting case of combination 
among shoemakers’ servants at Nottingham in 1619. Records of the Borough of 
Nottingham, Iv. 362.