If I remember rightly Four Loom Weaver/Poor Cotton weaver appears in Mrs Gaskell's Mary Barton.

I also have it in a private printing of Lancashire Ballads where it appears as on of the John O' Grinfelt series as stated earlier. I think mine gives it's title as J O G Jr. I'll dig it out and check.

I've always said that the words date from a time when the mills only spun cotton and then put the yarn out to outworkers (handloom weavers). Initially in the Industrial revolution this group of workers were a highly skilled group (males) who commanded high wages. This was certainly the case in my own Gee Cross, Hyde area. The cotton spun in the early Ashton Bros mill was bottle necked by the lack of weavers on a number of occasion leading to drops in spun cotton prices and layoffs in the mills for the cotton operatives.

As the hand loom weavers needed to be based in one spot this led to the conversion or building of the Weavers loft properties still to be seen around older settlements in the Uppermill and surrounding areas. This was unlike the earlier generation of weavers such as depicted in Silas Marner (The Weaver of Raveloe) who moved around the communities to weave their spun threads.

Once these highly skilled workers lost their mobility they were susceptible to shortages to supply in the spun cotton supplies and the whole vicious cycles of supply/shortages/demand/prices etc started to bite.


Working four looms (four in hand , or sometimes more)ie Four Loom weaver, came in when the automatic power looms came in. These were usually located in the big north light weaving sheds built around the 4 or 5 storey spinning mills. These were worked by women. My understanding is that this job was rarely done by men. The men did however usually work the big spinning mules. A role reversal from the early days of the cotton industry.

I won't claim this to be a precise analysis of the Cotton trade so don't come wading in with minute historical inconsistencies but generally it went along those lines.