DURING THE FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH CENTURIES. 85 



most places by the sweating sickness, which first became epi- 

 demic in 1485, and appears, like the plague, to have been pecu- 

 liarly fatal in densely peopled towns and villages. The fact 

 that great part of London was burned in 1 503, will explain the 

 comparative scantiness of the London contingent. But the 

 principal reason of the change, in so far as it marks a decline in 

 the opulence of Eastern England, is to be found in the rapid 

 extension of manufactures throughout the other counties. As 

 soon as ever the quality of cloth became a consideration and 

 this occurred long before machinery was called in to aid human 

 labour it was detected that fine yarns are better spun in those 

 parts of the country where the climate is most moist and 

 equable. Hence the cloth manufacture began to migrate 

 westwards. 



The first six counties take the same places which they held 

 in 1453. But Oxford and Norfolk were very close together in 

 1453, an d a great deal apart in 1503, for Oxford has become 

 more wealthy. Bedfordshire and Berkshire have also made 

 progress, while the change of place between Cambridge and 

 Huntingdon is trivial now, as their difference was trivial half 

 a century before. The most singular fall is that of Kent, which 

 was the fifth English county in the year 1341, the tenth in 

 1453, an d the twelfth, being exactly equal to Northampton, in 

 1503. It is probable that this decline is owing to the im- 

 poverishment of the Cinque Ports. The fortunes of only one 

 other county are as singular. In 1341, Warwick was the eight- 

 eenth English shire. In 1453, ^ jumps up to the ninth place. 

 In 1503 it falls again to the seventeenth. Westmoreland, which 

 was successively thirtieth, thirty-fourth, and twenty-seventh, 

 and Hereford which was thirty-fifth, twenty-seventh and twenty- 

 eighth, may have their places explained by local reasons, just as 

 the generally low contingent of the Scotch and Welsh marches 

 in 1453 ma 7 be assigned to causes already commented on. 



