302 Textiles and Textile Materials Trades 



Since 1516 Blackwell Hall had been made the exclusive London 

 cloth market. The ordmance of 1678 and the act of 1696 confirmed 

 this monopoly. But the factors found clandestine ways of dealing 

 outside the Hall when it convenienced them especially. For instance, 

 the governors of the Hall permitted them to hire warehouses in the 

 Hall for their own private use; thus opportunity was given for them 

 to enter on other than market days and carry out cloths and expose 

 them to sale in their own houses.^ The use of patterns likewise 

 afforded a means to evasion ; along with the cloth the clothier sent up 

 patterns of the same, which the factor took to his house or store-house 

 or to the drapers' houses and made sales in advance of the Thursday 

 market.^ Another practice which amounted to a similar evasion and 

 which was opposed by the clothiers was that of trust sales whereby 

 large stocks of cloth of various patterns were sent out to drapers, 

 ostensibly as sold; the draper carried them in stock for a week or two 

 and returned what he had not sold, claiming they were in excess of the 

 bargain, the worse for wear and handling, and the factor charged the 

 cost of repressing to the clothier.^ The amount of the sale was thus 

 determined outside of the Hall, as was also the specific cloth sold. 



At times, for the purposes of profit or as a weapon employed to 

 maintain their monopoly against the clothier in the Hall, the factors 

 engaged themselves as clothiers. During times of prosperovis trade 

 they furnished employees with wool, oil, dye-stuffs, etc., and made 

 cloth of their own and gave it the preference of the market. They 

 thus assumed to themselves the advantage of boom times to the detri- 

 ment of their clothier principals.'' If the poorer sort of clothiers of 

 any particular locality offered continued and active resistance to the 

 domination of the factors in the trade, it was claimed that the factors 

 would join their capitals and set up the clothmaking trade in some 

 other nearby town and force such competitive pressure as to undo 

 the refractory town. Actual instance of such action occurred at 

 Kidderminster in Worcestershire.* Efforts were made in 1678 to 

 stop the factors' doing any other than the true agent's function; they 

 were prohibited from dealing in cloth on their own account except for 



1 8 and 9 Wm. Ill, Cap. 9, Sec. 1. 



2 This was practiced in 1692: see "Clothiers Complaint," 14-15, where it was 

 claimed the market day had lost its signification through this practice. 



^Haynes, View of the Present, 89 (1705); "Case of the Clothiers and Weavers" 

 (1739), quoted in Smith, Memoirs, II, 312-13. 



* See "Case of Clothiers and Weavers" (in Smith's Memoirs, II, 313) for the 

 opinion the clothier had of the effect of this practice on the clothier and trade. 



5 See Smith, Memoirs, I, 318; Yarranton, E.xtract from a Dialogue, 1. 



