Trading+networks

In the first half of the 16th century, the population of East Anglia gained from the initiation of a golden age for English exports, later boosted by the chaotic devaluations of the pound, which Henry VIII debased to finance his extravagant military expenditure in France. Economic development of Halesworth hinged on the east coast trading networks of prosperity emanating from the London-Antwerp mercantile axis. This fact explains the tendency during that period for eastern England to be the richer and more active area of the economy, sucking in people, goods, and trade from other parts of the nation. However, many provincial traders found themselves unable to compete against the increasingly rich and powerful London merchants. The commerce of the old and important west-coast port of Bristol declined, and a similar fate even befell such long-established Eastern ports as Hull and Boston. Some were able to develop other types of trade, and in this respect, Southwold was ideally placed to serve the coastal maritime traffic to a local purpose, importing coal from Newcastle, and exporting cereal grains to meet the demands of the rapidly growing London economy. The development of the road from Harleston to Southwold via Halesworth was a measure of the importance of Southwold in the regional economy.

Elements of continuity with the past were numerous and significant, and yet in more than one sense, by the middle of the sixteenth century, England looked very different from what it had been a century earlier. There was more concern with property and the first descriptions, of ‘who owned what’ in central Halesworth date from this time. Literacy, to take one indicator of development, was rapidly spreading among the population, and society as well as the economy was undergoing a process of substantial change. The fact of the matter is that the period 1550-1650 was characterised by England's entry into a new stage in economic development, a stage in which other manufactures besides woollens began to play a major role in the economy. These new sectors had begun to expand and to achieve a steadily increasing importance in the economy from about the middle of the 16th century. The shift from one type of economy to another occurred gradually, and even at the end of the 17th century, woollen textiles still accounted for about 48 percent of exports. However, change was evident in the increased production of iron, lead, armament, and new types of cloth, glass, and silk. The rural blast furnaces of England and Wales produced some 5,000 tons of iron per annum around 1550 and 18,000 tons per annum around 1600. The output of lead reached 3,200 tons in about 1580, and that was not all. Joshua Gee mentions that: “the manufacture of Linnen was settlled in several parts of the Kingdom.... Also the manufacture of Copper and Brass were set on Foot, which are brought to great Perfection and now in a great Measuere supply the Nation with Coppers, Kettles and all Sorts of Copper and Brass ware. The making of Sail cloth was began and carried on to great Perfection; also Sword Blades, Sciffars and a great many Toys made of Steel which formerly we used to have from France”.

The following, a remarkable summary of a century of British achievement, was written in the Edinburgh Review of 1813:


 * "The lower orders . . . have still less good fortune (than the higher and more instructed orders of society) to reckon on. In the whole history of the species there was nothing at all comparable to the improvement of England within the last century; never anywhere was there such an increase of wealth and luxury-so many admirable inventions in the arts-so many works of learning and ingenuity-such a progress in cultivation-such an enlargement of commerce -and yet, in that century, the number of paupers in England had increased fourfold, and is now rated at one-tenth of her whole population, and notwithstanding the enormous sums that are levied and given privately for their relief, and the multitudes that are drained off by the waste of war, the peace of the country is perpetually threatened by the outrages of famishing multitudes".

This was by way of a provisional progress report on an unprecedented mixture of industry and charity that was the British Industrial Revolution. By the time of the 1851 census a well-defined phase of economic development was complete. Steam-power and machinery were victorious. The technique of big-scale manufacture was in large measure understood, and appropriate specialists to carry forward both trade and industry were rapidly being produced through educational reforms. Negotiation rather than violence came to workers' minds to take issue with employers. The farm labourer had become stoical about the workhouse as the probable home of his declining years; the resentment of the displaced hand-loom weavers was passing with their final extinction; the country boys were "off to Philadelphia" instead of their nearest town. The country, measured by days' journeys, had grown nine-tenths smaller and safer.  4.2.1 The high-trust culture Of importance to this discussion is the highly individualistic culture, which prevailed in Halesworth for much of the period. Philosophers and political economists like John Stuart Mill and Thomas Malthus, as well as the later well-known populists like Samuel Smiles, promulgated a philosophy of self-dependence as the key to improved economic and social betterment. They believed that personal success ought to be measured by a common standard, regardless of means, and that those who succeeded in life did so because of their hard work, thrift and ingenuity, while the poor suffered as a result of personal fecklessness. In simple terms, it was the individual's responsibility to pull himself up 'by the bootstraps' and exploit the opportunities available, rather than rely on others, or the state, for succour. Self-help was the key, encouraging those without adequate resources to believe that they could emulate outstanding individuals like Richard Arkwright, the twelfth son of a barber, who, by the time he died in 1792, owned large landed estates and had been knighted for his services to industry after a career as a successful industrial innovator.

One must treat much of this proselytising about the benefits of self-help with great caution, because while it is true to say that the myth of the self-made man and the ideology of self-help were deep-rooted in British public opinion, there were actually very few recorded cases of working class entrepreneurs in this period. In Suffolk there were only two native self-made entrepreneur engineers, Richard Garrett of Leiston and James Smyth of Peasenhall, both pioneers in the mass production of agricultural machinery. It was the very few successes that produced Smiles generalisations about the importance of self-help. Therefore, it is important to stress the contribution made by the lower middle classes to the growth of a business community at this time, because having started off with relatively modest capital resources most of these men were probably 'architects of their own fortunes'. Halesworth has several examples of people falling into this class. It is also important to stress that the belief in self-help was further compromised by economic reality. Extensive local social networks for the mobilisation of finance, talent, or information were utilised as an essential aid to management. These networks were primarily based on what has been described as a 'high-trust culture', which sustained the finely spread business structure prevailing at that time, and within the regional context especially, elite groups of businessmen collaborated extensively to reduce the transaction costs arising from the high levels of uncertainty. Religious groupings were especially successful in building up networks, particularly the Quakers and other non-conformists, who utilised their common bonds to build a mutually supportive infrastructure in the North East Suffolk linen industry. Religion, however, was by no means the only bonding agent at work from the mid-eighteenth century, because it was 'the region' that took on a crucial importance as an integrated unit. It provided not only the key factors of production and vital technical and commercial information, but also forged a community of interests. This regional dynamic was to become the abiding characteristic of Britain's first phase of industrialisation, and for businessmen struggling with market uncertainties and deficient knowledge, it provided and encapsulated a 'high-trust culture', which would minimise transaction costs external to the firm. In this context, the self-help philosophy had an important negative influence on business development at this time, largely because it placed so much emphasis on the individual as the key to success. This often led to a managerial constraint on business growth, through too much reliance on one man as an arbiter and decision maker. The ultimate failures of Smyths and Garretts are good examples of the original entrepreneurial force petering out in their founder’s descendants.

Halesworth was an epitome of this age of personal adventure with regard to individuals and their extensive regional networks. In particular, the importance of personal capital and the high trust culture are features that characterised the careers of Halesworth's local self-help hero, the industrious Scot, Patrick Stead, and William Jackson Hooker, a refined and well-born dilettante scientist. They dominated Quay Street, which was the town's new centre of ideas on how to make lots of fast money.

But the character of a place cannot be gathered from its exceptional figures. It is revealed in the lives of the typical and the humdrum that inhabited Chediston St, the Market Place and The Thoroughfare. These people are exemplified by Halesworth's manufacturers and traders, competent, self-assured and complacent, who were content with an order of things, which allowed them to buy in the cheapest and sell in the dearest market. A third social group was the urban artisans for whom work was a monotonous round of disciplined toil. Then there were the tenant farmers enfranchised in 1832, but as tenants-at-will, they were often the political vassals of their landlord in the 'big house'. Such was the power of the Plumer’s and then the Parkyns’ of Chediston Hall. Finally, there was the labourer of the farm, who was politically voiceless and socially isolated. It has been said that this kind of social mix was a British civilization that had strength without grace. People worked hard and saved hard. They passed on the technique and the products of the new industrialism to other countries; they exported their capital, and a considerable fraction of their population, so that a big contribution to boost a world economy was made. On a national scale, the Great Exhibition of 1851 showed a solidity of achievement, which could not be mistaken. Up in Halesworth, the goings on in Quay Street were making a small, but significant contribution to this national whole. However, at the terminus of the scale of prosperity were the paupers of Chediston Street, where Halesworth displayed more than its fair share of family misery. The continual rise in the population made it indeed impossible to provide work for everyone. Agriculture had absorbed all the hands it required, and many traditional kinds of rural occupation were disappearing. Great national industries, like cloth, were migrating back out of the country districts to which they had moved in the later Middle Ages and Tudor times, to the rapidly growing new industrial towns. The village was becoming more purely agricultural; it was ceasing to manufacture goods for the general market, and, moreover, was manufacturing fewer goods for itself. In this sense, the story of Halesworth as an economic island extends into the sea of village life that surrounded it. With the improvement of roads and communications, first the lady of the manor, then the farmer's wife and lastly the cottager learnt to buy in the town many articles that used to be made in the village or on the estate. The ' village shop ' was now often set up with goods from the cities or from overseas. The self-sufficing, self-clothing village, became more and more a thing of the past. This was a beginning of a process that dragged on to the last quarter of the 20th century. One by one the craftsmen began to disappear; the harness maker, the maker of agricultural implements, the tailor, the miller, the furniture maker, the weaver, sometimes even the carpenter and builder slipped away, till, at the end of the second World War, the village blacksmith was in some places the only craftsman left, eking out a declining business in horseshoes by mending the punctured bicycle tyres of tourists. Young lads, who in the 1930s were apprenticed to village craftsmen, such as harness makers, after the War found themselves in charge of tractors.

This time was also the birth of a mythical countryside fostered by those confined to the sparse greenery of urban streets. In the face of change, the life of the village children, let loose to play in the hedges, heaths and thickets, was conflated as being entirely wholesome and sweet. This was the first whiff of nostalgia for the countryside and its biodiversity as first depicted by Bewick, Wordsworth and Cobbet, who were actually people with boyhoods that were connected with the realities of a previous generation. William Howitt, George Borrow and other writers actually shared the life of the common people in lane, field and cottage during the 'twenties and 'thirties, and as successful popular authors they left a largely false impression of much widely diffused rural health and happiness. It is ironic that Halesworth's contribution to local economic and national intellectual development came from two contrasting aspects of its local natural resources, the intensive production of barley, and the scientific wealth of its untrammeled hedgerows and meadows, both of which were in opposition. In this respect, William Hooker and Patrick Stead, both temporary residents of the town, exemplify the two pillars of cultural ecology, the 'biological' and 'industrial', which are now starkly revealed as being in need of an economic bridge to conserve the country's green heritage assets.