Weaving - The Role of The Weaver

The Role of The Weaver

A distinction can be made between the role and lifestyle and status of a handloom weaver, and that of the powerloom weaver and craft weaver. The perceived threat of the power loom has led to disquiet and industrial unrest. Well known protests movements such as the Luddites and the Chartists had hand loom weavers amongst their leaders. In the early 19th century power weaving became viable. Richard Guest in 1823 made a comparison of the productivity of power and hand loom weavers:

A very good Hand Weaver, a man twenty-five or thirty years of age, will weave two pieces of nine-eighths shirting per week, each twenty-four yards long, and containing one hundred and five shoots of weft in an inch, the reed of the cloth being a forty-four, Bolton count, and the warp and weft forty hanks to the pound, A Steam Loom Weaver, fifteen years of age, will in the same time weave seven similar pieces.

He then speculates about the wider economics of using powerloom weavers:

...it may very safely be said, that the work done in a Steam Factory containing two hundred Looms, would, if done by hand Weavers, find employment and support for a population of more than two thousand persons.