PLATE 3
Taken in the County of Louth representing taking the Flax out of the Bog when it has laid a sufficient time to separate the Rind, (which is the Flax) from the Stem, and strengthen it, spreading it to dry, stoving, beetling, and breaking it.
WILLIAM HINCKS 1783
CONRAD GILL’S The Rise of the Irish Linen Industry was published more than half a century ago but even now little is known about the early progress of the industry and especially about its capital and technology.2 No substantial collection of linen business records has survived from the pre-1750 period and, as for the Journals of the Trustees of the Linen and Hempen Manufactures of Ireland, they survive only in an abridged form for the period of its inception in 1711 until 1737 in the Precedents and Abstracts (1784). Such poverty of basic sources compels us to search for another approach and for sources that might be pieced together to construct an accurate picture of the development of the linen trade in the early eighteenth century. The answer lies in more detailed investigation of case studies. Evidence about the development of the industry in the Lurgan area in the north-east corner of County Armagh suggests that several members of the Quaker community resident there did play significant roles in the early history of the linen trade. The family records of the Lurgan Quaker meeting enable us to identify and to keep track of not only individual members of this community but also their kin and family connexions.3 In addition the minutes kept by both provincial and local meetings are wide-ranging and more comprehensive than the contemporary records of any other sect in Ireland. The details from them can be supplemented by wills and other legal documents lodged in the Registry of Deeds in Dublin since its inception in 1708, and by estate records. From these sources it has been possible to construct a chronology of some technical changes in the practice of bleaching and to shed light on the organisation of both the trade and the business community.
The venerable tradition that ascribes the successful promotion of the linen industry in Ireland to Louis Crommelin and his colony of Huguenot immigrants cannot be substantiated.4 When they arrived in 1698 the industry was already well established in various parts of Ulster. A report written only a year previously to the Board of Trade and Plantations from Lisburn, where the Huguenots settled, claimed that there were at least five hundred looms working commercially in the counties of Down, Antrim, Armagh, Tyrone, and Londonderry and that County Down produced well made linens ‘little inferior to French cloth’.5 A London compendium of trade published in 1696 referred to linen ‘made in the north of Ireland, some yard wide, some three-quarters, and some half-ell [22½ inches], which are of great use for shirts and wear very white and strong’.6 It is true that Louis Crommelin did publish An Essay towards the Improving of the Hempen and Flaxen Manufactures in the Kingdom of Ireland (1705), and that his claim about his prominent role in the promotion of the industry was accepted by the Linen Board in 1716, but other contemporary evidence reveals that he owed much of his reputation to the favour and patronage of the Huguenot Earl of Galway, especially while he was Lord Lieutenant.7 About forty years after its initial publication the contents of Crommelin’s pamphlet were analysed by a recognised expert, Robert Stephenson. He concluded that Crommelin’s knowledge of weaving was limited to the sort of fine linen cloth in which his home district in France had specialised, such as cambrics, kentings, and holland diapers:8 Crommelin himself had admitted in his 1707 petition that he and his colony had concentrated on the weaving of Holland diaper alone.9 It could be argued that Crommelin’s colony by its example stimulated the weaving of Holland diapers, especially when it was admitted in 1722 that a bounty on the weaving of hollands had produced a glut on the market.10 As for bleaching, however, Stephenson reckoned Crommelin’s knowledge of bleaching was slight and argued that ‘by the improvements of our machinery for washing and rubbing, and saving expense of hands, sowers [sours] and ashes, we have gained more in a few years on foreigners in our finest branches of the manufacture than it would be possible to have effected for ages by pursuing his schemes’.11
Among the men who helped to bring about this transformation in the Irish linen industry were several members of the Quaker community in Lurgan: Thomas Turner, James Bradshaw, John Nicholson and John Christy. The names of the first two appear regularly in Precedents and Abstracts because they were employed by the Linen Board and so it might be argued that their projects were not representative of the weavers and bleachers in their native district. It can be demonstrated from the evidence, however, that both Turner and Bradshaw spent most of their life in the Lurgan area, while the experiences of both John Nicholson and John Christy confirm that Turner and Bradshaw were typical of the innovators of that part of Ulster. The fact that several members of the Quaker community in Lurgan appear often in Precedents and Abstracts is not a reason for arguing that the Lurgan area led the way in innovations in the Ulster industry. It is a moot point, for example, whether Turner innovated, or developed, or merely took the credit for other people’s ideas that he had picked up on his tours through the province as a representative of the Linen Board. Did he only put into words the accumulating experience of the bleachers? Whatever Turner’s role was, it cannot be doubted that these men were busy adapting practices from related industries, improving equipment, and experimenting with new varieties of bleaching agents in their drive for efficiency.
Thomas Turner was the most prominent. As early as 1704, a year before Crommelin published his treatise, the journals of the Irish House of Commons record that Turner had received £220 from the Trustees for the Management of the Linen Manufacture in Ireland although no reason is given for the payment.12 In May 1709 he petitioned the Irish Parliament about the repayment of £200 lent to him by the Trustees and a few days later asked for some recompense for his expenses in contriving ‘an engine for dressing hemp and flax’.13 That he was regarded as an expert in all branches of the industry is clear from the range of commissions given to him by the new Board of Trustees of the Linen and Hempen Manufactures of Ireland created in 1711: he prepared ground for sowing hemp, devised a scutch mill, reproduced foreign methods of weaving, and contrived improved bleaching techniques.14
James Bradshaw, who was married to a niece of Thomas Turner, was equally versatile. Appointed in 1712 as an ‘itinerant hemp and flax man’ to propagate new methods in the industry, he sowed hemp seed, copied linens for foreign markets, inspected premises for grants, and was sent to the Continent to study Dutch, Flemish, and French practices, first in 1721 and again in 1729.15 By then Bradshaw appears to have concentrated on the weaving of fine linens while Turner became noted for his knowledge of bleaching methods and materials.
In 1715, when Turner’s pamphlet New methods of improving flax and flax-seed and bleaching cloth was published, he was described as ‘a person well-skilled in bleaching.’16 Robert Stephenson, who had been so critical of Crommelin as a bleacher, reckoned that the publication of Turner’s pamphlet marked a significant advance in techniques for that date: ‘the utensils and apparatus recommended by him are easily provided, and best suited to the wealth of our manufacturers and dealers at that time’, a pragmatic assessment.17 Whereas Crommelin and others had been used to spreading their cloth on the bleach-green with the lyes still in it and relied on subsequent watering to flush out the chemicals, Turner urged bleachers to rinse the lyes out of the cloth after each immersion, or ‘bucking’, as it was termed. He devised a simple wooden batting plank on which the cloth was to be first lightly beaten to loosen the lye and then rinsed on a wooden planking floor with the aid of planking poles such as dyers used. The Linen Board sponsored a tour by the author to instruct bleachers from Antrim as far as Cootehill and Monaghan and it was widely adopted. This method of bleaching must have been that described as the ‘bat staff’ which was said to have been superseded by the ‘tuck mill’ about 1730.18 Evidence that Turner continued to devise improvements in bleaching methods can be found in Precedents and Abstracts. In 1719 he was rewarded for a flax mill and claimed that he was working on a ‘possing’ or washing mill. This may have been comprised in ‘the new method’ of bleaching for which he was rewarded in 1728 but no details of it have been recorded.19 In the same year another Lurgan Quaker, John Nicholson, was awarded £150 as well as equipment for his bleachgreen, which was situated on the River Bann, but again there is no mention of a wash mill.20 However, yet another Quaker, John Christy, was later to claim that when he moved to Scotland in 1731 from his father’s green at Moyallen, close to Nicholson’s green, he had brought with him the design of a ‘washing mill or put [sic] stock mill’: he reckoned that it ‘was the first in Scotland made use of in a bleachfield’.21 This last phrase is significant because several writers have suggested that the wash mill for linens was simply an adaptation to the linen industry of machinery from the existing woollen tuck mills. It may be significant in this context that in 1730 John Nicholson was the owner of a tuck mill at Knocknagore townland on the river Bann.22 John Christy is also credited with introducing to Scotland the drying house (a shed equipped with louvred sides to allow air to circulate round the cloth):23 before he left Ireland in 1731 he must have seen the new ‘dry house’ 92 feet long by 20 broad built by John Nicholson in 1728 with a grant of £50 from the Irish Linen Board.24
John Christy (spelt also Christie) was the youngest of three brothers who became prominent bleachers in Scotland. Their grandfather, Alexander Christy, born in Scotland in 1642, came to Moyallen on the river Bann in 1675 and is said to have introduced the linen trade into that district. His son John (1673–1763) had five sons: Alexander (1699–1764), Joseph (1703–54), John (1707–62), James (1709–?), and Thomas (1712–80).25 Alexander went to Scotland and set up a bleachgreen in 1731 at Ormiston near Edinburgh on the property of John Cockburn, the noted agricultural improver, who put up part of the capital. John assisted him and took over the Ormiston green when Alexander moved to set up another field at Perth in 1733: he himself moved on to Kinchey in 1741. Joseph sold his interest in property at Moyallen in 1744: he does not appear to have arrived in Scotland until the late 1740s when he took possession of a new bleachgreen at Saltoun Barley-mill field on Lord Milton’s estate. All three ran successful ventures with the assistance of skilled tradesmen from Ireland. They taught the Scots the Irish method of finishing linens. Although the traditional Dutch method produced a quality finish to the linens, its cost proved too expensive for any but the fine linens. Much of the linen woven in Scotland was cheap and coarse and did not require high whitening; so the Scottish bleachers availed themselves of the wash mills, the rubbing boards and the beetling engines that the Irish had devised.26 In time Irish bleachers and tradesmen came to be resented in Scotland and the comment made about the Irish in 1748 by the then secretary of the Scottish Board of Trustees (‘multitudes of such are coming yearly and none of them have the skill wanted’) really marks the coming of age of the Scottish linen bleaching industry: by that date Scotland was training its own managers and believed that it had nothing new to learn from the Irish industry.27
It is not easy to account for the great advances made in Irish bleaching methods in the first half of the eighteenth century, but a comparison between the evolution of Irish and Scottish developments in that period does suggest several points of interest. The rapid expansion of the linen industry in both countries owed much to the imposition by the Westminster parliament of high duties on continental linens while it removed duties on Irish linens in 1696 and permitted their direct export to the colonies after 1704, before it admitted the Scots to the same privileges by the Act of Union in 1707. The increasing demands of the English market provided the catalyst for the expansion of both the Scottish and Irish linen industries: in 1738 the London agent of the Scottish Board claimed that the Scottish and the Irish could sell three times the quantity they were selling if they could manufacture it.28 Yet how can we explain why Scottish bleachers tended to concentrate on traditional methods of bleaching while at least some of the Irish bleachers were devising and adopting new methods? Part of the answer may lie in the lapse of time between the creation of the Irish Board of Trustees in 1711 and the Scottish Board in 1727. Both boards in their desire to promote the industry were ready to countenance claims put forward by innovators and to give rewards and grants towards expenses incurred in developing new processes, but the Irish had a lead of sixteen years. There men like Thomas Turner and James Bradshaw were encouraged to experiment, to study contemporary developments outside as well as inside Ireland, and to propagate their ideas. Entries in Precedents and Abstracts demonstrate that the Irish Board countenanced even proposals from individuals who had not the skill to translate them into practice. In defence of the Irish Board it should be added that at a time when bleachers could still refer to their trade as a ‘mystery or art’ and relied overmuch on experience when handling raw materials like potash and lime or using apparatus like rubbing boards, the only standards of judgement for laymen were the finished products. It also has to be admitted that the attitude of the boards in both countries did create a climate for innovations with a premium on efficiency and costcutting. The response went further than the Irish Board, for its part, was prepared to tolerate and it is a moot point whether their regulations on several matters did hinder progress in certain fields. Between 1736 and 1749 rubbing boards were banned by the Irish Parliament while the use of lime for bleaching was actively but never completely suppressed by prosecutions in the courts.29 In the use of chemicals it should not be overlooked that Irish bleachers were among the first to experiment with oil of vitriol (sulphuric acid) for bleaching and that in 1764 Thomas Greg and Waddell Cunningham, two prominent Belfast merchants, were sufficiently confident of a local market to open their Vitriol Island works at Lisburn; another vitriol works in operation at Moyallen by 1786 had a Christy as its shareholder.30
The other great incentive to the introduction of mechanisation into bleaching in Ulster may have been an accident of historical geography. The heart of the linen industry in the early part of the eighteenth century lay in north Down and north Armagh and the bleachers who served it used water wherever it was available in rivers, streams, ponds or lakes. It is probable that, as we have seen in the case of Christy and Nicholson, the bleachers along the river Bann began to adapt the machinery of their tuck mills for linen bleaching whenever they realised the advantages provided by a regular, strong, plentiful supply of water of good quality for washing linen. Soon a stretch of some ten miles along the river around Gilford and Banbridge became a nest of bleachgreens. This development of water power rang the knell for those earlier establishments that lacked adequate water supplies and was responsible for the erection of some thirty-six bleachgreens on the river Callan in mid Armagh between 1743 and 1771.31 Both districts were well supplied by water transport with coal from the Coalisland collieries or turf.
The capital to develop these sites does not appear to have been in short supply. Even a cursory examination of the mortgages and sales memorialised in the Registry of Deeds (established in Dublin in 1708) reveals that many local individuals prominent in the industry were negotiating with Dublin merchants, landowners, or clergy for their capital needs. Of special interest are two series of transactions involving John Nicholson. Between 1715 and 1726 he leased, bought, or secured on mortgage, titles to a variety of properties in nine transactions. In 1725 he mortgaged most of these properties for £1,000 to Rev. Henry Jenny, the then Archdeacon of Dromore. He mortgaged more property to Jenny in 1726 for an additional £500 and yet more in 1730 for an undisclosed sum. The awards by the Linen Board made early in 1728 of a sum of £100, plus £50 towards the construction of a drying house, and a further provision of two large coppers, eight kieves, a wringing-engine, and a cold press, suggest that Nicholson had mortgaged his property to develop the bleachgreen. Even as late as the 1730 deed John Nicholson was described as ‘merchant of Lurgan’ but when the mortgage of all the property was renewed in 1739 to another clergyman, Archdeacon William Usher, John Nicholson had become ‘gent of Nicholson’s Hall, County Down’; his bleachgreen at Hall’s Mill was the only green on the river to be noticed by Walter Harris in his 1744 survey of County Down.32
Nicholson’s apparent transformation from draper or merchant to bleacher is not surprising when we learn that he had served his apprenticeship in the linen trade. It does, however, call attention to the real distinction between bleachers and drapers in the early years of the industry.33 Bleaching was not a business to be entered upon lightly because lack of skill and errors of judgement could prove costly. Anyone, however, could set himself up as a linendraper if he had the capital to purchase webs. Indeed, Arthur Brownlow, the owner of a large estate in north Armagh, claimed in 1708 that he had established a linen market in Lurgan at an earlier date by purchasing all the webs that were brought to the market.34 Conrad Gill in The Rise of the Irish Linen Industry assumed for want of ‘definite evidence of the origin of the drapers’ class … that drapers were becoming a distinct class about 1720, at the time when specialised bleaching was developing, for the presence of bleachers implied the existence of drapers’.35 Evidence that as many as nineteen individuals on the Brownlow estate were named in leases to property as linendrapers before 1720 – the earliest in 1696 – indicates an earlier date for their appearance. The very number indicates that they were merchants and shopkeepers, as Gill surmised, who were prepared to deal in linens as a profitable trading line, rather than specialists concentrating their whole attention and capital on the purchase of linens. That they would be prepared to switch their activities from linen to any other commodity can be inferred from another comment on the Lurgan area as late as 1745, ‘that the breaking of so many factors in London has so discouraged this [linen] manufacture of late in this place where I best know it, that many substantial dealers are turning their money to other business; and the great plenty of the hides of the cattle of the poor which died this spring has induced them to turn tanners …’36 The linendraper who bought the web in the market or in his shop would contract with a bleacher to finish it according to his specifications and then carry it to Dublin or ship it to London for factors to market. As the century passed, more bleachers and their agents appeared in the linen markets to purchase linen for their greens: until the business careers of these individuals have been investigated it will not be possible to determine the relative proportions of merchants and of bleachers who claimed to be linendrapers, nor to reckon the rate of capital investment and accumulation by the bleachers.
It has been possible to collect sufficient evidence for analysis about Robert Hoope, the earliest man on the Brownlow estate to be described as linendraper in 1696, and his son John who succeeded him in business. Robert Hoope had come to Ireland in 1660 from Yorkshire as a tailor and had become a Quaker about seven years later. By 1696 he was the wealthiest member of the Quaker community in Lurgan and had subscribed £40 of the £208 raised to complete a new meeting house there. According to a eulogy of him preserved by John Rutty in his 1751 revised edition of A History of the rise and progress of the people called Quakers, Robert had retired about 1700 to concentrate on his religious life and he left his business to his son John.37 In 1706 John demonstrated his wealth when he became a partner of his landlord, Arthur Brownlow, in the purchase of another estate in north Armagh, the Richmount estate, for £13,000: John Hoope’s contribution was three thousand pounds, for which he received a proportion of the lands.38 He did not retire to enjoy his new rural estate but remained a merchant of Lurgan until his death in 1740 at the age of 74. In his will made in the previous year Hoope described himself as a merchant and mentioned his stocks of iron, lead, linen cloth, linen yarn, cashub (potash for bleaching) and kelp (also for bleaching): unfortunately no inventory of them survives and so the value of his stock cannot be assessed. Hoope referred also to the post-office which he had administered in Lurgan for about forty years. He also held a two-thirds share in a bleachgreen at Ballymacateer: this he had taken in partnership with John Turner and John Nicholson in 1717 and leased to Thomas Turner for his experiments in 1728.39 There is no doubt that Hoope was deeply involved in the linen trade although he had other business interests.
John Hoope was highly regarded not only by his local Quaker meeting but also by the Friends in Dublin. In general, links between the Northern and the Dublin Quakers were not strong and they met only when representatives of the Northern meetings attended the national half-yearly meeting in Dublin.40 Yet the marriages made by John Hoope’s children reveal a much more intimate relationship with the Dublin Quakers and indicate that Hoope’s social standing and reputation matched theirs. His first daughter, Abigail (to whom he left £600), married the third son of Amos Strettell, one of the leading Dublin linendrapers. Hannah, the second daughter (to whom he left £400), married John Petticrew, another Dublin merchant, and Sarah, the third daughter (to whom he left £300), married John Clibborn of Moate in County Westmeath, by then the head of a very influential Quaker family. John’s first three sons had all died young. The fourth, Edward, married Sarah Willcocks, daughter of another Dublin merchant, Joshua Willcocks, but Edward died in 1738 leaving children. Robert, the fifth son, married Sarah Lark, daughter of James Lark of London, but he died in 1737. John Hoope himself, after the death of his first wife in 1714, married Elizabeth Willcocks, the widow of Thomas Willcocks of Dublin. She bore him two sons, James and Joshua, before her death in 1721. James was apprenticed to Robert Clibborn, a Dublin merchant, and married a daughter of Timothy Forbes, another Dublin merchant who had held letters of attorney from Robert Hoope, young James’s grandfather.41
This marriage network may have been the product not so much of Hoope’s religious connexions as of his financial links. In an account book kept by John Hoope with William Brownlow, the owner of the estate in which Hoope lived, several of the names of Hoope’s Dublin kin regularly appear, notably Amos, Abell, and Thomas Strettell, James and John Petticrew, and Timothy Forbes.42 While Brownlow lived in the capital each winter season he drew on Hoope’s accounts with these merchants: until 1720 he drew mainly on the Strettells but after that time James Petticrew had the business. Hoope received cash from several of Brownlow’s servants and in return he transmitted cash or bills to Dublin, serviced interest charges and annuities, met any bills drawn on him, and paid local accounts. Each year in October on the eve of Brownlow’s return to Dublin the account was settled but occasionally it ran for as long as two years and there was no hurry to settle although the average annual account reached £1,300. The arrangement clearly suited both men because Hoope could obtain cash (the linen trade was conducted only in cash transactions and rents were taken only in cash and not in banknotes or bills of exchange) while Brownlow was provided with ready access to money in the capital. Brownlow dealt with regular banks also: in 1731–2 it was Messrs Swift and Company, in 1733–6 Hugh Henry’s, and from 1737 until Brownlow’s death in 1739, Richard Dawson’s. When he visited England Brownlow was able to draw on Hoope’s running account with Jonathan Gurnell and Company or Robert Hales in London. Elsewhere in England Hoope had three other correspondents: James Bolt of Bristol and Jonathan Patton and Robert Fielding of Manchester.
The structure and detail of the account book suggest that it is unlikely that John Hoope ever operated as a correspondent for one of the Dublin banks of the period. It does suggest that he did discount bills for cash for his fellow merchants and linendrapers. In this context it is surprising that his will does not mention any significant sums of money lent by him either to them or to innovators such as Thomas Turner or John Nicholson. An entry in the account book suggests a reason. It records that on 24 July 1733 John Hoope purchased from William Brownlow for £600 the townlands of Derrykeevan and Derrykeeran close to his other property in the manor of Richmount, County Armagh. Hoope’s family commitments and his age (66 years) may have forced him to invest in land rather than in ventures.
The approach used in this study may not find favour with those economic historians who rely on statistics to determine norms of human and mechanical activity. Yet in the absence of reliable statistics or any other source materials capable of providing a comprehensive account of developments, it is still necessary to construct a model. We have to piece together and to probe even fragments of evidence in order to determine the parameters of problems. We have to test and discipline our speculations. From the records of the Scottish Board of Trustees Dr Durie has provided a coherent picture of the development of the linen industry in Scotland and if we can appreciate the comparisons and contrasts between the Scottish and Irish industries we should be able to apply some of his findings to improving our model of the development of the Irish linen industry and the commercial structure in which it evolved.
NOTE: The case of the linen manufacture of Ireland, relative to the bleaching and the whitening the same published in Dublin in 1750 and reprinted here as Appendix 2, provides some corroboration for the interpretation advanced in this study.
1 First published in Louis Cullen and Pierre Butel (eds), Négoce et Industrie en France et en Irlande aux XVIIIe et XIXe Siècles (Bordeaux, 1980).
2 Gill, Conrad, The Rise of the Irish Linen Industry (Oxford, 1925, reprinted 1964).
3 The records of the Quaker meetings in Ulster are held in the Meeting House, Railway Street, Lisburn. The references in this article are to copies held in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (hereafter PRONI), reference number T1062.
4 See pages 18 to 21.
5 Public Record Office, London. CO 389/40, pp. 71, 87, George Stead, Lisburn, to Philip Bayley, London, 8 September 1697, and John Molyneux, Liverpool, to the Lords Commissioners of the Council of Trade, 19 November 1697; CO 391/10 Evidence of Philip Bayley, 23 August 1697, and Mr Bennett, 30 September 1697, to the Lords Commissioners. I am indebted to Dr David Dickson for these references.
6 Quoted from pamphlet ‘The merchant’s warehouse laid open’ in Ulster Journal of Archaeology, 1st series, 3 (1855), 198.
7 See page 20.
8 Robert Stephenson, An inquiry into the state and progress of the linen manufacture of Ireland (Dublin, 1757), 60.
9 Journal of the House of Commons, Ireland (hereafter JHCI) (1692–1713), part i, 505–6.
10 Anon, Remarks on the present state of the linen manufacture of this Kingdom (Dublin, 1745), p. 15.
11 Stephenson, op. cit., pp. 62–3.
12 JHCI (1692–1713), part ii, appendix, ccii.
13 JHCI (1692–1713), part i, 595, 599.
14 Precedents and abstracts from the Journals of the Trustees of the Linen and Hempen Manufactures of Ireland (Dublin, 1784), pp. 2, 9, 14, 15, 18, 22, 28, 29.
15 Quaker records, T/1062/37/60 recording that James Bradshaw of Lurgan married Ann Turner in 1707, that they had their first child in Lurgan in 1710 and their next four children at Naas between 1713 and 1716 and their last four children at Lurgan 1720 and 1725. Precedents and abstracts, pp. 2, 5, 12, 20–1, 22, 23, 29, 43, 49, 102–3, 106, 108, 109.
16 JHCI (1715–30), appendix, xxxv. Pamphlet published as Appendix 1.
17 Stephenson, op. cit., pp. 113–14.
18 Precedents and abstracts, p. 15; H.D. Gribbon, The history of water power in Ulster (Newton Abbot, 1969), p. 82.
19 Precedents and abstracts, pp. 31, 93.
20 Precedents and abstracts, pp. 92–3.
21 National Library of Scotland, Saltoun MSS, box 329, ‘Observations on Dr Cullen’s remarks on the art of bleaching or whitening linen by John Christy [c. 1752–3], p. 8. I am indebted to Dr Alastair J. Durie for this reference and advice about the Scottish linen industry: see his Scottish Linen Industry in the Eighteenth Century (Edinburgh, 1979).
22 Gribbon, op. cit., 83; A. McCutcheon, Wheel and spindle (Belfast, 1977), p. 68; Registry of Deeds, Dublin (hereafter RDD), Book 63, p. 449, Number 44351, Nicholson to Jenney.
23 A.J. Durie, ‘Saltoun bleachfield 1746–73’, Transactions of the East Lothian Antiquarian and Field Naturalists’ Society 15 (1976), 52.
24 Precedents and abstracts, p. 93.
25 Quaker records, T1062/37/71.
26 See Appendix 2. That the new Irish methods were not imported from Lancashire but were indeed exported to Manchester by 1752 is illustrated by an advertisement for a new bleachgreen where the ‘Dutch and Irish methods’ were to be employed: see A.P Wadsworth,. and J. de L. Mann, The Cotton Trade and Industrial Lancashire 1600–1780 (Manchester, 1931), p. 306. I am indebted to Dr Durie for much of the information about the activities of the Christy brothers in Scotland and to Mrs Brenda Collins of Edinburgh University for enabling me to fill in details about their careers.
27 A.J. Durie, ‘The Scottish linen industry in the eighteenth century; some aspects of expansion’ in L.M. Cullen, and T.C. Smout, (eds), Comparative aspects of Scottish and Irish economic and social history 1600–1900 (Edinburgh, 1977), p. 93.
28 N.B. Harte, ‘The rise of protection and the English linen trade, 1690–1790’ in N.B. Harte, and K.G. Ponting, (eds), Textile History and Economic History (Manchester, 1973), pp. 91–6; A.J. Durie, ‘The markets for Scottish linen, 1730–1775’, Scottish Historical Review, iii (1973), 35–8.
29 Gribbon, op. cit., 83–4; Gill, op. cit., pp. 63, 208–10.
30 A.J. Durie, ‘Textile bleaching: a note on the Scottish experience’, Business History Review, xlix (1975), 340; JHCI (1765–72) part 1, 181, 196; Post Chaise Companion (Dublin, 1784), p. 642. When sulphuric acid replaced buttermilk in the bleaching process, the buttermilk would have been used to feed pigs.
31 PRONI, Foster–Massereene MS D562/1270, Robert Stevenson’s view of County Armagh, 1795.
32 RDD, Book 15, 130, Number 6964 (1715) Reilly to Nicholson;
27/409/17586 (1720) Robson to Nicholson;
28/109/16769 and 16770 (1720) Brownlow to Nicholson;
31/371/19482 (1721) Finlow to Nicholson;
34/97/20717 (1721) Thompson to Nicholson;
39/155/24730 (1723) Thompson to Nicholson;
40/152/24727 (1723) Moore to Nicholson;
40/153/24729 (1723) Thompson to Nicholson;
46/188/38249 (1724) Moore to Nicholson;
47/272/30549 (1725) Nicholson to Jenney;
49/99/31050 (1725) Tuft to Nicholson;
52/139/33927 (1726) Nicholson to Jenney;
63/449/44351 (1730) Nicholson to Jenney;
97/92/67454 (1739) Nicholson to Usher;
[W. Harris] The ancient and present state of the county of Down (Dublin, 1744), p. 106.
33 This paragraph reflects a slight change in the interpretation of evidence presented on page 14, as a result of the evidence about John Nicholson and the Christys considered above. The bleachyards in and around Lurgan town were very small in scale and not to be compared with the greens being developed by individuals like Turner, Bradshaw, and Nicholson. The fact that bleachers always referred to themselves as drapers indicates both that bleachers would purchase webs as well as bleaching on commission, and that drapers had had more social standing than bleachers in the early years of the century.
34 From Dr Thomas Molyneux, ‘Journey to the north in 1708’ printed in R.M. Young, Historical notices of old Belfast (Belfast, 1896), p. 154.
35 Gill, op. cit., pp. 51–2.
36 Richard Barton to Walter Harris, 27 May 1745 (Armagh Public Library, Harris MSS).
37 Quaker records, T1062/37/66; J. Rutty, A history of the rise and progress of the people called Quakers in Ireland (fourth edition, London, 1811), pp. 262–3; Quaker records, Lurgan men’s meeting, T1062/47.
38 PRONI, Brownlow MS T3300, Conveyance of townlands in manor of Richmount from Arthur Brownlow to John Hoope, 1706.
39 RDD 100/33/69469 (1740), Will of John Hoope, Lurgan, County Armagh, merchant; a summary of the will is published in P.B. Eustace, (ed.), Registry of Deeds Dublin: Abstract of Wills, I (1708–1745) (Dublin, 1956), pp. 272–4. Also RDD 36/517/23896.
40 John ‘Hoop’ was one of the sixteen signatories of ‘The humble address of the people called Quakers, from their national half-year’s meeting held in Dublin, the 10th of the ninth month, 1715’ to the Dublin government: see Rutty, op. cit., p. 220. Amos Strettell was another signatory.
41 Compiled from John Hoope’s will and the Hoope family entry in the Quaker records; see also Eustace, RDD: Abstract of Wills, I (1708–1745) and P. B. Eustace, and O.C. Goodbody, (eds), Quaker Records Dublin: Abstracts of Wills (Dublin, 1957) for reference to the other families.
42 PRONI, Brownlow MS D2667/5/2, John Hoope’s account book with William Brownlow 1711–39.
