I love this song, particularly Brian Peters's rendition of it. Thanks for the information about the technical weaving jargon.

However, am I the only one who thinks that the last verse is out of character with the rest of the song? It all seems kind of good-spirited and jolly right up to there: I've spent my entire life working hard at a difficult job that I basically hated, but by God I made it through, and I get to walk out of this place with my head held high and the satisfaction of a job well done, and now my wife and I will live on my nice little pension and I'll have time to do all those jobs around the house that I could never get to before, and I have all these amusing memories of the gaffer kicking the sheep and so forth. And then, boom, we're both out of our minds with misery and grinding poverty and I just want to curl up and die. The penultimate verse seems like a perfectly nice last verse; I suspect that maybe it was until Marsden realized that it's kind of weird for a folk song to say anything even arguably positive about the Industrial Revolution so he stuck on a depressing one.

I don't know. Still love the song. But that last verse just seems odd to me.