ABSTRACT
THE efforts of the government to lift the clouds of the depression which overhung the west country woollen industry for a generation after the Cockayne experiment had little success. The traditional broadcloth manufacture continued to languish and its ancient market in central Europe proved impossible fully to recover. The Wiltshire woollen industry was ultimately rescued from its persistent depression only by the independent development of new products within its confines—a long and sometimes slow process which may plausibly in part be traced to changes operating in the manufacture of broadcloth itself. For these new varieties of Wiltshire cloth fresh markets were sought and eventually found; but the struggles for the discovery of the latter were intimately bound up with the development of English commercial and foreign policy during the century and necessarily therefore lie almost entirely outside the field of the merely local historian.
