BADGERS, BROGGERS, GALLS AND JAGGERS.

[Stanley]

BADGERS, BROGGERS, GALLS AND JAGGERS.

I couldn’t resist the title and I’ll put you out of your misery straight away if I have confused you. A ‘badger’ is an ancient name for a tradesman who was licensed to deal in corn. A ‘brogger’ was similar but dealing in wool, yarn or cloth. A ‘gall’ is short for a Galloway, a small hardy breed of horse much favoured by packhorse proprietors and ‘jagger’ is the same but a small bred German cavalry horse, the name comes from the German word jaeger or hunter.

I was asked a question the other day about packhorses and realised how little I knew about the trade so I thought I’d do a bit of digging. The results have been enlightening so I thought I’d have another look at transport over the last 1000 years in Barlick. You may have to bear with me for a week or two because it’s a big story.

There has never been a time in human history when transport was not important. Even our nomadic ancestors 10,000 years ago had to carry their possessions when they moved from one hunting ground to another. For thousands of years this was the norm, if you wanted to shift something you put it on your back and walked. We still do it today when we carry the shopping home from the supermarket.

As recently as the late 19th century weavers were walking with packs on their backs to where they obtained their yarn and sold their cloth. There is a reference in ‘The Rambler’ of 1906 where Mr Stephen Clarke tells of a conversation with an old handloom weaver in Blacko who told him that he used to carry his finished pieces of cloth eight miles to Clitheroe and he knew two weavers in Grindleton who regularly walked 10 miles from there to Barnoldswick for their warp and weft, almost certainly dealing with a branch of the Bracewell family. The packs they carried would be about 40lbs weight (18kg).

We should ask ourselves a question here. What if the weight was more than a man could carry or was further than a day’s march? The modern answer would be some form of wheeled transport and the assumption might be that this would be the case say 500 years ago but if we are thinking about Barlick, or anywhere north of a line from Bristol to the wash in England we would almost certainly be wrong. Graham, in his book ‘The Social Life of Scotland in the eighteenth century’ relates how when a load of coals was carried by cart from East Kilbride to Cambuslang in 1723 ‘crowds of people went out to see the wonderful machine. They looked with surprise and returned with astonishment’. Admittedly the further North you went the more backward the technology but as late as 1607 the Parish of Weybridge in Surrey asked to be excused from supplying transport for the Queen’s journey to Oatlands on the grounds that they had ‘but one cart in the Parish’. A traveller in Northumberland reported in 1749 that there wasn’t a cart in the county.

We might be forgiven for wondering why this was the case. The answer lies in the absence of roads as we know them in the North of England. There was no road between Liverpool and Manchester until 1760. In 1718, in Derbyshire, the justices decided to build a ‘horse bridge’ at the Alport ford because of the ‘great drifts of London Carrier’s horses, malt horses and other daily traffic and carriers.’ No mention at all of wheeled traffic on one of the busiest routes in the kingdom, what is now the A6. The pressure of commerce demanded better transport and in 1663 the first turnpike trust from London to York on the Great North Road was established. There was a great expansion in the 1750s-70s, thousands of trusts and companies were established by Acts of Parliament with rights to collect tolls in return for providing and maintaining roads. A General Turnpike Act was passed in 1773 to speed up the process of setting up such arrangements.

This doesn’t mean that there were no wheeled vehicles at all, simply that the crude carts that existed were only used locally. So, in terms of Barlick we’re fairly safe in assuming that it wasn’t until early in the 18th century that local turnpikes made carriage of goods between the major towns possible. Before this everything had to be carried by packhorse and passengers were accommodated on ‘pad nags’, a packhorse with a ‘pad’ or crude saddle instead of the usual packs.

Two facts became clear to me when I started to look into this subject. The first is that I had always had this romantic view of man and a lad with a train of a few packhorses plodding along a salter’s way, perhaps even over the Salter’s Ford’ (Salterforth) on a summer’s day. In reality it seems that there was much more traffic than I had imagined, even on a local basis. The local tracks would have been busy and this raises the question of how many horses were employed in the trade, where were they based and how much traffic there was.

The second fact that emerged was the range of goods that needed to be transported. Even in a self-sufficient economy such as Barlick in the 16th century there were certain goods that had to be brought in. Corn, coal, lime, salt and bar iron spring to mind. What really surprised me was the fact that there were well established trades in perishable goods. I have no direct evidence for Barlick but I’ve found references to fresh salmon being carried from Carlisle to London and even more surprising, live carp! The latter could be kept alive for many days if packed in a hamper of wet straw and so were perfectly fresh on arrival. Mind you, I’m not suggesting that anyone in Barlick could afford fresh salmon at four shillings a pound in 1724 but it is as well to take note that such things were possible.

Right, we’ve set the scene. Next week I’ll look at the Barlick traffic in more detail.

SCG/19 September 2005

[Moh]

There was a family in Kelbrook called Jagger.

[Stanley]

I knew a man called Joe Jagger at Cunning Corner near Halifax. A real character!

[PanBiker]

My first boss, Ray Thornton's wife, (Ethel) was a Jagger before she was married. Her brother and sister in law (Hilda) still lived in the village when I was a TV Engineer.

[Stanley]

Ian, I've posted one of my old articles in Stanley's View that has a bearing on this subject.

[Moh]

I had forgotten that Ian.

[Stanley]

Bumped

[Stanley]

Bumped

[Stanley]

Bumped again.....