106 ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF WEALTH IN ENGLAND, 



over and over again, and later in the accounts Lancashire is 

 named as the source of the coarser kinds. Linen and canvas 

 are much more frequently designated as of foreign origin. 

 Woollen manufactures, especially of the commoner kind, were 

 carried on in all parts of the country, The fellows of New 

 College buy their liveries frequently at Winchester, and prob- 

 ably at St. Giles' fair, which up to comparatively recent times 

 was a famous and much frequented mart for West of England 

 cloth. In a MS. book of accounts, preserved in the British 

 Museum (Add. MSS. 28,208), and relating to Castle Combe, 

 Wilts, a writer of the fifteenth century notes that for the space 

 of twenty-two years and more, Sir John Fastolfe used to buy 

 by his receivers red cloth every year of the tenants in the 

 village of Castle Combe to the amount of ^100 sterling and 

 more. Castle Combe is now a small village containing some 

 five hundred inhabitants. At Norton Mandeville in Essex, 

 now a very small village, Bishop Fitzjames, the warden of 

 Merton College, purchased in 1499 a considerable quantity 

 of cloth for his own use, and for that of his fellows, the article 

 being obviously manufactured on the spot. The purchases 

 made on behalf of the monks of Durham are of woollen stuffs 

 made at Wakefield and Bradford, and were in all likelihood 

 the produce of a district which has now become the principal, 

 almost the only, centre of this industry. Frequent allusion is 

 made in the accounts to Northern cloth, and we do not hear 

 of Norfolk stuffs so much, probably because Stourbridge fair, 

 the great mart to which all resorted, was the principal locality 

 in which Norfolk produce was sold. It appears likely that 

 during the fifteenth century hand-loom weaving was very 

 generally practised, especially by women, and that as wages 

 were good, the industry was profitable. 



In 1515 (6 Hen. VIII, cap. 6) complaint is made of the 

 general decay of towns, and of the growth of pastures. The 

 act states that in certain places, there used to be two hundred 

 persons, men, women, and children, who were occupied and 

 lived by the growing of corn and grain, the herding of cattle, 



