SPINNING AND WEAVING. 585 



made great progress, and that what at the beginning of the 

 time was a trivial part of English trade, had by the end 

 of it become a matter of immediate significance and great 

 hope. It is clear that the saying of Bishop Burnet, that the 

 English climate was peculiarly adapted to the spinning and 

 weaving of linen and woollen yarn, was the summary of an 

 experience which had become very generally familiar. The 

 original home of all linen and woollen fabrics, as far as Eng- 

 land was an agent in the production of them, was the Eastern 

 Counties, especially Norfolk. The selection of the locality was 

 accidental, and was due to the intimate trade relations which 

 subsisted, perhaps beyond historical evidence, between the 

 Low Countries and Eastern England. Even after the 

 trade had begun to migrate, the relations of Norfolk 

 and Suffolk with Flanders and the rest of the States, 

 which were gradually being accumulated by the House of 

 Burgundy, were kept up and made intimate by the business 

 ties which it was the interest and endeavour of men like 

 Fastolfe and Cromwell to maintain in the fifteenth century. 

 And as constantly happens, the manufacturing activity of the 

 Eastern Counties kept their minds open to those speculative 

 novelties in faith and practice which the followers of Wiklif 

 first inculcated, and the sectaries of the Reformation, whose 

 true home was the same Eastern Counties, clung to amid inces- 

 sant persecution. 



The hint given in the grocers' accounts as to the origin 

 of some of the cloth which the guild purchased shows that at 

 the beginning of the fifteenth century the manufacture of cloth 

 was migrating westwards. The evidence supplied from the 

 various Acts of Parliament for defining and regulating the 

 trade shows how rapidly cloth manufactures spread in the 

 West and the North. I believe that during the period treated 

 in these volumes, very little of the finest products could 

 be obtained in English manufactories. But there was a wide 

 market for middling and cheap products, and the North of 

 England, peculiarly adapted to the spinning and weaving of 



