ABSTRACT
The only two medieval industries pursued on a sufficiently large scale to require a major organisation were textiles and shipbuilding. (Building, which might have rivalled them, was in the hands of thousands of individual craftsmen.) Ships continued to be built in Tudor times near or in all the major ports; their number increased, though their size did not, and no change in method took place. In the clothing industry the chief developments to note are the introduction of new textiles and the adoption of a few pieces of machinery. The old staple products-woollens and worstedsbegan to lose favour, partly because their export declined in the second half of the century and partly because fashion demanded finer and lighter cloths. Hence ,ve find the so-called new draperies (bays and says) encouraged by the government; the use of cotton in fustian began in Lancashire (c. 1600); silk was attempted. Yet wool retained pride of place. England exported in the main unfinished or 'white' cloth-undyed and not treated to the point where the tailor would use it-to the industrial centres of Flanders and Brabant where the rough cloth was turned into the finest stuff in Europe. Of course, some cloth had always been finished in England for the home market, but the English finishers (even the elite among them, the dyers) were insufficiently skilled, and the Flemings refused to buy any but white cloth. Attempts to concentrate all cloth manufacture in England-to exploit industrially England's virtual monopoly of the raw material-thus proved only partially successful. The new inventions mattered little. Since at least the thirteenth century cloth had been fulled (beaten in water to felt the fibres) by water-driven mills; now there was added a gig-mill to raise the nap for shearing, a stocking-frame on which stockings could be knitted more rapidly than by hand, and the Dutch loom which made possible a sort of mass production of narrow goods like ribbons. All were resented by the workers as dangers to employment, and none amounted to more than a slight adjustment in one or two minor processes. More stockings were certainly produced and worn, and also more English-made ribbons, but this chief of England's industries was in the main remarkable for changing very little.
