ABSTRACT
Dr Paul Arblaster generously acknowledges the work of his predecessors, but his book is very much his own. In 1612 Verstegan was granted a licence which gave him the monopoly for the importation of undyed English cloth into Antwerp. He shared the monopoly with a consortium of refugee English Catholic merchants. Arblaster’s knowledge of Antwerp economic history introduces us to the hitherto little discussed class of recusant merchants, some of whom were very wealthy indeed. In polemical and devotional literature he was almost entirely dependent on Jesuit sources – he seems to have had little time for the rest of the clergy, secular or religious. Within the limitations of a review, it would be impossible to do justice to all the topics and nuances of Arblaster’s book. This account is a commentary on an arbitrary selection of a few aspects.
