PLACES OF ORIGIN OF A GROUP OF IMMIGRANTS INTO SHEFFIELD, 1624-1799

Abstract

F ROM i624 to i814 the cutlery trades in Hallamshire were regulated by the Cutlers' Company.' Among the surviving records of the Company are lists of indentures of apprenticeship signed during the period of the Company's rule. The lists for a few years are missing, but in general are probably fairly complete. Admission to the Freedom of the Company was not confined to men who had served formal apprenticeship. The privilege could be claimed by sons of Freemen who had been taught their trade by their fathers. Thus the list of indentured apprentices does not, even in principle, represent a complete list of all new entrants into the cutlery trades. We have no direct evidence of the number of unapprenticed sons of Freemen who started to learn their trade in any given year. Most, if not all, of the numerous grants of Freedom to men not known to have served apprenticeships were presumably made to members of this group, but we do not know when they actually first entered the industry and there were in any case many men who entered the industry without ever claiming Freedom of the Company. The lists of indentures and Freedoms are thus of somewhat limited value as a basis for estimates of the growth of the labour force of the industry, particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century. In spite of this, the list of indentures contains a great deal of interesting information, some of which is summarized in this note. The list, together with that of grants of the Freedom of the Company, is published by Leader in vol. II of his History of the Company.2 The two lists are there arranged alphabetically, and have had to be rearranged chronologically for the present investigation. They contain about 24,ooo entries, of which about 4700 are of grants of the Freedom of the Company to men not known to have been formally apprenticed. The indentures give the name of the apprentice, the name and trade of the master and the date of signature. In addition, in nearly every case they give the name, occupation and place of residence of the father of the apprentice. From this information we may make certain deductions as to the geographical origins of the apprentices bound to masters in various periods. These deductions are interesting because they bear on a question on which we have very little numerical information, namely, labour migration in periods before the nineteenth century. It is clear that the apprenticeship data do not represent the total amount of immigration into the Sheffield district during the period reviewed. They relate to only one component of this immigration, since many people no doubt entered the district to carry on other trades. The cutlery trades, however, employed a very large proportion, perhaps between 30 and 50 %, of the male population of working age3 in Sheffield, the township which contained the greater part of the population of Hallamshire. On general grounds one l G. I. H. Lloyd, The Cutlery Trades (I 913) . 2 J. D. Leader, History of the Cutlers' Company in Hallamshire (I 905). 8 Judging from a study of occupations recorded in some of the Parish Registers. See E. J. Buckatzsch, in Econ. Hist. Rev. (I949), I, 145.