Middlemen in English Business 307 



in the country was brought into towns to be sold there by the drapers. 

 It was found in Leeds that the manufacture was suburban and the 

 sale was urban: the dwindling of town manufacturing was compen- 

 sated for by the selling of cloth by the drapers.^ Middlemen became 

 necessary- thereafter to judge and guarantee the quality of the cloth 

 and to study the market demand so as to equalize the quantity pro- 

 duced and consumed.-' 



The specialized wooldealer antedated the clothdealer for the 

 reason that England in the early centuries produced and exported 

 wool rather than cloth and the import trade in cloth was relatively in 

 the hands of Dutch merchants. The clothdealers sprang from those 

 clothworkers having the greatest degree of capitalism quality, either 

 the wooldealers or the cloth-finishers. Stray bits of historical e\'i- 

 dence and a priori considerations incline one to believe that they came 

 mostly from the cloth-finishers. The cloth passed through their hands 

 last: they would be tempted to buy from the weaver and finish it for 

 the customer; an accumulation of stock on hand would induce them to 

 pay more attention to selling and less to finishing cloth, or gwe them- 

 selves over to buying and selling entirely. There is little e\-idence 

 that English clothdealers, to any large extent, came from the wool 

 buyers whereas the Charter of 1364 shows that the drapers at that 

 date were still makers of cloth; and the charter gave them a monopoly- 

 of the retail cloth trade of London and vicinity. Non-freemen could 

 sell in gross to lords and commoners for their private use but not by 

 retail, nor in gross to merchants. By this charter they thus became 

 local retailers on the one hand, and middlemen between makers and 

 merchants of cloth.-^ 



The drapers continued to be makers of cloth and finishers of doth 

 in certain parts of the land at least till the eighteenth century was 

 well spent. At Beverley in 1492-4 express permission was granted 

 to the drapers to "make hose and keep apprentices and servants sew- 

 ing in their shops without hindrance or any payment ... to the 

 Tailors' craft." They were thus artisans at that time.' In 1561 

 theirs and the tailors' work were differentiated and their shops were 

 not to be used for tailoring.'' In Worcester a like ordinance of the 

 sixteenth century declared "hytt shall be lawful to the saide drapers 



' Cf. V. C. H., Worces., II, 287. 



- See opinion of Babbage, Mach., 164-5. 



•■* See Ashley's opinions in his "Eng. Wool. Ind.," 60-8. 



' Selden, XW, 75, 100, 103. 



5 Ibid.. 105. 



