In Tudor times metal pins had become a fashionable item, replacing skewers of ivory, boxwood or bone as a means of fastening clothing. The importance of the pin trade is illustrated by the fact that a law was passed during the reign of Henry VIII that stated “no person shall sell any pin but only such as shall be double-headed and have the heads soldered fast to the shanks of the pins, well smoothed, the shanks well shaped, the points well and round filed and sharpened”.

The manufacture of pins. commonly made of brass, became a cottage industry, carried out in peoples homes, which for some unknown reason seems to have become extensively done in Sherburn. The evidence of this comes from the writings of John Leland who travelled the country widely making observations as he passed through each place. About the year 1540 he visited Sherburn and found its inhabitants ‘extensively engaged in the manufacture of pins’.

A century later around the year 1638 it seems the trade was still going strong as witnessed by the rhymes of another traveller known as Drunken Barnaby (real name Richard Braithwaite whose focus was mainly on peoples drinking habits). He wrote: 

Thence to Sherburn, dearly loved, 

And for pinners well approved”.

Aberford was also a centre for the pinning trade as Barnaby wrote:

Thence to Aberford, whose beginning 

Came from buying drink with pinning”. 

He also provides us with evidence that soldering and filing metal in the confined space of your own home was not good for your health as he came upon a pinner who had died from being choked with pin dust and in whose memory was this epitaph:

O cruel death!

To rob this man of breath,

Who, while he lived,

In scraping of a pin

Made better dust

Than thou hast made of him.

By the 18th century the trade became dominant in the West Midlands where it moved into factories and the cottage industry died out.