y owning the raw material
and the requisite tools, and working with the power of their own
bodies in their own homes, produce commodities for their own
consumption. This private production for private consumption survived
largely in the eighteenth century, not merely in the case of
agriculturists who produced the more necessary articles of food for
themselves as well as for the market, but also in the case of farmers
and cottagers in the remotest parts of the country who produced their
own wool and flax, and spun and wove it for their own use.[42]

From this primitive form which required no commerce and no industrial
organisation we may trace the growth of various forms of higher
industrial development, many of which co-existed in eighteenth century
England.

The simplest structure of "domestic" manufacture is that in which the
farmer-manufacturer is found purchasing his own material, the raw wool
or flax if he is a spinner, the warp and weft if he is a weaver, and,
working with his family, produces yarn or cloth which he sells
himself, either in the local market or to regular master-clothiers or
merchants. The mixed cotton weaving trade was in this condition in the
earlier years of the eighteenth century. "The workshop of the weaver
was a rural cottage, from which, when he was tired of sedentary
labour, he could sally forth into his little garden, and with the
spade or the hoe tend its culinary productions. The cotton-wool which
was to form his weft was picked clean by the fingers of his younger
children, and was carded and spun by the older girls assisted by his
wife, and the yarn was woven by himself assisted by his sons."[43]

Following as the central point the ownership of the requisites of
production, we find in the next stage that the ownership of the
material has passed from the workman into the hands of the organising
merchant or middleman, who usurps the title "manufacturer." The
workman, however, still retains the ownership of the implements of his
craft and works in his own house. The condition of the worsted trade
later in the century, about 1770, well illustrates this industrial
form.

"The work was entirely domestic, and its different branches widely
scattered over the country. First, the manufacturer had to travel on
horseback to purchase his raw material among the farmers, or at the
great fairs held in those old towns that had formerly been the
exclusive markets, or, as they were called, 'staples'