Britain Before the Industrial Revolution

1. The Open Field System

Before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution Britain was a quite different place to the one that exists
today. Out of a population of six million inhabitants in England and Wales, four fifths lived in villages and
worked in agriculture. Life thus was, for the bulk of the population, the life of a farmer. By the 18th century
the feudal system was long gone, but in its place was a system in which the people were as reliant upon
each other and their master as before.
In general, people worked in villages and small towns, working the land and relying upon the local
community to provide for them. Food production was small and sporadic, with cereals holding the lion's
share in every dish. The open-field system prevailed and primitive methods of cultivation were used. The
open-field system was the prevalent agricultural system in England and many other European countries
during the Middle Ages and into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Each manor or village had two
or three large fields, usually several hundred acres (4047 square meters) each, which were divided into
many narrow strips of land. The strips or selions were cultivated by peasants called tenants. The holdings
of a manor also included woodland and pasture areas for common usage and fields belonging to the lord of
the manor. The farmers habitually lived in separate houses in a nucleated village with a much larger manor
house and church nearby. The open-field system necessitated co-operation among the residents of the
manor. The Lord of the Manor, his officials, and a manorial court administered the manor and exercised
jurisdiction over the peasantry. The Lord levied rents and required the peasantry to work on his personal
lands.
Since the medieval times, little land was owned outright. Instead, generally the lord had rights given to him
by the king, and the tenant rented land from the lord. Lords demanded rents and labour from the tenants,
but the tenants had firm user rights to cropland and common land and those rights were passed down
from generation to generation. Since the medieval age, a lord could not evict a tenant nor hire labour to
replace him without legal cause. Most tenants likewise were not free without penalty to depart the manor
for other locations or occupations.
The open-field's best-known form consisted of three elements: individual peasant holdings in the form of
strips scattered among the different fields; crop rotation; and common grazing. Crop rotation was by the
two-field system in the earlier age and by the three-field system in the later centuries; in either case some
of the commonly held fields were always fallow and used for common grazing. Under the two-field system,
arable land was divided into two fields or groups of fields, one group was planted to wheat, barley, or rye,
while the other was allowed to lie fallow until the next planting season to recover its fertility. After
cropping. the first group of fields was turned to fallow, with the livestock permitted to graze on the stubble
and enrich the soil with their droppings. Beginning about the 8th century, the two-field system gave way to
the more sophisticated three-field system. In the old two-field system half the land was sown to crop and
half left fallow each season: in the three-field system, however, only a third of the land lay fallow. In the
autumn one third was planted to wheat, barley, or rye, and in the spring another third of the land was
planted to oats, barley, and legumes to be harvested in late summer. The legumes (peas and beans)
strengthened the soil by their nitrogen-fixing ability and at the same time improved the human diet.
2. The Domestic System
Historians favour the term "protoindustrialization" to describe the form of industrial organization that
emerged in the 16th and seventeenth centuries. The word was initially applied to cottage industries in the
countryside. In spite of the opposition of urban societies, rural residents were performing many industrial
tasks. Agricultural labour did not occupy the peasants during the entire year, and they devoted their free
hours to such activities as spinning wool or weaving and washing cloth. Peasants usually worked for lower
remuneration than urban artisans. Protoindustrialization gave rural residents supplementary income,
which conferred a certain immunity from harvest failures; it enabled them to marry younger and rear
larger families; it prepared them, socially and psychologically, for eventual industrialization.
More recently, historians have stressed the role of towns in this early form of industrial organization.
Towns remained the centres from which the raw materials were distributed in the countryside. Moreover,
urban entrepreneurs coordinated the efforts of the rural workers and marketed their finished products.
Certain processes usually the most highly skilled and the most remunerative remained centred in cities.
Not only the extension of industry into rural areas but also the greater integration of city and countryside
in regional economies was the principal achievement of 16 and seventeenth-century industry.
This manner of organizing manufactures is known as the "putting-out system," The key to its operation was
the entrepreneur, or the merchant-employer, who purchased the raw materials, "put out" materials to
rural producers who usually worked in their homes but sometimes laboured in workshops or in turn put
out work to others. Finished products were returned to the employers for payment on a piecework or
wage basis. The merchant employer would then market the finished products. He was typically a great
merchant resident in the town. As trade routes grew longer, the small artisan was placed at ever-greater
distances from sources of supply and from markets. Typically, the small artisan would not have the
knowledge of distant markets or of the preferences of distant purchasers and rarely had the money to
purchase needed raw materials. The size of the trading networks and the volume of merchandise moving
within them made the services of the entrepreneur indispensable and subordinated the workers to his
authority. The domestic system differed from the handicraft system of home production in that the
workers neither bought materials not sold products. The advantages to the merchant-employer were the
lower wage costs and increased efficiency due to a more extensive division of labour within the craft.
One of the most common cottage industries was textile manufacturing, including the production of wool.
This was the process of making wool for clothes: Sheep were sheared for their wool, which was then
cleaned. Then, the carding of the wool would involve brushing it into separate fibres. A comb would be
used to get the fibres parallel. Once it has been cleaned and combed, the wool would be spun by a team of
spinsters, which usually consisted of unmarried girls- thus explaining the use of term spinster in today's
language for a single woman. The finished product was called yarn. The yarn would be woven by a
specialist and skilled worker, known as a weaver, who would use a handloom. And finally, once this process
was complete, the woven yarn would then be sold to a clothier.
3. Life before the Industrial Revolution
Before the Industrial Revolution it was very hard to keep in touch with people in other parts of the country.
News was spread by travellers or through messengers and goods were distributed largely within the
locality in which they were produced. Travel was very difficult as there was no means of mechanised
transport. Because it was so hard to move around, people had to rely upon themselves and their
communities to provide the vast majority of the things that they needed. Some people were fortunate
enough to benefit from imported goods which came into ports such as London and Bristol in increasing
quantities.
Education was poor. The rich were catered for by nannies and private tutors. There were some schools and
universities. These were not for the ordinary man or woman though, indeed girls were largely excluded
from education after the age of 7. Politics was based upon land ownership and military honours won, with
women and ordinary men given few rights.
Poverty was a problem before the Industrial Revolution. Many jobs in agriculture were seasonal. This
meant that they were only available at certain times of the year. Likewise, the merchants in towns often
found that they had busy periods and quiet periods. In both cases, this led to people having work that was
not guaranteed for the longer term. Living conditions were bad for most of the population. Occasional
starvation, poor diet, epidemics, high death rate, low birth rate, child and infant mortality and a short life
expectancy (30 years) were all features of pre-industrial British society.
A system to help the poor had been introduced toward the end of the reign of Elizabeth 1 (1533- 1603).
The Poor Relief Act 1601 was an Act of the Parliament of England. The Act for the Relief of the Poor,
popularly known as the Elizabethan Poor Law, or the Old Poor Law was passed in 1601 and created a poor
law system for England and Wales. It gave the local government the power to raise taxes as needed and
use the funds to build and maintain alms-houses; to provide indoor relief (i.e., cash or sustenance) for the
aged, handicapped and other worthy poor, and the tools and materials required to put the unemployed to
work.

The Middle Ages: The period of European history from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West in the 5th century to
the fall of Constantinople in the middle of the fifteenth century (1453).

Nucleated: Formed or gathered around a central area.

Jurisdiction: The official power to make legal decisions and judgements.

Rents: A usually fixed periodical return made by a tenant or occupant of property to the owner for the possession
and use thereof especially an agreed sum paid at fixed intervals by a tenant to the landlord

Alms-houses: Charitable housing provided to people in a particular community also called poorhouse.