Earl Shilton - The Workhouse

The Workhouse

The economy of the village was based mainly on boots and stockings. A whole family would work from morning until late at night for very meagre earnings. Stocking makers worked ten, twelve and even fifteen hours a day at their frames, for seven or eight shillings per week. Frame rents were high and varied from one shilling to three shillings per week. Poverty and disease were rife. In Hinckley there was a framework knitters strike in 1824. Two years later, disorder in the town was quelled when a detachment of lancers arrived, killing one man.

The Earl Shilton village population had risen to 2017 by 1831.

Many Earl Shilton people in the 1840s became destitute and sought refuge in the Union Workhouse at Hinckley, locally known as "The Bastille." Things had become very bad, and are spoken of as the "hungry forties." Queen Victoria ordered an inquiry into distress, and sent in 1843 a commission headed by a Mr. Muggeridge, and afterwards much valuable information was obtained from interviews with work-people and employers. Earl Shilton frame-work knitters and hosiers, gave evidence at the enquiry of 1843. Rich Wileman, of Shilton, described himself as the oldest stocking manufacturer in the kingdom, and stated that many thousands of dozens of socks were sent to the American market every year.

At a time when a reasonable daily wage was 4/-, a report showed the weekly earnings in 27 parishes varied from 4/- to 8/- a week, Hinckley district being 5/3, Bosworth 4/6, Ibstock 4/- and Shepshed 5/6. Frame rents in the cottages were high and varied in different parishes from 1/- to 3/- per week. This rent and the addition of the vicious Truck Act (1831), made poverty and disease rife in the Leicestershire parishes (John Lawrence). The Truck Act stated that goods had to be paid for in cash instead of in kind and, as usual, hit the poorest the hardest. Had it not been for their allotments ground, things would have been much worse, as it was many were close to starvation.

In the year 1844 there were in Shilton alone 650 stocking frames. Mr. J. Homer, giving evidence to the commission, said that the whole of these were in the houses of the workpeople at that time. Neither the workshop, nor the factory system was in operation in Earl Shilton until after the findings of the Commission were made public.

Stocking making in the home quickly died out with the introduction of the factory system. Both the boot and shoe and the hosiery industry eagerly took to the new system of working and for the first time people began to be regulated by time, as the factory needed villagers to work in unison. The last known stocking-frame in Earl Shilton disappeared when its owner, a man named Mr. Pratt, who lived in Wood Street, died.

Earl Shilton saw its first hosiery strike in 1859. The employers involved were Messrs. Homer & Everard. Almost 130 operatives took strike action, and an appeal was sent out to workers of three counties for aid for the Earl Shilton strikers to fight it.

There is no doubt that the 1840s were wretched times, and sheep stealing, highway robbery and burglary were common. It was not safe to go out after dark. If a man was caught sheep stealing, he was sentenced to fourteen years transportation. Fourteen years transportation was also the sentence for anyone who was driven by hunger to take a pheasant from the woods.