Agricultural History Review, Volume 57 Part 1 (2009), p. 135

W.G.Hoskins’ book on Wigston’s peasant farmers has become a fundamental text, describing what happened when a rural population, rising in numbers, turned to an industrial occupation – framework knitting – to augment its income in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. At first, this was a welcome supplement to their living, but it led to increasing poverty, as the rewards for knitting were squeezed by economic pressures into meanly paid work that enslaved whole families.

Hoskins wrote it in the later 1930s and 1940s, as David Hey explains in an instructive new Foreword. But it was not published until 1957 when historians were taking more interest in the distinctive history of local regions. R.H.Tawney suggested that Wigston’s story should be given a bolder, broader title as the history of The Midland Peasant. Thus it appeared, a telling example of industrial innovations that occurred elsewhere also, though each varied in the measure of poverty inflicted on one-time farming communities.

Regrettably, this re-issue of Hoskins’ book does not interpolate anything of the more recent additions to our understanding of such developments. Historians in 1957 knew little or nothing about the way stocking knitting became a major new occupation in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. At first it was a handicraft, but when William Lee invented – and others improved – the knitting machine, knitting became a machine industry as well, and that is how it arrived in Wigston. Hoskins gave no thought to the impact on women’s earning power. As a handicraft at first it gave them an important chance to earn cash to contribute to family budgets. They could pick up hand knitting in almost any situation, in free moments at home, or when walking to the fields with their animals. Even when men took charge of the knitting frame, that still left many hand-working jobs that women could do at home. In 1957, however, historians disregarded women’s contribution to industrial processes, and the early days of knitting await more research; Hoskins’ text moves swiftly from the introduction of framework knitting to 1845, when the government investigated the depressed condition of framework knitters.

A criticism voiced in 1957 concerned Hoskins’ meagre footnotes; that criticism remains. Nevertheless, the chronology of industrialization is clearly, indeed vividly traced out in Hoskins’ story, and David Hey correctly underlines the originality in Hoskins’ use of his sources. This is a welcome reprint.