and perpendicular styles: indeed, some writers say that this was formerly a cathedral. Besides these four old churches, there are many new ones, two or three of which are buildings of considerable beauty.

The other relics of really early days, except the churches, are mostly crumbled into dust. The Roman remains met with are wholly fragmentary. On the establishment of the Anglo-Norman power, William the Conqueror either built a castle here, or enlarged one already in existence: it was situated east of the south-gate, near the river. This contiguity of the castle to the town often gave the town's-men an unwelcome share in the turbulent scenes of feudal days. The castle was destroyed in the reign of William Rufus, and built again in the reign of Henry I. In the fifteenth century, Leicester Castle was a focus of much splendour and power; but after that time it was suffered to decay indeed, the reason assigned for Richard III. having slept in the humble Blue Boar' inn is, that the castle was too dilapidated to accommodate him. Decay did its work rapidly, until, in 1633, orders were transmitted to the sheriff to pull down the remainder of the castle, and build a sort of recordhouse with the fragments. Hardly a vestige of the castle now remains. With regard to the ecclesiastical or monastic antiquities, Bishop Tanner states that there was a collegiate church at Leicester before the Conquest, that this church was burned during the reign of William I., and that it was rebuilt in 1107, for a dean and twelve prebendaries, forming the present St. Mary's church. In the year 1143, an abbey of black canons was founded about a mile northward of Leicester, and dedicated to the blessed Virgin: a few vestiges of this abbey yet remain. (Cut, No. 4.) A hospital was built in 1330, in a spot of ground near the castle, for "a master and certain chaplains, and poor persons;" but of this hospital, and of the religious houses of gray friars, black friars, and Austin friars, which once existed in Leicester, no remnants are now visible.

If now we turn our attention to the social features of this town, we find, as was before stated, that hosiery,

in its multiform varieties, is the main stay and prop of the population. Most of the principal firms, most of the influential inhabitants, are directly or indirectly connected with this manufacture. Some of the larger firms employ two or three thousand hands; and one or two spinning-mills recently built would rival those of Lancashire. Among those who supply the raw material for the manufacture are worsted spinners, lambs'-wool spinners, and wool-staplers; for the working implements there are frame - smiths,' needlemakers,' and 'sinker-makers;' for conducting the larger arrangements there are manufacturers and merchants in hosiery; while the large bulk of the articles made are the result of the labour of thousands of men, women, and children, who work at the stocking-frame' in their own humble abodes-a stocking-factory, properly so called, hardly exists; for reasons which will appear in a later page. The worsted-mills, indeed, are factories, in which machinery is employed in spinning the woollen fibres into yarn for the knitters; but almost every other portion of the work is conducted by hand. Wherever there is a poor street throughout the town, there may we be pretty certain to hear, early and late, the clack and rattle of the stockingframe. There may be some of our London readers who have occasionally seen frames of this kind, brought thither by unemployed workmen of Nottingham or Leicester, and set to work in the open streets in the manufacture of hosiery. Such a frame is the type of Leicester industry; there are, perhaps, ten or twelve thousand such in the town, worked by both sexes and by nearly all ages; and the daily average produce of each frame-small and precarious as it too often is-mainly determines the social position of the whole of the inhabitants. When ladies wear long dresses, and gentlemen wear trowsers and boots instead of the dress-attire of former days, they are wont to regard it as a question merely of fashion or taste; but if a 'stockinger' were appealed to in the matter, he would say that it is a food-question to him, especially if his work be of cotton or silk hosiery; he would point to the elegance and high finish of the stockings which were worn by the wealthy of both sexes in by-gone days, and to the large price paid for them; and he would contrast those with the unseen and therefore uncriticised substitutes of the present day.

THE HOSIERY TOWNS AROUND LEICESTER.

We will, however, not dwell longer on this point here. In another page we group together a few details illustrative of the industrial features of the whole district; and will, therefore, now proceed with our bird'seye glance at the hosiery towns.

Leicester is almost exactly in the centre of the county; and there is a circle of secondary towns surrounding it, at an average distance of twelve or fifteen miles. These towns are Market Harborough, Lutterworth, Hinckley, Market Bosworth, Loughborough, and Melton Mowbray. All of these, to a greater

Well argued, good queen! Lea was urged on by the terms of this letter to try to make silk stockings by his loom; and he succeeded in bringing his machine to that pitch of efficiency in 1597. It is said that Lord Hunsdon himself was Lea's first apprentice: so greatly were hopes raised as to the pecuniary results of the invention. Lea made nine of his machines, and set his relations to work in them; but court favour he found to be rather an evanescent commodity: neither the queen nor her successor did much to aid him; and he was induced to accept an offer made to him by the great Sully to introduce his new manufacture into France. He did so: he established his frames at Rouen, and was fast rising into note, when all was blasted at once:-the king of France was assassinated, Sully retired into private life, and poor Lea died of a broken heart. Lea's brother and friends tried for a while to work the machines, but failed; they came to England, and sold the machines to one Mead, who was invited over to Venice, to try to introduce the manufacture in that Republic; but neither Mead nor the Venetians knew how to repair the machines when they became disarranged; so this project also fell to the ground, probably about the year 1620.

In the mean time improvements had been gradually introduced by various persons in England; and the stocking-looms increased steadily in number. By the year 1670 there were 660 in England, of which 400 were in London, chiefly employed in making silk stockings. By the end of Queen Anne's reign there were nearly 9,000 in England, of which 2,500 were in London-Nottingham and Leicester still having only a relatively small number. This restriction was mainly owing to the Framework Knitters' Company-a company which still exists, and which still exhibits its arms (consisting of a stocking-loom, supported by a clergyman, and a female presenting her unused knittingpin), but which has totally outlived any useful duties connected with the manufacture. By the middle of the last century the balance began to turn against London, and in favour of Nottingham and Leicester; and this movement has been going on for a hundred years, until at length a stocking-loom is a curiosity in London. The number of stocking-looms in the three hosiery counties, when Mr. Felkin made an investigation in 1844, was about 43,000.

The reader would not thank us for any elaborate attempt to describe the stocking-loom: it would puzzle rather than enlighten him. The 'carcass,' the 'carriers,' the 'jacks,' the needles,' the 'sinkers,' the 'slurs,' and many other technical names for the mechanism, are somewhat bewildering; for the stockingloom is really a very complex piece of machinery. Let us not forget that Dr. Johnson defined 'network' to be "anything reticulated or decussated, at equal distances, with interstices between the intersections:" an account of the stocking-loom, in this place, would be about as equally clear and satisfactory. Suffice it to say that this machine is a sort of upright loom, in which a number of small steel hooks are set so peculiarly at

work as to twist successive rows of thread round each other, so as to form loops or meshes: if we unravel a piece of a stocking, we shall see how peculiar this entanglement of the thread becomes. The phraseology of the manufacture, in other respects, too, is as odd as the mechanism is intricate. Listen, kind reader, to a few of the technical terms: 'Bothering-up' and 'bothering-on,' and 'fruzzed work,' are three elegant names for a particular mode of making the stockingweb. Cut-ups' are a kind of inferior or slop-made hose. Drop-offs' are hose made at three looms in succession. 'Fashioned hose,' or 'wrought-hose,' are the better kinds of manufactured goods. 'Plated-work' consists of stockings in which the outside is of silk, and the inside of cotton or worsted. 'Seaming' and stitching' are processes for making up the web into the form of a stocking; in seaming,' the seamer joins the selvage edges together with a needle, which is passed through loops in the web left for the purpose; while in stitching,' the edges are brought together by random, hasty, and slovenly sewing, which soon gives way in wear. 'Spider-work' was once an ornamental kind of stocking, with eyelet-holes; but 'blind-spiders' are a cheap and trashy modern production. 'Straightdowns,' or 'dandies,' are stockings which are made of one uniform width from top to bottom, without narrowing' above the heel; these are invited and persuaded, by the use of a 'leg-board,' to assume somewhat the shape of a smart human leg; but their original perpendicularity clings to them pretty closely throughout their career.

But though the technical details of the manufacture are beyond our present purpose, the commercial features of its distribution lie within our scope: indeed, this is the very point which will enable us, better than anything else, to observe the existing state and relation of the mass of the inhabitants in the hosiery towns.

In the first place, then, the reader must understand that stocking-weaving is not steam-engine work. Steam assists in spinning the yarn in the worsted, cotton, or silk mills; but it has scarcely aught to do with the working-up of this yarn into hosiery. This fact is a singular one; for in almost every other kind of weaving steam-power has become a formidable competitor with human power. It has been sometimes explained thus,-that the varied movements of the body, hands, and legs, called into action in the working of a stocking-frame, are all necessarily mainly guided by the eye; especially in the finer kinds of work, where the tax on the sight of the workman is very severe. But this does not seem to be a sufficient reason. Steam has been made to perform work of a much more delicate kind than that of making stockings. The explanation may perhaps be found in the very low rate of wages in this department of industry, which renders it doubtful whether hosiery could be made much more cheaply by machinery than by hand. This seems to be all the more probable, because, in America, where the wages of labour are comparatively high, steam-power is applied to the making of hosiery.

Steam has been applied to some extent, in the Nottingham district, to the making of cotton and lambs'-wool shirts and jackets. We are so accustomed to associate steam-engines with factories, and factories with steam-engines, that we scarcely think of the one without the other. Yet there might certainly be a thousand stocking-frames assembled in one large building, as there are a thousand looms in some of the cotton-factories, although the frames might be worked by hand-power. There are, however, no such large assemblies of hand-worked frames. The manufacturers do not seem to consider it a system from which any especial advantages can be derived; and only a very small number have tried it. Some of them consider that the system would ensure greater regularity in the quality of the work, and greater uniformity in the rate of production; while others think that no adequate advantage would be derived from the system by any party, that the expense of building and superintendence would more than counterbalance any saving in the work, and that the workmen would lose more time than they now do in going and returning to and from work. It has been urged that the factory system is the perfection of the division of labour; whereas the division of labour in frame-work knitting is as complete with ten frames as with a thousand. One of the manufacturers, in evidence given a few years ago, gave a curious proof of the dislike of the stockingers to the restraints of the factory system. He built a factory, stocked it with a number of frames, and established a system of daily economy in the establishment. He charged no framerents, but agreed to pay a definite price for all the work done; he repudiated the truck system' (which prevails very extensively in the hosiery district), and paid all wages in money but he found, after twelve months' experience, that the workmen had been for so many years accustomed to do their work in their own way, at their own homes (a stockinger seldom works on Monday), that they could not brook the organized regularity of the factory system. It was like sending a number of grown-up boys to school to learn something which they had not known before; and these grown-up boys did not show much inclination to attend to their lessons. The home-workers jeered the factory-hands, and all was soon over. If, therefore, the manufacturers feel no particular inducement to the adoption of the factory system, and if the work-people dislike it, we need no longer wonder that the hand-working system still prevails.

6

There being no stocking-factories, then, we have to see how the manufacture is managed.

In the first place, our attention is directed to the manufacturers. If we look among the principal inhabitants of Nottingham and Leicester, we find them to be, to a very large extent, hosiery manufacturers; they have warehouses, they are men of more or less considerable capital, and they each give employment to a large number of workpeople. But they are not like the cotton manufacturers of Lancashire: they do not

bring in the raw material at one door of a large establishment, and send it out at another in the form of finished goods: they have no steam-engines or lofty chimneys; nor have they hundreds of work people congregated for ten or twelve hours a day under their roof. The manufacturer executes all orders for the staple produce of the district: he watches the state of the market, abroad and at home, and manages his commercial relations according to the state of trade from time to time. He buys his cotton yarn (if engaged, as most of the Nottingham manufacturers are, on cotton hosiery,) from Manchester, or some small quantity, perhaps, in Nottingham itself; or his worsted yarn, if engaged in the Leicester trade, from some of the worsted spinners of Leicester, or, perhaps, from Bradford in Yorkshire-the head-quarters of worsted spinning. Having thus procured the raw material, he sets his men to work; but here the peculiarities arise; for, instead of arranging his frames or stocking - looms under the roof of his own factories, he gives out the spun yarn to the weavers, who take it home to their own humble abodes, and receive a specified price for every dozen pair of stockings or of gloves woven. But the reader may ask—is the stocking-loom the property of the weaver who works at it? The answer to this question, instead of being in the affirmative, opens up to us the very remarkable system of framerents: a system around which the whole industry of the hosiery district hinges; and which has hardly any parallel in other parts of England.

The value of these frames depends on two circumstances-the width and the gauge: the former relates to the width of the web capable of being wrought at the machine, and the latter to the fineness of the meshes forming the web. The width varies from about fifteen to thirty inches; and the gauge has particular numbers attached, from 24 to 70: indicating different degrees of fineness. These frames cost, when new, from about £15 to £50 or £60, according to the width and gauge; but it is a remarkable circumstance that, instead of the owner of a frame using it until it is worn out, as is the case in almost all other manufactures, the stockingframes are repeatedly changing hands. There are frequent public sales of second-hand frames at Nottingham and Leicester; and the prices which these frames realise vary quite as much according to the state of trade at the time, as according to the condition of the frames. In 1815 the average price realised for frames exposed to sale in this way was about £9; in 1826 it was not much above £6; in 1840 it was only £4; while in 1841, a period of severe depression in the manufacture, there was no price at all for such machines, as the number of frames far exceeded the working-demand for them at the time. Since that date, the auction-value has varied from time to time according to the fluctuations of the trade; but the point to be borne in mind is, that any person who has a little money to spare can, at all times, buy a second-hand stocking-frame.

This, then, being the case, we have next to remark,