Boom and Bust in 18th-century Yorkshire

Trade card, 1730-1742, V&A Museum
With Britain on the cusp of a new coalition government - an alliance that will have to tackle major economic problems - I thought this news item from the University of York might draw some interesting parallels with boom and bust, 18th-century-style.

I talked a while back about Tulipomania and the South Sea Bubble, but in this instance, economic ruin threatened the people of Yorkshire, who were not taking it lying down...

The coming of Industrial Revolution in the latter part of the 18th century changed West Yorkshire from a remote landscape to an industrial powerhouse. Because of the fertile pasture land where sheep could be raised, and the soft water - handy for cleaning wool - Yorkshire was particularly suited to the developing textile trade. As steam power was explored, the coalfield south of Leeds would also come into play as a source of energy for the machinery.

Yet, despite the consumer revolution of the 18th century - which saw the market for luxury goods expanding to tempt a new middle-class - cash was in short supply and the markets could be volatile. When the wool trade suffered a decline in the 1760s and 1770s, hundreds of people from rural Yorkshire communities took matters into their own hands and began counterfeiting British and Spanish coins to save themselves from poverty.

1787 Proclamation Shilling
The Yorkshire Coiners, as they were known, were concentrated around Halifax and led by a ‘royal family’ of King David (David Hartley) and his brothers, known as The Duke of York and The Duke of Edinburgh. In the 1700s counterfeiting was a serious offence - punishable by hanging - and the Government took the matter seriously, sentencing many of the gang to death at York's Tyburn. Yet the characters live on in the old ballads, and many people today can trace their ancestry back to members of the The Yorkshire Coiners.

And in a further interesting twist to this story, soon the plucky northerners will be immortalised on film. Original research on the coiners by University of York historian, Dr Hannah Greig, has led to a collaboration with Harrogate-based film-maker Peter Kershaw who is making a feature film called The Last Coiner, which promises to give a more accurate flavour of life in 18th-century Britain than your average period drama. Check out The Last Coiner movie site and the Official Movie Blog for more details.

And... please don't try this at home!

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Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds

The housing market has collapsed and the economic forecast is grim, but as my partner remarked the other day, it's no different from Tulipomania.

Tulips first caught on in a big way at the start of the 17th century, when French women began wearing them in corsarges. The fashion spread quickly to the Low Countries, and in due course, the Dutch were seized with tulip frenzy. Huge sums of money changed hands for small beds of tulips, and the bulbs themselves became a kind of currency, with many buying them at inflated prices purely to sell them on. People abandoned perfectly good jobs to cultivate the flower and others speculated in tulip shares; fashionable women began wearing fabrics depicting the sought-after flower. Then, in February 1637, the prices skyrocketed beyond all reason, and the bubble burst.

Journalist Charles Mackay later renewed public interest in Tulipomania in his book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1841). Another event that Mackay covered was the frenzy of speculation on The South Sea Company in the early years of the 18th century, leading to the famous South Sea Bubble (see above left for an illustration from Mackay's book of headlong fools plunging into South Sea water). At its peak in 1720, people invested in a company that advertised its business as: 'carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is'.

Any of this sound familiar? Rest assured, history does repeat itself...

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