Wants+and+needs

__C.M. Cipolla, 1976__
 * “Wool and woollen cloth represented the bulk of English exports in the last centuries of the Middle Ages and the rise in the proportion of woollen cloth to raw wool in export figures can be taken as an index of the increasing weight of manufacturing in the economy. The transition from a stage characterised by massive exports of indigenous raw materials to a stage increasingly characterised by manufactured goods made from raw materials is a typical step on the road to economic development”.

The increased consumption of goods and services is ultimately what economic growth is about. Economic growth cannot affect our spiritual welfare. It can be diverted to purposes which are damaging to others, such as the construction and use of weapons, or which are positive in the long run but have no immediate effect on welfare, such as investment. This leaves increased consumption as the only end for which economic growth is much use, at least to the people who are involved.

After 1815, relatively little was spent on weapons and war. Other forms of government expenditure also remained low. Investment, which rose as a proportion of income until the mid-nineteenth century, was stable thereafter. By a combination of their own volition and the actions of the outside world, the British people spent most of their extra income from economic growth on consumption. The basis of consumption for most people in this period was food, drink and clothing. Although the middle classes didn't stint themselves on food, they still had much more disposable income than other purchasers. In the eighteenth century, their consumption of semi-durables like china was an important component of demand. The proliferation of cheap Staffordshire ware in the early nineteenth century shows that these tastes extended down to the working class when they could afford to indulge them. Clothing was the most important semi-durable, although with the reduction in the cost of material, the actual proportion spent on it may not have changed much. Of equal or greater importance than semi-durables as an item of consumption was housing, spending on which was growing rapidly throughout the period. The substantial detached villa of the middle-class Victorian family must have been much more expensive than the neat Georgian terrace.

//Food and drink// In poor societies, people inevitably spend much of their income on food. For poorer members of the working class in the early part of the period, this proportion was around three-quarters. Much of this expenditure went on bread, and it was a measure of English wealth as compared with the Continent that the English mainly ate wheaten bread, made as white as possible by milling out the husk. This was more expensive but offered a higher protein content than rye bread. More important to the consumer, it was digestible. When bread was the main item of diet, an excess of fibre, the Holy Grail of modern diet, was as unpleasant as its absence can be deleterious. By contrast, in Scotland, originally a much poorer country, oats had been and remained an important part of the diet, their persistence in the menu showing the importance of custom as well as income in dietary habits. Although bread was the mainstay of the working-class diet in the eighteenth century, tropical luxuries were penetrating working-class homes, as they were middle-class. Consumption of sugar and tea in particular was burgeoning. The relative wealth of Britain at this time, and access to cheap supplies of these commodities, fixed an enduring taste for them in this country, which was marked by the rise of the grocery trade. The first record of a grocer in Halesworth, who probably vended dry goods, is in the Parish Register for 1680.

As income increased, diet diversified, although food and drink still dominated working-class budgets, food alone accounting for over 50 per cent of working-class spending by the end of the nineteenth century. Tea and sugar consump­tion also went on rising throughout the century. Contrary to the fears of contemporaries worried about its effect on the health of the nation, tea is simply a mild stimulant. However, most foodstuffs were not bought for health but to provide variety, although they might bring nutritional benefits. Meat, milk and butter consumption all rose steeply in the later nineteenth century. Not shown in the statistics, but often referred to in accounts of working-class life, were tinned salmon and pineapple. The fish canning industry was one of the first developments of Victorian mass production adding value to cheap perishable, seasonal mass-catches, such as pilchards. There is substantial oral evidence that much of the benefit of this diversification went to working males in the family, who were thought to need meat in particular. The continued heavy spending on food has been represented as an adherence to traditional patterns of consumption, but a moment's thought shows that diversifying a diet consisting largely of bread and potatoes would be anyone's priority in the same position. This diversification could only be achieved by buying more expensive foodstuffs such as meat. It was human nature rather than tradition that accounted for the continued predominance of spending on food in family budgets. In 1851 there were three butcher’s shops in Halesworth that seem to have possessed their own integral abattoirs. This situation may be contrasted with Prime’s open stalls in the Market Place, and adjacent abattoir, in the 16th century.

Fig 1 Advertisement in the Halesworth Times (18th December. 1855)

Alcohol consumption rose until the 1870s, to a level of 270 pints of beer and 1.5 gallons of spirits per person, per year; most was consumed by adult males. Beer was by far the bigger market in volume, but spirits and wines come close with regards alcohol consumption (Fig 1). In the 1870s, a change in taste happened. The rising real wages of the next twenty years were not marked by any further rise in alcohol consumption, and in the 1900s it declined. At its peak in 1876, it took 15 per cent of consumers' expenditure. It was on the back of this growing habit that Halesworth’s brewers became bankers and entrepreneurs. .

//Clothing// The making of cloth, like the growing of food, is one of the earliest economic activities of human societies. At a primitive economic level, the raw materials are pro­duced in the ordinary course of farming, and the same labour which handles the wool, flax or hemp also tills the fields. For many centuries there was therefore a very intimate connection between the making of clothes and the growing of food. Moreover, so long as the tool employed, distaff, spinning wheel or loom, was simple and could be worked by hand, the industry remained dis­persed in the countryside. There was no great advantage in concentration. In the Middle Ages, the woollen industry was carried on in most counties of England; and as early as the reigns of Henry I and II there were weavers' guilds in London, Oxford, Lincoln, Nottingham, York and Huntingdon. Most villages had at least one weaver, and every cottage had a distaff. Spinning was an occupation that employed the leisure hours of women of all ages and classes.

The cloth used by the masses for clothing in these early days was coarse. At quite an early date some districts, like the West Country and Yorkshire, were specializing in weaving, possibly because of their suitability for sheep rearing and to the number of streams which supplied abundant water for the main processes of cloth-making. By the fifteenth century the woollen industry was so important that export of cloth, handled by a national corporation called the Merchant Adventurers, had become the chief item in England's foreign trade. In 1355 between five and six thousand cloths were exported; at the end of the fifteenth century the Mer­chant Adventurers alone were shipping abroad annually some 60,000 cloths; in 1509, 84,789; and in 1547, 122,354. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the value of England's total exports in normal years stood perhaps at some £75,000 per annum. Woollens of one sort or another accounted for over 80 percent of all exports, with raw wool down to a mere 6 percent. Most of the English trade was still limited to Europe. The English mercantile marine was as yet of small consequence, perhaps about 50,000 tons, and much of the country's foreign trade, even when handled by English merchants, was carried by foreign vessels, many of which used the East Anglian ports of Lynn, Yarmouth, Southwold, Aldeburgh, Woodbridge and Ipswich.

New fashions influenced and were influenced by the clothing indus­tries. In the seventeenth century Lancashire was laying the foundations of the cotton industry. At first, raw cotton from Cyprus, Smyrna and the Levant was spun, and a coarse cloth called fustian, half cotton and half linen, was made. Before 1700 the various East India companies and the interloper traders were pouring Indian cottons and silks into Europe, and there was hardly a country that did not view with alarm the decay of its native woollen industry. English pamphlets were loud in their denunciations of the foreign trash.

"Cotton is as fine and soft as Wool, it may be spun as small or as large, it may be Milled and Drest, it may be Dyed and Stained, and when the English merchant shall send over Cloth-Weavers and Dyers, and Throwsters, as well as Silk, I question not but we shall have Cotton-Cloth and Knaves enough to make it a Fashion and Fools enough to wear it," said one writer.

Nevertheless the new cotton goods caught on. The extent of the popularity may be seen from the inventory of a Preston draper in 1688. There were for sale white calico buckram at under a shilling a yard; white calico, printed and glazed calico at 1s. 1d.; brown calico at 10d.; black, blue, and "coloured" calico at l d.; broad glazed calico at 1s.; stained calico at 1s. 2d. and 1s.; narrow flowered calico at 9d.; and, finally, coloured calico at 1s. 7d. In the 1660s to 1680s six drapers were operating in the Halesworth, no doubt vending these materials.

The calico-printing industry, fostered by the importation of plain calicoes from the East, was a significant development of the closing years of the seventeenth century. Hitherto, designs had been executed by hand and were accordingly expensive. Now elaborate designs could be printed cheaply. Women's clothes became brighter. About 1690 the woollen manufacturers began to agitate against the use of Indian goods, and so strong was their influence that in 1701 an Act was passed forbidding "the use and wear, in any form, of Indian and Chinese silks, and of Indian printed or painted calicoes and striped or checked cottons." This, it will be noticed, did not prevent the importation of plain calicoes and the printing of them in England. The printing industry naturally took full advantage of this Act, so much so that in 1707 the woollen manufacturers were complaining of its competition as:
 * "more prejudicial to us than the importation of painted calicoes was before the passing of that Act. For whereas then the calicoes painted in India were most used by the richer sort of people whilst the poor continued to wear and use our woollen goods, the calicoes now painted in England are so very cheap and so much the fashion that persons of all qualities and degrees clothe them­selves and furnish their houses in a great measure with them".

Printed calicoes were used for frocks, aprons, quilts, and other articles purchased by the rural housewife. In the interests of the ancient woollen industry, Parliament imposed excise duties on printed linens and at double the rate on printed calicoes. From time to time, these duties were increased, and though this checked the sale of such articles, the woollen manufacturers were still dissatisfied. In the depression of 1719 the agitation was renewed on an extensive scale. This culminated in the Act of 1721 that prohibited the use and wear of any kind of calico, except calicoes dyed blue, which were probably used for aprons and smock frocks. However, there was no stopping the producers of cotton cloth, and under the stimulus of an expanding market and power production, the chief change in dress material during the industrial revolution was the substitution of cotton for wool and linen. The drapers of Halesworth played their part in disseminating both home-produced and imported cloths as well as ready-made outfits (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2 Advertisement in the Halesworth Times (18th December. 1855)



//Housing// William Harrison, a parson, in 1577 recorded the improvement in household conditions that had taken place since his father's day, ' not among the nobility and gentry only but likewise of the lowest sort in most places of our south country.'


 * ' Our fathers [he writes] yea and we ourselves have lien full oft upon straw pallets, covered only with a sheet, under coverlets made of dagswain or hop harlots and a good round log under their heads instead of a bolster. If it were so that our fathers or the good man of the house had a mattress or flockbed and thereto a sack of chaff to rest his head upon, he thought himself to be as well lodged as the lord of the town that peradventure lay seldom in a bed of down or whole feathers. Pillows were thought meet only for women in childbed. As for servants, if they had any sheet above them, it was well, for seldom had they any under their bodies, to keep them from the pricking straws that ran oft through the canvas of the pallet and razed their hardened hides.'

Straw on the floor and straw in the bedding bred fleas, and some fleas carried plague.
 * Harrison also notes that chimneys have become general even in cottages, whereas ' in the village where I remain," old men recalled that in ' their young days ' under the two Kings Harry,' there were not above two or three chimneys if so many, in uplandish towns, the religious houses and manor places of their lords always excepted, but each one made his fire against a reredoss in the hall where he dined and dressed his meat.'

The increasing use of coal, siphoned off the east coast trade from Newcastle to London, instead of wood for the domestic hearth made it more dis­agreeable not to have chimneys, and the increasing use of bricks made it easier to build them, even if the walls of the house were of some other material. Harrison also records a change during his own lifetime 'of treen [wooden] platters into pewter, and of wooden spoons into silver or tin.' The age of forks was not yet come; where knife and spoon would not avail, even Queen Elizabeth picked up the chicken bone deftly in her long fingers. Until her reign ' a man should hardly find four pieces of pewter in a farmer's house.' Of china there was as yet none. Wooden household utensils, such as butter moulders, continued to be used for centuries to come. Until relatively recent times the home brew continued to be made with an assortment of specialised wooden aids, which are captured in the following account by old Reuben Noy of Westleton, as related by Alan Jobson.


 * " All the things thet wur used in brewin' wur made o' wood, an' wunnerful clean and smooth they wur. They cum fro' the coopers, barrels, tubs, pail, tongs or rack, wedges, spickets and fawsets, even the funnels (' tunnels' we called 'em) ; an' thur wur the wilsh made o' osiers. Thet wur like a little wicker bottle, an' wur used tew strain off the hops from the beer when thet wur runned off. We used tew buy them from owd Daines o' Dennington, same as used tew make the skeps and baskets in his little shop near the church."

Common houses and cottages were still of timber, or of ' half-timber ' with clay and rubble between the wooden up­rights and crossbeams, and a thatched roof. An idea of the character of Halesworth in the age of wood may be glimpsed in the old photograph of such a house and bakery that once stood at the bottom of Station Rd, next to the Oriental Public House (Fig.3). This property was destroyed by fire in the 1930s. Its latter day retail history as a bakery can be traced from the 1844 to 1929 as follows:
 * White's Directory 1844; David Fisk, baker
 * 1851 census for Bungay road: David Fiske, age 48, master baker (Halesworth) wife, Sarah Fiske, age 42 (Tasburgh Nfk)
 * White's Directory 1855: Frederick Fiske, baker
 * Kelly's Directory 1896: Edward Dykes, baker
 * Kelly's Directory 1925, Nathan Mills, baker
 * Kelly's Directory 1929, Nathan Mills, baker

Fig. 3. Nathan Mills’ Bakery, Station Road

Brick was replacing wood in Suffolk by the end of the 17th century. It is from this time that the designation ‘Red House’ became commonplace to emphasise the novel feature of the first brick-built houses in town and country. There were two properties so named in Halesworth, ‘Red House’ close to the junction of Bridge St and Quay St and another ‘Red House Farm’, on the boundary with Walpole. These have not been dated, but it is probable that they were constructed in the mid-18th century. The large-scale use of bricks to rebuild properties in the Thoroughfare awaited the growth of local brick making on an industrial scale. Designations, such as ‘Tilehouse’, indicate that thatch was giving way to new ways of roofing.