making room being at length exhausted, new weavers' cottages, with loom shops, rose up in every direction, all immediately filled, and when in full work, the weekly circulation of money, as the price of labour only, rose to five times the amount ever before experienced in this district, every family bringing home 40, 60, 80, 100, or even 120 shillings per week! It may be easily conceived that this sudden increase of the circulating medium would, in a few years, not only show itself in affording all the necessaries and comforts of life these families might require, but also be felt by those who, abstractly speaking, might be considered disinterested spectators; but in reality they were not so, for all felt it, and that in the most agreeable way too; for this money, in its peregrinations, left something in the pockets of every bricklayer, carpenter, slater, plasterer, glazier, joiner, &c., as well as the corn dealer, butter factor, cheesemonger, butcher, and shopkeepers of every description. The farmers participated as much as any class, by the prices they obtained for their corn, butter, eggs, fowls, with every other article the soil or farm yard could produce, all of which advanced at length to nearly three times the former price. Nor was the portion of this wealth ineonsiderable that found its way into the coffers of the landed proprietors, who had estates in the district, the rents of their farms being doubled, and in many instances trebled."

From 1778 to 1788 the increase in the number of cotton mills in Oldham township appears to have been five, exclusive of several Dutch wheel spinning rooms, and a few short lived small spinning mills. The number of cotton mills in the township of Oldham in 1788 was, therefore, eleven, and in the entire parish about twenty-five. The number of cotton mills in the out-townships in 1778 was six, but from that period to 1788 they had increased eight in number, so that in the latter year the cotton manufactories in the three townships of Crompton, Royton, and Chadderton, were fourteen.

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