page_title: Brewood
section_title: The Victorian crisis
hierarchical_section_title: Brewood / History / The Victorian crisis
caption_attribution_description: English: Shropshire Union Canal viewed south from Brewood bridge.
context_page_description: Brewood is an ancient market town and civil parish in South Staffordshire, England. Located around grid reference SJ883088, Brewood lies near the River Penk, eight miles north of Wolverhampton city centre and eleven miles south of the county town of Stafford. Some three miles to the west of Brewood is the border with the county of Shropshire.
context_section_description: Brewood in the early 19th century still seemed a hive of economic activity. These were good times for agriculture, with the Napoleonic Wars and the Corn Laws protecting producers against foreign competition. From the 1840s, things changed for the worse. Since there are reliable statistics for this period, based on the UK Census it is fairly easy to chart the decline.
  The 1831 census marks a peak in population for the Brewood parish of 3799. After that date, there is decline for the rest of the century, and only a modest recovery in the 20th century. In fact, the 1831 peak was not surpassed until the housing boom of the 1950s, even the expansion of the parish in 1934 failing to lift the population by much. The fall in the male population throughout the Victorian period is particularly significant. There were 2099 males in 1831, although this was unusually high, perhaps because this was the year canal building commenced at Brewood. The figures for 1841 and 1851 hover around 1800, but this plunges to 1180 in 1901. The female population was much steadier, reaching a peak in 1851, and outnumbering the male from that point onwards. One of the results of population decline was a proliferation of empty houses. In 1831 only six of the 699 houses in the parish were unoccupied. In 1891, 84 houses out of 630 stood vacant – about 13.3% or more than one in eight.
  Figures for employment in various occupations are generally hard to interpret, as definitions changed through the century. However, it is relatively easy to extract those for agriculture. The 1831 census found that the parish had 377 adult male agricultural labourers and 76 farmers, of whom about half were employers of labour, while the rest presumably relied on their own family. This gives a total of 453 men directly earning their living on the land. The 1881 census gives a more detailed analysis under so-called occupational orders, but this mainly affects industrial occupations. Adult male agricultural employment is stated simply as 317, although the women agricultural workers are now also numbered – at just three. Almost a third of jobs on the land have gone in 50 years, and it is a process that can only continue.
  Not only did the Long Depression grip world agriculture for almost a quarter of a century, but any relief was slight and temporary. After World War I, the even deeper Great Depression was to place more pressure on agriculture. Moreover, there were changes in farming techniques that tended to drive down employment even when the market was good. Boscobel House has a good selection of late Victorian and early 20th century far machinery. Still horse-powered, it is nevertheless ingenious and substantial, and manufactured already in the Uttoxeter area or along the Humber, not locally. It had the power to displace many labourers. A simple potato plough, for example, could harvest several acres a day, undermining the bargaining power of labourers at precisely the time of year when it was traditionally strongest, and starving families of the little extra, often earned by women and children, that cleared debts and kept their heads above water. When less successful farmers sold out to the more efficient, the effect was irreversible: employers did not sacrifice efficiencies of scale when the times were better. By 1940, eleven of the farms exceeded 150 acres – very different from the small holdings of one and two centuries earlier – and the full effects of mechanisation and scientific agriculture were yet to be felt.
  There were many signs of decline to confirm this overall pattern. The weekly market had ceased and the market cross fell down in 1810. Attempts to revive it came to nothing in the face of growing prosperity elsewhere. Iron working disappeared altogether, and the other industries declined. Malting gave employment in mid-century, but soon followed the other trades into decline. Other improvements arrived too late or gave too little. Work began on the Birmingham and Liverpool Junction Canal (now the Shropshire Union Canal) in 1830, but progress was slow and it was n
caption: The canal viewed southward from Brewood. The wharves are still lined with boats, but nearly all are leisure craft.
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