70. A SKETCH OF THE WOOLEN INDUSTRY1

We have already seen the fundamental importance of the woollen industry for English economic development. It furnishes the explanation of the far-reaching agricultural changes of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries: it provided the commodity with which England first entered actively into the world's commerce. Its significance can hardly be overestimated. It was the first of the great manufactures of England; it created a basis for English activity and wealth before iron and cotton; and in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries it accounted for more than two-thirds of our exports.

1. The establishment of the gild system. We are unable to trace the existence in England of a separate craft of weavers farther back than the early part of the twelfth century.

In London at this date and the same was probably true in other large towns the woollen industry was divided into four or five branches, the weavers and burellers, each organized in a gild, the dyers and fullers united in the same gild, and the tailors or cissores. But they were very conscious that they had interests in common, and they were accustomed to act together in matters affecting the whole industry.

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries there must have been a very rapid increase in the amount of cloth manufactured in England. This is shown among the evidence by the increased importation of woad, which was necessary for the purpose of dyeing blue or blue-black.

[NOTE.-Details concerning the gild stage of development are omitted. The student should recall the characteristics of the gild economy in general and should regard those characteristics as applicable to the woolen industry.-ED.]

2. The first immigration.-With Edward III (1322-77) begins the policy of encouraging the settlement within the kingdom of foreign clothmakers, from whom English weavers and dyers could learn the arts in which they had previously been wanting.

The increase of the cloth manufacture in England had two great results: (1) an increasing differentiation among those engaged in the industry, a splitting up into separate crafts, sanctioned and mainAdapted by permission from W. J. Ashley, The Economic Organization of England, p. 88 (Longmans, Green, & Co., 1914); and from W. J. Ashley, "The Early History of the English Woollen Industry," in Publications of the American Economic Association, Third Series, II (1887), 308-80.

tained by the public authorities; and (2) the creation of a class of merchants and dealers in the finished article.

3. The rise of a trading class.-Any citizen could now trade in cloth if he wished. Still it was not until the second half of the four teenth century that a special class of cloth dealers or drapers made its appearance. There had been so little manufacture for any save the immediate market-the wants of the town and neighborhoodthat if men dealt in cloth at all, they dealt in it together with half a dozen other commodities; they were merchants, and not dealers in one particular article.

We are so accustomed nowadays to the appearance of a new branch of commerce, entered upon by men with the command of capital, which they are ready to make use of in any profitable way that presents itself, that the rise of the cloth trade may not seem to need explanation. But in the fourteenth century there was but little of what may be termed free and disengaged capital, ready to be turned in any profitable direction. Hence the question arises, in what way precisely did this new division of occupations arise? It is antecedently probable that trade in cloth would be engaged in chiefly by men who were already in some way connected with the industry, and of these, there were two groups from either of which the new body might conceivably have arisen-the wool dealers and the cloth finishers. It does not appear that before this time there was any very uniform system of relations among the various branches of the cloth industry. I suppose that the weaver had usually been the most independent; that he had very generally bought the yarn himself, and then, after weaving the cloth, had paid the fuller to full and the dyer to dye it, and had sold the cloth himself to the person who intended to use it. The user might employ it in its rough state, or, as was often the case, would take it to the cloth finisher, the pareur, or, as he is called later, the tonsor or shearer, who sheared off the nap at so much the piece. But the weaver did not always occupy this economically superior position; sometimes he received yarn from a customer or employer, and gave back cloth, receiving so much per piece as remuneration; sometimes again the fuller bought the cloth from the weaver, or paid the weaver for working up yarn into cloth, and himself sold it to the public. Any of these branches, therefore, might have become the dominant one. But the two mentioned, the wool dealers and cloth finishers, had obvious advantages. On the one hand, the wool dealer, whether he merely bought the raw wool and sold it to those

who would make it into yarn, or whether he himself paid for it being beaten and spun, and then sold it to the weaver, was already a merchant with some command of capital, and accustomed to commercial dealings. English dealers in wool and other staple commodities were at this time becoming an important and influential body, and were beginning to contest with the Teutonic Hanse its monopoly of export from England.

The other theory, that it was the cloth finishers who first ventured upon trade, has also antecedent probability in its favor. For it was through their hands that the cloth last passed; instead of waiting for a customer to bring a piece of cloth to be shorn or finished, they might see the advantages to be got by buying the cloth from the weaver and finishing it ready for the customer. As the demand increased, they would need larger stocks, and some of them would probably soon give themselves up entirely to the trade.

Isolated "drapers" appear in the thirteenth century; but there is no certain evidence of a body of dealers in cloth, even in London, before 1364, the date of the first charter granted to the Drapers' Company. The same charter furnishes evidence that the drapers were still makers of cloth, i.e., completed the final processes, including shearing.

However we may explain their origin, the drapers certainly formed powerful companies in London and other great towns towards the end of the reign of Edward III [1327-77] and in that of Richard II [1377-99]. The London company of drapers were not long in obtaining important rights of supervision over the industry of the capital and indeed of the whole country. Their earliest charter had given them a monopoly of the retail sale of cloth in London and its suburbs. Anyone not belonging to the mystery who had cloth to sell could indeed sell it in gross to lords and commoners who wanted it for their own use, but they might never sell it retail, or even in gross to merchants not belonging to the Drapers' Company. By the purchase of a hall in 1384, the company obtained an administrative centre; the fact that this hall was in St. Swithin's Lane shows how close their connection still was with the weavers of Cannon Street.

The earliest accounts in the possession of the company, those of 1415, show that it was already a powerful body, numbering as it did more than 100 members by which must be understood master drapers only, and not journeymen or apprentices. By this time, however, a considerable number of drapers had arisen in other towns;

and, both for the sale of their cloth to the people of London, as well as for its easier export to foreign countries, these began to resort to the capital. They could not fail to come into collision with the monopoly of the London drapers, and it was necessary for the government and the municipal authorities to devise some way out of the difficulty. The plan they hit upon was the establishment of Blackwell, or, as it was originally called, Bakewell Hall, which was destined to be of the utmost importance to the English woollen industry for four centuries. This was an old hall with a considerable piece of ground around it, in Basinghall Street; it had originally belonged to the Basings, had been occupied by a certain Thomas Bakewell in the reign of Edward III, and was now, in 1397, purchased by the mayor and commonalty of London and turned into a market for country drapers.

4. The growth of the domestic system. For the history of industry during the first sixty or seventy years of the fifteenth century, we have singularly little evidence. Yet during that period a complete change was taking place in the whole character and conditions of manufacture. The gild system was dying, and the domestic system was taking its place; a change which can only be compared in its far-reaching consequences to the overthrow, during the present century, of the domestic system itself by the strength of machinery and great capital.

We may conjecture that a twofold process went on in the fifteenth century: (1) that in the towns, the gilds or companies became small, close corporations and lost control over the industry; (2) that the industry spread from the towns into the country, and that there a new class of men called clothiers or clothmakers, arose, commanding an amount of capital great relatively to previous conditions, and bringing into dependence upon themselves comparatively large numbers of workpeople.

Of the early history of the domestic industry we have no information; when it is first noticed in public documents, it seems to be already widely spread over the country. The central figure to be studied in the new organization of labor is the clothier. He buys the wool, causes it to be spun, woven, fulled, and dyed, pays the artisans for each stage in the manufacture, and sells the finished commodity to the drapers.

Now there can be little doubt that the impulse towards this extension of a freer industry into the country was given primarily by the new mercantile capital which successful trade had created. But

when once the movement had begun it would be followed by all who saw their opportunity, by wool staplers, by drapers, by landed proprietors, by energetic artisans from the towns. The requisite labor would readily be found in the unemployed of the agricultural districts, and the necessary technical skill could be acquired from the journeymen whom the jealous restriction of gild privileges by the master artisans had driven from the towns.

Limitations of space prevent the present sketch of the history of the woollen industry from being carried farther. Otherwise it would have been interesting to trace the regulations of the Tudors as to the quality of cloth and as to apprenticeship, and to consider how far these were dictated by the jealous endeavors of the town craftsmen to hinder the growth of the industry in the country, and how far they were guided by a wise policy on the part of the government which aimed at maintaining a certain standard of work. The appearance towards the end of the seventeenth century of a new class of factors and great merchants; the abandonment under mercantile pressure of the policy of preserving the quality of cloth; the growth of credit; the struggle between the woollen and cotton interests-all these preparing the way for the actual factory and machine industry of today are of the most vital importance for the social history of England. But for the present we must be content with having traced the earlier stages of the long evolution.

71. COMMERCIAL ORGANIZATION IN THE WOOLEN

INDUSTRY'

The operations of the various wool-buyers were so little differentiated, each one performing at different times the same business as the others, that a rigid classification is quite impossible. And it is to be understood in the following treatment that clear-cut distinctions did not exist among the various buyers of wool.

Broggers. The buyer who was most specialized was the brogger. The brogger was an agent or broker of a manufacturer or exporter or big wool-merchant or jobber. He made a farm-to-farm canvas, established regular customers from whom he bought from year to year, and picked up what wool he could outside this regular custom. He either packed it up himself or employed a specialized class of

'Adapted by permission from R. B. Westerfield, "Middlemen in English Business," Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, XIX, 265-79, 296-317. (Yale University Press, 1915.)