Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

359 WELSH COTTAGE INDUSTRIES. II.—SPINNING AND WEAVING. IN the little kingdom weaving is almost as old an art as agriculture, and is only second in importance to it. For centuries the farmer was also the weaver. On winter evenings, or when the weather was inclement enough to drive even a Welshman from the fields, the good Taffey, with his family and farm hands, sat round the peat fire, winding and twisting the yarn, or laboriously working the hand-shuttle, to the rhythm of the folk- song and the whirr of the spinning wheel. In this manner the industrious and ingenious peasantry produced quantities of cloth almost ex- actly like that the Flemings of the twelfth century taught their ancestors to make, w hen Henry I., after offer- ing them an asylum in England from the inundations of their own country, out of compliment to Queen Maud, daughter of the Earl of Flanders, finding his party larger than he antici- pated, banished his guests to Pembrokeshire that they might form a convenient buffer against the turbulent Welsh. Here they generously repaid his questionable hospitality by developing the rude weavers of Wales into the very corner-stone of the British woollen manufacture. For over four centuries the Welshmen held the lead in the trade, selling their stuffs and “ whittles ” at good prices to the “ Shrewys- burye men,” who journeyed twice a year into the woollen districts to buy it, or to the eager merchants at the Chester fairs. But the end of the eighteenth century brought the great industrial revolution due to the introduction of machinery, and domestic manufacture was crippled by the factory system. The farmer-weaver was crowded out of the market, and half the cottage manufacturers drifted to the factories, while the remainder, clinging to the methods of their fathers, contented themselves with a purely local custom. So it happens that the domestic and factory systems have ever since co-existed in Wales, the latter constantly encroaching