Urban areas not only offered jobs with higher pay, but promised a varied and appealing social life, which appealed particularly to young men and women who found life in a small community both oppressive and dull. Workers in the new factories and mills of northern England were not dispossessed agricultural labourers they were primarily recruited from local families who had long been involved in some form of manufacturing. They point to the fact that 'enclosures' affected only a small proportion of the population, primarily in parts of the south and east Midlands. They argue that people were attracted by new opportunities elsewhere rather than driven from the land. This gloomy picture is not without its critics. Limited opportunities: Rural women postworkers Only those who serviced the horse-economy - blacksmiths, wheelwrights, saddlers - survived somewhat longer until the motor vehicle undermined their trades in the twentieth century. Similar stories could be told of potters, furniture makers, brewers, millers and other trades, while the decline in population which ensued adversely affected those involved in the building trades by the end of the 19th century. Tailors declined as mass produced clothing became available. Hand stitched boots were superseded by machine-made products from Northampton or Leicester. Machinery also destroyed the hand-lace making which once flourished in the South Midlands. The subsequent growth of factory spinning and power-loom weaving, then undermined the rural economy of North, leading to marked falls in population in many upland townships in the Pennines from the 1820s. The rural woollen and linen industries of the South West and East Anglia collapsed in the face of increased competition from Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. Textiles, for example, had once been spun and woven in the countryside on a large scale.
Declining employment: the collapse of rural industriesįrom the late 18th century the concentration of manufacturing in larger units in towns or on the major coalfields, undermined the viability of 'cottage industries' which had once provided work for women and children, and local craftsman who could not compete with machine-made goods. North of the border, the popular story of forced expropriation and eviction appears even more dramatic, with the indigenous people ousted in favour of sheep farms and deer reserves during infamous 'Highland Clearances'. The wonder is not that so many left, but that so many stayed. Attempts to fight back, notably through trade unions from the early 1870s, failed.
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