From A Yorkshire Cottage

In 1710 Timothy Leach of Allerton, a serge weaver, married Alice Reader, the daughter of a blacksmith from Coulton near Leeds. Throughout their married life the couple remained in Allerton, a small scattered settlement near Bradford comprising rural farmsteads and weavers’ cottages. They had several children, including their eldest son Robert who became a butcher. Robert is my 6th Great Grandfather, and until a few days ago he was the earliest ancestor that I could claim with certainty, having traced my patrilineal ancestry back to him a year or so ago.

During half term my sister and I visited East Riddlesden Hall, to which we believe we have a tenuous ancestral link. This inspired us to re-invigorate our family history research, having abandoned it when last year we got stuck at Robert Leach, butcher of Allerton, who got married at Bradford Church (now Bradford Cathedral) in 1738, but whose parentage and year of birth were a mystery to us.

Previously we had been limited to examining the search results we could find in Ancestry, but last week we cast our net wider by searching the indexed catalogue of the West Yorkshire Archives, and by finding and downloading a PDF copy of the transcribed registers of the Old Bell Chapel at Thornton (near Allerton), many of which are missing from Ancestry. By cross-referencing various facts found in these three data sources (Ancestry, the West Yorkshire Archives, and the Thornton parish registers) we have now in fact identified with confidence every ancestor in our patrilineal genealogy right back to the Tudor period. However, Timothy of Allerton in the Stuart period is the earliest of our ancestors whose occupation we know with certainty.

The content of a document in the West Yorkshire archives suggests to us that Timothy’s father, Robert Leach of Wilsden (a mile or so from Allerton) had also been involved in the textile industry, though in what specific capacity we do not know. The document is the legal record of a lease that was arranged in 1679, when together with two of his brothers, Robert Leach of Wilsden rented the “Woollster House and Barn” in Wilsden. Because of the name Woollster we believe that this was a property associated with wool cloth production, which was the area’s main industry. Some 30 to 40 years later when the Thornton chapel registers started including occupations, the few Leaches that appear in the registers (Timothy’s kinfolk) were mostly listed as weavers. Because of this we think it’s very probable that Timothy’s father and uncles were likewise weavers that established a joint business as clothiers at the Woollster House and barn.

I am of course delighted to find that over three hundred years ago my ancestors were working with wool!

Despite sharing a fairly recent ancestor (a Thomas Leach in the mid-sixteenth century) with landed gentry in the Bingley area, it appears that the Leaches of Allerton were working folk in a branch of the Leach family that was now in the social class known as husbandmen. I don’t know whether or not Timothy and Alice or any of their children were literate, a useful marker of status and wealth. I do however know that their grandson wasn’t, because when he got married in 1784 my 5th Great Grandfather Jonathan Leach of Allerton made a mark instead of signing his name on the register. Like his grandfather, Jonathan was a handloom weaver, as was his son, my 4th Great Grandfather who was also called Jonathan. Indeed, for some 200 years from the 1679 date of the first evidence of occupation that we’ve found, my patrilineal ancestors all worked in the textile industry until Mark Leach, the 2nd Great Grandfather that I have previously blogged about, became a book-keeper circa 1870.

Timothy and his family will almost certainly have lived in a cottage with a long run of windows on the upper floor, maximising the light that Timothy needed for working at his loom. Many such weavers cottages from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can still be found in our part of Yorkshire. Indeed, we shot photos for my book Lace Knits at some ruined weavers’ cottages near Slaithwaite in the Colne Valley. Those cottages have a 1758 datestone, and are part of a small farmstead with an attached stone barn. As Timothy Leach was variously listed in parish records as a husbandman and as a labourer and as a weaver, and as his eldest son became a butcher, I think it’s very likely that Timothy similarly had a bit of land around his cottage on which he kept livestock. There were many such clothiers in the district.

In the early eighteenth century weaving had not yet been mechanised, nor had spinning. So textile production was very much a cottage industry. It took at least five spinners to keep one weaver supplied with yarn, so I assume that Alice Leach, Timothy’s wife and my 7th Great Grandmother, was a spinner, and that he also bought yarn off other spinners in the area. It took about a week for one weaver to produce a standard 30-yard length of cloth.

Before selling the cloth Timothy would take it, probably on the back of a mule, to Shipley to be dyed and fulled. This would be done at either Dixon Mill or Hirst Mill, both of which were water-driven fulling mills on the River Aire, much like the medieval fulling mill in Brighouse about which I blogged last year.

Timothy was weaving before any of Yorkshire’s covered cloth halls were built, such as the Piece Hall in Halifax. So after his cloth had been dyed and fulled he would have taken it to an outdoor cloth market, probably in Bradford, which was the nearest market town to Allerton. There he and the many other weavers in the area would sell bolts of their cloth, called ‘Pieces’, to cloth merchants. At this time more than a quarter of adult men in the Bradford area whose occupations were recorded in the parish registers were involved in the textile industry, so the cloth market would have been very busy. In 1724 Daniel Defoe described the cloth market in nearby Leeds.

“Leeds is a large, wealthy and populous town, it stands on the north bank of the River Aire, or rather on both sides of the river, for there is a large suburb or part of the town on the south side of the river, and the whole is joined by a stately and prodigiously strong stone bridge, so large, and so wide, that formerly the cloth market was on the bridge itself. The increase in the manufacturers and of the trade, soon made the market too great to be confined to the bridge, and it is now kept in the high street, beginning from the bridge, and running up north almost to the market house, where the ordinary market for provisions begin.

The market is here twice a week. At seven the market bell rings (in the summer earlier, in the depth of winter a little later). It would surprise a stranger to see in how few minutes, without hurry or noise, and not the least disorder, the whole market is filled; all the boards upon the tressels are covered with cloth, close to one another as the pieces can lie long ways by one another, and behind every piece of cloth, the clothier standing to sell it.

Merchants in Leeds go all over England with droves of pack horses, and to all the fairs and market towns all over the whole island. Other buyers of cloth send it to London. They not only supply shopkeepers and wholesale men in London but for exportation to the English colonies in America and to merchants in Russia, Sweden, Holland and Germany.”

Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through The Whole Island Of Great Britain, 1724

The introduction to my first book, Novel Knits, ends with the words ‘from a Yorkshire cottage’ because I wrote it at the kitchen table in my childhood home, a Yorkshire woollen mill-worker’s cottage in Huddersfield, where my Mum still lived at that time. I now know that my family story has been firmly embedded in the woollen textile industry for many hundreds of years. Firstly this was as handloom weavers in the cottage textile industry, then after the industrial revolution my ancestors worked in Yorkshire’s wool spinning and weaving mills, with a short diversion to cotton in Lancashire. So from the seventeenth century onwards most of my ancestors will have lived in cottages similar to my childhood home. With ancestors like these, and having grown up in that environment, it is very fitting that 300 years after Timothy Leach was plying his trade as a weaver his 7th great granddaughter is passionately interested in wool, and that like him, I have built my own business around it.