wool-winders or wool-packers, which arose in the wool-producing sections or the markets, as, for example, in London, where the woolstaplers, packers, winders and combers together made up the woolmen's livery company. After it was wound and packed the brogger arranged to have it fetched away.

Jobber and merchant.-The wool-jobber and merchant was closely allied with the wool-brogger on the one hand and the wool-stapler on the other. All were buyers of wool, either direct from the woolgrower or from the first buyer.

Two facts gave occasion to this occupation. In the first place, the wool harvest was quickly made: `in less than a month the whole year's clip was ready for sale. It at once became dead capital in the grower's hands, and to carry the stock was an economic loss, due to the interest charge against it. But, on the contrary, the needs of the manufacturers were nearly constant throughout the year; and it was an economic loss to them to buy up in advance large provisions for their consumption during the year. They sought a seller who would sell them small lots as they needed them; whereas the wool-growers sought a buyer who would take at once their whole clip. These two functions were combined in the wool-jobber.

He was a capitalist. He bought for cash large volumes of wool seasonally; he owned warehouses for the storage of his purchases; he sold to clothiers and manufacturers on credit and in such parcels as they needed. In performing these capitalistic acts he incidentally did others that promoted the wool trade. He acted as collector and forwarder of the wool from the grower to the manufacturer. As a buyer of wool and a seller of wool he developed a clientele of buyers and sellers, both of whom he cared to preserve by fair and honest dealings; and consequently reduced the frauds of the false winding graziers, so much complained of where manufacturers bought directly from the grazier. He conducted a wider correspondence and effected broader connections than would be possible or profitable to a grazier and in this way broadened the market of wool, more equally distributed it according to needs, and at a steadier price. By these labors, the manufacturer was enabled to specialize in making cloth and free himself from the tasks of buying wool from the scattered farms.

Wool-stapler.-Staple, in connection with the textile materials, means the fiber of any material used for spinning and is expressive of the character of the material. A stapler was one who was employed

in assorting wool according to its staple. In connection with this assorting, the stapler performed all the functions attaching to the jobber and merchant. He had large warehouses and required a great capital. But his special and distinctive function consisted in breaking and assorting wool, making it up into sortments fit for the manufacturer. Without the stapler the clothier was under the necessity of buying his wool in the fleece, and unless he could work up all sorts of wool, a thing no clothier could do to any advantage, he suffered a loss of those parts not used.

Yarn merchant.-The yarn merchants were a class of merchants who owed their existence to the localization of spinning and weaving. This localization increased the interdependence of the different parts of the kingdom. The clothmaking districts were forced for want of spinners to draw part of their yarn from quarters near and remote. The operations of getting the wool from the wool-buyers, and into the hands of the spinners in their localized districts, and of collecting again and selling the yarn to the clothiers were performed by this specialized class. Sometimes they simply bought up the surplus yarn spun by the country spinners and carried it and distributed it among the clothiers. They commonly combined the functions of the woolstapler (viz., assorter, kember, washer, scourer, and trimmer) with that of the yarn merchant proper.

Clothier. The clothier was the central figure in the domestic system of manufacture which characterized increasingly the productions of cloth from the middle of the fifteenth century till the Industrial Revolution. His business was a composite of the middleman's business and the manufacturer's business, but must be regarded in larger measure that of middlemen. In a restricted sense, he was not a manufacturer since he had ceased to exercise the craft of clothworker; nor was he a pure middleman, for all the wares he handled underwent transformation while under his control and assumed a very different aspect from the time he purchased the raw wool till he sold the finished product. He was an organizer of the manufacture, of the labor and of the distribution of the materials. His shop was a neighborhood, a village and its environs. Not until the closing decades of the period covered by this study did he assume the ownership of the tools of manufacture, and even then they were leased out to the artisans under his employ. Nevertheless, since he did not directly manufacture the materials which he bought and engaged himself exclusively (a) in the buying of materials and of labor used

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upon them and outside his supervision and (b) in the selling of the cloth, his middlemen characteristics are very obvious.

Having raised his wool, or bought it at the Cirencester or London or other markets, or having dispatched broggers into the country to buy, the clothier delivered it out weekly among the spinners who lived in the vicinity of these clothing towns, in the country and the hamlets. The spinners were paid for their work and the yarn was then carried to a weaver, who was likewise paid by the clothier. The yarn dealer sometimes intervened and relieved the clothier of these earlier parts of the business. And so successively through the remaining processes of the manufacture-milling, dyeing, shearing, dressing, etc.-the clothier carried his ware and paid the artisans. He thus employed many distinct classes of artisans and each performed only one operation upon the wool or cloth. The excellence of this system consisted in the concentrated direction of all the process by the clothier under a well-defined division of labor. Its greatest defect was the wastes caused by repeated carriage over considerable distances between successive artisans, and the cause of this decentralization was fundamentally the fact that power machinery needful to concentrated factory production had not yet been invented. But the clothier's business at this early time required considerable capitalists and men of broad correspondence who could undertake the risks involved.

The clothier occupied a very responsible and prominent place in the local community. He was the moneyed man, the paymaster and the employer of the whole vicinity. The neighborhood's activity and prosperity rested in his hands.

Those clothiers who stand out with the greatest halo of tradition tried the concentration of these employments in large halls. Deloney in 1632 in his Introduction to Thomas of Reading said in retrospect that "Every one of these (nine clothiers of the West) kept a great Number of Servants at Worke, Spinners, Carders, Weavers, Fullers, Dyers, Sheeremen, and Rowers, to the great Admiration of all those that came into their Houses to behold them." The same author in a poetical dissertation on John Winchcombe, the celebrated "Jack of Newbery," gave the following statistics of his employees: at 200 looms, 200 men and 200 boys, 100 women carding, 200 "maydens" spinning, 150 children picking wool, 50 "shearemen," 80 rowers, 40 men in the dyehouse, 20 men in the fulling mill, a butcher, brewer, baker, 5 cooks, 6 scullions, and children "to turne the broaches

every day." This traditional clothier lived about 1500. Fuller says "he was the most considerable clothier, without fancy or fiction, England ever beheld." Thomas Dolman succeeded Winchcombe as the leading clothier of Newbery.

Lest there be undue emphasis given in the foregoing description to the capitalistic nature of the clothing business, it must be remembered that there existed alongside these capitalistic clothiers others of less means. In every region the small master seems to have continued despite the tendency to large scale production. In 1615 one class of clothier was described as one that seldome or never travells into the woolle country to buy his woolle, but borrowes the most part of it att the markett, and setts many poore on worke, clothes it presently, and sells his cloath in some countries upon the bare thred-and then comes to the woolle markett and payes th' old debte and borrowes more." Another class was described as too poor to buy up stocks of wool but able to buy parcels of yarn which they wove into unfinished cloth and sold weekly at the market. The poverty and limited scale of business done by these classes of clothiers favored the business of cloth merchant on the one hand and wool-staplers on the other. Since the poor clothier sold the cloth in an unfinished state and others completed the processes of manufacture and distribution his control. over the industry was very limited and he was the first to suffer in periods of dearth or of dull business.

The clothiers of all England sold mostly through London. The great London market for cloth had been for many centuries at Blackwell Hall. The non-resident clothiers were constrained to bring their woollens for display and sale to this market, and an elaborate set of rules were adhered to in the business transacted.

Factors at Blackwell Hall.-A specialized class established themselves in the business of Blackwell Hall about 1660. They were known as the factors and received public recognition in the regulations of the Hall laid by the Act of Common Council of 1678.

The first factors were likely some clothiers or clothworkers with whom other clothiers had left their residue of cloths from one market till a later market. As stated above, the clothier sometimes authorized the keeper to sell the cloths in the interim, specifying a certain price at which he might sell. This authorization was the wedge by which the factor entered the trade and seized upon his limited function. In order to make sales the keeper would abate the price a few pence per yard below the price specified by the clothier. This

difference in price was sufficient motive for the preference which the buyer thereafter showed for buying them from the keeper. To secure sales the clothier was then forced to sell through the keepers, who set up as regular factors and thus "usurped the sole power of selling the clothier's cloth, both for what price, and for what time, and to whom they pleased."

Several circumstances at once operated to strengthen and establish the factor in this his so-called usurped place. The convenience realized by both clothier as seller and by merchant or draper as buyer, through the instrumentality of this factor made them prone to a passive compliance, for they could then devote themselves to their more proper employments. But this separation of clothier and merchant lessened the merchant's judgment of cloth, a judgment which his daily practice of examining cloth in the Hall had heretofore trained and maintained, and consequently the merchant became dependent upon the factor as a specialist in judging the qualities of cloth. The factor used his profits sometimes to buy materials and employ woolworkers and became in part a clothier; this gave him an economic advantage by which he could undersell any clothier who persisted in selling his cloth himself and could force himself into the clothier's employ. And further, the factor could make or break a clothier by partiality in the time of sales and in the longer or shorter period during which they retained the proceeds; naturally they favored the richer and larger dealers, and the poorer became very subservient to their factors.

The prime service of a factor is to facilitate exchanges; buyers and sellers are brought together through specialized representatives; wide correspondence and connections swell the number of buyers and sellers; there is a broader, steadier market; an economy of time, cost and effort at sale is effected; the producer, in singleness of effort, is enabled to produce more and better; the agent becomes an intelligencer to the manufacturer; and so forth.

Draper. The woollen drapers seem to have differentiated their employment and separated their function from the general cloth manufacture and trade during the fourteenth century.

It appears that the drapers were occasioned by the migration of industry from the towns to the country and the consequent establishment of the domestic system of cloth manufacture in the homes. The rise of the country clothier was primarily due to the arbitrary restrictions laid down by the town craft gilds. Heretofore, each craftsman