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The Stone Workers of Purbeck
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 October 2008
Extract
In his book Green and Pleasant Land, Howard Newby used the term ‘occupational communities’ to describe the villages of rural England in the nineteenth century. By using this term he intended to convey simultaneously the notions that the populations of these villages were dependent upon a single economic activity, agriculture; that social and economic life within them therefore revolved around the agricultural cycle; and that social relations in such villages were defined and understood on the basis of occupational relationships within agriculture.
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References
Notes
1. Newby, H., Green and Pleasant Land: Social Change in Rural England (Harmondsworth, 1980), pp. 156–64Google Scholar. See also Newby, H., Country Life: A Social History of Rural England (London, 1987), pp. 79–96.Google Scholar
2. Newby, , Green and Pleasant Land, p. 157.Google Scholar
3. The traditional boundaries of the Isle of Purbeck include the entire parishes of Arne, Church Knowle, Corfe Castle, Kimmeridge, Langton Matravers, Steeple, Studland, Swanage, Tyneham and Worth Matravers together with the extra-parochial place of East Holme (we are grateful to R.J. Saville, Chairman and Curator of the Langton Matravers Local History and Preservation Society, for clarifying this for us). It is also possible to enter Purbeck from the west, using small and winding country lanes.
4. Benfield, E., Purbeck Shop: A Stone Worker's Story of Stone (Cambridge, 1940), p. 10Google Scholar; Hutchins, J., History and Antiques of the County of Dorset, 3rd edition (4 vols, ed. Shipp, W. and Hodson, J. W.) (Westminster, 1861–1870), p. 657.Google Scholar
5. Cockburn, E.O., The Stone Quarries of Dorset (London, 1971), p. 17Google Scholar; Crickland, M.M. and Vellacott, C.H., ‘Industries,’ in Page, W. (ed.), The Victoria History of the County of Dorset, vol. 2 (London, 1908), p. 337Google Scholar; and Moore, M., ‘Stone Quarrying in the Isle of Purbeck: An Oral History,’ unpublished MA thesis, Department of English Local History, University of Leicester, 1992, pp. 45–6Google Scholar (we are grateful to Dr Keith Snell for drawing our attention to this excellent thesis). See also Letter from Bishop, Jn, dated 10th 06 1771Google Scholar (Dorset Record Office (hereafter DRO), D/RWR/E107).
6. Baines, F., ‘The History of John Mowlem and Co.,’ (unpublished typescript) p. 5 (DRO, D432/1).Google Scholar
7. For more on quarrying methods, see Saville, R.J., Langton's Stone Quarries (2nd edition) (Langton Matravers, Dorset, The Langton Matravers Local History and Preservation Society, 1986), pp. 12–19Google Scholar; letter XXVIII ‘The Stone Quarries of Swanage,’ in Razzell, P.E. and Wainwright, R.W. (eds.), The Victorian Working Class: Selections from Letters to the Morning Chronicle (London, 1973), pp. 43–4Google Scholar; Phillips, J., ‘Quarr Houses on the Isle of Purbeck, Dorset,’ Mining History: Bulletin of the Peak District Mines Historical Society 13, 1996, pp. 157–58Google Scholar; and Moore, , ‘Stone Quarrying in the Isle of Purbeck,’ pp. 7–14.Google Scholar
8. They were usually described by those who worked in the industry as ‘quarrs’.
9. Morning Chronicle, letter XXVIII, p. 43.
10. Morning Chronicle, letter XXVIII, pp. 39–40. The question of whether a landowner or occupier had the right to refuse permission for a quarrier to open a quarry was, from time to time, disputed. Some eighteenth-century leases relating to land in the parishes of Langton Matravers and Worth Matravers stipulated that quarriers were to be granted access should they request it. However, the right of access was the subject of more than one court case during the nineteenth century (see part VI below).
11. Strictly speaking therefore, the quarriers were only bequeathing or selling the right to work the quarry, not the quarry itself (we are grateful to R.J. Saville for clarifying the details in this paragraph).
12. According to C. le Neve Foster, inspector of mines for the west of England, reporting in 1878: ‘if men can find work as masons they abandon their quarries for a time, and do not return to them until other work is slack’ (quoted in Legg, R., Old Swanage: Quarry Port to Seaside Spa (Sherborne, 1983)).Google Scholar
13. Morning Chronicle, letter XXVIII, pp. 45–7.
14. Moore, , ‘Stone Quarrying in the Isle of Purbeck,’ pp. 78–80.Google Scholar
15. The fact that merchants were required to be members of the Company was confirmed to us in correspondence by R.J. Saville.
16. Much ambiguity surrounds the date of this document. Several copies are in existence, at least one of which bears the date 3rd March 1551. The text of all the copies we have studied seems, however, to be identical.
17. See Moore, , ‘Stone Quarrying in the Isle of Purbeck,’ pp. 68–9Google Scholar. It was also forbidden for a freeman to take an apprentice who was illegitimate, or whose parents had led a ‘loose lyfe’ (DRO, D/169).
18. Saville, , Langton's Stone Quarries, p. 28.Google Scholar
19. Ibid., p. 26. The ‘Order’ referred to in this quotation is the same organisation as the Company of Marblers mentioned earlier. The name was changed in the twentieth century to the ‘Ancient Order of Marblers and Stone Cutters’.
20. Other articles laid out penalties for working another freeman's quarry without his consent, undercutting an agreed bargain of sale, disregarding the Warden's instructions, and revealing the Company's secrets (DRO, D/169).
21. Articles of Agreement of the Company of Marblers, including articles to set up a joint stock company, 8th March 1697/8 (DRO, D619/1).
22. Langton Matravers marriage register, 1837–91 (DRO, PE/LAM: RE3/5). It is also worth noting that of the grooms' fathers who were described as ‘quarriers’ or ‘stonemasons’ during the same period, only three out of 71 had sons who were not in the stone trade.
23. Copies of the records of the Shrove Tuesday meetings from 1837 to 1933, including the names of those made freemen of the Company in each year, may be found in the Dorset Record Office (DRO, D1/OM17).
24. In addition to the fact that movement between these two activities was common, it seems likely that nineteenth-century census enumerators failed to distinguish consistently between the two.
25. By the mid-nineteenth century, employment in the stone trade was confined to the parishes of Langton Matravers, Worth Matravers and Swanage. According to Ordnance Survey maps of 1888 and 1891, there were 37 shafts in the parish of Langton Matravers, 21 in the parish of Worth Matravers, and 69 in the parish of Swanage (though quite a number of these were probably disused). We are in the process of analysing data from the parishes of Swanage and Worth Matravers.
26. Public Record Office (hereafter PRO) Census Enumerators' Book, Langton Matravers, 1881 (RG11/2098). The tendency for stone workers' children to remain in the family home may have been particularly marked in 1881 because there had been a lot of work locally during the late 1870s. A new church at Kingston was constructed at that time, and the church at Langton Matravers was rebuilt. The difference between the stone workers and agricultural workers is rather smaller in other census years.
27. The heads of stone workers' households were mainly born in Purbeck (as might be expected). A handful were born in Hampshire, Kent or London.
28. The Isle of Portland was another Dorset area where stone was quarried. However, it seems that there was no love lost between the quarriers of Purbeck and Portland, and contact between the two groups was limited prior to the 1920s.
29. Drury, G.D., ‘The Use of Purbeck Marble in Medieval Times,’ Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society 70, 1948, pp. 78, 97–8Google Scholar; Page, , VCH Dorset, vol. 2, pp. 334–5.Google Scholar
30. This index is presently available on microfiche in county Record Offices. We used the collection held by the Hampshire Record Office. The Genealogical Society of Utah has, in fact, transcribed the enumerators' books for the entire 1881 census, and this transcription, too, is available in microfiche in county Record Offices. The Data Archive in Essex is presently preparing a machine-readable version of the transcription.
31. We have yet to search a few counties where we do not expect to find many (or indeed any) Purbeck–born persons (e.g. Norfolk, Lincolnshire and the four northern counties of Durham, Northumberland, Cumberland and Westmorland).
32. PRO, RG11/603.
33. Ibid.
34. For example, several Cornishmen were to be found in the lead mining parish of Sheldon in Derbyshire in the mid-nineteenth century (PRO, HO107/2149, RG9/2539 and RG10/3627). These Cornishmen apparently called themselves the ‘Magpie Mining Co.’ and had a share in the lead mine of that name. See Ford, T.D. and Rieuwerts, J.H. (eds), Lead Mining in the Peak District (Bakewell, 1968), p. 59.Google Scholar
35. PRO, RG11/602.
36. Ibid.
37. PRO, RG11/1195.
38. PRO, RG11/603.
39. Stone workers tended to have large families. Although we have yet to make a detailed study of their fertility, it is clear from a preliminary analysis that families of six and seven children were usual. Assuming that half of these were males, and even allowing for a fairly high rate of child mortality, it is clear that for all sons born to stone workers to have been absorbed by the industry, the number of workers would roughly have had to double every 25 to 30 years. This did not happen. The number of persons described as stonemasons or quarriers in Langton Matravers was 132 in 1851, 93 in 1861, 105 in 1871, 145 in 1881 and 68 in 1891 (PRO, HO107/1856, RG9/1343, RG10/1992, RG11/2098 and RG12/1641).
40. Moore, , ‘Stone Quarrying in the Isle of Purbeck,’ p. 95Google Scholar. The nineteenth-century census enumerators' books are notoriously poor at recording dual occupations, but even in these a number of householders in the Derbyshire parishes of Sheldon and Ashford-in-the-Water in 1851 and 1861 are described as ‘lead miner and farmer’ (PRO, HO107/2149 and RG9/2539). According to Raistrick, A. and Jennings, B., A History of Lead Mining in the Pennines (London, 1965), p. 314Google Scholar, about one-third of the lead miners in Swaledale in Yorkshire had ‘some sort of agricultural holding, usually with one or two cows’.
41. PRO, HO107/1856, RG9/1343, RG10/1992 and RG11/2098.
42. In the five censuses from 1851 to 1891, we have found only 17 members of the main stone-working families described as tradesmen or craftsmen.
43. Morning Chronicle, Letter XXVIII, pp. 45–7; Hutchins, , History of Dorset, p. 630.Google Scholar
44. According to Raistrick, and Jennings, , History of Lead Mining p. 289Google Scholar, there is no evidence to suggest that truck was practised in lead mining.
45. DRO, PE/LAM: RE 3/5. A chi-squared analysis of these data revealed no significant association between the occupations of grooms and the occupations of their brides' fathers. The same result is obtained when, rather than dividing the population on the basis of occupation, a division is made on the basis of surnames, dividing the population into those belonging to the main stone-working families (that is, those listed in Table 3) and the rest.
46. Pushman, D., Purbeck Underground (Langton Matravers, n.d.) p. 53Google Scholar. In correspondence with the first-named author, R. J. Saville has written: ‘[t]he quarrying families certainly became very emotionally attached to the family quarry, which had probably been worked by father, son, grandfather, etc. On Sundays they took picnics there and petted the donkey. Womenfolk very often cleaned up the top of the quarry, brushed out the sheds, weeded and tidied generally. Some courting was even done in the quarry enclosures. They regularly showed visitors, such as cousins from other parts of the country, around the quarry with great pride. One old man, upon coming to die, sent for the quarry donkey and they brought it upstairs to his bedroom so that he could say a tearful goodbye.’
47. Morning Chronicle, Letter XXVIII, p. 40.
48. Report of the Chief Inspector of Factories and Workshops for year ending 31st October 1879, British Parliamentary Papers 1880/XIV (C. 2489), p. 81.
49. Reports of these two court cases may be found in the Poole and South Western Herald, 1st September 1853, p. 8, and 17th November 1853, p. 8.
50. See Raistrick, and Jennings, , History of Lead Mining, pp. 102–4.Google Scholar
51. Ibid., pp. 104–13.
52. See Hart, C.E., The Free Miners of the Royal Forest of Dean and Hundred of St Briavels (Gloucester, 1953)Google Scholar; and Lewis, G.R., The Stannaries: A Study of the Medieval Tin Miners of Cornwall and Devon (Truro, 1965).Google Scholar
53. Raistrick, and Jennings, , History of Lead Mining, p. 182.Google Scholar
54. Moore, , ‘Stone Quarrying in the Isle of Purbeck,’ p. 83.Google Scholar