PLATE 1
Taken near Scarva in the County of Downe, representing Ploughing, Sowing the Flax Seed and Harrowing
WILLIAM HINCKS 1783
ALTHOUGH EVERY ULSTERMAN identifies the linen industry with the economic development of the province, he can have little real conception of the indelible imprint it has left on its society and its culture. In the eighteenth century the domestic linen industry expanded so rapidly across the province that annual exports increased from less than a million to forty million yards of cloth. Flax was grown on every small farm, prepared and spun into linen yarn and woven into webs of cloth by families in their own homes, and sold in linen markets in towns to the linendrapers and bleachers who finished the linens and marketed them in Dublin or in Britain. As linen transactions were conducted in coin, money percolated through Ulster society so that in time many families managed to get their feet on to the property ladder and Ulster became noted for the density of its family farms. The trade was well organised under the aegis of the Linen Board and then dominated by the bleachers who managed the industrialisation of the spinning and weaving sectors during the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the domestic linen industry survived into the twentieth century, producing linens of the finest quality such as damasks and cambrics.
Such a phenomenon was bound to attract historians. In 1925 Conrad Gill, then a lecturer in economic history in the Queen’s University of Belfast, published The Rise of the Irish Linen Industry. In this pioneering work Gill was interested in the linen industry chiefly as Ireland’s contribution ‘towards that great transformation of industry and society’ popularly known as the Industrial Revolution, and so he was concerned mainly ‘to trace the change from domestic to factory production’. As he wanted also to investigate the role of successive governments in this process, he paid considerable attention to the history of the Board of Trustees of the Linen and Hempen Manufactures (known as the Linen Board) set up by the Irish Parliament to regulate the industry. Although his comments on this source in his bibliography indicate that he had not studied it systematically before the destruction of the whole archive in the burning of the Four Courts in Dublin in 1922, Gill deplored in the preface to his book the loss of this ‘best of his sources … in the catastrophe of the Dublin Record Office’. It has to be admitted that the loss of the manuscript volumes of the ‘Proceedings of the Board of Trustees of the Linen Manufacture in Ireland 1711–1828’ has made it impossible to produce a detailed history of the Irish Linen Board in spite of the survival of a printed volume of Precedents and Abstracts selected from the early minute books from 1711 to 1737 and later the publication of the Proceedings from 1784.
The loss of such a vital source in Dublin was, however, discounted to some extent by the success of the new Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI, established in 1924) in locating and processing government and private archives throughout the province. One of the first academic historians to exploit these archives was a local polymath, Rodney Green, who published The Lagan Valley 1800–1850: a local history of the industrial revolution (Manchester, 1949) and The Industrial Archaeology of County Down (Belfast, 1968); after he became Director of the Institute of Irish Studies in Queen’s University Belfast in 1970 he encouraged several students to carry on research. Harry Gribbon, who came from a Coleraine family long engaged in textiles, published several papers on the history of the Linen Board as well as A History of Water Power in Ulster (Newton Abbot, 1969). Both Green and Gribbon were well acquainted with the industrial history of the province. Their work was complemented by Alan McCutcheon’s Industrial Archaeology of Northern Ireland (Belfast, 1980), based on the regional survey of industrial archaeology that he conducted for the Ministry of Finance.
I was introduced to historical research in the records of the Brownlow estate (then held in a solicitor’s office in Lurgan, County Armagh, but now available for study in PRONI). After working on these records for several years I approached Professor J.C. Beckett to supervise me in preparing a doctoral thesis. He introduced me to Professor K.H. Connell, who passed on to me an invitation to contribute to a symposium in England on the role of landowners in the development of industry. My first paper on the linen theme, ‘Ulster landlords and the linen industry’, was later published in Land and Industry: the Landed Estate and the Industrial Revolution (Newton Abbot, 1971). While it owed much of its basic argument to the reprint in 1964 of Conrad Gill’s classic, The Rise of the Irish Linen Industry (Oxford, 1925), it did include some corroborative evidence from the Dublin Registry of Deeds and the Brownlow estate papers. Both these sources, as well as records of the Society of Friends, were used more extensively about this time in the preparation of a paper on ‘The development of the linen industry in the Lurgan area of County Armagh 1660–1760’, which was finally published in Ulster Folklife 17 (1971) as ‘The origins of the linen industry in north Armagh and the Lagan valley’.
In December 1966, I joined the staff of PRONI, then based in the Law Courts in Belfast. The year 1967 saw the publication in Ulster Folklife 13 of an analysis of the contents of ‘The market book of Thomas Greer, a Dungannon Linendraper, 1758–59’ and the preparation of a script of a Thomas Davis lecture for Radio Eireann, subsequently published as ‘The rise of the linen industry’ in The Formation of the Irish Economy, edited by L.M. Cullen (Cork, 1969). This phase of research culminated in the publication in Dublin in 1972 by Gill and Macmillan of Domestic Industry in Ireland: The Experience of the Linen Industry in a series, ‘Insights into Irish History’, edited by L.M. Cullen for schools. In 1994, it was reprinted with a new introduction and a bibliographical essay, by the Ulster Historical Foundation as The Handloom Weavers and the Ulster Linen Industry.
A great impetus had been given to research in Irish history by the creation of the Economic and Social History Society of Ireland in 1970, with Ken Connell as President and Louis Cullen as Secretary. Many of us benefited also from attending seminars hosted by Cullen for British and foreign scholars in Trinity College Dublin. They in turn inspired conferences with first the Scots in Dublin in 1976 and then the French in Dublin in 1977. For a conference in Bordeaux in 1978 I was encouraged to pursue my research into the growth of the linen industry in the linen triangle and received much advice and assistance from two academics in Scotland, Brenda Collins and Alastair Durie. This paper was published as ‘Drapers and bleachers in the early Ulster linen industry’ in the collection of conference papers edited by Louis Cullen and Pierre Butel, Négoce et Industrie en France et en Irlande aux XVIIIe et XIXe Siècles (Bordeaux, 1980).
The third phase of my research into the history of the linen industry coincided with the preparation of an exhibition, ‘Our Linen Industry’, in the Ulster Folk and Transport Museum in 1987, taking advantage of the fine collection of textiles and the knowledge of the staff. Among the spin-offs was ‘The introduction of the flying shuttle into the weaving of linen in Ulster’. For the exhibition I prepared an illustrated brochure, The Irish Linen Industry, which was published with the support of the Irish Linen Guild. It contained a commentary on the dozen prints made by William Hincks and published in 1783, illustrating the several stages then employed in the production and marketing of the finished cloth. In retrospect I realise that these illustrations conditioned my conclusions in the preparation of a paper on the role of women in the domestic linen industry contributed to a volume of essays, Women in Early Modern Ireland, edited by Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O’Dowd and published in 1991.
It was about this time too that I realised the significance of two parliamentary reports on the Irish linen industry in the early 1820s that confirmed some of my impressions about the evolution of the domestic linen industry in those important years before James Kay introduced mechanisation into the wet spinning of linen in 1825. In 1988 the results of this research were published in Irish Economic and Social History XV with the title ‘The evolution of the linen trade of Ulster before industrialisation’. The year 1989 saw the publication of Ulster: an Illustrated History, a collection of essays by several specialists edited by Ciaran Brady, Mary O’Dowd and Brian Walker on behalf of its sponsors, the Dublin Historical Association and the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies, to satisfy ‘a demand from both teachers of history and the general public for an accessible and up-to-date history of the province’. It included ‘The political economy of linen: Ulster in the eighteenth century’, an essay that tried to explain how the great expansion of the domestic linen industry helped to politicise several social groups in the province. A further opportunity to develop this theme was presented in 1995 in seminars commemorating the 1798 Rebellion. ‘The “Linen Triangle” in the 1790s’, published in Ulster Local Studies in 1997, introduced several fresh factors requiring consideration in any discussion about the eruption of sectarian violence between Orangemen and Defenders in the north-west corner of Armagh in the closing years of the eighteenth century.
Other important evidence had come to light about changing dimensions in the linen trade. In 1784 a statistical survey of the state of the linen markets in Ulster was submitted by John Greer soon after his appointment by the Linen Board as Inspector General for Ulster and published by the Board. A copy of this printed report, with detailed annotations in manuscript about the condition of the markets in Ulster in 1803, was found among the papers of John Foster, the last Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, who was sometimes referred to as the ‘Chief Trustee of the Linen Manufacture’ because he dominated the Board, although no such office existed. This valuable document I have edited in full for publication here.
I have added transcripts of three other pamphlets for the light they throw on important aspects of the industry. Thomas Turner’s New methods of improving flax and flax-seed and bleaching cloth (Dublin, 1715) secured the approval of the Linen Board in its early years and marked an initial stage in the improvement of the finishing process. About twenty years later water power was harnessed to drive machinery in the bleach mills. The case of the linen manufacture of Ireland, relative to the bleaching and the whitening the same (c. 1750) provides a contemporary account of this very significant development that changed the whole character of the Irish linen industry and set it on the road to international success. Serious considerations on the present alarming state of agriculture and the linen trade, by a farmer (Dublin, 1773) is especially interesting because it both reinforces and elucidates the critical comments made about farming in Ulster by the noted traveller Arthur Young in that same decade. Although the author could not foresee the period of prosperity that lay before the farmer/weavers of Ulster, he did identify the fundamental economic dangers that would continue to haunt rural life.
The character of Ulster rural life still reflects the impact of the domestic linen industry to a greater or lesser extent. In the early 1960s when I was living in the townland of Corcreeny on the Armagh/Down border near Lurgan town, I became aware that some of those relics were still surviving: several damask weavers produced superb linen cloths while Swiss embroidery still flourished. Thirty years later I investigated these phenomena and their context in ‘A handloom weaving community in County Down’, using the census returns of 1901 and 1911 and valuation records. It proved to be a very satisfying exercise.
