Description
Little is known about Daniel Neild the author in 1795 of this pamphlet. He was living in Saddleworth during the early 1790s and may have been practising as a surgeon here. The harvests of 1794 and 1795 were disastrous and grain prices rocketed at a time when the textile trade was in one of its frequent depressions. Times were hard for the local hand loom weavers as living costs were escalating while the prices they could obtain for their cloth were falling. In this pamphlet Neild proposes a novel scheme for augmenting wages and extols its benefits in a number of addresses aimed at the various classes in Saddleworth – the yeomen, the weavers, the master clothiers and the shopkeepers and innkeepers. Essentially the scheme combined a cloth manufacturing co-operative into which weavers can buy shares with a relief fund to help impoverished weavers. But what would have undoubtedly enraged the manufacturers and secured the opposition of the authorities was a proposal to boycott those masters who were not paying adequate wages.
