pages 154-155
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154                 Illustrations of Lancashire

chiefly about Leigh. Middleton, once so famous for its "broad silks" - those adpated for ladies' dresses - now spends its time chiefly in the preparation of "trimmings": and wherever carried on the manufacture is almost wholly of the kind called "mixed," or cotton and silk combined this being more in demand,

Miscellaneous Industrial Occupations                155

because lower in price, though not wearing so well.
From silk that befits empresses to hemp, the material of sackcloth, the way is long. But it must not be overlooked, in regard to the textile manufactures of Lancashire, that each extreme is familiar. Warrington, in the by-gones, prepared more than half the entire quantity of sailcloth required for the navy. It was a ship laden with hemp from the Baltic for use in Lancashire which, touching at the Isle of Skye, brought the first news of Prince Charles Edward's landing there.
Lancashire produces one-sixth of all the paper made in England. In other words, there are in this county about fifty of the nearly 300 English paper-mills, including the very largest of them - l\/Iessrs. Wrigley and Sons', near Bury. The first to be established was Crompton's, at Farnworth, near Bolton, which dates from 1676, or exactly eighty-eight years after the building of the famous Kentish one referred to by Shakspere,1 which itself followed, by just a century, the primeval one at Stevenage. Every description of paper, except that required for bank-notes, is made in Lancashire. The mills themselves, like the dyeworks, haunt

1. Sir John Spielman's, at Dartford.-- Vide 2nd Henry VI., Act IV. Scene 7.