16. Agricultural and Industrial Revolution

Between the early eighteenth century and the middle of the nineteenth the society of Kibworth, as of England as a whole, once again went through dramatic change. This change had its roots far back in time, in the agrarian crises and labour disputes after the Black Death when a society of communally organized peasants gradually became a commercially minded society of yeoman farmers under a county gentry, their economy increasingly tied to urban and industrial centres beyond their immediate horizons. A sign of the times was the coming of the turnpike road between London and the west of Scotland, built in 1726. Now the A6, this road followed the old road through Market Harborough and Leicester which had been created in the twelfth century. At first it was paved with gravel and small stones, later with granite sets, with little toll houses, some of which survive today. When a fast and regular public coach service to London began in 1766 there was a revival of coaching inns in the village, and the London road (Main Street in Kibworth Harcourt) soon had eight coaching hostelries with accommodation, yards and stables. With that the modern age was on the horizon.

At this point Kibworth was still a cluster of agricultural communities but its society had already been transformed from the late-medieval village. Harcourt in particular was a typical ‘closed’ village, with a small circle of gentlemen and yeoman farmers, a growing number of tradesmen and craftsmen, a few husbandmen or small farmers, and a group of landless labourers for whom housing was provided by their employers. The old and retired tended to live under the same roof as the younger generation, but there was still the need for a gradual increase in housing for the poorer members of the community (who will loom much larger in the village story during the eighteenth century and whose names we come to know now through the records of the Poor Law commissions and the charitable clauses in the huge number of surviving wills). For these people new houses were built on the few remaining patches of waste land and along the verges of the road; one group, which became known jokingly in local speech as ‘the City’, comprised small houses of mud and thatch on the edge of the village. Here, for example, lived the Perkins family in the late eighteenth century. These people were not migrants, newcomers or seasonal labour. They were the indigenous poor who from now will be a constant in the story, typical of the new British proletariat.

But the visitor to Kibworth would still have seen the same shape of the village recognizable since the thirteenth century. The hamlet at Smeeton, with its well-built brick farmhouses, was smaller than it had been in the fourteenth century. Beauchamp, with its Tudor manor farm and its new grammar school building, still straggled along the high street with its workers’ cottages down by the fishponds below Church Hill. In Harcourt the Polles were gone now, but the Parkers and Brians, Oswins, Carters, Rays and Haymes continued. The Colmans too still thrived. Providing literate village ‘registrars’ during the Commonwealth, they no longer held significant land but Will Coleman will be an important figure in the many wrestlings of the parish with the Poor Laws in the early nineteenth century – and indeed the family still live in the village today. The aspect of all three villages was much more of red brick now, with chimneys everywhere (for fireplaces burning coal), but Main Street was still lined with big medieval and Tudor farmhouses along the northern side, facing a row of neat little cottages down to the village pump. Here stood the grand late-seventeenth-century Old House where the poet Anna Laetitia Barbauld grew up and where the dissenting academy in the eighteenth century offered a curriculum that would have been the envy of the universities.

The most significant changes in the village in the eighteenth century came in its agricultural life, for these profoundly altered the social order. Ever since the village had been founded in the Dark Ages the life of its people had centred on the cultivation of the fields. But from the Tudor period onwards there was a movement across the country on the part of well-off landowners to enclose the common fields and move from arable to pasture. In Kibworth the old communally organized open fields still survived, as they did in most places in the English Midlands, but there were wealthy graziers among the local farmers ‘whose lands and tenements were so dispersed in the fields that in their present situation they were incapable of any considerable improvement’, as a Kibworth man was later to remark. On all fronts though this was an age of improvement. And wherever they could, such men were already trying to buy up parcels in the common fields, meadows and pastures with a view to gathering their scattered holdings together, usually through private agreements with other landowners, and enclosing them with hedges. From the seventeenth century, and particularly during the eighteenth, Parliament became involved in the process, enabling a majority of proprietors who were keen on the development to override the objections of a minority. In such economic rationalization lay the path to the future. Though some small yeoman farmers were still to be found in the area before the Second World War living in the old style, from now on the writing was largely on the wall for the old ways. The process came to a head with the enclosure of the common fields of the whole of the parish in 1779.

The enclosure of the common fields

On the evening of Wednesday, 21 April 1779, William Peters, the innkeeper of the Crown Inn on the main road in Kibworth Harcourt (now an Indian restaurant), had a big crowd in for a midweek night and did a roaring trade catering for a noisy meeting of local landholders. The assembled group were there to discuss the issue which had dominated talk in the parish for months: the enclosure of the open fields in the lordships of Kibworth Beauchamp, Kibworth Harcourt and Smeeton Westerby. Needless to say, no more than at any other time were these developments conditioned only by local concerns: just as in the Middle Ages, the reorganization of the countryside came at a time when society as a whole was undergoing rapid change. The population of England rose from five and a half million in 1688 to more than eight million in 1801. Huge urban centres were now growing up, especially London, of which an increasingly educated farming community was well aware through travel, business and the beginning of regional and local newspapers. Change was in the air.

Among local landholders, including ordinary small yeoman farmers like Will Perkins on Main Street, who still held land in virgates and yardlands, the issue of enclosure had already rumbled on contentiously for some years. The process of obtaining a Parliamentary Enclosure Act required the prior support of at least three quarters of the local proprietors, as well as agreement about who would act as commissioners to oversee the process and the compensation to be paid for tithe and manorial rights. In most places this was a drawn-out process, descending to light bickering at the very least. By 1779 it was achieved in Kibworth, and the necessary Act of Parliament was passed that year. If there was ongoing tension at the Crown that evening it may have stemmed from the owners of the eight out of the 148 ‘yardlands’ in Beauchamp who had declared their opposition to the process. Typically it was in Beauchamp, the proletarian half of the parish, that resistance was most felt.

The purpose of the meeting was for the appointed commissioners to debate the many practicalities arising from the Act’s execution, such as the definition of public roads and paths across the village land. Some of these had been customary ways for centuries: the Slang, from the horse mill out into the North Field; Mill Lane, westwards out of Beauchamp from which one could reach the west fields of both Smeeton and Beauchamp; the old ox tracks out into Ridge Field and Nether Field in Smeeton and on to the even more ancient furlong of the Gric. The new Act meant that the old pattern of the countryside was to be swept away.

The landscape they were measuring and valuing was owned by many landowners, the most important of which was Merton College, which leased lands in the open fields of Harcourt to farmers both big and small, some of which had been passed by father to son over many generations. As we have seen, the open-field landscape of Kibworth was the product of centuries of development and change since the fields were first laid out, probably in the tenth century, and then expanded up to 1300. Rights to use the land were shared between the landowners – Merton in Harcourt and various manorial lords in Smeeton and Beauchamp. The commoners had the right to graze their livestock when crops were not being grown. Some of these rights had eroded over the previous couple of centuries, and some areas of the parish had already been enclosed by well-off landowners working together. But still in the 1770s most of the land consisted of the remains of the three big fields, the common haymeadows and a series of closes, paddocks, orchards and gardens dotted around the village which had come down over time for common use; and also the common waste, the pasture and rough lands on the very edge of the parish. In 1779 this patchwork system, with its scores of field names going back to their medieval and Viking ancestors, was still part of the common mental world picture of the villagers. But with the sanction of the state, by parliamentary Act, these common lands were now to be fenced off and divided, with deeds and titles awarded to private owners, ending the centuries-old traditional common rights.

Throughout the summer that year the Enclosure Commissioners worked in the open fields of the ancient parish of Kibworth, walking with local jurymen, ‘dividing, allotting, and inclosing the Open and Common Pastures’ and measuring and staking out all public roads and tracks which traversed the open land. On 28 August a formal notice was printed in the local press, and pasted prominently around the village, detailing the various ‘Carriage and Drift Roads and Bridle Roads’ to be retained. Thus, for instance, ‘the present Turnpike Road [now the A6] leading from Market Harborough to Leicester, in the same track it now goes over the Fields, is marked and staked out of the breadth of sixty feet.’ (Other carriage roads in the parish were forty feet wide; bridle roads twenty.) The commissioners’ clerk, William Wartnaby, announced a subsequent meeting at the Crown, scheduled for 9 September, which would give villagers a chance to voice objections to the proposed routes.

Kibworth Harcourt in 1781 after enclosure, from a map in Merton College, Oxford: the three great open fields and the old customary holdings have now gone

Kibworth’s enclosure took place during the most important period of enclosure in Leicestershire: during the 1760s and 1770s two thirds of all the enclosure acts for the county were passed, at an average of five or six per year. In the parish of Kibworth some 3,900 acres of open farmland, unsegregated by hedge or fence, were awarded to twenty-seven proprietors in Beauchamp, twenty-three in Harcourt and thirty-five in Smeeton Westerby, according to the number of ‘yardlands’ they had previously claimed in the parish. The subsequent erection of fences and cultivation of hedges to demarcate individual plots would change the appearance of the surrounding country for ever, shaping today’s patchwork field system which we now think of as archetypal English countryside.

The most powerful local owners, Lebbeus Humphrey (a relative newcomer) and Robert Haymes (from a village family which rose in Tudor times), did best out of this process. The popular mythology of enclosure quickly became that of a ‘Great National Robbery’: a land grab by the powerful at the expense of the impoverished tenantry, whose access to any remaining common land was much reduced if it was not removed entirely. Dr John Aikin, a descendant of the Reverend John Jennings and born and raised in Kibworth himself, expressed the view of many radicals when he wrote: ‘[the poor man] has resigned to the landlord all his share of the ground, which his own hands cultivated, not reserving to himself as much as will bury him …’ A child in the 1860s, F. P. Woodford remembered the bitter opinion of many working men in the village:

the surrounding landowners said that it would be very advantageous if the fields, meadow and pastures were enclosed (for ever). Amazing candour! Agreeable and acceptable to all concerned no doubt, totally ignoring the poor man, whose rightful heritage they were, and whose need was more pressing than theirs (rank robbery, and discreditable to all concerned).

Historians have been more divided. Large-scale enclosure was both symptom and catalyst of broader economic change. As population growth increased the demand for food, and improvements in transport facilitated the movement of produce, so the incentive grew for landowners to pay the costs of enclosure in return for gains in productivity. In Leicestershire, at least, there do not seem to have been widespread outbreaks of violence as a result of parliamentary enclosures during the eighteenth century (the only instance concerning the South Field of Leicester in 1753) – though the much earlier Midlands Revolt of 1607 which affected the region to the south of Kibworth was sparked by the enclosure of common land. That said, there is certainly some evidence that the dramatic changes prompted by enclosure in Kibworth were the cause, directly or indirectly, of increased suffering among the growing numbers of rural poor.

The creation of a landless proletariat

In 1797, less than a decade after the parish of Kibworth was enclosed, Sir Frederick Eden published his remarkable and pioneering three-volume survey The State of the Poor, the predecessor of great works on the English working class from Engels to E. P. Thompson. Prompted by the hardship he observed among the labouring classes in 1794 and 1795, when harvests failed and prices rose steeply during the war with France, Eden set out to survey conditions among the poor all over England. Doing some of the fieldwork himself, he gathered information from the clergy, as well as designing a questionnaire which he sent out with ‘a remarkably faithful and intelligent person’, John Housman. Housman gave brief accounts of his tours in the Monthly Magazine and observed the rapid decline of arable now in the Leicestershire area where ‘the farmers graze most part of their grounds.’ A major change in English economy and society was under way before his eyes.

In Eden’s book Kibworth features strongly. The detailed picture Eden provided for the village in the 1790s noted that some nine tenths of the land had become pasture, while no common or waste land (such as described in 1086 in Domesday) now survived in the parish. Before the fields were enclosed, people in Kibworth told Eden, they were ‘solely applied’ to the production of corn; the poor then ‘had plenty of employment, in weeding, reaping, threshing, &c and could also collect a great deal of corn by gleaning’. ‘There is,’ Eden concluded, ‘some truth in these observations: one third or perhaps one fourth of the number of hands which were required twenty years ago, would now be sufficient, according to the present system of agriculture, to perform all the farming work in the parish.’

He may have exaggerated the extent to which the open fields in Kibworth had been exclusively arable – a portion at least of the open fields had been set aside for ‘ley’ (that is, grass for grazing) and the 1779 enclosure survey of the fields shows many already as ‘Old Inclosure’. But there is no doubt that pasture significantly increased as a result of enclosure and that this drastically reduced the available farm work for landless labourers. The 1801 crop returns gave the relatively low figure of 348 acres of surviving arable land for Kibworth Beauchamp, of which the largest constituents were beans, wheat and barley in that order. It cannot have been coincidental that annual expenditure on poor relief in Kibworth Beauchamp soared during this period: from £72 in the year ending Easter 1776, to £147 in 1785 to £423 in 1803 (getting on for £350,000 today in terms of the average earnings index).

Eden discussed in detail the economic situation of one Kibworth labourer in particular. In August 1795 he was forty years old, and had a wife and five children from fourteen down to eighteen months to support; at fourteen the eldest girl earned two shillings a week spinning, but neither the labourer’s wife nor his other children earned; his second daughter, who was twelve years old, suffered from fits. He worked part of the year as a canal navvy, and at other times picked up casual labour. Lacking the regular seasonal agricultural work on which his ancestors had relied and which he might have expected to perform for much of the year, the family were often dependent on the extensive system of charity organized by the parish – one of the features of Kibworth life as far back as records go. ‘The parish pays this man’s house-rent, finds him coals, occasionally gives him articles of wearing-apparel, and, for the last two weeks past, has given him an allowance of 2s. a week.’ The labourer gave a detailed account of his family’s basic diet:

[He] says that they use little or no milk or potatoes; that they seldom get any butter; neither do they use any oatmeal; that they occasionally buy a little cheese, and sometimes have meat on a Sunday; that his wife and daughters consume a small quantity of tea; but that bread is the chief support of the family and that they have far from a sufficiency of that article at present; that they should use much more, if they could procure it; and that his children are almost naked, and half-starved. He adds, that he has lately worked many days with only bread diet, and that many weeks have elapsed since he has tasted any beer.

With its journalistic approach to factual detail Eden’s approach, which is typified by this 1795 interview with a poor Kibworth labourer, is the pioneer of the flood of great nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature on the condition of the English working class, from Marx and Engels to Priestley and Orwell. In his book the signs are unmistakably on the wall. Over the next century the population of England will quadruple; our nameless worker and his family, it might fairly be said, represent a new turn in English history.

Canals and industry

Fortunately for him, and many others like him in Kibworth, at this particular moment, when the enclosure of the village fields severely reduced the available agricultural work, an entirely new source of labour – albeit temporary – had appeared in the region. ‘Many labourers,’ Eden noted, ‘can, at present, get work at a canal cutting in the neighbourhood; otherwise, the [county poor] rates must have been much higher than they even now are.’ The labourer reported that he was working at the canal for about half the year, earning 2 shillings a day, when the weather allowed. Money was money, with a family to feed, but digging canal trenches by hand, with hand picks and shovels, and with overseers intolerant of slacking, was work which must have been painful and draining almost beyond endurance on a meagre diet of bread and gruel.

For the region, though, this was a momentous development. Economic growth in Leicestershire had always been constrained by the fact that this part of the Midlands was unserved by navigable waterways. By now coal was an important part of the local economy, for industry and for domestic heating, since there were few sources of wood close by. In fact the Merton court rolls show that coal was already used in Kibworth in the late thirteenth century, when the peasants’ dues included carting the lord’s coal across the county. But the poor quality of roads and tracks made Kibworth dependent on local supplies of coal, which were more costly and inferior in quality to that produced in neighbouring Derbyshire. The roads were so bad in places that even local coal was brought to Leicester on the back of horses and mules. Goods from London, astonishingly, were still conveyed to Leicester by sea, in coasting brigs which travelled down the Thames, north around the Suffolk and Norfolk coasts to the Lincolnshire mouth of the Trent, and then in ‘Trent boats’ as far as Loughborough, before they were finally carried overland by wagon.

Though strong vested interests opposed the building of canals – not least the Leicestershire coal merchants – sufficient weight in favour was eventually secured to overcome resistance. The success of river ‘navigation’ schemes in the north of the county was followed in the early 1790s by the canal mania which gripped England as a whole. An ambitious plan was drawn up to create a water link – later dubbed the ‘Grand Junction’ – from London to the Oxford Canal and ultimately to join the Trent and Mersey Canal to Liverpool. This led to a ‘Union Canal’ project which would link the Midland towns of Nottingham, Derby and Leicester to this wider network. In spite of tortuous negotiations, and a dip in canal fever as the French wars continued, the project went ahead on a route which ran north-west from Market Harborough, round the southern edge of Smeeton Westerby, towards Leicester. Less than a mile to the west of Smeeton a major tunnel, 880 yards long, was dug through rising ground at Saddington, whose huge spoil tips are still visible along the edge of Smeeton fields. As the English canal revolution was launched, villagers in Kibworth had a box seat.

For the locals, though, this had pros and cons. On the one hand, employment in the village, which had dried up with the enclosing of the fields, could find an outlet on major local engineering projects. On the other, works on this scale required more labour than they alone could provide. Much of this labour was provided by gangs of imported ‘navigators’ or ‘navvies’ who lodged in temporary encampments on the edge of the village or in local accommodation if it could be found cheaply. The unruliness of many of these newcomers, who were often Irish, made them highly unpopular with the communities on which they descended. The height of canal mania in the 1790s was also a time of war in Europe, and since the Irish had a history of alliance with the French, xenophobic passions made it a particularly combustible time in the village. One incident recorded in the Leicester Journal for April 1795 became long remembered as the ‘Kibworth Riot’.

On Monday, 30 March 1795, the Mayor of Leicester was brought word that a large number of men who were working on the Union Canal had assaulted a detachment of Leicester ‘Fencibles’ (these were temporary home guard units called up during the war). Having liberated two deserters being held by the soldiers, the navvies were now rioting in Kibworth. The mayor promptly summoned one Captain Heyrick and ordered him to organize a military response. Between three and four that afternoon, as the Leicester Journal reported, Heyrick blew a horn in summons and the Leicester troop of Volunteer Cavalry duly formed up, armed and equipped, in the town’s marketplace. Having been informed of the situation and given their orders, the troop rode off for Kibworth with bayonets fixed, while an infantry detachment followed shortly afterwards armed with muskets. When they reached the turnpike at Oadby, word reached them that a group of the rioters, along with the two liberated deserters, had moved on to Newton Harcourt, a small hamlet to the north-west of Kibworth which was also on the line of the canal earthworks. Arriving there the troops traced a group of the rioters to the Recruiting Sergeant public house, where they appeared defiantly at the door armed with long pikes and ‘seemed determined to resist’. The local JP, Justice Burnaby, who had been summoned to the scene, read out the Riot Act – the measure of 1713 which allowed local authorities to order any group of twelve or more to disperse or face punitive action. For the process to be lawful the text had to be read accurately, audibly and in full:

Our Sovereign Lord the King chargeth and commandeth all persons, being assembled, immediately to disperse themselves, and peaceably to depart to their habitations, or to their lawful business, upon the pains contained in the act made in the first year of King George, for preventing tumults and riotous assembles. God Save the King!

Once the Act had been read, a group of cavalrymen were ordered to dismount and to search the public house for the two deserters, who were not found, though four of ‘the most desperate’ of the rioters were seized and sent to Leicester under armed guard. The remaining cavalry then scoured the neighbouring country, following the line of the canal south-east to Fleckney, Smeeton and Kibworth, where they met up with the infantry detachment at around seven o’clock in the evening. The following day the cavalry again rode along the canal route, accompanied by a sergeant and another of the Fencibles who had been injured during the fighting in Kibworth the day before (and so knew their men). Nine more of the rioters were identified and apprehended: ‘amongst them was Red Jack and Northamptonshire Tom, two fellows notorious for being a terror to every country they have resided in.’ All taken were examined on the Thursday before Justice Burnaby, when nine were freed and four – Jack and Tom presumably among them – committed.

The Union Canal became operational from Leicester to Kibworth in 1797, when the nearby Debdale Wharf officially opened for business, though not until 1814 was the full Union project completed, with the opening of the huge staircase of ten canal locks at Foxton, south-east of Kibworth – one of the most dramatic engineering projects of the canal age. In general those canals built earlier than 1790 were more successful than the many conceived afterwards in what has been described as ‘a spirit of excited optimism’. In Leicestershire the subsidiary side canals in the north of the county were almost all failures. However, the main north–south line, linking London, Birmingham and Leicester with the Trent – a key element in the massive network which now linked the capital with the booming industrial cities of the north-west – was ultimately important enough to pay dividends and had a lasting impact on the local economy. The ‘fuel famine’ which had for so long held back the development of this part of the Midlands was resolved by regular, and cheaper, supplies of coal; and even the back kitchens of Kibworth houses were now stacked with lumps of ‘Derbyshire Bright’. The population of Leicester itself began to rise rapidly, from just under 17,000 in 1801 to 30,000 in 1821, and it continued to grow at the rate of 10,000 per decade until 1850. In town and country, industrial England was on the move.

The Industrial Revolution comes to Kibworth

The effect of the canals on Kibworth itself was dramatic too. As we have seen, the village had been one of the most populous in the area since the eleventh century; it had had perhaps 600 people in 1381 and by 1670 the village population had returned to its highest medieval level. In the early eighteenth century there were 150 families in the parish – perhaps 750 people – but from then on like many places in England it experienced a steep rise. The 1801 census, which is not a complete record, gives a population of 1,232 people, and this almost doubled in the next century. And yet again the story of national historical change is mirrored at this point in the life of the village as the old agrarian world is transformed and industrial society begins to enter the village with small-scale industry, brick works, textile factories and especially framework knitting.

Framework knitting had begun with the invention of the knitting frame in the Midlands in the 1590s. Strongly concentrated in Leicestershire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, it became a massive industry during the Napoleonic Wars, employing nearly 100,000 workers, not counting children. Their product was not only plain and fancy hose, but also gloves, braces, mitts, blouses, pantaloons, cravats and miscellaneous articles. Leicester itself was a centre of fine work – ‘spider net’ blouses, fancy hose and best gloves. In Kibworth basic hosiery was produced both in private houses and later in small factories, whose remains are still dotted around the closes and back lots of the village. These were confined to the ‘open’ villages of Beauchamp and Smeeton. Across the road the closed village of Harcourt resisted such inroads: farms, cottages and coaching inns still characterized that part of Kibworth.

The reason why Beauchamp and Smeeton in the south of the parish became so heavily a part of the hosiery industry, but not Harcourt, lies in their different histories. As it had been since 1270, Merton College was still the owner of the fields and many of the houses in Harcourt, and it was still an agricultural place, a ‘closed’ village, as indeed it was until very recently. Smeeton’s seven manors had broken up in the early modern period into private holdings open to speculation; and Beauchamp was a proletarian place where an underemployed workforce was ripe for industrial exploitation. Perhaps it is not too fanciful to think this pattern an old one. In Beauchamp in the fourteenth century there had been twenty-four villein families, three cottagers and eighteen families of serfs – a population of well over 200 unfree or semi-free peasants. The pattern continued. In the late-fourteenth-century poll taxes there was still only one free couple, Thomas and Amice Swan, but already there were thirty-one married couples who were former villeins now holding the land as tenants ‘at will’, along with seven servants, a ‘labourer’, a ‘craftsman’, eight cottagers and a widow, Juliana Ward (whose descendants still lived in the village in the seventeenth century, when there were forty-five families in the 1664 Hearth Tax). So Beauchamp’s history from early times suggests a dependent landless proletariat: not freeholders, but tenants and workers. Here in the early nineteenth century widespread unemployment after enclosure and new production opportunities led to the growth of an industry which would change Kibworth for ever, turning it into what was almost a small town, with cottage industries and workshops, and eventually, in the mid-Victorian age, working men’s clubs, pubs and small factories.

The adoption of framework knitting spread fast in the first decades of the nineteenth century, pushed by the demands of the war abroad and the fashions of the rising middle class at home. By 1850 it was the major source of employment in Kibworth. The reasons are not hard to see: after the enclosure of the common fields, once the stopgap of labouring on the canals had dried up, the lack of work in the village fields became severe. If direct employment on the land in Kibworth declined as a result of increased pasturage, however, the rearing of sheep in ever-growing numbers in Leicestershire did indirectly create new jobs. ‘With regard to the collective interest of the nation, and not the particular benefit of the parish,’ Eden wisely noted, ‘I much doubt whether the wool now produced from the Leicestershire inclosures does not employ more hands (though not perhaps in Leicestershire) than its arable fields did formerly.’ In fact, as Eden would have seen had he returned to Kibworth a couple of decades later, some at least of the additional jobs did remain in the parish.

The fleeces of Leicestershire sheep had long been prized, as John Leland had remarked back in the 1540s. While on his famous tour of Great Britain in the 1720s, Daniel Defoe observed that the sheep bred in Leicestershire were ‘without comparison, the largest, and bear the greatest fleeces of wool on their backs of any sheep in England’. Since Queen Elizabeth’s day shifting fashions had seen an increasing demand for long stockings or ‘hose’ – silk for those who could afford it, wool or later cotton for those who couldn’t. Initially they were knitted by hand, but the invention of the stocking frame – generally credited to William Lee of Calverton in Nottinghamshire – created a large-scale industry which came to be concentrated in the East Midlands from the late seventeenth century. (Initially, in what would be a recurring pattern, this technological innovation was angrily resisted by hand-knitters, who feared for their livelihood; when the first frame was brought to Leicester in the 1680s it is said to have been operated in secret in a cellar for fear of retribution.) While its Midland neighbours focused on silk (Derbyshire) and cotton (Nottinghamshire), Leicestershire in particular specialized in products made from worsted (fine-combed woollen) cloth. Daniel Defoe visited Leicester in 1705–6 and wrote two decades later in the account of his tour:

A Considerable Manufacture carry’d on here, and in several of the Market Towns round for Weaving of Stockings by Frames: and one would scarce think it possible so small an Article of Trade could employ such Multitudes of People as it does; for the whole County seems to be employ’d in it: as also Nottingham and Derby.

In Kibworth it was the poor families of the parish, once the field labourers, who took up this cottage industry which could be carried out at home, with the frame being rented. Knitting occupied the whole family: the father operated the frame with its heavy treadles, the mother seamed together the stockings, and the children assisted by winding the threads – though they might themselves be put to work the frame from the age of ten or eleven. Some at the time romanticized this employment in which all the family worked together, but the reality was anything but romantic: as one framework-knitter retorted, for all members of a family to be engaged in order to scrape a meagre living was a sign of poverty and wretchedness rather than well-being.

At the time of his survey a few years after the enclosure, Eden did note ‘a little stocking weaving’ in Kibworth Beauchamp, but this was clearly the sort of old-fashioned hand-knitting or weaving which women customarily practised to supplement a family’s income, while the spinning of worsted thread which he also recorded as a ‘principal employment of the women’ involved the preparation of the raw material rather than the finished clothing. A few decades later, however, much had changed. In his survey of Leicestershire of 1831, the curate John Curtis reported that many of Kibworth Beauchamp’s 1,372 inhabitants were employed at framework knitting. By the gazetteer of 1850 ‘the majority’ of Kibworth Beauchamp’s people were engaged in the industry, and the character of the village had been changed for ever. Even today the visitor to the village (and to Smeeton) will see the distinctive weavers’ cottages with enlarged upper-storey windows which admitted enough light to work the frame.

After a relatively good period for wages in the late eighteenth century, much harsher conditions after the Napoleonic Wars led to deep social unrest, and the struggle of the framework-knitters played a key role in what has been called the ‘Making of the English Working Class’. In this Leicestershire was an important part of the story – it is no coincidence that Ned Ludlum (Ludd), who gave his name to the Luddites, came from just outside Leicester. After the Napoleonic Wars conditions for workers in the industry were often poor and sometimes perilous. A huge increase in the number of frames for hire, demand that fluctuated with fashion, a faltering economy and an uncertain international situation all conspired to put the individual worker and his family in the hands of the capitalists. Grievances especially turned on the ways in which unscrupulous hosiers sought to economize on labour and cheapen production, particularly by the hated practice of ‘trucking’, in which payment was not made in money but in supplies, or tokens redeemable only in shops of the owners (which were often not a fair equivalent). The frames were substantial – the height of an upright piano, if a little narrower; they were generally hired and the frame rents had to be paid consistently, regardless of the work available. Hosiers or their middlemen, for whom such rents constituted a substantial portion of their income, were suspected of deliberately hiring out more frames than were needed for the available work. Between 1812 and 1844 the number of frames in use in the East Midlands doubled to almost 50,000.

A serious deterioration in the industry took place from the late 1830s and this struck the village very hard. In 1840, at the worst point of the depression, a third of the frames in Leicestershire were said to be unused, and in Kibworth Beauchamp the dire situation saw many single men queuing up once more at the old weekly hiring fair on the Bank, and a flood of applications to the local Poor Law board, many from bemused older workers who had never experienced such cut-throat work practices. Three years later a petition was presented to Parliament signed by over 25,000 framework-knitters in the three Midland counties, which led to the appointment of a Royal Commission to look into the industry in 1844. The subsequent detailed report by R. M. Muggeridge largely confirmed the petitioners’ belief in worsening conditions and gives fascinating detail on the conditions of workers in Kibworth.

Among the witnesses whose interviews were transcribed in the report were five framework-knitters from Kibworth and Smeeton. John Mawby of Beauchamp reported that he worked for seventeen or eighteen hours a day to make two dozen pairs of hose a week, for which he was paid 4s 3d a dozen – but he had to pay frame rent and seaming costs as well as for the candles he needed to work by night, and the soap or oil with which to grease the worsted. His eldest, crippled, child did a little seaming, and his nine-year-old daughter he had already put to operate a second frame, though she struggled to cover the cost of renting it. Thomas Iliffe was another (he came from an old Beauchamp family prominent in the village in the seventeenth century, and even earlier in Saddington). Iliffe declared that he had recently been seriously ill for a year and able to work only at a fraction of his normal rate, but he had been allowed no reduction in his frame rent: ‘the master stated that the frame had stood still while he wanted the work, and that being the case, he should not take any rent off.’ Job Johnson of Smeeton similarly bemoaned the rental burden: ‘I think it is a very extravagant price we have to pay for frame-rents.’ He worked fourteen hours a day to keep his wife and five children, whom he could not afford to send to school, a misfortune similarly lamented by John Lover, also of Smeeton:

There is no race of people under the sun so depressed as we are, who work the hours we do, for the money we get. It would be my delight to bring my family up to a school; I cannot bear the thought of bringing a family up in ignorance so as not to read a little.

The report had critical words about the use of trucking. This had evidently continued to be a serious problem, even after the Truck Act of 1831 had outlawed the practice. It affected a fifth of town workers, the report estimated, but as many as four fifths of those in the country. In the parish of Kibworth the problem seemed to have eased only in recent months in the wake of prosecutions of offending hosiers. Job Johnson claimed to have been paid ‘nearly all in goods’ until the Christmas past; goods which, as John Lover made clear, they were ‘obliged to receive at a price, I believe, extortionate to what the other shops were selling them’. Lover would, he thought, ‘have been completely starved this winter, if that system had not ceased before Christmas’. Many of them reported relying for food on potatoes grown on allotments they had been granted by the parish, a system which ‘had always proved a very good thing’. (The allotments incidentally are still there, and very actively tended, below the former workhouse and the frameworkers’ tenement at Smeeton Terrace.)

Real wages had declined significantly since the war years. Middlemen increasingly interposed themselves between the local knitters and the hosiers in Leicester: they saved the knitters from travelling to and fro, but spread the work too thinly and it was felt took rather more than a fair cut. One manufacturer who lived in Smeeton, William Ward, freely agreed that these ‘undertakers’ or ‘bagmen’ were having a highly pernicious impact; the hosiers, he said, used such middlemen to beat down prices when demand was a little flat:

They know those are the men to do it; they do not like to do it with the single hands themselves, and so they do it through them … [The undertakers] know that things have been so middling lately that the poor people are obliged to work at any price, or else they would have nothing to do … When the hosiers could not have the barefacedness to offer it themselves, they get those men to do it for them.

That this sort of man-powered work continued at all in a village like Kibworth might seem surprising given that in other parts of the country the production of textiles had become mechanized and factory-based. The knitting and seaming of stockings had been, however, relatively resistant to steam power, with the result that the Leicestershire hosiery industry in the early nineteenth century did not share in the dynamic growth (albeit combined with deplorable working conditions) experienced in Lancashire. Moreover technological innovation, when it came, continued to be treated with the utmost suspicion and hostility by frameworkers, who saw in it only a further reduction in their chances of employment. Back in 1773 a stocking frame reputedly capable of producing a dozen pairs of hose at once, when put on exhibition at the Leicester Exchange, was destroyed by a crowd of workmen who obliged the hosiers to promise not to introduce such a machine. An invention for mechanized spinning of worsted yarn had led to serious riots instigated by the hand-spinners in 1787. (The fact that many large-scale manufacturers in the region came from the dissenting community led to a widespread rallying cry: ‘No Presbyterians, no machines.’) The Luddite machine-breakers of the 1810s were busy in Leicestershire, smashing many hundreds of stocking frames inspired by the now legendary Ned Ludd.

The shocking conclusion of the 1845 commission report was that as many as three quarters of all Midland framework-knitters were either out of work or ‘seriously under-employed and dependent on parish relief’. For those out of work and impoverished, their plight seemed worsened by the changing nature of this relief since the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. The ‘Gilbert’s Act’ of 1782, named after the MP Thomas Gilbert, had liberalized the parish-based workhouse system so that ‘poorhouses’ were established purely for the old, sick and infirm, while able-bodied paupers were to be provided with outdoor relief and employment near their own homes (at the discretion of the parish poor guardians). In a precursor to the council housing system, parishes like Kibworth owned a number of cottages which could be let at low rates to the poor. There was also, in Smeeton, a purpose-built poorhouse: a large, three-storey building which still stands. Under the terms of the 1834 Act, however, control of poor relief was taken away from individual parishes and centred on regional ‘Poor Law unions’ which answered directly to the Poor Law Commission in London. For Kibworth, this meant the transference of control over poor relief to the Market Harborough Union.

A fascinating insight into the local running of the Poor Law over the period of transition from the old to the new system – at a time of particular economic hardship – is provided by the papers of the Market Harborough Union in the National Archives in Kew: part of a still largely untapped archive of more than 16,700 volumes of papers, reports, submissions and letters which together constitute a source of social history as rich as the national censuses. In a series of handwritten letters to the Poor Law Commission in London, for example, a group of elderly Kibworth paupers complained bitterly that the local parish guardians were failing in their obligation to find work for the unemployed.

‘We the undersigned,’ they wrote on 11 January 1835, ‘beg leave to inform you that we are poor men belonging to the parishes of Kibworth Beauchamp and Kibworth Harcourt in the county of Leicester and being out of employ we have applied to the guardian repeatedly for work but he invariably refuses to employ us.’ Gilbert’s Act, they insisted, had made clear that no guardian could refuse to employ destitute men unable to find work. Even more loathed, however, than the haphazard nature of the old system was the new workhouse regime under which the able-bodied unemployed could be forced to do residential labour in the Harborough workhouse in return for the most basic subsistence:

We beg further to state that in no place are the poor so much oppressed as at Kibworth. They have actually sent poor people to the workhouse and they have worn their linen 11 weeks with only once washing during the time until they have literally swarmed with vermin …

The letter was signed by Richard Tolton of Kibworth Harcourt (upwards of seventy years of age), William Tolton of Kibworth Beauchamp (nearly seventy years of age), and Samuel Guest and William Jackson, both of Kibworth Beauchamp and both nearly sixty years of age. Though all were near or past today’s retirement age, they were nonetheless insisting on their right to work – and their desire to do so.

The Poor Law Commission in London responded with an argument which sounds familiar today:

the amount of relief, you must be aware, ought not to be such as to render the situation of the pauper equal to that of a person living by independent industry: a practice of making allowance for idleness equal or nearly equal to the wages of industry […] must tend to make pauperism preferable to independence.

This was beside the point, the four Kibworthians alleged. The failure of the local authorities was a consequence of persecution against them because they were religious dissenters. As was typical of Nonconformists, their letters were rich in biblical allusions: those that held back relief from poor disciples would be sentenced to eternal damnation; ‘blessed is he that considereth the poor; the Lord will deliver him in time of trouble’ (Psalm 41); while the Israelites had been forced by the Egyptians to make bricks without straw, the Poor Law overseers expected the manufacture of bricks without clay. Residence in the workhouse, moreover, was particularly abhorrent for conscientious men and women of religion:

You may rely on it that men will not submit to be incarcerated in a Workhouse merely for want of employ. If that were the case the marriage ceremony must be altered for instead of man and woman being joined together until death separates them it must be until parted by the workhouse master … No dissenter can submit to be transported into such dens of iniquity, we have lately collected information respecting one of those dens of iniquity and we consider it worse if possible than West Indian Slavery.

What is perhaps most remarkable about these letters is the level not only of literacy and general education, but also of specific knowledge about the precise terms and clauses of government legislation. It is abundantly clear that the ethic of education and learning among the Nonconformist community in Kibworth had remained strong since the days of Jennings’ and Doddridge’s Academy: a thread of literacy in the village story which goes back to the likes of the fifteenth-century butcher John Pychard and the village clerks and reeves from the time of the Black Death.

One Jeremiah Jackson, meanwhile, wrote from Leicester, whence he had moved from Kibworth in a vain search for work, to complain likewise of the hard line taken by the local Kibworth guardians:

I am by trade a framework knitter and have a wife and one child, one I have lately buried and my wife is far advanced in pregnancy – and being utterly destitute of work I applied to the relieving officer of the Harborough Union as I belong to the Parish of Kibworth Beauchamp … I understand all parishes except Kibworth relieve the poor at this distressing time when out of work …

The commission in London confirmed that his case had been dismissed on the grounds that he was now a non-resident pauper, but did state that ‘should the depression in the markets continue, the Board would have no objection to rehear his case’.

Also among the Harborough Union papers are the documents pertaining to the selling off of those local cottages owned by the parish for the use of the poor. In Kibworth Beauchamp alone there were sufficient cottages, some of them divided, to house fifteen impoverished families, among them owners of some long-surviving Kibworth surnames: a freehold cottage in Smeeton Lane, for instance, ‘now used as three dwellings and in the respective occupations of Joseph Fletcher, William Carter and William Green’; another freehold cottage in Smeeton Lane ‘in the occupation of William Holyoak’; and a freehold cottage in Wire Lane ‘now used as two dwellings in the respective occupations of Robert Lea and Sarah Coleman’; or a freehold cottage in Wire Lane ‘now used as two dwellings and in the respective occupation of Joseph Holyoak and Samuel Butcher’. All were to be sold off, and the tenants evicted, with the proceeds used to pay off parish debts and contribute to the new union workhouse. A similar list of property to be sold in Smeeton Westerby included Smeeton Terrace, the ‘large building formerly used as a workhouse’ but now divided and let along with a group of cottages or tenements adjacent to it to, among others, Matthew Woolman, Robert Freer, Robert Iliffe and Job Johnson, the framework-knitter interviewed for the commission report.

The process of evicting these sometimes long-standing tenants was painful. In 1837 John Jackson, the son-in-law of William Holyoak (who had evidently died some years back), wrote plaintively to the commission:

In the year 1803 I married the daughter of the late William Holyoak and she being housekeeper to her father I went and resided with them, and have continued to reside in the said house ever since … I have had no relief from the parish several years and the late Mr Holyoak absolutely gave me the house. Under all these circumstances I am at a loss to conceive what claim the parish can have on this house … As I have always considered that every Englishman’s House were his castle, I feel therefore determined to defend mine to the last extremity …

The parish, however, had ordered the properties to be sold and Jackson’s understandable distress was unavailing. (One of those wealthy landowners who took the opportunity to purchase the cottages was Robert Haymes, whose grandfather had done so well out of the enclosures.) Among those who supervised the new Poor Law system, the attitude was ingrained – as it would be in England for centuries – that poverty was an indication of moral weakness, since work, in a natural equilibrium, would always be available for those who sincerely sought it. In this some of the debates of the time seem strikingly contemporary. In 1836 Thomas Symes, the Vice-President of the new Harborough Union, reassured the commission in London regarding the complaining paupers of Kibworth:

The true cause of their pauperism being want of character and inclination to work, their worst principles being fed by the ready aid administered to them by the old law; I have ever contended, and I doubt not it will now be found so, that within the limits of this Union, we have no more labourers than work.

Together the guardians of the union testified in 1837 to the ‘great benefit which the new system has introduced into this union – not only as to the reduction of the rates but as to the moral improvement of the labouring classes …’

Not surprisingly the labouring classes of Kibworth did not in the main see themselves in need of moral improvement – and they were perfectly willing to turn to any form of work to earn a fair living. This comes out vividly in a remarkable letter sent late in life by Jonathan Jesson of Kibworth to Lord Feilding, after he had heard the latter speak at a meeting at Fenny Compton in Warwickshire. Jesson was a well-known Kibworth character who was fondly remembered even on the eve of the First World War for his dancing on Plough Monday (an ancient East Midlands festival still observed in Kibworth in the 1930s). He had requested that his letter be returned, but Feilding’s wife considered it sufficiently interesting to transcribe it and retained her copy. At sixty-five, Jesson wrote, he scarcely need bother himself in detail about the political matters Feilding had addressed in his speech: ‘but I cannot help but take an interest in it’. The letter gives us a mid-Victorian working man’s autobiography.

Born in 1825 in Fleckney, barely a mile and a half west of Kibworth, Jesson was raised in poverty with ten siblings by his widowed mother: ‘during that time we was glad of three meals of wasted potatoes a day & nothing but a bit of salt to them.’ Between the ages of nine and thirteen he drove a plough before declaring that he would buy his own bread, or starve. He worked cleaning turnips; then took a job in service, which allowed him to provide a little help to his mother and crippled sister. He worked on a railway line at Stamford, walking twenty-six miles home with beef for his family at Christmas. In 1850 he married Ann, the daughter of Samuel Butcher (who had lived in one of the parish poorhouses on Wire Lane in Kibworth Beauchamp), and at this point moved to live in Kibworth. In the 1851 census he was living with his wife and child in Pudding Bag Lane, just off the Bank where the roundabout is today. Family health was not good and his wife was bed-bound for six months with rheumatic fever, though, Jesson says, ‘no one gave to us.’ ‘I have told many a poor man to persevere in his labours & be punctual to his payments, if that won’t carry him thro’ life nothing will.’ He worked at one of the framework knitting ‘factories’ in the village – perhaps the long two-storey workshop close to his house which still stands behind number 24 on the Bank; such places were little more than a collection of frames under one roof. Later he went into the ‘fish & rabbit trade’, pushing a truck-load from Kibworth to market in Leicester. Though his wife remained sickly, he spurned suggestions that he fall back on charity: ‘some people will try to console a man by telling him to trust to providence, but I dare not my spirit won’t allow me, it always says go & look for work.’ In the end through perseverance he did well enough to become involved in the building boom in Kibworth as the ‘new town’ took shape in the late nineteenth century. As a working man’s tale, literate, self-reflexive and realistic, adaptable and tenacious, it is no doubt typical of many of the age. Where his ancestors had worked the land as peasants, nativi or villeins, he was now part of what had come to be known as the working class.

The village in the 1860s

From the enclosures of the 1770s the villagers had lived through a time of European war, agricultural and industrial revolution, and social change. The patterns of work and life in the village – as in the country as a whole – had changed for ever. But for all the upheavals, the village community had shown a remarkable tenacity – the social glue that bound people together had not been dissolved: the role of the church and the many dissenting chapels, the importance of culture, sport and music, the role of the parish in education, charity and social welfare, in provisions for the poor, and even for their health (which in some respects appear today as a precursor of the NHS).

The transformations of the mid-century are recorded for Kibworth in the 1851 census and in the district gazetteers, which, rather like a Victorian Domesday, testify now both to the growing commercial and industrial life of the village and to its place in the new Victorian order of Poor Law unions and local government and law and order. According to White’s gazetteer, Kibworth was now a parish of almost 2,000 people with over 3,000 acres ‘mostly given over to pasturage’ rather than arable – far less acreage than in 1300: ‘Many of its inhabitants are framework-knitters employed chiefly in weaving worsted stockings for the Leicester manufacturers. The Leicester and London Railway, which was opened in 1856, passes through the parish and has a station at Kibworth Beauchamp. The Union canal traverses the western side of the parish, and passes under a hill about one and a half miles S.W. of the village by a tunnel more than half a mile in length.’ In such a portrait, no less than that of 1086, great historical change is encapsulated. It is a sketch of a populous agricultural community transformed by the industrial age, its traditional communally organized rural workforce now representative of the new working class of the industrial age. In the previous seventy years many of its people had suffered loss of status, work and freedom, and had often experienced degradation, but their Victorian descendants would create a culture and political consciousness of real vitality – and with it, as we shall see in the next chapter, a vigorous and democratic popular culture.