292 Textiles and Textile Materials Trades 



men intervened as middlemen. These spinners appear never to have 

 had a gild organization and were, as a class, very dependent upon the 

 weaver and clothier. 



It appears that the weaver was the earlier employer of labor. The 

 weavers were strongly organized in the earlier part of the period. But 

 the statute that forbade the migration of town clothiers to the country 

 and the setting up of clothiers in the countr}- exempted the Suffolk 

 district^ and this gave the weavers free way to set up as countr\^ 

 clothiers. There were, therefore, two sets of employers who under- 

 took the capitalistic manufacture of cloth in these parts. The larger 

 clothiers of the towns employed the smaller weavers of the towns and 

 the country weavers and kept a multitude of spinners preparing yarn.- 



After it was woven and fulled the clothier could have it finished by 

 local shearmen, or sell it to merchants who would care for the finishing 

 of it. It was marketed in the coast ports for shipment abroad or in 

 London. The part that went to London was usually finished by the 

 purchasing merchant.^ The Surrey trade was almost entirely to 

 London. In 1630 one Samuel Vassall, a merchant in London, bought 

 the whole produce of at least two important parishes of that county.^ 

 This was regarded a dangerous monopoly. A growing portion of the 

 Essex cloth went to London ; it offered a considerable market for bays 

 and says; the Dutch bay-makers of Halstead sent their bays here for 

 sale about 1600;-^ in 1767 Young found that in many parts of Essex 

 "The whole manufactory works chiefly for the London markets."*^ 

 In 1700, — a date about mid-way between the above-cited two — the 

 transport of Colchester cloth to London by water engaged a number 

 of hoys sailing regularly each way once a week. A statute of that 

 date exempted these Colchester packets from certain tolls as they 

 went "weekly from Wivenhoe to London with bays, says, and per- 

 petuanos, and from London to Wivenhoe with wooll to be manu- 

 factured at Colchester."''' 



The clothiers sold their cloths to the merchant? and drapers at 

 Blackwell Hall and to the merchant exporters of Colchester, Ipswich, 

 Norwich and Yarmouth. They usually allowed credit to these buyers, 



. ' 4r-5 Ph. & M., Cap. 5, Sec. 25. 



2 Hist. MSS. Com. Rep. XIV, .\pp. pt. VIII, 133-8; V. C. H., Suff., II, 256, 259. 



3V. C. H., Suff., II, 259. 



^S. P. Dom., Chas. I, CLXXV, 105; V. C. H., Surrey, II, 347. 



^V. C. H., Essex, 389. 



^ Young, Six Weeks Tour, 58-65. 



7 13 Anne, Cap. 20. 



