3.  Though there is little peasant life in England, there is life of a feverish desperate order for many who live in country places.  These people are not farm workers nor yet are they craftsmen who supply the industrial needs of the village.  They are feeders to the towns, engaged in what is misnamed ‘domestic industry’.  The life they lead is a sordid replica of an all too sordid original.

Cobbett in a tirade against the Lords of the Loom[33] idealized the old-time union of agriculture and manufacture.  The men should work in the fields, while the women and children stayed at home at their spinning wheels, making homespun for the family garments.  But the picture was a vanishing one even in his day.  Domestic industry does not mean this.  The rural distress revealed in the Hand-loom Weavers Commission is the distress of specialized hand-workers, male and female, who are clinging desperately to the worst-paid branch of a dying trade.  The worsted industry of East Anglia is perishing, defeated by the resources of Yorkshire, of which the power-loom is only one.  The cloth trade in the Valley of Stroud (Gloucester) is a shadow of its former self.  It has lost the power of recovering from a depression.  The next period of slackness that comes along may bankrupt the business and rob a village of specialized hand-workers of their main employment.

In Devonshire, the serge trade, which used to give employment to looms in almost every town and village, has become so unremunerative that it has passed into the hands of the wives and daughters of mechanics and agricultural labourers.  In Oxfordshire in 1834, we are told by the Poor Law Commissions of that year, glove and lace making were vanishing occupations.  In the neighbourhood of Banbury ’some make lace and gloves in the villages.  Formerly spinning was the work for women in the villages, now there is scarcely any done.’[34]

Since 1834 the process of disintegration had proceeded apace.

We must not, however, convey the impression that domestic industry in 1842 had all but vanished from the countryside.  In its ancient strongholds it still endures, but it is in an unhealthy condition, and the towns are sucking its life-blood away.

To illustrate this, let us describe the course of a boom in domestic industry and study how the trade boom of 1833-7 reached through to the country silk weavers in Essex and other places all around London.  The terms which we usually apply to the cultivation of land are apposite.  The town workers represent the intensive margin of cultivation, the country workers the extensive margin.  First of all the Spitalfield weavers, who have been short of work, have more work given to them.  The weavers’ wives also get work, and their boys and girls who never were on a loom before are now put to the trade.  Fresh hands are introduced.  From the Metropolis the demand for labour pushes outwards over the country.  Recourse is had to ‘inferior soils’.