nly dependent on
distant and unknown producers for their comforts and luxuries.

Trade is for the most part conducted on a small steady local basis
with known regular customers.

Outside of agriculture the elements of speculation and fluctuation are
almost entirely confined to foreign trade. Capital and labour are
fixed to a particular locality and a particular business.[36]

Sec. 9. Turning to the structure of the several industries we find that
different employments are not sharply separated from one another. In
the first place, agriculture and manufacture are not only carried on
in the same locality but by the same people. This combined agriculture
and manufacture took several forms.

The textile industries were largely combined with agriculture. Where
spinning was carried on in agricultural parts there was, for the most
part, a division of labour within the family. The women and children
spun while the men attended to their work in the fields.[37] Every
woman and child above the age of five found full employment in the
spinning and weaving trades of Somerset and the West Riding.[38]

This method prevailed more largely in the spinning than in the weaving
trades, for before the introduction of the spinning-jenny the weaving
trade was far more centralised than the other. For example, a large
quantity of weaving was done in the town of Norwich while the earlier
process was executed in the scattered cottages over a wide district.
But even these town workers were not specialised in manufacture to the
extent which prevails to-day. Large numbers of them had allotments in
the country to which they gave their spare time, and many had pasture
rights and kept their cattle on the common lands. This applied not
merely to the textile but to other industries. At West Bromwich, a
chief centre of the metal trade, agriculture was still carried on as a
subsidiary pursuit by the metal workers.[39] So too the cutlers of
Sheffield living in the outskirts of the town had their plot of land
and carried on agriculture to a small extent, a practice which has
lasted almost up to the present day. The combined agriculture and
manufacture often took the form of a division of labour according to
season. Where the weaving was not concentrated in towns it furnished a
winter occupation to many men who gave the bulk of their summer time
to agriculture. Generally speaking, we may take as fairly
representative of the manufacturing parts of England