with buildings, which are subdivided into numbers of small workshops. Some of these cover but a few square yards, and there I saw smiths hammering, all the day long, blades of knives on a small anvil, close by the blaze of their fires; occasionally the smith may have one helper, or two. In the upper storeys, scores of small workshops are supplied with wheel-power, and in each of them, three, four, or five workers and a “master” fabricate, with the occasional aid of a few plain machines, every description of tools: files, saws, blades of knives, razors, and so on. Grinding and glazing are done in other small workshops, and even steel is cast in a small foundry, the working staff of which consists only of five or six men.
When I walked through these workshops I easily imagined myself in a Russian cutlery village, like Pavlovo or Vorsma. The Sheffield cutlery has thus maintained its olden organisation, and the fact is the more remarkable as the earnings of the cutlers are low as a rule; but, even when they are reduced to a few shillings a week, the cutler prefers to vegetate on his small earnings than to enter as a waged labourer in a “house.” The spirit of the old trade organisations, which were so much spoken of in the ‘sixties of the nineteenth century, is thus still alive.
Until lately, Leeds and its environs were also the seat of extensive domestic industries. When Edward Baines wrote, in 1857, his first account of the Yorkshire industries (in Th. Baines’s Yorkshire, Past and Present), most of the woollen cloth which was made in that region was woven by hand.133 Twice a week the hand-made cloth was brought to the Clothiers’ Hall, and by noon it was sold to the merchants, who had it dressed in their factories. Joint-stock mills were run by combined clothiers in order to prepare and spin the wool, but it was woven in the hand-looms by the clothiers and the members of their families. Twelve years later the hand-loom was superseded to