Women, Migration and Textile Work in West Yorkshire, 1800–1851

Between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth century, the West Yorkshire woollen industry was one of the heartbeats of the Industrial Revolution and British prosperity on the international stage. At least until the 1830 s, much of this woollen cloth production was undertaken in a domestic or small workshop context and with a significant use of family labour. The communities that were at the heart of this industry thickened and grew. At the same time they retained a remarkable contemporary reputation for insularity and a distrust of strangers. This reputation sits at odds with the certainty that migration into, out of and around these manufacturing districts was significant. My article seeks to reconcile these two observations. Employing a large scale family reconstitution based upon parish registers, nonconformist registers, and census data (in turn linked to poor law accounts, landholding data, apprenticeship registers, manor court documents, family papers and antiquarian publications), the article argues that migrant women are the key to resolving the two different perspectives. For themselves, husbands, daughters, sons, grandchildren, brothers and sisters, the work, connections and cultural and economic networking of migrant women facilitated the integration of ‘strangers’ in these dynamic areas of proto-industrial production.

The trajectory of development and decline for the West Yorkshire woollen cloth industry and the communities associated with it is now well-established. With seventeenth and early eighteenth-century roots in small-scale rural domestic production, the industry developed rapidly from the later eighteenth-century, mirroring the ascendency of cotton production in neighbouring Lancashire. Production was driven initially by independent 'clothiers' who often combined industrial production at familial level with a continued presence in agriculture. 1 By the early nineteenth-century this model had begun to break down as the rapid development of towns like Leeds, Bradford and Wakefield, allied with the thickening of population in villages across West Yorkshire, gave new impetus to putting-out and massed workshop arrangements. 2 For one contemporary commentator, the impact of industrial intensification was wholly negative: 'to the west [of a line drawn between Otley, Leeds and Wakefield], with very few exceptions, the villages are unsightly, dirty, crowded, irregular, and occupied by inhabitants whose complexion and apparel denote the nature of the occupation in which they are engaged'. 3 Another contemporary, William Cudworth, was more positive tracing what we would now call agglomeration effects, the development of a class of merchants with district-wide interests to act as 'change-agents', the key role of urban centres (particularly the cloth and the piece halls of Leeds and Halifax) and the evolution on the part of elites and workers of a sense of the 'whole' industrial region. 4 Testimony before the 1806 enquiry into the state of the Woollen industry suggests that many ordinary clothiers shared this global sense of the clothing districts and their being part of a single unified structure. 5 In turn, these changes to the underlying organisational architecture of industrial production drove the intensification of migration, both circulation within the region and its localities, and longer distance migration. 6 More importantly, the composition of the migratory host shifted decisively in the 1830s from individuals to families, pointing to a qualitative change both to the probability of migration over the life-cycle and to the experiential dynamics of that migration. The sprawling industrial villages of West Yorkshire thus became increasingly polarised between a core of families with great longevity and a more fluid population in which inter-generational persistence was more uncertain. 7 The decline of the woollen textile industry from the 1850s in the face of changing fashions and increasing international competition accentuated the fluidity of these communities. Structural decay made woollen workers more likely to migrate, in contradistinction to the cotton handloom weaving communities of Lancashire where industrial decline was firmly associated with immobility and self-exploitation in the face of declining wage rates. 8 This much is familiar, and it might be augmented by an increasingly nuanced understanding of the level and determination of wage rates, the nature of labour market architecture and the business culture of the West Riding woollen industry. 9 On the other hand, the micro-history of migration in the countyits scale, frequency, gender and age composition, and particularly the integration or exclusion experiences of migrants themselves -remains oddly neglected at a time when European scholars with interests in broad frameworks of insider/outsider and belonging/not belonging have been informing a renewed interest in the relations between migrants and their host communities. 10 The neglect is even more surprising when set against a further distinctive feature of the communities that constituted the West Yorkshire woollen textile area: an intense and enduring localism which was not in any sense diminished by the dilution of core family dynasties, short-term circulatory migration or even longer-distance immigration of individuals and families both from elsewhere in England and from further afield places such as Moravia, Ireland and Sweden. 11 This article, then, deals with the way in which migration and integration was understood and experienced in the large proto-industrial parish of Calverley-cum-Farsley between the intensification of proto-industrial production in West Yorkshire in the early 1800s, to the 1851 census. In particular it deals with the way in which the activities of women were important in breaking down ingrained structures of localism, allowing communities to adapt and reinvent themselves as migration increased. We turn first to the frameworks within which belonging and identity were constructed, understood and framed in this period and area.

Frameworks
Contemporary diarists, antiquarians and memorialists provide consistent evidence of intense and enduring localism for this area. In his retrospective book 12 on the township of Pudsey, which sat in the parish of Calverley-cum-Farsley, Joseph Lawson noted: Nearly all the young lads and lasses of Pudsey know each other by sight if not by name, though mostly, more especially if it is so in one's immediate neighbourhood, as an uptowner or down-towner … The people are hedged round in their own and the few neighbouring villages where it is customary to visit the annual feasts, or maybe Leeds or Bradford fairs, or to the last great show at Bradford, called "Bishop Blaize", where so many young couples went from their surrounding villages. But the people so seldom leave their homes, or their immediate localities, that narrow prejudices are fostered. 13 Cudworth's portrayal of nearby Idle (also a township in Calverley-cum-Farsley) paints a similar scene of an inward looking culture and social structure. He noted of the township that: No man of exalted rank or great wealth resided in the township, nor is there a giant manufacturer overtopping all of his neighbours … Probably in no place throughout the land is one man more fully equal to his neighbour … It might be added also that they are decidedly clannish … Whatever little status there is in Idle can only be acquired by lengthened residence and contact with the people. 14 As some historians have done subsequently, Cudworth linked the dilution of this culture of localism to the coming of powered factory establishments and the disruption of local labour market architecture that such enterprises encouraged. Thus, of the community of Farsley he suggested: 'The building of Sunnybank Mills in 1830 and 1836 marked an epoch in Farsley. Previous to that time a strong kinship had existed in the village and few that were not Farsley born lived, or perhaps could have existed, in it.' 15 Yet few contemporaries agreed with Cudworth's sense that localism declined over the nineteenth-century. Of the rapidly industrialising parish of Calverley as a whole, for instance, the antiquarian J. Horsfall Turner noted: The village of Calverley, approached by an avenue of well grown beeches, has remained unchanged for many years. The sturdy men of Calverley formed the guard of Stanhope at his election, but the village as a whole is enclosed in a small world and has few links with other villages aroundabouts except those that come for the parish church. 16 Indeed, Laura Price has argued that intense localism and suspicion of outsiders has been constantly reinvented in the area right up to the present day. 17 Reconciling these two divergent pictures of West Yorkshirea vibrant and rapidly growing woollen industry that stood alongside the cotton industry of Lancashire in providing the very heartbeat of the British Industrial Revolution and was crucially dependent upon the recruitment and circulation of migrant labour, versus an intense localism and associated structures of exclusion at the social and occupational levelis by no means easy. Some of the answers lie in the sponsorship of 'incomers' by large landowners or employers determined to develop their estates by implanting industrial employment in the countryside. 18 For others, kinship links, however tenuous, provided a way for migrants to gain acceptance in a new host community. 19 At a more systemic level, however, West Yorkshire communities must have had a variety of integration mechanisms that fostered the transmission and adoption of community memory and the absorption of some groups of migrants through multi-layered networks of belonging. This is not to suggest that the 'othering' of outsiders traced by Lawson, Cudworth and others did not happen, merely that the need to support industrial growth inevitably meant that it was selectively applied.
The rest of this article focuses on the way that women in particular could be crucial to the integration process. It uses autobiographical and antiquarian accounts of nineteenth-century Yorkshire communities, in particular Joseph Lawson's rendering of life in Pudsey in the 1830s, to analyse the key mechanisms by which women could (within their own lifetimes or inter-generationally) ensure the integration of their families into insular communities. These perspectives are explored and intertwined with a focus on the parish of Calverley-cum-Farsley for which a family reconstitution has been conducted and the results linked to records on landholding, inheritance, occupation, apprenticeship and poor relief. 20 Through this lens the article investigates the marriage strategies of migrant mothers for their sons and daughters and the wider process by which migrants sought to create fictive kin as a way of improving their socio-economic position. This analysis feeds directly into a wider discussion of the nature of work for migrants and migrant women in these communities and then into a consideration of the wider participatory networks which could inscribe belonging into the lives of migrants.

Socio-cultural mechanisms
Early oral history work and the analysis of gossip and neighbourhood networks in urban Britain have located women as the key players in community building and cohesion in the late-Victorian period, while the centrality of women to welfare networks is now well established. 21 Against this backdrop it is perhaps unsurprising, if poorly elaborated, that the ability of wives and daughters to navigate the local politics of belonging was crucial to the integration of migrant families in West Yorkshire. Nowhere is this more clearly demonstrated than in Joseph Lawson's retrospective account of life in Pudsey. His detailed and colourful book highlights three major areas in which migrant women could act to claim, maintain and exploit local belonging. The first was in terms of lending and borrowing networks. While the coming of proto-industry and the more voluminous circulation of small coinage from the later eighteenth century killed off the formal barter system as a means of making payments and created a notional market in everything from clothing to clocks, the day-to-day existence of families in West Yorkshire cloth making villages continued to depend heavily on co-operation. 22 Lawson notes that 'notwithstanding the occasional back-biting, tittle-tattle and ill-will' families in Pudsey and more widely 'borrow and lend almost anything in the house', from implements and clothing to food and tools. 23 Few families, he suggests, had all of the implements needed for washing clothes, making domestic clothing or for the crucial task of brewing. Of the latter we learn that: It requires an important plant … which costs too much for every poor family to have them all; hence few persons own a complete plant, so there is a deal of socialism or co-operation in connection with it in most neighbourhoods, some owning part and others part, each having their brewing days to suit the convenience of the rest.
Such co-operation involved the frequent movement of items, and 'one can scarcely go into a neighbourhood without seeing these articles carried from one house to another'. 24 Producing staple foods might also involve sharing networks. Making oatcakes, for instance involved the use of brick-built bakestones. While most houses had single stones, some had double or even triple facilities and 'On these sometimes the neighbours bake in turns, taking their meal tubs and coal to heat the bakstone'. 25 Since these ovens were expensive and difficult to build, one way to ensure integration into a community was to rent a house with such facilities. In turn, these lending and borrowing networks extended to the materials and tools for the production of everyday clothing. While buying 'off the peg' became rather more common by the end of the period covered here, for much of the nineteenth century cloth and clothing for re-making, thread, patterns and dyestuffs were communal as much as individual and familial resources. 26 Migrants with skills or a good stock of clothes for re-making were thus much more likely than others to find a ready engagement mechanism with natives in the West Yorkshire cloth producing communities.
Of course, understanding the real place of migrants within these lending and borrowing networks is complicated and Lawson, in common with other antiquarians, makes no rhetorical distinction in this sense between migrant and native. This reflects in part the difficulty of knowing what terms such as native and migrant might mean in a West Yorkshire redolent with extended kinship ties, but it also speaks to the limited terms of reference employed by early antiquarians. A detailed consideration of wills and probate inventories for the townships of Calverley-cum-Farsley up to 1800, however, provides a more direct route into this question. 27 Connecting such inventories with the family reconstitution reveals that definitive migrants 28 had a much greater stock of 'lendable' items at death coming into our period than was the case for those with rather firmer kinship links. This situation might reflect the fact that 'kin rich' family groupings were wealthier than other families in these communities and had less need to be involved in lending and borrowing, though Joseph Lawson's account of Pudsey would suggest otherwise. A more intuitive interpretation would be that migrant familiesfor which we might read migrant women given their centrality to the domestic environmentconsciously built up a stock of lendable items as a means of integration. The fact that the same families had more small debts owing to them at the time of death than was the case for native families points in the same direction. 29 A second mechanism by which migrant women might seek to navigate the local politics of belonging was through active participation in the celebratory culture that pervaded these communities. Lawson claimed that 'The hospitality of Pudsey people is well known' 30 and went on to describe a complex set of interlocking rituals and customary or personal celebrations running from fairs and feast days, through nuptial celebrations and to neighbourhood events. The feast days that declined so rapidly elsewhere in England remained a centrepiece of the celebratory culture of this area and Lawson suggests that most people in Pudsey 'invite and expect visitors at feast times'. In particular, 'what with the people staying at home, and so many outsiders coming into the village, there is a busy Pudsey tide'. 31 To be hospitable, in other words, was both expected and a means by which participatory credit could be accreted by migrant families. Since, according to Lawson, much business in terms of jobs, credit facilities and communication of stocks of knowledge was done at times of celebration, a warm welcome and open house could have a significant impact on perceptions of migrant families. Local marriages offered other opportunities in this vein since they were occasions for large groups of women to come together to talk about love, marriage, dowries and families. 32 As one antiquarian of the period noted in relation to West Yorkshire communities 'a good marriage celebration broke down the existing barriers relating to age or length of residence'. 33 Reconstructing the detailed integrative mechanisms generated by female involvement in celebratory culture is hampered by the fleeting nature of celebrations and the very general character of the records that flow from them. Drawing the canvas more widely to participatory culture, however, provides a more robust platform. While in southern rural England participatory culturebroadly office holding in the earlier nineteenth century but expanding as the century wore on to include contributions to civic life and membership of clubs and other organisationswas disproportionately the preserve of native and kin rich families, the situation could not be more different in industrial West Yorkshire. Here, linking of family reconstitution data for Calverley with membership and office holding lists, church lists and subscription lists shows clearly that migrants were disproportionately represented in participatory activities compared to broadly native families. 34 Moreover, women from migrant families were heavily over-represented compared to women from the native group. Participation, in other words, was valued by both migrants and the communities of which they were a part.
A final mechanism for navigating the local politics of belonging was the provision of services in the neighbourhood and locality. Such services might include nursing, laying out the dead, childcare, or even adoption. Indeed, it is notable that when the poor law of Calverley paid for nursing services the recipients of such payments were heavily and disproportionately first-generation migrant women or their adult children. 35 No service, however, was more important than the provision of reading and writing. Joseph Lawson was appalled by the low state of education in nineteenth century Pudsey. He saw a deliberate attempt by the powerful to block the education of the masses, suggesting that the ignorance he saw in Pudsey 'will apply to other villages, and most of the towns as well'. 36 He traced a picture in which 'Those who could write a little had often to go about borrowing materials to write a letter with; and one or two in a neighbourhood wrote the letters for the rest'. In similar fashion, reading was a communal affair in which one person would convey the contents of newspapers to larger groups. Such perspectives fit with a more general historiography on literacy which sees incremental improvement in measures such as an ability to sign one's name and the proportion of children attending school, through the early nineteenth century. 37 Yet the study of pauper lettersnarratives written to local welfare officials by those trying to negotiate reliefhas begun to reveal a very different picture. Considering the tens of thousands of such letters that have survived across the country suggests widespread, if highly functional, literacy and also the existence of a substantial group of neighbours, landlords, friends and younger kin members who wrote for the less literate. Nowhere is this clearer than in West Yorkshire, where more than 1.000 such surviving letters encompass dozens of series of correspondence in the same hand but ostensibly signed by different people. In Wortley, for instance, just five hands scribed the majority of the 86 letters surviving for the village. 38 In turn, to be literate was to be at the core of community concerns as the rise of the nineteenth-century information state required more and more written correspondence from ordinary people and the physical growth of communities made face-to-face communication more spasmodic than it had been in the past. 39 Scribes were not just the custodians of communal memory. Rather they were its creators. In this sense, it is important to observe that a comprehensive analysis of all surviving pauper letters (whether addressed to parishes, officials such as magistrates or to central government) in England and Wales for the period 1800-1880 points compellingly to much higher literacy levels among migrants than those who remained 'in their place'. Crudely, migrants, and migrant women in particular, were more literate because the very fact of movement meant that they had to be. While Joseph Lawson did not identify the scribes of nineteenth-century Pudsey, elsewhere in West Yorkshire the role of migrant women at the heart of epistolary communities is clear. 40

Marriage strategies and fictive kin
For those seeking belonging between, rather than within, generations, a 'right' marriage was important. 41 Joseph Lawson's picture of Pudsey is of an inward looking demographic culture. The people, he claimed 'seldom leave their homes or their immediate localities' such that 'narrow prejudices are fostered, and if one man goes from one part of the village to another to win a girl he is looked upon as an interloper by the young men there, and as a poacher on their preserve'. 42 Yet, such sentiments sit uneasily with family reconstitution data for Calverleycum-Farsley, of which Pudsey was a constituent part. Here, few of the children of in-migrants married each other rather than marrying into established parish families, thereby connecting themselves with long-ingrained local employment and neighbourhood networks. The price for this networking was (when all of the townships in the parish are aggregated) slightly higher ages at marriage for migrant than native children in each marriage cohort between the mid-eighteenth century and the 1820s, when upper truncation bias in the sample permits fewer and fewer observations of marriage events for birth cohorts. 43 Moreover, while the tracing of marriage ages is more difficult after 1837 given the deterioration in the quantity and quality of demographic evidence, taking people recorded as married in the 1851 census for both communities and working backwards into the family reconstitution data confirms that the children of first-generation migrants continued the earlier trend of marrying into longer established Calverley families. 44 Moreover, there was a clear spatiality to the marriage market, which at the very least extended to the next tier of surrounding parishes. 45 It was, in other words, possible to marry into native families and thereby to claim and lay down a sense of belonging to a place, with all that this meant for work, landholding and status.
This nuptial experience was intimately entwined with a tendency for the children of migrants to climb in occupational terms. For the whole period 1680-1837 a comparison of the occupational labels (defined by the balance of life-cycle occupation indicators from all sources rather than just a single occupational label recorded at marriage 46 ) claimed by the fathers of migrant children and those given by their sons or the men who married their daughters demonstrates that the children of migrants had a distinct tendency to either keep the occupation of their fathers where this was a high status trade such as clothier, or to improve on the father's trade where it fell into the low status 'waged textile' or 'waged other' categories. For the period 1780-1837 some 89 per cent of the daughters of first-generation migrants for whom we have evidence married men of equal or better occupational status than their fathers. Similarly, 74 per cent of the sons of firstgeneration migrants married women from the same or a better occupational category. By contrast the children of native families were more prone to downward occupational mobility. 47 Perhaps not unexpectedly given the centrality of work to income and status, the majority of children in migrant families consistently bettered the social and economic position of their parents. It is clear, in other words, that for Calverley and its townships the stable core of families was continually augmented by new blood from amongst the ranks of recent migrants. Where migrant families failed to prosper in these terms the experience was disproportionately focussed on whole sibships. Crudely, if one or two siblings from a family failed to climb, then they all tended to fail, a reflection perhaps of Joseph Lawson's observation that villages in the area had an inbuilt norm of clannishness. 48 We should be under no illusion as to the importance of women in this story of improving inter-generational social status via marriage. While historians of the family have broadly concurred that for much of the nineteenth century parental authority in terms of choice of marriage partner and conduct of courtship was weakened by urbanisation, industrialisation and the rise of youth culture, 49 the same observation cannot be made in the West Yorkshire industrial district as a whole. For Joseph Lawson: Married women with all their little gossip are very useful in getting the lads and lasses together. They plead their cause and help them to overcome many difficulties. They have a larger experience than the young folks, and perform both for them and society at large very important and beneficial service … In fact, it may be said, and said truly, that a very large share of the courting is done by the married women and even the old women do a large amount of work of this sort sometimes, for we know cases where matters of courtship have been made smooth and agreeable by the wise and shrewd diplomacy of some old woman'. 50 In a situation where sheer chance might have a considerable effect on whether and who young people married, the services of mothers were indispensable for both boys and girls. 51 The socio-cultural, work and alternative neighbourhood networks formed by women, not the work networks formed by men, were the key to inter-generational social advancement. While direct narrative evidence for the particular role of migrant mothers in the marriage process is almost impossible to come by, the outcomea systematic tendency for children in migrant families to marry into the establishmentpoints inexorably to such women exercising a central role in the marriage strategies of their children.
Marriage prospects, social advancement and community integration could also be underpinned by the seeking of 'voluntary' and 'fictive' kin -ties between individuals and families which stood on a par with kinship by blood and marriage and were described in the same manner and language. 52 These ties might be generated by contracts of employment (apprenticeships, domestic service), adoption, close neighbourly connections and customs of service and support which brought together individuals and families in a consistent family-like situation. For England, much of the analysis of fictive kin has focussed on individual families or novels, showing the potential rather than the community-wide reality of fictive kinship. 53 For Calverley-cum-Farsley a crude analysis of nineteenth-century census data provides an important interpretive framework. The 1811 census gives no data on the detailed structure of families, but by relating household numbers and sex composition (variables in the census) to the family reconstitution it is possible to compare what was recorded under these categories and what was theoretically possible or practically likely. The disparities are significant. Samuel Waite had a household of ten (four male and six female) but a maximum possible nuclear family of just six (three male and three female). Moreover, we know from other records that at least one of these people would have been a parish apprentice. Phoebe Earnshaw was apparently alone, but she should have had two illegitimate children living with her. By contrast, her brother John had a household of seven but could only have had a maximum likely nuclear unit of three. Instances such as this pepper the 1811 census and they suggest not only the possibility that Calverley families took on co-resident kin but that there were substantial numbers of other potentially voluntary/fictive kin as well. The evidence of the 1851 census provides explicit confirmation of these ideas. In Calverley, for instance, 31 per cent of household units contained lodgers or servants/apprentices, while some 32 per cent had co-resident kin. 54 Some households were notably complex, including for instance William Cordingly, who had a wife and his own children living alongside both a son and daughter-in-law and grandchildren, all of them recent in-migrants.
How far these sorts of co-residential arrangements fostered functional support for the integration aspirations of migrants is in one sense unclear. Nonetheless, several features of the data underpinning the family reconstitution are striking. Thus, the children of migrants were more likely than their native counterparts to be privately and parochially apprenticed. For the latter group, drawn from the very poorest strata of migrant families, it was usually women who undertook the negotiation with parochial authorities. Indeed, many such apprenticeships were actively instigated by migrant mothers, where for native families they tended to be imposed by parochial officers. In almost all cases of private apprenticeship, it fell to mothers to accumulate and guard the apprenticeship premium that was invariably required. 55 A second feature of the underlying data is that domestic servants in Calverley were more likely to emerge from migrant than native families. Wills for Calverley and surrounding townships point to frequent bequests for servants and ex-servants, confirmation that a present or historical contractual relationship could transform into one more resonant of fictive kinship and a mechanism by which social status might be improved between generations. This is significant for, as Lawson suggests, women were the key information brokers when it came to placing sons and daughters with families. 56 Finally, the practice of lodging was common, something revealed by the 1851 census at one end of our period but also more subtly for earlier periods in the witnessing of demographic events and leases, newspaper reporting and apprenticeship disputes. While it is tempting to think of such arrangements as a short-term measure associated with work and the gaining of financial independence from families of origin, this scenario was the least important driver of lodging. To be sure, some lodgers migrated as adults or young adults into Calverley, taking up lodging as a part of the process, while others lodged as a precursor to marriage. 57 Rather more numerous were individuals who lodged with others in the same neighbourhood as their nuclear family, those who were returning to the village of their birth, and individuals for whom lodging was a lifestyle choice rather than an expedient. Against this backdrop, migrant families were both more likely than native families to send children into lodging and to take lodgers from other families in the same community. Linking family reconstitution data to the 1851 census we can discern that 22 per cent first-generation migrant families had children lodging in Calverley (versus just 8 per cent of natives) and 29 per cent of migrant families had lodgers (versus 17 per cent of native families). First-generation migrant families were overrepresented in the hosting of aged relatives of native families as they returned or were returned 'home' after living elsewhere. This delegation of old age care by native families necessarily created a sense of voluntary kinship. In the sense that women dominated the allocation of resources in these West Yorkshire textile communities as elsewhere 58 the exploitation of fluid household structures and boundaries so as to facilitate integration and social advancement must be seen as an active strategy on the part of mothers in migrant families, alongside work and the other networks that are the focus of the rest of this article.

Work and networks
Joseph Lawson talks about men largely in the context of employment, markets and production, something consonant with the wider role of work in generating working class income and male identity. 59 The cloth makers who dominated industrial production in West Yorkshire 'are a hardworking resolute sort of folks', tied into dense extra-parochial networks of producers, suppliers, production and marketing. It would simply not have been possible as an artisan/yeoman clothier or a puttingout worker to have been unengaged with the wider business and occupational networks of the woollen district. Against this backdrop it is perhaps unsurprising that women have often been assigned a support role in male work or their independent work is portrayed as transient. 60 Lawson notes that the 1820s saw the development of a nascent cotton industry in Pudsey, where 'The weavers in some cases are men, but mostly women, girls and boys'. However, 'we soon see these cotton looms taken down, and in most cases hand looms for weaving woollen cloth [and worked by men] put in their places'. 61 Enclosure of the common fields and waste land is also usually supposed to have removed an important strand of the economy of makeshifts (keeping bees, selling wood, cutting turf or the processing of food from animals kept on the common), both undermining female contribution to household income and taking away some of the routes (in terms, for instance, of buying and selling) by which migrant women might seek to gain access to local networks. 62 While numerous studies have found women to be crucial to the economic viability of households both within and without the industrial districts, the fragility of female earning networks and a wider lack of evidence for their operation has meant that the integrative capacity of work and work networks has by default been seen as a male preserve. 63 For the West Yorkshire clothing villages, this perspective is misleading, with women in general and migrant women in particular playing four key roles in local labour market architecture. The first was in terms of the connective nature of the work that they did themselves. As Joseph Lawson notes, for much of the period up to the later nineteenth century Burling (the removal of imperfections from new fabric) was central to the marketability of cloth and it was an occupation for women and girls to do either in their own homes or, more frequent as the period progressed, in communal workshops. The work provided an important income stream for families in Calverley and it is notable that migrant women were disproportionately represented amongst the Burlers both where we have occupational snapshots that link to the underlying family reconstitution and in the 1851 census. Their ability to exploit these work opportunities to generate investable income might help to explain how migrant families came to accumulate a larger cache of lendable items than was the case for native families. Yet, Burling represented more than just 'work'. For Lawson, the 'burling sheds' increasingly emerging across the nineteenth century were a hotbed of both gossip and knowledge exchange, with the women collected in such facilities ranging daily over local topics from wealth and courtship to religious understanding and job opportunities across the cloth making sector in the local areas. 64 These sheds were the locus of communal memory and the site for the creation of new communal customs, a place where information was shared, good words were had and the trust relationships emerging out of participation in neighbourhood rituals and economies were cemented and utilised for the good of husbands, daughters, sisters, brothers, parents, and sons. In a situation where, even by the later nineteenth century, job advertisements were few and most positions filled by word of mouth, the Burling shed, and not the public house or the male-dominated putting out networks, were the key to integrative employment. 65 A second role for migrant women in particular lay in gaining access to dynastic occupational networks. The centrality of such kin-based networks for the development of industrial production in Calverley, most of which involved both horizontal and vertical integration of people across the occupational spectrum, is overwhelming. The family reconstitution is punctuated with cases like that of Abimelech Hainsworth, tenant of Cape Mill in Farsley during the early nineteenth century. Reconstructing his extensive actual kinship network reveals that he was in the upper reaches of a dynastic group that included two mill tenants (himself and a brother), eleven other clothiers, two large tenant farmers, two carriers, one whiteman and a joiner. It is hard to escape the inference that the nature and number of these occupations were linked together in a genuine occupational dynasty, though we must recognise the ambiguities of the term. William Cudworth commented on Hainsworth's pivotal role in the development of cloth production in the nineteenth century Calverley area and added that not until the mid-1830s when there was a significant run of new mill openings, were the dense kinship and occupational networks of this part of Calverley undone. 66 Elsewhere, dynastic occupational groups were very much a reality until the 1850s. A simple scanning of names and residence patterns in the 1851 census gives a general sense of the scale and importance of such dynasties, but linking this snapshot backwards into the family reconstitution suggests that 23 core dynastic groups dominated economic life in Calverley from the early nineteenth century. Evidence of how and why apprentices, migrants and natives were brought together to create and maintain such dynasties is of course sparse, but it is striking that (in common with other large occupational dynasties in the area) the Hainsworth marriage strategies were disproportionately focussed on the children of migrants. Given the centrality of women in fostering marriages, supporting the local lending and borrowing networks that might establish initial contacts and generating credit facilities for themselves and others, it is inconceivable that migrant mothers were not active in the bargains that sustained dynastic hierarchies.
Partly connected with the longevity of occupational dynasties, women in these West Yorkshire textile communities were also important agents for pushing the boundaries of pre-existing labour market architecture and product range. We have already seen that the work of women and girls underpinned attempts to create a cotton weaving sector in Pudsey, and while Lawson suggests that the enterprise ultimately failed, in other places cotton cloth production remained an important niche for women. This in turn tied them into rather wider, Lancashire-focussed, putting-out networks than their male counterparts working in wool. Mothers and daughters were also central to two important occupational developments within the woollen districts themselvesthe development of the shoddy (rag) trade and the rapid expansion of power loom weaving, both from the 1840s. 67 Power looms in particular changed the dynamics of cloth production, sending all but the most sophisticated handloom production (done by men) into terminal decline and facilitating an occupational structure in which 'girls can earn more money on the power-loom the year through, than the average hand-loom weaver could, and with much less exertion too'. 68 We might add to this picture the inexorable rise of the sewing machine and growth of associated (largely feminised) trades which, for several decades before such machines became associated with sweated labour, changed the occupational infrastructure in many woollen communities as recorded in the censuses of the 1880s. 69 For Lawson, the sewing machine 'has effected much good, both as used by families, and especially by dressmakers and tailors, as well as in the boot and shoe trade'. 70 In short, an early nineteenth century labour market architecture that was strongly orientated to male work shifted decisively to gain a much more variegated and feminised complexion from the 1840s. To integrate into the former structure involved, as we have seen, the intensive cultivation of local networks of marriage and belonging. By the later nineteenth century integration still involved this sort of activity but it also required a much more individualised engagement both with the labour market itself and with the new actors and networks that changes in occupational structures and associated local cultures empowered.
An increasingly important alternative network of this kind for both integration and work during the nineteenth century was that of nonconformity. Joseph Lawson was scathing about religious commitment in Pudsey, suggesting 'Many who went to chapel did not seem to like it, and were pleased when service was over. They did not appear to be as happy as those who stayed away'. Of the Church of England he was even more scathing noting that churches were rarely open and ale houses were seldom closed and that the established church had driven its congregations away. 71 Such perspectives sit uneasily with other evidence. By the opening of our period, the fifteen major townships that drove the cloth making industry between Leeds and Bradford hosted active Baptist, Unitarian, Presbyterian, Catholic, Moravian, Methodist and Congregationalist groups. 72 When the Methodist conference opened in Leeds on 2 August 1812, the diarist Joseph Rogerson noted: 'The conference at Leeds today; never saw more people go on this road for [it] yesterday and today in my life'. He went on to suggest (7 November 1812) that 'What few goes to chapel in these days while the Methodist place is crowded with hearers'. 73 Family reconstitution evidence for Calverley suggests that during the course of the nineteenth century, membership of nonconformist groups shifted quickly and decisively from a relatively narrow group of interrelated families to a much wider sub-group of the population. Literally hundreds of families seem to have flirted at least briefly with nonconformity, even if the bulk of their demographic registration history was either registered in Anglican registers or completely unregistered. 74 By the later nineteenth century, chapels were central to the leisure and personal lives of a significant cohort of people. For Calverley and the rest of the major cloth producing towns between Leeds and Bradford, the majority of employers were part of these networks and they in turn provided a way for members to subvert the localism of labour markets. It was much easier to move from one township or district to another under the sponsorship of a major employer or member of a nonconformist 'circuit'. While chapel life was not without its tensions, young men and women moving place for work could invariably call upon the resources and support of other believers in a de facto kinship network which might stretch across the entire woollen cloth area of West Yorkshire and even into Lancashire. The role of women in organising such nonconformist networks is now well established and the preponderance of migrant women amongst the membership provides some explanation for the fact that in family reconstitution data for Calverley, migrant families were both disproportionately likely to marry into established families and to have family members who left as young adults spread across a wider spatial range in the woollen districts than those native families. 75

Conclusion
In the period covered by this article, the woollen and worsted cloth industries of West Yorkshire were major drivers of national economic growth. The small villages here grew physically and demographically, filling up the countryside with domestic industrial units, workshops and eventually power loom factories. Such development was achieved in part by the transition of long-established families from agricultural to industrial production and by the emergence of a class of large clothiers and putting out merchants drawn from those with deep roots in these localities. The vibrancy of the West Yorkshire industry could not, however, have been sustained without the direct transplantation of capital, entrepreneurship and labour into the region and the movement of resources between different production centres. This basic logic sits uneasily with a widespread sense in the nineteenth century that cloth producing villages were insular and rejected strangers and new ways. To be sure, this insularity was less pronounced in 1880 than it had been in 1800. In a postscript to his magisterial survey of Pudsey, Joseph Lawson thanked the many people who had written letters to him 'for the true and faithful pictures given of Pudsey and its inhabitants in times long since passed away'. 76 Yet even in our own times many of these communities have come to be seen as closed to strangers.
Reconciling a picture of growth in significant part driven by the inward flow and circulation of resources with a supposed localism bordering on xenophobia, 77 involves a reconsideration of the role of women in general and migrant mothers in particular, in achieving the integration and advancement (often on an inter-generational basis) of their families. While much attention has been paid to the nature, determination and level of female wages both in absolute terms and in relation to their contribution to the family economy, it is possible to see these matters as a side issue in the story of the contribution of women to industrial development, certainly in the woollen districts. 78 The substantial family reconstitution and associated data deployed here portrays migrant women in particular as strategic players in the exploitation of the opportunities for integration afforded by neighbourhood lending and borrowing networks, participation in the celebratory culture of the woollen districts, apprenticeship markets, local credit and nonconformist networks, the marriage market and the nature of labour market architecture in cloth producing communities. Family reconstitution data, both in itself and linked to other records, demonstrates formidably that migrants were simultaneously successful in marrying into established family groupings and using nonconformist and other networks to achieve a wide physical spread of workers across the cloth districts. Native families in their turn were consistently augmented and regenerated by new blood from inmigrant families. It was this dynamic process of integration which explains the success and adaptability of cloth producers across West Yorkshire and also the picture of localism traced by antiquarians and others throughout the nineteenth century. Crudely, migrant women were successful because they adopted the cloaking of traditional attitudes and cultures, not because they challenged them. For those migrant families where mothers died or did not integrate, there is a compelling sense in which poverty, decline and re-migration followed. Such women, in other words, were key change agents in the West Yorkshire industry and its underlying cultures and communities.