Woven silk brocade in leopard-spot pattern, France, 1760s, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
By Natasha Bailey
William Eastman was indicted for that he on the 11th of September, about one in the night, the dwelling house of Daniel Clarke, did break, and by force enter, with intent, feloniously and maliciously to cut and destroy silk manufactory, being in the loom in the said house, and did cut and destroy twenty yards of certain wrought silk…1
It is early morning, around one or two o’clock, when the silk-weaver Daniel Clarke is woken by a racket outside his front door. “Open up, Clarke!” he hears several voices demand in unison. Clarke approaches the window and calls down: “Gentlemen, what do you want?”
“Clarke, come down and open the door! We will not hurt you,” one of the men shouts back. Another pipes up besides him: “You can afford it, you have got good business.”
Not good enough business for what these men intend, Clarke fumes to himself. He knows once he lets them in, they will rush to his workshop and cut to shreds all the woven silks they find. Each represents weeks of painstaking work by Clarke and his wife Elizabeth. Silk-weavers don’t own the raw silk they work into fabric; all the pieces in the workshop belong to his master Thomas Cook. Mr Cook might well demand that Clarke compensates him or, worse, switch to using a different weaver altogether.
He’ll test their resolve; if they want to ruin his silk so badly, he’ll make them work for it. Clarke waits until he hears the splintering of the door under an axe and crowbar and a crash of breaking glass. It’s no good. Unless he wants to get better acquainted with the broadsword one of them is swinging, he’ll have to open up…
Why such a fuss over a few yards of silk? And why destroy this valuable material rather than steal it? Several Old Bailey cases from the 1760s paint a vivid picture of London’s silk-weaving communities at breaking point, and their decision to make their discontent known even at the risk of their own lives.
We don’t typically think of London, or even the UK, as a hub for silk craftmanship. Whilst raw silk has never been produced here—the mulberry trees whose leaves silkworms eat prefer a temperature of 24°C-28°C— silk processing industries have existed in England from at least the 13th century. By the 18th century, the beating heart of the British silk-weaving industry was London’s Spitalfields. The area’s reputation for silk-work was intensified by the mass settlement during the seventeenth century of Huguenot Protestant refugees from France who had worked in sericulture and silk processing for generations. As in many skilled trades, silk-weavers would begin as apprentices then progress to the status of ‘journeyman’, from the French journée, indicating that their labour was paid by the day. Some journeymen might eventually become master weavers, who commanded far higher wages and contracted much of the actual weaving out to journeymen like Daniel Clarke, who would usually work the silk in their homes. Silk was woven on hand-operated looms, on which the pattern had to be set before weaving could begin [Fig. 1]. For a complex pattern, this threading alone might take up to five weeks.
Underpaid and overworked, journeyman weavers were particularly vulnerable to fluctuations in the silk market; lower prices for British-manufactured silks meant even less trickled down to those who wove them. Weavers blamed French, Italian and Indian imported silks for a downturn in their trade and pushed for a ban on all foreign silks. The ensuing Act for Encouraging the Silk Manufactures of 1753 did little however to raise the wages of journeymen, whose pay was determined by their masters. As journeymen weavers found themselves struggling to make ends meet, they became increasingly frustrated with the failure of parliamentary acts.2 If Benjamin Thatcher, tried for “seditious words” in 1722, did indeed say that he “wish’d he had never been a Weaver” and that “we shall never have any Good Trade while [King George is] alive”, his would have been a common sentiment.3
Enter the “cutters”, journeyman weavers who broke into silk workshops to destroy the woven fabrics. If a weaver was known to be accepting wages that undercut his fellow craftsmen or if a master refused to pay living wages, the cutters would target their looms. The Old Bailey cases offer an intriguing window into community relations between weavers who cut work and those whose work was cut. Cutters’ “committees” or “sloops” (as they were called in the court record) met in various local taverns to hear petitions from weavers but also to decide on punishment for those who fell out of line.4 . Plaintiffs usually knew who the cutters were in their community, not least because these groups also functioned as informal trade unions. Concern about being recognised (rather than a jaunty sense of fashion) certainly seemed to be the reason the cutters in the Daniel Clarke case had worn women’s bonnets. This did not stop him from identifying William Eastman’s voice; although Eastman was “no particular acquaintance of [his]”, Clarke had “[known] him four or five years before, and [had] often discoursed with him about weaving”.5 Another weaver, Thomas Poor, was also able to name the defendant William Horsford as one of the cutters who attacked his workshop from his voice.6 Poor’s wife Mary seems to have believed that Horsford owed her some kind of debt of friendship and confronted him at a tavern, asking how he could bring himself to break into her house.7 Exceptions were, however, not to be made this easily. Horsford allegedly responded that he “could not have spared her if she was his own sister“.8 By identifying the cutters, moreover, Poor and Clarke broke a code of silence. Diana Eagan, a neighbour’s housekeeper, told the court that although many weavers around Spitalfields had their work cut, “they always declared they did not know one of [the cutters]”.9
Tensions also seemed to be rising in the weaving community regarding the involvement of women in the trade. Elizabeth Clarke testified that she had been able to make out little of what the cutters had said, save the ominous “blast [her], we’ll learn her to make Leopard sattin [sic]”.10 When asked by the court why she thought the cutters had been so incensed by the leopard-spot satin, Elizabeth Clarke replied that it was because she had made it and “they were offended because it was a work too good for a woman to have a hand in”. With the rise of mechanised looms during the nineteenth century, weaving would become increasingly demasculinised; the relative ease of working these looms removed the need for lengthy apprenticeship and made them accessible to women working in their homes.11 Yet as early as the 1760s, some women like Elizabeth Clarke were proving just as skilled as the journeymen and some seemed to resent it bitterly…
The act of cutting silk-work or destroying silk-making equipment carried the death penalty.12 This was not an uncommon sentence during the eighteenth century and was in fact specified for a wide range of offences, including theft. Because theft was so commonplace, however, even if a judge passed the death sentence required by a conviction, it was often reduced to a non-capital punishment (e.g. transportation) or a pardon was extended. Yet not only were William Eastman and William Horsford both hanged for destroying silk work and weaving equipment, their sentences were carried out only two weeks after their trials. John Doyle and Thomas Valloine, who had broken into Thomas Poor’s house along with Horsford, were hanged in their own neighbourhood of Bethnal Green rather than at Tyburn, clearly as a warning to their fellow weavers. Cutters’ activities were often referred to as ‘riots’ and therefore a menace to public order. It cannot have helped either that attacks on silk manufacturing could be interpreted as attacks on British trade and production itself.
It’s hard to know where your sympathies should lie in these cases where community members were pitted against one another. On the one hand, cutting was clearly a last resort where campaigning had failed to bring about the kind of legislation needed, one that would force masters to pay fair wages. The anger and sense of injustice felt by cutters and their supporters almost radiate from the written record. The Bath and Bristol Chronicle reported that the crowd at the execution of Doyle and Valloine became so restive and threw so many bricks and stones that “the poor wretches [Doyle and Valloine] were dispatched almost as soon as the gallows were erected…a full quarter of an hour before the execution was generally known.”13 Following the hanging, the spectators rushed to the house of Lewis Chauvet, the silk manufacturer who had allegedly offered £500 for the apprehension of the cutters. There they broke all the windows and destroyed much of Chauvet’s machinery and silk wares. On the other hand, it was hardly the fault of the weavers whose work was cut if their masters would not pay decent wages. The Poors and the Clarkes clearly felt just as wronged by the cutters as the latter did at their “disloyalty” in accepting low wages. Aware as they must have been that a guilty sentence meant death for their fellow weavers, plaintiffs insisted they had “a good right to have looms worked, and [the cutters] had no right to cut [them]”.14
The cutters’ protests were not completely in vain, however. The first of the so-called Spitalfields Acts came into force in 1773, charging magistrates with the responsibility for regulating wages in the silk industry.15 Any journeyman who accepted either more or less than the set wage would forfeit 40 shillings, whilst a master who committed the same offence would pay £50, almost £4500 in today’s money. It might have come too late for the likes of William Eastman and William Horsford but perhaps we might see this as a cutters’ victory nonetheless…
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- Old Bailey Proceedings Online, December 1769. Trial of William Eastman (t17691206-31). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17691206-31?text=silk (Accessed: 27th February 2025). Text in italics indicates verbatim quotes from primary sources. ↩︎
- For more on silk politics and the Weaver’s Company appeals to Parliament, see William Farrell, Silk and globalisation in eighteenth-century London: commodities, people and connections c. 1720-1800 (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Birkbeck, 2014), ch. 3 “The politics of silk”. ↩︎
- Old Bailey Proceedings Online, 12th January 1722. Trial of Benjamin Thatcher (t17220112-19). Available at: https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17220112-19?text=weaver. (Accessed 4th April 2025). The “seditious” part of the charge came from his reply to a fellow drinker who cited an earlier ban on Indian calicos as an example of the King’s concern for weavers, to which Thatcher allegedly replied “God damn King George and his Laws too!” ↩︎
- Weavers mentioned in their testimonies that they were obliged to give money to the committees but it seems unclear whether this was a form of dues payment or something closer to extortion. ↩︎
- Trial of William Eastman. ↩︎
- Old Bailey Proceedings Online, December 1769. Trial of William Horsford (t17691206-34) Available at https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17691206-34?text=silk (Accessed 14th April 2025). ↩︎
- It’s not entirely clear where this expectation of solidarity came from, though the Poors and Horsford did share a common background. Thomas Poor revealed in his testimony that he and William Horsford were both Irish and that Horsford had asked Poor in court (in Irish) to show him compassion. ↩︎
- Trial of William Horsford. ↩︎
- Trial of William Eastman. ↩︎
- Trial of William Eastman ↩︎
- For more on this, see Hilda Kean and Bruce Wheeler, “Making History in Bethnal Green: Different Stories of Nineteenth-Century Silk Weavers”, History Workshop Journal, Vol 56 (2003), pp. 217-230. Apprentices were almost always young men, effectively shutting many women out of the trade, though the latter often worked in making silk thread (‘throwing’). ↩︎
- “A Bill, intituled, an Act for laying Several additional Duties upon the Importation of Wrought Silks and Velvets, for the Encouragement of the Silk Manufactures of this Kingdom; and for preventing unlawful Combinations of Workmen employed in the said Manufactures”, House of Lords Sessional Papers (1714-1805), vol. 1, pp. 291-296. ↩︎
- Bath and Bristol Chronicle, Thursday 4th December 1769, p. 1. ↩︎
- Trial of William Eastman. ↩︎
- Public Act 13 George III c. 68 (1773), An act to impower the magistrates therein mentioned to fettle
and regulate the wages of persons employed in the silk manufacture within their respective jurisdictions. ↩︎
