Excerpt from The Popular History of England, Vol. 5: An Illustrated History of Society and Government From the Earliest Period to Our Own Times

Manchester, in the early part of the reign of Charles II., was reckoned to contain six thousand people.* Fifty years later its population was esti mated at fifty thousand but this estimate included the suburb, or village, on the other side of the bridge. 1 There were no very precise data for this estimate, beyond the manifest increase of buildings and of trade; the increase of inhabitants having demanded a new church, that of St. Anne. If this calculation be just, as I believe it really is, writes Defoe, you have here an open village, which is greater and more populous than most cities in England: neither York, Lincoln, Chester, Salisbury, Winchester, Worcester, Gloucester, no, nor Norwich itself, can come up to it. I The social condi tion of Manchester, at the end of the seventeenth century, was very primitive. Its manufactures of fustian, girth web, ticking, tapes, were carried on by small masters, who had apprentices residing in their houses. These lads were employed in the servile offices of turning the warping mills, and carry ing packages from place to place. The master and his young men breakfasted together upon water-pottage, boiled thick, and a bowl of milk stood upon the table, into which all dipped their spoons. In 1702 there was the per tentous entry in a tradesman's household-book, of a sum expended for tea and sugar. In the reign of george'i. It was held that the luxury of the age will be the ruin of the nation and one of the proofs of this degeneracy was that the wholesome breakfast of water-gruel and milk-pottage is changed for coffee and tea. H The present mill-owners of Manchester, each with his enormous transactions, represented by hundreds of thousands of pounds in a year, furnish a remarkable contrast to those travelling trades men whom we call Manchester-men. To every town the fustians and small things called Manchester-ware were borne by horse-packs; the Manchester men being, saving their wealth, a kind of pedlars who carry their goods themselves to the country-shopkeepers everywhere. 1[ The perils of their land journeys were not trifling The horse is driven away by some sudden flood, or falls down in the water and spoils the goods. Manchester had few rival neighbours in its trade of fustians and dimities, in which a little hand-spun cotton was used. Towns such as Bolton, to which the cotton manufacture had reached, did not presume to compete with Manchester's warping-mills, and Manchester's looms, which work twenty-four laces at a time, as is recorded with wondering commendation. At Bury, the cotton manufacture was ended, and the woollen manufacture of coarse sorts begun. At Preston, the tourist had come beyond the trading part of the country. This gay town, known as Proud Preston, was full of attornies, proctors, and notaries. 'h' Between the trading towns there was very imperfect communi cation and until the Mersey, the Irwell, and the Weaver were made navi gable, land-carriage to and from Liverpool was an important addition to the cost of exported and imported goods.

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