extent. They continued for the most part to work in their own houses,
though for material and sometimes for the implements of their craft
they were dependent upon some merchant or large master-manufacturer.
This was the condition of industry in the neighbourhood of Leeds in
1725. "The houses are not scattered and dispersed as in the vicarage
of Halifax, one by one, but in villages, and those houses thronged
with people and the whole country infinitely populous."[50] In the
more highly-developed branches of the cloth trade, however, where the
best looms were a relatively costly form of capital, the foundation of
the factory system was clearly laid. In Norwich, Frome, Taunton,
Devizes, Stourbridge, and other clothing centres, Defoe found the
weaving industry highly concentrated, and rich employers owning
considerable numbers of looms. Some of this work was put out by the
master-manufacturers, but other work was done in large sheds or other
premises owned by the master. This large organised "business," half
factory, half domestic, continued to prevail in the important West of
England clothing industry up to the close of the eighteenth century.
"The master clothier of the West of England buys his wool from the
importer, if it be foreign, or in the fleece if it be of domestic
growth; after which, in all the different processes through which it
passes, he is under the necessity of employing as many distinct
classes of persons; sometimes working in their own houses, sometimes
in that of the master clothier, but none of them going out of their
proper line. Each class of workman, however, acquires great skill in
performing its particular operation, and hence may have arisen the
acknowledged excellence, and, till of late, the superiority of the
cloths of the West of England."[51]

So again, in the cotton industry of Lancashire, the hold which the
merchants had got over the weavers by supplying them with warp and
weft led in some cases, before the middle of the century, to the
establishment of small factories containing a score or two of looms,
in which hired men were employed to weave. A little later, though long
before steam power, Arthur Young finds a factory at Darlington with
over fifty looms, a factory at Boynton with 150 workers, and a silk
mill at Sheffield with 152 workers. Even where the final step of
substituting the factory for the home had not been taken the
subordination of the handicraftsman to the master who provi