II THE GREAT PLAGUE AND ITS RESULTS 29 



Mr. Ashley 1 has pointed out the importance of the 

 wool trade with Flanders. We know that the wars of 

 Edward III were largely commercial. But England was 

 also becoming a manufacturing country, witness the 

 advance of the cloth industry. In the century and a half 

 which followed the Great Plague this development was far 

 more rapid, and there were few countries, if we except 

 Italy and Flanders, where industries were so flourishing or 

 trade so prosperous. Thus the author of the ' Commodities 

 of England ' 2 speaks of the woollen cloth ready made at 

 'all times to serve the merchants of any two kingdoms, 

 Christian or heathen, and of the store of gold and silver 

 ore, whereof Englishmen had 'the worthiest payment 

 passing any land, Christian or heathen'. And the number 

 of the churches built in the perpendicular style, more 

 especially in the woollen districts, like that of Norfolk and 

 the Cotswold, from the middle of the fourteenth to the 

 close of the fifteenth century, tell the same tale. ^^ 



All this is, however, quite compatible with the opposite 

 view, that the fifteenth century was one of great distress, 3 

 for the period was characterized by the breaking down of 

 the customary and self-sufficing methods on which industry, 

 both in town and country, had hitherto been based, 

 methods by which private enterprise had been checked. 

 Competition was beginning to have freer play. Domestic 

 industry, especially that of weaving of cloth in the rural 

 districts, was taking the place of the old guild system and 

 causing dislocation of manufactures in many towns. Out 

 of the wreck of the mediaeval system the capitalist was 

 arising, who found in this new world a field for enterprise 



1 Ashley, Economic Hist. ; Cunningham, i. 389. 



2 Written somewhere about 1450, possibly by Fortescue. Cf. 

 Plummer, Fortescue, Gov. of England, p. 81. 



3 Cf. Cunningham, English Industry, i. 393. 



