The history of Manchester is chiefly the history of the textile industries. There was a mill for the manufacture of woollen cloth in Manchester so early as the time of Edward the Second, and in the succeeding reign a settlement of Flemish weavers further increased the trade. In the reign of Henry the Eighth, Manchester was described as “the fayrest, best builded, quickliest, and most populous toune of all Lancastershire,” and “well-inhabited, distinguished for trade, both in linens and woollens”; but the cotton industry, introduced at the close of the sixteenth century, became no great thing until another two hundred years had passed.

In the meanwhile history was enacted. Early in the Cromwellian wars Manchester declared for the Parliament, and the Royalists besieged what was then the walled town twice, unsuccessfully. But these were only passing incidents. Everywhere in England at that time crop-headed men of sour visage and in subfusc garments warred with ringleted men of a cheerful countenance and ungodly conversation, wearing clothes of extravagant cut and colour. The one side fought for Parliament, the other for King, but the quarrel really was deeper than that. It was a conflict of ideals. But they fought it out elsewhere with greater fierceness and expenditure of blood, and Manchester went on as best it could with its fated function of providing linen for all the godly and ungodly, whether Royalists or Republicans, who had the wherewithal to buy.

Again Manchester was to know something of warfare, for Prince Charles and his Highlanders came in November, 1745. The sympathies of the town were largely with him, the bells of “t’owd church” were rung, and a great illumination lit the streets—as great illuminations were then understood: modern Market Street, with the shops lit of an evening, would probably reduce that illumination to a sorry flicker. Three hundred Manchester men marched south with Prince Charlie, under the command of Colonel Townley. Within a week they were marching back, and when they were come to Manchester again they found local sentiment sadly changed: the mob harrying their rear on the retreat to Preston. Colonel Townley and some of his ill-fated men were hanged on Kennington Common.

What the trade of Manchester was, and how goods were brought to and despatched from it in old times, may be seen from Aikin’s description in 1795:

“When the Manchester trade began to extend, the chapmen used to keep gangs of pack-horses and accompany them to the principal towns with goods in packs, which they opened and sold to shopkeepers, lodging what was unsold in small stores at the inns. The pack-horses brought back sheep’s wool, which was bought on the journey and sold to the makers of worsted yarn at Manchester, or to the clothiers of Rochdale, Saddleworth, and the West Riding of Yorkshire. On the improvement of turnpike roads, wagons were set up and the pack-horses discontinued; and the chapmen only rode out for orders, carrying with them patterns in their bags. It was during the forty years from 1730 to 1770 that trade was greatly pushed by the practice of sending these riders all over the kingdom.”

Such enterprise would not have been possible at an earlier period, for the turnpike roads surrounding Manchester date only from 1750: the earliest was the Preston to Lancaster turnpike, constructed under the Act of that year. Tolls were taken, on the Preston to Garstang section, until February 1st, 1875, and on the Garstang to Lancaster portion until November 1st, 1882. The way out of Manchester, on to Bolton, was turnpiked in 1752, and tolls ceased to be taken on November 1st, 1871.

From the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth century the roads of Lancashire were less roads than slushy lanes, very narrow and full of ruts, mud, and water. Even the main route through to Scotland was no better, and had then but little need to be, for wheeled conveyances were almost entirely unknown. Pack-horses, as we have seen, conveyed what goods were ever sent, but for all practical purposes most communities were self-contained. Their wants were few and simple, and were easily supplied from their own resources; while persons obliged to travel made their way on horseback; only those of robust physique and in good health being able to undertake such journeys, and glad enough, amid the difficulties of the way, to find here and there a stretch of lane roughly paved with rude slabs of local millstone grit.

But if the ways were incredibly foul, the inns at the end of each day’s journey went some way towards compensating the fatigued horseman for his labours. The Lancashire inns were then, according to Holinshead, writing in 1577, exceptionally good, each guest being “sure to lie in clean sheets wherein no man hath lodged.” Evidently the innkeepers looked to make their profit out of the “entertainment” they supplied for man and beast, for the horseman’s bed cost him nothing, but “if he go on foot, he hath a penny to pay.” Mere public-houses, of the complexion of drink-shops, were not tolerated in Manchester and Preston; for at Manchester it was forbidden to brew or sell ale unless the brewer or vendor could make “two honest beddis,” while Preston was even more strict: lodgings for four men and four horses being the irreducible minimum.

The old “Seven Stars” inn in Withy Grove is ancient enough to have come under this ordinance, which must have affected also the picturesque old house now styled the “Wellington,” in the Market Place, and the even more picturesque “Bull’s Head,” in Greengate, Salford.

With the growth of trade referred to by Aikin, between 1730 and 1770, Manchester’s interests comprehended the whole of the kingdom, and its trade was greatly helped by the demand that by this time was growing for good roads, not alone here, but generally throughout the country. Road improvements, made possible by Turnpike Acts, began to be frequent from about 1710, and were very numerous and important between 1730 and 1770, when 420 Acts were passed. In this period business grew so heavy that pack-horses did not suffice to carry the increasing bulk of goods, and wagons came more and more into use; while the press of affairs was such that principals found it necessary to visit London and other centres at more frequent intervals. It was thus that the Manchester and London Flying Coach was established, in 1754.

In 1760 the exportation of cotton goods began; for, with the first tentative application of machinery to weaving, production had increased beyond the possible consumption of the country. The first improvement upon the primitive form of handloom weaving was the invention of the fly-shuttle, in 1738. This contrivance doubled the weaver’s powers; but it was followed in 1768 by the invention of the “spinning-jenny,” by James Hargreaves, which increased production eight-fold.

The population of Manchester and Salford had by this time grown to close upon 40,000, and the local needs had increased in like degree. But still, although much had been done to improve roads throughout the country, and in Lancashire, those immediately around Manchester itself were still so bad in 1760 that although coal was mined at Worsley, less than ten miles away, it could not be brought into the town by wheeled conveyance, but had to be carried by long lines of pack-horses, in loads of 280 lb. Coals were cheap at the pit mouth—usually 10d. the load—but the carriage cost, as a rule, a shilling more.

Inventions do not burst upon a world that has felt no need for them. The need may not have been more than blindly felt, but the necessities of the ages have, nevertheless, been supplied as they have arisen. In this, almost more than in anything else, the thinking man sees an ordered scheme of existence which, in other directions, the brutalities and injustices of an imperfect world would seem to deny.

At this time, the consumption of coal was growing so fast in Manchester, and the difficulties of marketing it were so great that the wealthy Duke of Bridgewater, owner of the pits at Worsley, conceived the idea of enriching himself still further, and at the same time helping the growth of Manchester, by means of constructing a canal from Worsley, by which coals could be carried cheaply and expeditiously. It was necessary to secure the support of the people of Manchester, before he could present a Bill to Parliament for this purpose, and he accordingly undertook, if the canal were made, to sell his coal at 4d. per hundred in the town—less than half the usual price—or to charge not more than half-a-crown a ton freight. The Bill was introduced and passed in 1759, without opposition, and by July 1761 the canal was opened. This first section of what eventually became the great Bridgewater Canal, extended to Runcorn in 1773, was the first step towards the making of modern Manchester, and was rendered possible only by the homely genius of James Brindley, the self-taught engineer, whose works were justly considered marvels in their day. He designed and originated all the novel and ingenious contrivances that were features of the undertaking, and did it all on wages not exceeding a guinea a week, a rate of pay he continued to receive for years of unremitting toil, until his death. The canals at length brought the Duke an income of £80,000 a year, but at Brindley’s untimely death in 1776 the stingy peer owed him some hundreds of pounds, on account of salary, which he was so incredibly mean as not to pay.

This enterprise was remarkable in more than the engineering difficulties overcome. Several canals had already been made in various parts of the country by deepening and straightening the channels of streams and rivers, and the first ship canal was that constructed in 1566, on the Exe, from Topsham to Exeter; but the Bridgewater Canal was the first to be dug in dry ground. Its extension across country, to the Mersey at Runcorn, was undertaken for the purpose of cheapening and expediting traffic in raw and manufactured cotton and other goods, between Manchester and Liverpool, and was thus the precursor, by a hundred and twenty years, of the Manchester Ship Canal, which aims to make Manchester a port entirely independent of its great seaboard neighbour.

The last quarter of the eighteenth century was a great turning-point in Manchester’s history. One invention rapidly succeeded another; most of them by local men, for among the sprack-witted Lancashire folk there has ever been plenty of mechanical genius. At the time when Hargreaves was planning his spinning jenny, another was perfecting a similar machine. This was Richard Arkwright, of Preston, the youngest of a poor family of thirteen children, who was born in 1732, and began life as a barber and dealer in hair at Bolton. In 1768 his cotton-spinning machine, which performed the work of sixteen or twenty men, was set up at Preston, and in 1707 was patented. His first spinning-mill was erected at Cromford, Derbyshire, in 1771, and was entirely successful. In 1786 he was knighted, and in 1792 he died, leaving a fortune of close upon half a million sterling.

The fickleness and waywardness of fortune are proverbial, but nowhere else so marked as in the struggles of inventors. In 1779, eleven years after Arkwright had set up his spinning-jenny, Samuel Crompton, of Hall-i’-th’-Wood, near Bolton, invented the hybrid “Spinning Mule,” combining the useful features of Hargreaves’ and Arkwright’s machines. He was an exceptionally poor man, and partly earned his living by playing the violin at the Bolton theatre.

A great step forward was Cartwright’s power-loom, invented in 1785, and the Government in 1809 granted him £10,000, in recognition of his usefulness to the advancement of commerce. With the same year that witnessed Cartwright’s invention, steam was first employed in weaving, by Boulton and Watt, and the history of the cotton industry has been, since that day, a long record of improvements, until nowadays factories are equipped with the most beautiful and complicated contrivances—the outcome of a hundred and seventy years of invention—that seem themselves almost sentient and understanding.