278 Textiles and Textile Materials Trades 



clothiers; artisans were being "payde in mercery vitelle or by other 

 meanes and not in sylver" and the practice had "grown to grete 

 hurte;" it was legislated, therefore, that the workmen should be com- 

 pelled to "ressyve no thinge in chaffre, but in gold or sylver of eny 

 makers, chapmen, or syllers of cloth. "^ 



Lest there be undue emphasis given in the above description to the 

 capitalistic nature of the clothing business, it must be remembered 

 that there existed alongside these capitalistic clothiers others of less 

 means. In every region the small master seems to have continued 

 despite the tendency to large scale production. In 1615 one class of 

 clothier was described as "one that seldome or never travells into the 

 woolle country to buy his woolle, but borrowes the most part of it att 

 the markett, and setts many poore on worke, clothes it presently, and 

 sells his cloath in some countries upon the bare thred — and then comes 

 to the woolle markett and payes th' old debte and borrowes more."- 

 Another class was described as too poor to buy up stocks of wool but 

 able to buy parcels of yarn which they wove into unfinished cloth and 

 sold weekly at the market. The poverty and limited scale of busi- 

 ness done by these classes of clothiers favored the business of cloth 

 merchants on the one hand and wool staplers on the other. Since the 

 poor clothier sold the cloth in an unfinished state and others com- 

 pleted the processes of manufacture and distribution his control over 

 the industry was very limited and he was the first to suft'er in periods 

 of dearth or of dull business. This system was more comparable to 

 the Yorkshire system. 



The clothiers of the West of England marketed their cloths in various 

 directions. Bristol and Lyme Regis were the leading exporting points 

 after London. Very much Somerset cloth went out by way of the 

 the latter port from the sixteenth century onwards.^ When the Amer- 

 icas became of commercial importance the cloth exports thither from 

 this district increased somewhat, but the cheap cloths of the north 

 and the Whitney blankets found a readier sale in those foreign parts. ^ 

 The Welsh cloths moved northward and eastward to Shrewsbury; the 

 Welsh clothiers carried their "webbings," as they were called, being 

 a thick sort of flannel for military uniforms, to market at Oswestre in 

 north Salop, and they were "loaded here on wagons and carried to 

 Shrewsbury"^ as a Severn port. About 1600 the Gloucester clothiers 



' Y. C. H., Wore. IJ, 286. 



2 S. P. Dom., LXXX, 13. 



3 See shipments per boat listed in V. C. H., Somers, IT, 411, for the year 1586. 

 " Plot, Nat. Hist. Oxford, 278-80. 



•'■ Pococke, TI, 15. 



