ABSTRACT
For several decades, historians have emphasised the need to identify those parishes
that bound children to textile mills, in order to estimate the extent of factory
apprenticeship; to assess the outcome of the policies that moved children from
parish to mill; and to challenge conventional wisdom that the trade in poor children
was simply a northward movement from London.1 It is unlikely that the true extent
of parish factory apprenticeship during early industrialisation will ever be known,
but as evidence so far presented is very limited, any progress must be welcome.
