A HISTORIAN at Hatfield's University of Hertfordshire has received a grant of about £800,000 for a five-year research project into spinning before the Industrial Revolution.

Professor John Styles will study how thousands of women acrosss Britain earned a living with their spinning wheels between the 15th Century and the late 18th Century, when mass mechanised textile production began.

He said: "When people think about spinning wheels , they usually think about Sleeping Beauty pricking her finger.

"In fact, working by hand at a spinning wheel was what most ordinary women in England did for the 400 years before the Industrial Revolution.

"This was a skilled occupation, vital to the success of the textile industries that made England rich.

"Yet historians often dismiss hand spinning as part-time unskilled work for ignorant country women.

"They treat it as an inefficient obstacle to increased productivity, ripe for replacement by the mechanical inventions of the Industrial Revolution.

"The quality of English cloth, and the spun yard from which it was made was crucial - it helped England become one of the world's richest, most successful economies.

"Yet we still lack a study that focusses on spinning, which, by the late 18th Century, was the most common form on non-agricultural work in England."

His grant of more than 800,000 Euros has been made by the European Research Council.