might have retailed his own product. Hereafter, cloth that saw produced in the country was brought into towns to be sold there by the drapers. It was found in Leeds that the manufacture was suburban and the sale was urban; the dwindling of town manufacturing was compensated for by the selling of cloth by the drapers. Middlemen became necessary thereafter to judge and guarantee the quality of cloth and to study the market demand so as to equalize the quantity produced and consumed.

The draper, as has been shown, was in the early centuries both retailer and wholesaler of woolen cloth. The retail function became less and less his and was given over to the mercers. By the middle of the eighteenth century he was a typical wholesaler. As such he had connections (a) with the clothiers or the factors, (b) with the merchant importers and exporters, (c) with the provincial wholesalers, and (d) with the retailers of London and other towns and cities.

Manchester Men.-One class of buyers at the great Cloth Fair at Leeds was the travelling merchants. These were a class peculiar to the northern manufacturing section and were often called the "Manchester Men." They were wholesale merchants (more properly, tradesmen). There was a demand all over England for the cheaper cloths-kerseys, cottons, as well as the other manufactures, such as cutlery, hardware, clocks, almanacs, etc., which were made in the north, and the Manchester Men acted as distributors to the shopkeepers of the Island. In a pamphlet dating from about 1685 it was spoken of, as a thing accustomed, that "the Manchester Men, the Sheffield men, and many others. . . . do Travel from one MarketTown to another; and there at some Inn do profer their Wares to sell to the Shopkeepers of the Place." They sold wholesale to shops, warehousekeepers, and to country chapmen at this date.

Chapmen. "Chapmen" (cheap man) was originally an inclusive name for all dealers; by the sixteenth century the term had become restricted to the small pedlar or retail dealer. The term "petty" was often prefixed. In 1639 petty chapmen were described as those who "buy up commodities of those that sell by wholesale and sell them off dearer by retaile, and parcel them out." Before the rise of country stores all retailing in the country was done from temporary booths at markets and fairs, or by itinerant dealers. From the latter fact the term "chapman" acquired the concept of our modern pedlar or hawker. This meaning was in vogue in 1745 when the chapmen were

defined as "Such as carry goods from market to market, or from house to house, to sell." They bought their goods from wholesale tradesmen of the cities or from the Manchester Men, and travelled on foot with packs on their shoulders, or with horse and panniers, or with horse and cart or wagon.

72. LOSS OF CONTROL BY THE GILDS1

Though there is much room for difference of opinion as to the origin of craft gilds, there is ample evidence as to their character and powers. In England the craft gild appears to have been an institution which obtained powers from the town to regulate a certain industry for the common good. On its economic side it aimed at supplying a known market, by meeting the wants of the townsmen themselves and of others who visited it for the purpose of buying; it strove, besides, to maintain a high quality of wares, the good training of the workmen, and favourable conditions for work; but the whole institution was subordinated to the good of the town, and to the steady growth of a material prosperity in which all could share.

The whole of this system served admirably for the regulation of industry under suitable conditions, but it made no allowance for growth; and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries there appears to have been a rapid growth, especially in connection with the manufacture of cloth for distant markets. Those who, as dealers, had formed some capital and were accustomed to handle it, began to invest their capital in industry and to compete with those who were craftsmen by training. The dealers might be dealers in raw material, or dealers in the finished product; but in either case they did not count to make an income by their own work, but by the wealth they

1Adapted by permission from W. Cunningham, The Progress of Capitalism in England, pp. 72-78. (The Cambridge University Press, 1916.)

had invested in buying materials and tools and used for paying wages. The capitalist system in the cloth trade appears to be as old as the incursion of Flemish weavers under Edward III, and it certainly had reached a high stage of development in the sixteenth century, when men like Jack of Winchcomb and Stump of Marlborough flourished. These men did not manufacture with reference to a market on the spot, but with reference to the requirements of a distant market, sometimes a market in foreign countries. They had an interest in manufacturing on as large a scale as possible, and turning over their capital rapidly so as to enable them to push their trade and get the command of a larger market. It is obvious that institutions which were built up by small craftsmen, each with his stock in trade, to meet a known market were unsuited to the industry as developed by large capitalists. The regulations, which had been maintained in the old corporate towns, were proving inconvenient in the fifteenth century, and industries migrated from the towns to the rural districts. In other cases the burden of taxation appears to have been oppressive to the old communities, while it is likely enough that some of them had never recovered from the ravages of the Black Death. At any rate we see that, in the middle of the sixteenth century, the institutions, which had served to regulate the industry of the towns in the Middle Ages, were no longer effective for their purpose.

The towns thus lost their importance as organised centres of economic life and they also ceased to be regarded as important units for political purposes. There had been a time when the payments that they made, for the enjoyment of self-government, and occasionally to meet special demands, were of great importance to the Crown and the maintenance of the prosperity of each town was a matter of public concern; this feeling prevailed as late as the time of Philip and Mary; but it appears that from that time onwards governmental measures were rather directed to fostering the prosperity of the realm as a whole than to maintaining the economic activity of particular towns. But during the seventeenth century old payments had, with the alteration of the value of money, become almost nominal and had often been redeemed. The town privileges of self-government had ceased to give substantial advantages; the capitalists, who had settled in suburbs or in the country, were developing a profitable business; the joint stock companies gave increased opportunity in the investment of capital on lines which lay outside municipal authority; by 1689 the towns were no longer seeking so much to preserve

an independent life of their own, but were more content to have their share in the general prosperity of the country.

See also 37. Merits and Defects of the Craft Gild.

73. SOME AGRICULTURAL CHANGES IN RELATION
TO THE WOOLEN INDUSTRY

A1

With the close of the Wars of the Roses and the dawn of the Tudor period an agricultural revolution began, which continued in progress till the middle of the reign of Elizabeth, and after more than two centuries of quiescence, recommenced in the eighteenth century. This revolution was part of the general movement which gradually transformed the country. It may be described as the introduction of the commercial spirit into national life. In agriculture the commercial spirit took the direction of enclosures-the break-up, that is, of mediaeval agrarian partnerships, the appropriation of commons by individual owners, the substitution of individual enterprise for the united venture of village farms. Both in the sixteenth and in the eighteenth centuries this was the direction which the revolution assumed. But in details the earlier and later movements widely differed. Under the Tudors the agricultural revolution was accompanied by the substitution of pasture for tillage, of sheep for corn, of wool for beef and mutton. Under the Hanoverian sovereigns the British farmer no longer took his seat on the woolsack, but devoted himself instead to the production of bread and beef for the teeming populations of manufacturing cities.

The fifteenth-century agricultural changes. The period which began with the close of the Wars of the Roses (1485) and ended with the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588) was one of transition from the mediaeval to the modern form of landownership. Feudalism was dead or dying, and trade was usurping its throne. In the hands of lords of the manor the soil had been required to furnish, not money, but men-at-arms. Mediaeval barons valued their estates chiefly for the number of retainers which they sent to their banners. Tudor landlords estimated their worth by the amount of rent which they paid into their coffers. Mediaeval farmers extracted from the soil 'Adapted by permission from H. D. Traill, Social England, III, 351-57. (Cassell & Co., Ltd., 1895.)

only so much food as they required for the sustenance of themselves and their families. Modern tenants were not satisfied with this self-sufficing industry; they desired to raise from the land, not only food, but profit. As trade increased and towns grew, and English wool made its way into continental cities, or was woven into cloth by English weavers, new markets were created for agricultural produce. Fresh incentives were supplied to individual enterprise, and both landlords and tenants learned to regard their land from the commercial point of view.

If money was to be made out of land, it was plain that only individual enterprise could make it. Under the old system it was open to the idleness of one man to cripple the energy of fifty others. To exchange, divide, enclose, and so consolidate the holdings became the object of the rural aristocracy. Sometimes the commons were equally divided; sometimes they enclosed them by force or by connivance with the principal commoners. Voluntary agreements between commoners and proprietors of land were not infrequent, and bargains were often struck on equitable terms, based on a valuation and commutation of commoners' rights. But it was a rough age, in which might was right; and Sir Thomas More presents us with another side of the picture. He speaks of "husbandmen thrust out of their own, or else by covin and fraud, or by violent oppression, put beside it, or by wrongs and injuries so wearied, that they be compelled to sell all."

The first result of the commercial spirit which was infused into farming was the increase of enclosures, and the consequent severance, x whether directly or indirectly, of a considerable portion of the rural population from the soil. If this change had been accompanied by a large extension of arable farming, the market for agricultural labour might have been so enlarged as to relieve agrarian distress. But the change which took place in farming served only to increase the scarcity of employment. The second result of the commercial revo-x lution was to substitute the shepherd and his dog for the ploughmen and their teams, wool for corn, and pasture for tillage, and thus to diminish the demand for labour at, the very moment when the supply was increased. Woollen manufactures grew so rapidly both at home and abroad that there was a ready sale for English wool both in England and on the Continent. The fineness of the English fleeces made them indispensable to foreign weavers; wool was easily transported, without risk of damage, and without liability to duty. The profits of sheep-farming was sure, and the outgoings in the cost of labour