y established mills--pretty much in the same way as
the straw plaiting industry was managed in after years.

Occasionally spinners were dishonest, and spun short measure, and
associations were formed for punishing the offence.

In every better class house a wheel was found by which the mistress
would spin the yarn, which was then sent away to be woven into the
family linen, and a very necessary part of the preparation for married
life was this spinning of a supply of yarn and sending it away to the
weaver. A full chest of table linen was as precious to the farmers'
wives as Mrs. Tulliver found hers, and home-spun linen was as much a
matter of pride as the cheese-making itself; so much so that servants
in farm houses were invariably placed at the wheel to fill up their
spare time.

The earnings of the poor spinners could not have been very great, for
in Essex in 1770 "a stout girl of fifteen or sixteen" was not able to
earn above 6d. a day. When the industry disappeared as a wage-earning
employment, parochial Workhouses turned their attention to teaching
children straw plaiting, and plaiting schools were subsidised by
overseers for this purpose.

Wool-combing, the next process of employment, was better paid, but
later on this too disappeared from our town and neighbourhood, owing to
the march of inventions, leaving the last stage of the industry, viz.,
the wool-sorter's occupation, which continued some time longer. This
process of sorting was one which required an experienced eye to detect
the different qualities of fibre, and nimble fingers to separate them.
A fleece of wool was thrown open on a bench and an expert would, with
surprising speed and dexterity, separate the fibre into about four
different qualities and throw them into as many baskets standing by to
receive them. After this, as in the combing days, it was sent off by
the {105} Wakefield wagons to the mills in the North, and buyers
continued to visit Royston, and wagons load up here, until about the
middle of this century, the last of the wool-staplers being Mr. Henry
Butler, whose warehouse was in Kneesworth Street, where Mr. Sanders'
coachbuilder's yard now is. With the appearance of the railway our
"spinning grandmothers" were a thing of the past.

Agriculture in the Georgian era differed somewhat in its appliances,
but the philosophy of it was pretty much the same as it is now. Oxen
were occasionally used for team labour and were shod like hor