There seem to have been very large numbers of shoemakers and cobblers in early modern England ... largely I suppose because purely leather soles on shoes wear out very quickly without modern toughening stuff. In Hamlet, Gertrude apparently says something like 'it can't have been long ago because I am still wearing the same pair of shoes'. Someone I know from a medireview recreation society reckons that maybe your shoes needed re-soling every couple of months or more often. Shoemakers were also often poor and have been implicated as being the sort of people who might be likely to riot / rebel (I can't remember the references but it relates to 16th century ish). Shoemaker and cordwainer are virtually interchangeable terms in the early modern period, at least in the local records for Suffolk which I have worked with. Although even in the mid eighteenth century everyone was still officially meant to do a proper apprenticeship lots of people didn't, and shoemakers were not the sort of tradesmen who had a society or guild - at least in rural areas, London and other big towns may be different. It was the sort of trade which people might start in, move off and do something else and then go back to later. Great and Little Waldingfield (no R) are just outside Sudbury, and border Melford and Lavenham parishes. There is an early listing for this area - 1522 - which gives occupations of heads of household. Of the 130 odd men listed for Melford, three were shoemakers - one was middling income and two were too poor to pay tax. In 1841, the census shows Melford, which is a lot bigger than either Waldingfield, had 22 shoemakers, 6 journeymen shoemakers, 4 apprentice shoemakers and one man running one of the local inns who used to be a shoemaker. That is 33 men out of 657 men with an occupation, nearly 5%.