With increased production he found himself spending more time delivering raw products and collecting the finished product, with all this
to-ing and fro-ing he barely had time to sell the finished cloth! So why not bring all the processes together under one roof? The day of the mill owner had arrived. By the 1770's hundreds of mills
had sprung up across Yorkshire; the abundant supply of water providing power to further increase production. The new mill owners were rapidly becoming very wealthy men indeed. The cottage dwellers
who's services where no longer required began to relocate from their isolated hamlets to the new towns that were rapidly growing around the new mills, providing labour for what was now becoming the
first mechanised industry. Meanwhile the croppers weren't doing too bad either, many new mill owners were still sending their cloth to dressing shops for finishing, with increased demand
they too had expanded. Other mill owners built their own dressing shops, but the power of the croppers "institutions" let them, to some extent, dictate their own terms and conditions for employment.
All in all the cropper's weren't having a bad time of it, but that was about to change!
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