Spinners and the Law: Regulating Yarn Standards in the English Worsted Industries, 1550–1800

The Worsted Acts, passed between 1777 and 1791, established semi-official industrial police forces in nearly a third of the counties of England, charged with detecting and prosecuting fraudulent reeling of worsted yarn by hand spinners. The Acts have been interpreted as the response of late eighteenth-century employers to new and growing problems of labour discipline associated with the putting-out system. But frauds by spin-ners in reeling yarn were not new. They had characterised the worsted industry since its rapid expansion began at the end of the sixteenth century. Over the subsequent two centuries, employers addressed the problem repeatedly. How they tackled it depended crucially on the way the different regional worsted industries were organised and on dramatic changes in the willingness and capacity of the state to regulate manufacturing. The Worsted Acts emerge as the product of a distinctive eighteenth-century approach to industrial regulation, reactive and particularistic, but bureaucratically innovative.


Introduction
Textiles dominated English manufacturing during the eighteenth century. Most were made by hand under the putting-out system. Embezzlement of materials by workers has long been recognised as one of the key shortcomings of putting-out. 'In the eyes of the employer', declared Ephraim Lipson in his 1921 history of the woollen and worsted industries, 'the most serious defect of the domestic [i.e. putting-out] system was the embezzlement of the raw material'. 1 In the 1970s Stephen Margolin went further, famously insisting that the chief incentive for employers to shift to centralised factory production during the Industrial Revolution was not the superiority of factory-based technologies, but the extent of embezzlement and associated problems of labour discipline under the putting-out system. 2 Of course, efforts by employers to control embezzlement by outworkers pre-dated the arrival of the factory late in the eighteenth century. Indeed, many historians have argued that the eighteenth century as a whole witnessed a progressive intensifi cation in the use of the criminal law to prevent embezzlement and similar frauds. They interpret new laws against embezzlement, enacted repeatedly by eighteenth-century Parliaments, as tools designed at the behest of employers to criminalise activities previously treated as breaches of trust, or to subject them to harsher penalties. The objective, it is argued, was either to confront problems of labour discipline that multiplied as the putting-out MORE  constructed primarily as an issue of enforcing penalties against employees? Second, how did industrial police forces established by several acts of the national Parliament, but restricted to one industry in certain counties, come to be accepted as a response to this problem that was not merely appropriate, but feasible? To answer the fi rst of these questions, we need to consider the longer-term history of industrial organisation in the worsted industries and the nature of the fi rm. How were the different stages of production, of which spinning was only one, coordinated and standards (qualitative and quantitative) controlled as materials passed from stage to stage? To answer the second, we need to consider the longer-term history of economic regulation and law making. What were the options for creating and enforcing offi cially endorsed rules for the worsted and other industries?
As we have seen, existing studies of the Worsted Acts have engaged principally with historical debates focused on the eighteenth century: debates about the role of labour discipline under the putting-out system in stimulating the transition to factory production and debates about the use of the eighteenth-century criminal law as a tool to transform popular customs into crimes. Examining false and short reeling across a longer period, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, obliges us to engage with a different set of debates, concerned with the impact of offi cial institutions -corporate, municipal and national -on early modern manufacturing. 10 The recent fl owering of this second set of debates refl ects, in part, the impact of the new institutional economics on early modern European economic history. Especially relevant for understanding false and short reeling is the transaction cost approach that has informed reassessments of the contribution made by guilds to economic progress and industrial innovation in medieval and early modern Europe. 11 In textiles, as in other industries, transaction costs were incurred as materials moved between different stages of production, whether those transfers took place within a fi rm or between different fi rms. Such transfers required checks on the standard to which the material had been worked at the previous stage. In an early modern world where materials were physically inconsistent, tools imprecise and workers variable in skill and dexterity, establishing those standards and ensuring they were upheld was costly. 12 However, recent debates about the impact of institutions on early modern manufacturing also expose dissatisfaction with the new institutionalists' narrow focus on economic effi ciency. An alternative approach, drawing on the economics of conventions, emphasises the importance of the tacit norms and rules -the shared conventionsthat constitute and legitimate markets. The focus here is cultural, social and political. How were shared notions of quality constituted by participants in different kinds of product market? How was trust in quality generated along supply chains? When and how did these shared 'quality covenants' secure offi cial endorsement? 13 The productcentred character of this approach is particularly valuable for the study of false and short reeling, alerting us to the way a product's material characteristics can shape the organisation and co-ordination of its manufacture. 14

False and Short Reeling
False and short reeling were frauds committed by hand spinners. The worsted industries were distinguished by their use of long-staple, combed wool. Spinning was one of a John Styles number of production processes to which the raw wool was subjected on its way to becoming worsted cloth. It differed from the other stages of production in a number of respects. Worsted spinning was mainly undertaken on an outwork basis by employees on piece rates, predominantly women (although in some of the poorer upland agricultural areas of north-west Yorkshire the proportion of men in the spinning labour force could be as high as a quarter 15 ). The numbers employed in spinning far outnumbered those employed in the other processes in the industry. It was estimated in 1774 that in the Yorkshire industry spinners outnumbered woolcombers and weavers (the principal male occupations in the worsted industry) by more than three to one. 16 As a consequence of this numerical imbalance, spinning work extended geographically far beyond the confi nes of those areas of male employment which historians have conventionally defi ned as the worsted manufacturing regions. By 1790 worsted manufacturers in the Bradford-Halifax area of the West Riding of Yorkshire were putting out spinning forty to fi fty miles away, both in mid-Cheshire to the south-west and in Swaledale to the north, and almost as far afi eld in other parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire. A century earlier, it was claimed that the Norwich worsted industry drew its yarn supplies from similar distances across the counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire and the Isle of Ely. 17 Putting wool out to be spun at any distance from the manufacturer's base involved the employment of agents, often shopkeepers, to distribute the wool in the spinning localities.
The many different varieties of worsted cloth required yarns of a wide range of fi neness. The coarser the yarn, the easier it was to spin. Hence coarser spinning commanded lower piece rates. The combed wool used in making worsteds was sorted according to the fi neness of spinning required and was then delivered out by weight. The particular standard of fi neness to which the yarn was to be spun was specifi ed in terms of the length of yarn to be produced from each pound weight of wool. It had been usual from at least the sixteenth century for worsted spinners to return the yarn reeled into set lengths, known as hanks or skeins. 18 The length of a hank was expressed as a fi xed number of coils or revolutions (known as threads) on a reel of a particular size.
Reeling could be performed in a number of ways. The simplest and cheapest form of reel commonly used by spinners was the reel staff. 19 It consisted of a wooden rod half the length of the standard thread, equipped with cross bars at each end to hold the yarn (Fig. 2). These were already familiar implements during the later Middle Ages. 20 Circular, revolving reels mounted on an axle were faster, but more expensive. The functionality of revolving reels could be further enhanced by devices to signal or count the number of revolutions, driven by gears from the axle. Snap or jersey reels made a sound after a certain number of revolutions, while clock reels had a clock-like face with a pointer indicating the number of threads reeled (Fig. 3). In addition, markets where yarn was sold might be equipped with fi xed reeling devices. It was claimed in 1616 that in every market town in Norfolk 'a paire of iron pinnes were driven into a post at half a yearde distance, for measuringe the said yearne'. 21 The different worsted industries and districts used reels of different sizes and hanks of different numbers of threads. 22 These local standards were said to be customary and appear to have pre-dated formal codifi cation. In the eighteenth-century Yorkshire worsted industry, for example, the reel was usually one yard in circumference and 560 threads (or 560 yards) constituted a hank. The number of such hanks in a pound of yarn provided a measure or 'count' of the fi neness of the yarn. The types of yarn required by a Yorkshire manufacturer of shalloons in the late eighteenth century ranged from counts as low as eighteen hanks to the pound to as high as thirty-six hanks to the pound. The rate paid in Yorkshire in the early 1770s for spinning yarn at twenty-four hanks to the pound was approximately 25 per cent higher than that for eighteen hanks to the pound. 23 False and short reeling were technically separate frauds, although most offenders were convicted for the two jointly. False reeling involved the yarn being defi cient in the number of threads, although reeled on a reel of the standard size. Short reeling involved the yarn being reeled on a reel of less than the standard circumference. 24 Thus in southwest Lancashire in 1785, Betty Dagnell, wife of a Prescot labourer, was convicted for reeling a hank of worsted yarn short by 35 yards (6 per cent), although reeled 'on a reel of a proper gauge', while Ellen Atherton, a widow from nearby Huyton, was convicted on the same day for reeling a hank short by 15 yards (3 per cent) 'on a reel of an under gauge'. 25 In practice, both offences involved the spinner producing yarn shorter than that specifi ed by the manufacturer. By these methods, the spinner could take advantage of her employer in at least two ways. She could appropriate some of the wool delivered to her to spin, or reduce her workload by producing yarn of a coarser and therefore less demanding count than that paid for, or she could benefi t by some combination of the two.  False and short reeling were activities confi ned neither to the worsted industry nor to the eighteenth century. Given that the value of yarn varied in all the textile industries according (at least in part) to the fi neness to which it was spun, the potential for this kind of deceit existed wherever yarn was the object of a commercial transaction. This was true irrespective of whether that transaction was between the spinner and an employer who paid her a wage to work up raw material that remained his property, between an independent spinner who owned the raw material she worked up and a customer to whom she sold the fi nished yarn, or between a yarn dealer who carried a stock of yarn supplied by others and a manufacturer who bought that yarn to make up into cloth.
In none of these transactions was the deceitful supply of false and short reeled yarn treated as simple theft under English law. Even where the spinner deceitfully worked up materials that remained the property of her employer with the aim of keeping part for herself, the fraud could not be tried on indictment as larceny at Quarter Sessions or the Crown Side of Assizes, in contrast to most thefts. This was because it was a general rule of English common law that larceny could not be committed by those to whom possession of the goods in question had been legally transferred by their owner, as was the case under the putting-out system. The primary legal remedy in such a case was an action for damages in the civil courts, just as it was when fraudulent yarn was sold deceitfully. However, a civil action was not always practical. It was one thing for a large manufacturer to use cumbersome and costly civil court procedures to remedy a bulk purchase of defective yarn from a yarn merchant, but it was a different matter altogether for a small weaving master to go to court to secure damages against a poor spinner who kept back a few ounces of wool worth only pence. Between the later Middle Ages and the end of the eighteenth century, Parliament provided, therefore, a succession of statutes, including the Worsted Acts, to enable cases between employers and outworkers accused of embezzling materials to be submitted to cheap and accessible summary adjudication by Justices of the Peace. 26 Insofar as false and short reeling was an issue in the relationship between employer and employee during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it was, to a peculiar extent, associated with the worsted industry. The problem of false and short reeled yarn was also widespread in the linen industry. However, most of the yarn used in commercial linen manufacturing was imported, especially from the eastern Baltic and later from Ireland. Moreover, much English-spun linen yarn was produced not by waged workers, but by independent spinners working fl ax they had grown or purchased themselves into yarn to sell. In these circumstances, illegality arose from the spinner putting fraudulent yarn on sale, not from any breach of her employment contract under the putting-out system. 27 False and short reeling of cotton yarn became an important issue in Lancashire in the middle years of the eighteenth century, when pressure on yarn supplies became acute and the range of cotton and semi-cotton fabrics was fast expanding. In the cotton industry, however, the false and short reeling issue was quickly resolved after the 1760s by the rapid shift from hand-spun to jenny-and frame-spun yarn. 28 The absence of expressions of concern about false and short reeling is more perplexing in the case of the woollen industry, which employed short-staple, carded wool. In many of its branches, spinning had been organised along putting-out lines since the Middle Ages. Woollen cloth manufacturers were much exercised about frauds by outwork spinners from the early sixteenth right through to the later eighteenth centuries, but their main concern was embezzlement of the raw wool rather than defects in the quality of the yarn. 29 Piece rates for spinning short-staple wool were often paid according to the weight of yarn spun rather than its precise count (although some account was John Styles usually taken of the fi neness of the spinning), in contrast to worsteds where piece rates were almost always paid according to the count of the yarn. 30 The main reason for the difference was probably the nature of the product. Woollen cloth, unlike many worsteds, was fulled to provide a raised nap. The individual threads were not visible in the fi nished cloth. Consequently, the yarn's twist and softness could be more important for the fi nal appearance of a woollen cloth than the exact fi neness and consistency of the spinning (Fig. 4). Moreover, the short staple wool used in the production of woollens was often put-out to be both spun and carded by the same person or family. Together these processes involved wastage and oiling, both of which could be manipulated to conceal embezzlement. The long-staple, combed wool used in worsteds was delivered to the spinners already combed and oiled, and could not be manipulated in the same way (or at least to the same extent). In addition, pure worsteds were not fulled, so the individual yarns remained visible in the surface of the woven fabric, rendering the look of the fi nished product highly dependent on the precise fi neness and consistency of the spinning (Fig. 5). Even in lightly fulled semi-worsteds like bays and serges, with a worsted warp and a woollen weft, the individual yarns were often visible.

Industrial Organisation and Regulatory Repertoire: The Seventeenth Century
It was in the worsted manufacture, therefore, that false and short reeling by outworkers occasioned the longest-standing and most vocal anxiety among employers and users of yarn. This was true from soon after the establishment of the 'new draperies' employing combed wool during the later sixteenth century, until the very rapid demise of handworsted spinning in the years after the introduction of power spinning at the end of the eighteenth century. 31 Far from conforming to a conventional image of pre-industrial stasis and immobility, the hand worsted industries that fl ourished from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries comprised one of the country's most dynamic industrial sectors, especially in terms of exports. 32 They were geographically mobile and regionally diverse. Neither their organisation nor their location remained constant during this long period. Both infl uenced the character and control of false and short reeling.
Although the production of various kinds of worsted and semi-worsted fabric became widespread in England during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were four principal core weaving areas -Norwich (with north-east Norfolk), Essex (with parts of south Suffolk), Devon (with parts of west Somerset) and the West Riding of Yorkshire (with parts of east Lancashire). 33 These areas served distinct markets, produced particular types of cloth, and prospered at different times. The Norwich industry grew very rapidly from the late sixteenth century and continued growing, with some setbacks, until the mid-eighteenth century. It concentrated on high quality all-worsteds and worsted-silk mixes, and was largely unchallenged in this specialism by any other branch of the domestic worsted industry (with the exception of manufacturers in the Spitalfi elds district of London) until the later eighteenth century. 34 The Essex industry also grew rapidly from the late sixteenth century, fl ourished until the early eighteenth century, and then went into an uneven and protracted decline that lasted until the end of the eighteenth century. It specialised in middle and low quality all-worsteds and wool-worsted mixes, particularly bays and says. 35 The Devon-Somerset industry also concentrated on middle quality wool-worsted mixes, especially serges. It underwent a very rapid expansion in the second half of the seventeenth century, and an equally rapid decline in the fi rst half of the eighteenth century. By the end of the eighteenth century it had virtually disappeared. 36 In the West Riding, the industry developed only from the start of the eighteenth century, initially producing middle and low quality cloths like bays and shalloons, in competition with Essex and other smaller centres in the South and the Midlands (especially Kettering in Northamptonshire). It grew rapidly through the century, moving into higher quality all-worsted fabrics after 1750 and eventually leading the transition to factory spinning. 37 These areas differed in the way spinning was organised and integrated with the other production processes. Of the worsted districts that fl ourished in the seventeenth century, it was in Norwich and in Essex that false and short reeling emerged as a major issue. Frauds by spinners in the zone supplying yarn to the booming Devon and West Somerset serge industry in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries did not excite much comment. A petition to Parliament from Taunton in Somerset initiated the process leading to the fi rst embezzlement Act to include general provisions against false and short reeling in 1703. 38 However, the Taunton petition was concerned with apprenticeship. It is likely that the initiative to include false and short reeling in the Act came John Styles not from the West Country, but from Norwich. Embezzlement provisions, including those for false and short reeling, were added only once the Taunton petition was under consideration by a parliamentary committee comprised mainly of MPs from other areas, including Norwich. False and short reeling of yarn destined for the Norwich worsted industry had in the 1690s been the subject of a failed parliamentary bill and an accompanying pamphlet war, in which corporal and other punishments were demanded for offending spinners. 39 The lack of engagement with false and short reeling in the West Country probably refl ected the area's focus on serges, semi-worsteds often with a napped surface that hid the yarn, and its reliance on large quantities of worsted yarn from Ireland, where there was legislation in 1733 to prevent false and short reeling of worsted yarn intended for export to Great Britain. 40 Spinning for the Norwich and Essex industries was organised in contrasting ways from the late sixteenth century. Both were characterised by fi rms run by master manufacturers employing workers, often on a putting-out basis, but the Norwich industry was vertically disintegrated, with a division between the enterprises that undertook weaving and the enterprises that undertook woolcombing and spinning. The Norwich manufacturers drew yarn from large areas of East Anglia and the Fens. Woolcombing was undertaken in Norwich itself and in various centres within the spinning areas (such as Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk). The combed wool was put out to spin by a multiplicity of master woolcombers and yarnmasters. The fi nished yarn was then transported to Norwich and sold to the master weavers there. Until the middle years of the eighteenth century, Norwich weaving was dominated by men with fairly small capital, employing perhaps half a dozen journeymen. In 1719 there were said to be about fi ve hundred master weavers in Norwich. 41 The advantage of vertical disintegration for the Norwich industry probably lay in the immense and fast-changing range of high-quality fabrics the city produced, requiring a corresponding diversity of yarns. In 1611, Norwich stuffs were already being described as being 'of infi nite varietie of sortes, fi gures, coullors and prices'. The need for constant innovation was stressed: 'our trade is most benefi tted by o[u]r new inventions and the varyinge of o[u]r stuffes which is contyn[ually] profi table'. 42 Specialist yarn suppliers were better placed to meet fl uctuating demand for a multiplicity of yarn specifi cations than vertically integrated manufacturing fi rms employing their own spinners. 43 However, vertical disintegration risked raising transaction costs by relying on the market rather than direct supervision to coordinate the supply of yarn -a key intermediate good -and by dividing the supervision of standards between separate businesses with potentially confl icting interests.
In Essex, by contrast, where the range of worsteds produced was narrower and more consistent, there was a much stronger tendency for fi rms to be vertically integrated, to be more heavily capitalised and to employ larger numbers of workers. The worsted industry in the various weaving towns -Colchester, Bocking, Braintree, Sudbury, Coggeshall and Halstead -was dominated by a relatively small number of large manufacturers who employed the combers and weavers, and put wool out to be spun in the Essex countryside. K. H. Burley estimates that by the early eighteenth century at Colchester, the principal centre of the Essex industry, there were between fi fty and a hundred manufacturers employing on average between sixteen and twenty-six weavers each, as well as many more combers, spinners and fi nishers. 44 False and short reeling became an object of complaint by employers in the Essex and the Norwich industries early in their development, as pressure on the supply of spinning labour rapidly increased. By the early seventeenth century both were seeking offi cially sanctioned regulation. To what extent this involved new forms of control is diffi cult to assess, as it is far from clear precisely what remedies putting-out employers in general already had against frauds by their employees. Given the looseness with which statutes providing summary penalties against idle and disorderly behaviour among the labouring poor appear to have been applied by the Justices of the Peace, in practice employers may sometimes already have had punitive sanctions readily available to them. 45 Even if this were true, however, worsteds in both Norwich and Essex at this period were emerging industries in which manufacturers evidently felt a need for new, less ambiguous means of control.
What is most striking about the forms of offi cial regulation sought by employers in the two industries at this early period is the extent to which they differed. The response of the Essex manufacturers to false and short reeling was through parliamentary legislation. They inserted into an Act of 1609 against embezzlement by workers in the woollen industries a clause specifying dimensions for reeling and making false and short reelers liable to the same penalties as workpeople who embezzled materials. 46 Unlike the rest of the Act, this clause applied only to yarn supplied to worsted manufacturers in six named towns in Essex. The Act provided for summary adjudication of such cases by magistrates, for recompense to be paid to the employer and for corporal punishment of offenders who were unable to make recompense. The latter appears to have been the key provision, as the Act claimed that offenders were 'poor and altogether unable to make recompence or satisfaction'. 47 Because the Essex manufacturers ran vertically integrated fi rms, employing the women who spun their wool, it was necessary that any new controls should bear directly on the spinners. Moreover, if those controls were to involve corporal punishments, it was important they should be established by statute, because by the early seventeenth century it was increasingly held to be unacceptable to impose such punishments through other forms of quasi-legislative enactment, such as royal proclamations, charters or guild ordinances. At Colchester, the industry was organised into companies or guilds dominated by the master manufacturers -the Dutch and English companies -chartered by the borough authorities and subsequently, in the case of the Dutch corporation, by an Act of Parliament in 1660. 48 Similar guilds appear to have existed in other Essex weaving towns. 49 The Colchester companies had powers to make by-laws and search for faulty work within the borough and liberty of Colchester, but spinning extended out into the Essex countryside, far beyond Colchester's boundaries. The 1609 Act of Parliament provided worsted manufacturers in Colchester and the other Essex weaving towns unambiguous powers to prosecute and punish false and short reeling by spinners who worked for them anywhere in the county.
The options available to the Norwich master weavers were different. Two characteristics of the economic and institutional environment in which they operated enabled them to concentrate their efforts on the sellers of defective yarn rather than on the spinners themselves. The fi rst was the vertically disintegrated organisation of the Norwich industry, the second the wide range of options available in seventeenth-century England for making, enforcing and securing the state's endorsement of industrial regulation. The price the industry paid as the master weavers exploited these options was chronic tension between its two principal stakeholders -the weavers and the yarn suppliers.
The Norwich weavers bought yarn from the master woolcombers and yarnmakers who employed spinners in the countryside in Norfolk, Suffolk and beyond. So insofar as the quality of yarn was a problem that required remedy, they had the option of dealing with it by policing the sale of yarn by the master woolcombers and yarnmakers, unloading the responsibility for control of the spinning workforce on to them. Throughout the period of rapid growth of the Norwich worsted industry during the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the city's master weavers were organised in a succession of companies, some authorised by statute and others by municipal authority, culminating in an Act of the Interregnum Parliament giving extensive powers to a reconstituted worsted weavers' company in 1650, renewed after the Restoration by an Act of 1662. 50 These successive weavers' companies enjoyed powers to regulate standards in the industry, including powers to search for faulty work and secure forfeitures and fi nes. Prior to 1700, searches, forfeitures and fi nes of this sort did not have to be authorised by parliamentary legislation. 51 To ensure the quality of yarn put up for sale, the city's weavers drew on several different kinds of offi cial rule-making. In 1617, for example, the worsted weavers' company secured a Privy Council order to confi rm the authority it already enjoyed under a city ordinance to regulate sales of defective yarn. Subsequently, the same powers were incorporated into the Acts of Parliament of 1650 and 1662. 52 In the course of the seventeenth century, the weavers repeatedly used their powers of search and forfeiture against woolcombers and yarnmasters from Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Cambridgeshire who supplied defective yarn to Norwich. Searches were undertaken mainly as yarn was brought into the city or put on public sale there. The woolcombers and yarnmakers responded by challenging the weavers in the higher courts, petitioning the Privy Council and Parliament, opposing the weavers' company legislation of 1650 and 1662. In 1693, they even tried to persuade Parliament to incorporate them by statute into a woolcombing and worsted yarn company. They argued that the number of spinners was huge and that it was physically impossible to check all the yarn received from spinners before it was sold. They claimed that disciplining the spinners by dismissing them was not effective because they could always fi nd work with another master. The Norwich weavers replied that the master woolcombers and yarnmakers in fact connived at the spinners' frauds, that false and short reeling was easily prevented by checking the yarn, and that the woolcombers and yarnmakers should secure legislation to punish offending spinners similar to the Act obtained in 1609 by the Essex manufacturers. 53 The terms of this dispute are revealing of the ambiguity of employers' attitudes to false and short reeling. Attitudes to this and other kinds of fraud by workers were not uniformly or consistently hostile. 54 Nor was the use of the law the obvious control technique of fi rst resort. Employers' attitudes to these offences and their responses to them varied according to the structure of the industry and the state of the product and labour markets. The Norwich weavers may have been correct to argue that the master woolcombers and yarnmakers could have checked at least some of the yarn, but the latter were also right to emphasise that, in an industry where numerous spinning masters were involved in intense competition for labour, the threat of dismissal or even prosecution would harm not the deceitful spinner but the master. The tightness of the spinning labour market in East Anglia is illustrated by the long-term expansion of spinning for the Norwich industry into the north of England in the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. 55 The pressures on the master woolcombers and yarnmakers to tolerate false and short reeling were reinforced by the organisational divide between the weaving and the spinning branches of the industry. The master woolcombers and yarnmakers did not have to confront the problems poor quality yarn could create for weaving, and there is little doubt that checking all the yarn would have been cumbersome. As long as demand was such that false and short reeled yarn found a ready sale, there was little incentive for them to control the fraud. Indeed, the ubiquity of false and short reeling suggests that it was often tolerated.

Industrial Organisation and Regulatory Repertoire: The Eighteenth Century
The seventeenth-century experience is important because it illustrates how the choice of different strategies to control a particular type of fraud by industrial workers could be infl uenced by differences in the structures of the industries concerned. Not that these were the only infl uences at work shaping the choice of strategy. The character of the machinery for securing the state's authority for regulation was also crucial. In the seventeenth century, parliamentary legislation enjoyed some advantages over other forms of offi cial rule making, especially with regard to punishments, but before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 Parliaments did not necessarily meet every year. When they met, it was often only for a few months at a time, and sessions were liable to be suddenly and unpredictably cut short by prorogations or dissolutions. These were real obstacles to using Parliament to enact industrial regulation. In 1621, the Privy Council redirected a petition from weavers of worsted, baize, says, stuffs and fustians in Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex to Parliament. The purpose was to secure an Act that would (among other things) have imposed punishments on spinners convicted of false and short reeling before a Justice of the Peace. It was 'well approved of by the whole house of Parliament, yet by reason of the suddaine dessolucon of the said Session, nothing was done therein'. 56 Parliament met during only four of the next eighteen years and provisions of the kind the weavers sought were not enacted until 1703.
Before 1640 these obstacles to parliamentary legislation did not represent a fundamental weakness in government because the Privy Council was the leading executive and administrative body of the kingdom and could in effect legislate by means of royal proclamations, patents and charters. Although in theory parliamentary statute was superior, in practice Parliament often operated as an auxiliary to the Privy Council. After 1660, the powers of Privy Council were dramatically curtailed and Parliament, to some extent, fi lled the vacuum. But it was only after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that Parliaments invariably met annually and on a regular pattern, almost never for less than four months and sometimes for as many as six. One effect of this change was to create a vast new capacity for parliamentary legislation, including economic legislation, but a capacity that could only be used for those modes of regulation that Parliament and the courts found palatable. 57

John Styles
While Parliament's capacity to make law was expanding at the expense of other modes of legislating, the range of alternative institutions available to regulate manufacturing was rapidly narrowing. Numerous attempts were made during the seventeenth century to enforce standards and regulate quality in the different branches of textile manufacturing, mainly by establishing guilds of clothiers and master manufacturers for particular types of cloth in particular areas, either by royal charter or by Act of Parliament. 58 These attempts were only intermittently successful, but they came to an end after the Glorious Revolution, with the curtailment of the royal prerogative and the ascendancy of political and legal attitudes hostile to corporate privilege. The Witney blanket weavers' company of 1711 was the last new guild chartered to regulate all aspects of production in a local textile industry. At the same time, and probably not coincidentally, pre-existing manufacturing guilds went into decline. 59 In worsteds, the Colchester Bay Hall corporation ceased functioning in the 1720s. 60 The Norwich weavers' company appears to have ended its activities in the same decade. A new body, the Committee of Trade, which had emerged at Norwich by 1736, had no offi cial status. A private association of manufacturers dedicated to lobbying in defence of the city's worsted industry, it exercised none of its predecessor's supervisory functions. 61 In Yorkshire, of course, worsted manufacture became well established only in the early eighteenth century, so a chartered corporation to regulate the industry on seventeenth-century lines was not an option. The Yorkshire industry, like the Essex industry, was dominated by vertically integrated fi rms, but, by the second half of the century, was noted for its very large number of master manufacturers. False and short reeling fi rst became a matter of public complaint in the industry in 1764, at the end of a period of rapid growth in the later years of the Seven Years War. 62 The chronology appears to be broadly similar to that in East Anglia one hundred and fi fty years earlier.
Concern with false and short reeling arose once the industry had grown large enough for there to be acute spinning labour shortages during phases of industrial prosperity. However, it also refl ected a shift after 1750 away from the coarser, simpler fabrics, especially shalloons, characteristic of Yorkshire worsteds earlier in the century, towards higher-quality fabrics, such as calamancoes, russels, everlastings, tammies and fi gured stuffs, requiring better quality yarns. 63 In a vertically integrated industry, manufacturers experienced these problems directly. False and short reeling were becoming increasingly diffi cult to prevent, at the same time as they impeded efforts to move up the quality ladder.
By the 1750s, the legal position of false and short reeling had changed from that of the seventeenth century. A clear-cut body of statute law, national in scope, existed for prosecuting the offence. The Act of 1703 made false and short reeling, along with embezzlement by outworkers, a specifi c summary offence wherever it took place, liable to a fi ne equivalent to double damages, or fourteen days' hard labour in the House of Correction and a whipping if unable to pay. 64 Subsequently, an Act of 1749 permitted false and short reelers, like other embezzlers, to be subjected to a period of fourteen days' hard labour in a House of Correction and a whipping, without any option of a monetary payment. 65 The 1749 Act was promoted by Norwich worsted manufacturers, who were still exercised about the quality of their yarn supply, but its main target was receivers of embezzled materials in Norwich itself.
The master woolcombers and yarnmakers of Norfolk and Suffolk undertook sporadic prosecutions for false and short reeling under this new legislation during the 1750s, stimulated in part by the example of an intense campaign in Norwich itself against other aspects of embezzlement undertaken by the city's manufacturers between 1751 and 1754. 66 By contrast, in 1764 a group of well-connected Yorkshire manufacturers and merchants, with a strategic interest in regional economic development, embarked on a much more ambitious and innovative campaign against false and short reeling. To enforce the law, they established a private association of manufacturers, funded by subscription, reminiscent of the associations for the prosecution of felons which became widespread in the second half of the eighteenth century. 67 Unlike most associations for the prosecution of felons, the manufacturers' subscription paid not only the cost of prosecutions, but also the salaries of at least two inspectors whose job was to detect offenders. 68 The number of prosecutions was relatively small (the York Courant reported eighteen convictions in 1764 and 1765, almost certainly only a fraction of the total), but the private, salaried industrial police force was a signifi cant innovation.
Precisely where the idea of an inspectorate came from is not clear. Before the eighteenth century, the word most widely used to describe guild offi cials who checked for faulty work was 'searcher'. The word 'searcher' continued to be used in this sense in eighteenth-century parliamentary legislation. The Yorkshire worsted manufacturers must have been familiar with the salaried searchers in the West Riding woollen industry, appointed under statute by the West Riding Quarter Sessions to check the dimensions of broad and narrow cloths at fulling mills. 69 In 1764, however, local industrial precedents were lacking for the use of the word 'inspector'. Yorkshire worsted manufacturers' decision to use the term suggests familiarity with the inspectors employed by the Board of Trustees of the Linen and Hempen Manufactures of Ireland after 1719 and the Scottish Board of Trustees for Fisheries and Manufactures after 1748, in each case specifi cally to search for badly spun and improperly reeled linen yarn offered for sale. 70 The Scottish example was probably the more infl uential. Whereas the Irish Board of Trustees dismissed all but one of its inspectors in 1757, the Scottish Board appointed additional yarn inspectors in 1761, just three years before the Yorkshire initiative, and launched a new and very public campaign against the sale of short and falsely reeled yarns. 71 In 1768, only four years after inspectors were fi rst appointed in Yorkshire, the master woolcombers and yarnmakers who employed worsted spinners in East Anglia adopted the Yorkshire model of an inspectorate funded by subscription. The result, as in Yorkshire, was a marked increase in the number and consistency of convictions for false and short reeling, with eighteen reported in the Norwich Mercury in 1769 and twenty-seven in 1770 (compared with one in 1766 and none in 1767). However, the vertically disintegrated structure of the Norwich-based industry persisted and with it tensions between weaving employers and spinning employers. The new East Anglian inspectorates were established by the woolcombers and yarnmakers because the Norwich weaving manufacturers who bought their yarn insisted on it. 72 By the mid-eighteenth century, the capacity of the Norwich manufacturers, now organised in their unoffi cial committee, to impose their will on the East Anglian woolcombers and makers of yarn was probably greater than it had been in the seventeenth century. It was bolstered by their increasing use of Irish yarn, which by the 1770s comprised about a sixth of the city's yarn consumption. 73

John Styles
The introduction of inspectorates in East Anglia in 1768 marked the beginning of a sustained campaign in the region against false and short reeling. It was to last until the demise of hand spinning at the start of the nineteenth century. This campaign was not a response to labour shortages and associated problems of labour discipline. Essex worsteds were already in long-term decline, while the Norwich industry was no longer expanding. Nor was the campaign indicative of some wholly new concern to eliminate perquisites. It can be better explained in terms of a shift in the balance of power between the weaving sector of the industry and the spinning sector, brought about by the increased use of Irish yarn, by the adoption of the new, more systematic policing technique borrowed from Yorkshire and perhaps by an increased capacity for concerted action as the Norwich trade became increasingly dominated by a small group of large merchant-manufacturers in the second half of the eighteenth century.
So successful was the inspectorate system in East Anglia that in 1774 Norwich, Norfolk and Suffolk MPs secured the passage of an Act reducing the corporal and custodial penalties for false and short reeling to a relatively small (5s) fi nancial forfeiture for the fi rst offence. 74 The preamble to the Act explained this reduction was necessary because the severity of the existing penalties had discouraged prosecutions and deterred honest, industrious people from spinning. The timing also suggests adaptation to a broader national trend which saw public corporal punishment completely abandoned between 1750 and 1800 for female criminals. 75 In effect, this Act completed a process whereby severe punishments imposed in terroram were replaced by much more systematic enforcement of milder penalties by inspectors.
In Yorkshire, meanwhile, the inspectorate system began to run into diffi culties in the late 1760s and early 1770s. The Yorkshire industry continued to grow (albeit in fi ts and starts) and used little Irish yarn. Pressure on local yarn supplies increased. Given this was an industry with a 'great number of . . . master manufacturers and the rivalship consequential thereon', there was a considerable temptation for some manufacturers to break ranks, leave the subscription which funded the inspectors, and attract spinning labour by tolerating false and short reeling. 76 By 1776 the inspection of yarn had collapsed, and it was said that manufacturers in general did not dare prosecute 'for fear of becoming unpopular among the spinners and losing their work'. 77 This prompted worries that Yorkshire would become uncompetitive, because 'in most other seats of the worsted manufactory in England, the laws respecting spinners are executed', especially where the subscription inspectorate system fl ourished, as in East Anglia. 78 It was in the face of this breaking of ranks that the original promoters of the inspectorate scheme sponsored the fi rst of the Worsted Acts, passed in 1777 and encompassing the spinning zone of the West Riding worsted industry in Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire. Essentially, it was a means of forcing solidarity on the manufacturers in the industry by law. The committee of manufacturers that supervised inspectors was now to be a body established by statute, the inspectors it appointed were to be licensed by the local Justices of the Peace and expenses were met by a levy on the industry administered through the machinery of the excise. There were some similarities here with the West Riding woollen industry, where the searchers of broad and narrow cloth who operated under statute were licensed by the Justices of the Peace in Quarter Sessions. But much more direct parallels lay in the state-funded boards of trustees for manufactures established by statute in Ireland in 1711 and Scotland in 1727, in the Irish case funded partly out of customs revenues. 79 As we have seen, the Scottish Board of Trustees for Fisheries and Manufactures had appointed salaried linen yarn inspectors in 1748. It is striking that in the fi rst published draft of the 1777 Worsted Act, the body the Act was eventually to call 'the committee of the manufacturers' was initially termed 'the trustees'. 80 The impact of the statutory inspectorate system was dramatic. In Cheshire, where the evidence is particularly strong, there were only eight convictions recorded for false and short reeling of worsted yarn in the fi ve years 1770 to 1774, but in the fi ve years 1778 to 1782, when the statutory inspectorate was operating, there was an annual average of fi fty-six. 81 The less complete fi gures for the West Riding suggest an even more spectacular increase, with, for example, well over two hundred convictions recorded in 1780 alone. 82 The model provided by the 1777 Worsted Act for Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire was, over the course of the subsequent fi fteen years, adopted by most of the worsted spinning counties in the East Midlands and East Anglia, but for different reasons. Here, in contrast to the north, spinning was in decline. In several of these counties, existing subscription-funded committees managing inspectors appear to have functioned effectively, but increasing competition from Yorkshire and the prospect of secure funding through the excise system may have encouraged the change to a statutory system. Last to change, in 1791, were the woolcombers and makers of yarn in Norwich and Norfolk. Whether their tardiness in adopting a Worsted Act refl ected continuing tensions with the Norwich worsted weavers within their still vertically disintegrated industry remains unclear.

Conclusion
Herbert Heaton, the historian of Yorkshire's early modern woollen and worsted industries, noted that the Worsted Acts of the later eighteenth century generated a system of industrial regulation with remarkable similarities to the guilds of the previous century. 83 Those guilds may have ceased to function, but the demand for offi cially endorsed regulation evidently had not. In the putting-out worsted industries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, yarn was a key intermediate good, its integrity a matter of crucial importance to the quality of worsted fabrics and their makers. But monitoring yarn standards, whether within vertically integrated fi rms, or in commercial transactions between yarn suppliers and yarn users, was a signifi cant transaction cost. It was a cost which some employers in the industry were inclined to avoid. For others, the value of monitoring was called into question when tight labour markets caused the enforcement of standards to confl ict with access to the spinning labour force. Legally enforced regulations offered ways of addressing these dilemmas, though they might vary according to the organisation of each regional industry. However, the institutional repertoire for creating and enforcing such regulations changed dramatically between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries.
Like seventeenth-century guilds, the manufacturers' committees established under the Worsted Acts were funded by local industries, enforced standards, inspected products John Styles and initiated prosecutions. Yet they also differed in signifi cant respects. The eighteenthcentury committees were narrowly targeted on a single set of offences -false and short reeling -which constituted the most acute monitoring problem within the worsted industries. They lacked the kind of general powers characteristic of earlier guilds to search and enforce standards across whole industries with regard to cloth dimensions or apprenticeship. They were established by parliamentary legislation, not by the exercise of the royal prerogative or municipal ordinance. They administered the detection and prosecution of statutory offences tried by Justices of the Peace; they had no judicial functions of their own. Their funding came not from a direct levy on participants in the industry, but indirectly via the state's new and highly effi cient excise bureaucracy. Their searches for defective work were conducted not by their own members or part-time offi cials, as had often been the case with guilds, but by well-salaried, full-time inspectors. These inspectors applied the new bureaucratic technology of surveillance developed over the previous century by the excise service, following regular circuits, keeping exhaustive paper records, and subject to systematic monitoring of their own performance. Inspection ranged far beyond guildhalls and urban marketplaces, extending from village to village across huge swathes of rural England. These differences refl ected changes in the way laws could be made, in the powers and institutions legislation could provide, and in the capacity of bureaucratic systems to fulfi l administrative goals set for them. 84 Eighteenth-century British Parliaments maintained a monopoly on law-making and were reluctant to establish corporate economic institutions with wide-ranging regulatory authority. The result was a highly particularistic mode of legislating, which created, at the behest of powerful private interests, a huge number of local bodies to perform narrowly defi ned economic purposes -turnpikes, enclosures, urban improvements and the like. The four late-eighteenth century Worsted Acts, enacted at different dates for different counties, were characteristic products of this approach to law-making. 85 They did not arise from any demand for general regulation of their industry, but rather from the shortcomings of pre-existing, informal arrangements. The outcome was not an absence of industrial regulation, but a particular mode of regulation -narrow and reactive, though not necessarily ineffective.
As Julian Hoppit has emphasised, such an approach was not inevitable in a parliamentary system. In the eighteenth-century Irish Parliament, general legislation applying to the country as a whole predominated, and in both Ireland and Scotland the state was more willing than in England to use public funds to encourage and regulate manufacturing. 86 Indeed, Conrad Gill described Irish efforts to promote the linen industry in the eighteenth century as 'Parliamentary Colbertism'. 87 It would be impossible to characterise the Worsted Acts in that way. They included provisions similar to some of those implemented by the Irish and Scottish Boards of Trustees for linens, but they were a piecemeal response to a specifi c problem, not elements in an aggressive, comprehensive policy, designed to establish internationally competitive textile manufacturing in their respective countries. The Worsted Acts demonstrate that options for industrial regulation existed in eighteenth-century England, but also reveal its limitations.

Bay
Usually a napped fabric with a worsted warp and a woollen weft. Calamanco An all-worsted fabric, often striped, fl owered, or glazed, much used for petticoats in the eighteenth century. Everlasting A tightly woven all-worsted fabric, often patterned with small fi gures and in the eighteenth century used for the uppers of women's shoes. Fustian For most of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a fabric with a linen warp, a cotton weft and a napped surface. In the sixteenth century, however, some fustians incorporated worsted yarn, while by the end of the eighteenth century all-cotton fustians were becoming the norm. Russel An all-worsted fabric, often patterned and glazed, used for clothes and furnishings. Say A term used in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to describe a wide range of lightweight fabrics woven, at least in part, with yarns spun from scoured, long-staple wool. Introduced from Flanders in the sixteenth century, says were used both for clothing and furnishings. Some were all worsted, some had a worsted warp and a woollen weft, others incorporated silk yarns. Serge A napped fabric with a worsted warp and a woollen weft. Shalloon An all-worsted fabric, often fairly coarse, used for clothes. Stuff A generic term for fabrics woven exclusively from yarn spun from long-staple wool, or combined with mohair or silk yarns. By the eighteenth century 'stuff' was being superseded as a generic term by 'worsted'. Tammy An all-worsted fabric with a lustrous fi nish, used for clothes and furnishings. Worsted Originally, in the mid-sixteenth century, yarn tightly spun from long-staple Norfolk wool in its natural oil on a drop spindle, or the fabric woven from it. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the word increasingly came to be used generically to describe any yarn spun from long-staple wool, irrespective of how it was spun, and any fabric woven with it. It is this second, generic usage that is employed in this article.
Worsted fabrics underwent a process of constant adjustment and innovation between 1550 and 1800, so defi nitions are necessarily approximate. For further information, see F. Montgomery, Textiles in America, 1650-1870 (London and New York: Norton, 1984), which deals not just with America, but with textiles throughout the British Atlantic world.