The Woollen Trade and Manufactures

The development of the woollen industry in England is interesting and important for two reasons. ¹ On the one hand it shows us the origin of the paruliar wealth of our country both in the middle ages and later, and on the other it illustrates with great clearness the evolution of our industry generally, an evolution that begins with the rude efforts of prehistoric peoples, passes through the stages of family work and gild work in hand-made industry, till in more recent times it reaches the stage of the machine and the factory. It is also particularly associated with our own country, for in the middle ages England was the chief wool-producing country in the North of Europe. Spain grew wool also, ² but it could not be used alone for every kind of fabric, ³ and, besides, it was more difficult to transport wool from Spain to Flanders, the seat of the manufacture of that article, ⁴ than it was to send it across the narrow German Ocean, where swarms of light craft plied constantly between Flanders and the eastern ports of England. ⁵ Hence England had a practical monopoly of the wool trade, ⁶ which was due not only to its favourable climate and soil, but also to the fact that even at the worst periods of civil war—and they did not last for long—our island was incomparably more peaceful than the countries of Western Europe. From the thirteenth to the seventeenth century the farmers of Western Europe could not possibly have kept sheep, the most defenceless and tender of domestic animals, amid the wars that were continually devastating their homesteads; nor, as a matter of fact, did they do so. ¹ But in England, especially after the twelfth century, nearly everybody in the realm, from the king to the villein, was concerned in agriculture, and was interested therefore in maintaining peace. Even when the great landlords, after the Plague of 1348, gave up the cultivation of their arable land, they often undertook sheep-farming, and enclosed large tracts of land for that purpose. Hence the export trade in wool became more and more important, and there was always a continual demand for English wool to supply the busy looms of the great manufacturing towns in Flanders, Holland, ² and even Florence ³ in Italy.