spinning entries

These are accounts that track the precise amount of wool that children spun in the Forehoe Hundred House of Industry from 1805 to 1809.  The workhouse master worked with pauper inmates who oversaw the children to assign each child a "stint", which gave them a goal number of skeins (a quantity of wool, whereby 20 skeins of yarn comes out of a pound of raw wool) that they were supposed to spin daily.  Then they recorded how many skeins each child actually spun, and noted when the child was sick, had run away, or was "keeping" elsewhere - a term that indicates that the child was doing agricultural work for a local farmer.