ABSTRACT
This paper is concerned with the rivalry between the Cloth workers’ Company and the Merchant Adventurers’ Company leading to the collapse of the Merchant Adventurers’ Company in 1614.1 Between these two City companies lies the clash between the interests of an exporter and those of an employer: the Adventurers dealt with the export of cloth chiefly to Northwest Europe, whereas the Clothworkers represented clothiers, clothworkers and dyers - people whose livelihoods depended on the manufacture of cloth. They acted as a lobbying group, a kind of union. The Adventurers, on the other hand, are better described as a professional body, which did not trade as a company, but their members traded individually. The Merchant Adventurers dominated not only the English merchant community at the turn of the seventeenth century, but the economy of the Low Countries and Germany.2 Robert Brenner’s study of commercial change in England in the century between 1550 and 1650, Merchants and Revolution, is framed by what he calls the ‘unquestioned leadership’ of the Adventurers from page one onwards.3 Indeed, commentary on merchant groups in the City frequently defines new trades or traders in relation to the old, established Merchant Adventurers.
