260 Textiles and Textile Materials Trades 



A second wool district, wliich suffers rough demarkation and which 

 produced the best wool and with the longest staple and taken from the 

 largest sheep in England, was centered in Leicester. It embraced 

 Leicester, Northants, Nottingham, Rutland and Lincoln. Defoe calls 

 Leicester the "vast Magazine of Wool for the rest of the Nation."^ 

 This district, bounded by the Anker, Humber, Trent and Ouse, about 

 sixty miles in breadth, was celebrated for its mutton and long staple 

 wool; and the manufacturing districts competed for them. In 1291 

 the staple for the wools of "Lincolnshire, Northampton, Leicestre, and 

 Notingham shires was at Lincoln, and there stapulled, custimiyde, 

 and poysed, wyth other tolles thereto belongyng, to the behoffe and 

 releve of the payment off the fee ferme of the seyd cite."- But in 

 1369 Boston was made staple for these counties and all wool was 

 dispatched abroad from this port for the staples of Antwerp, Calais, 

 etc.^ Hvdl, Yarmouth, and Newcastle also exported wool in consid- 

 erable quantities, but Boston ranked second in England, after London. 

 The introduction of the stocking and worsted manufacture provided 

 these counties with a larger home market for wool in the latter cen- 

 turies and the foreign trade gave place to the domestic. 



Part of the wool was "used within the county, being comb'd and 

 weav'd into Serges, Tammies, and Shalloons, at Kettering and other 

 towns."'* The fallow or shorter wool was usually sent into York and 

 into the Western district to Cirencester and Taunton. A spirited 

 competition existed between the York or Northern district and the 

 Western district for the Lincoln wool: "the records of the Yorkshire 

 woollen trade are full of complaints of the way in which the south 

 country clothiers bought up all the best Cotswold, Lincolnshire and 

 Norfolk wools. "^ That to Cirencester was carried by packhorse; here 

 it was made up into yarn and then bought up by the yarn-merchants 

 and distributed among the clothiers of Wilts and Gloucester. They 

 mixed it with Spanish wool and manufactured it into those famous 

 West England medley and white cloths. Part of that which was 

 carried into the North, into the remoter parts of York, Westmoreland 



1 Defoe, Tour, II, 332. 



2 Hist. MSS. Com. Rep. XIV, App. VII, 263; Ross, Civitas Lincolnia, 12; see 

 petition for the re-establishment of the staple at Lincoln by the counties of Leices- 

 ter, Nottingham, Lincoln and Derby, in Pari. R. (Rec. Com.) II, 332; ditto, in 

 1376, Rot. Pari. II, 322 f. and Cunningham, Growth, 316. 



'V. C. H., Lincoln, II, 302; this requirement was evaded: cf. statute 14 Ed. 

 IV, Cap. 3. 



< Morton, Nat. Hist, of Northants, 16 fif.; V. C. H., Northants, II, ?,?>. 

 "•v. C. H., York, II, 415-6, III, 460. 



