

INDUSTRIES 



required that no cloth should be strained or be said that even in Suffolk the beneficent 



stretched more than one yard in length or an 

 eighth of a yard in breadth, and that no person 

 should use ' any wrinch, rope or ring, or any 

 other engine for the purpose of such unlawful 

 stretching. 1 ' We have seen it was admitted by 

 the Suffolk clothiers that such engines were in 

 common use, and it also appears that the stretch- 

 ing of cloth beyond the legal limit was universally 

 practised. The Privy Council at different times 

 judged it expedient to grant a dispensation or a 

 ' toleration ' for the stretching of a certain number 

 of cloths for the Eastern market, 8 and an attempt 

 made to enforce the law in 1631 was met with 

 a protest on the part of the justices of Suffolk. 3 

 Sir Josiah Child, writing near the end of the 

 1 7th century, was of opinion that 



Excess of straining cannot be certainly limited by a 

 law, but must be left to the sellers' or exporters' dis- 

 cretion . . . besides, if we should wholly prohibit the 

 straining of cloth, the Dutch (as they often have done) 

 would buy our unstrained cloth, . . . strain it six or 

 seven yards per piece more in length, and make it look 

 a little better to the eye, and after that carry it abroad 

 to Turkey . . and there beat us out of trade with 

 our own weapons. 4 



Since 1487 it had been one of the main 

 features of English mercantile policy to insist 

 that all English cloth should be finished before 

 it was exported. Several statutes had been 

 made to this effect, but as the arts of cloth 

 finishing and dyeing were not as yet sufficiently 

 advanced in England to compete successfully 

 with the work of continental craftsmen, by far 

 the greater part of cloth exported was still white 

 and unfinished. In part the law had to be 

 relaxed, in part it was evaded, and royal licences 

 were granted to an extent which made the law 

 of very little effect. 5 Where the law was 

 operative, as in the case of Norwich worsteds, 

 the effect on trade seems to have been disastrous. 6 

 Nevertheless the policy remained in favour, and 

 the fact that so much Suffolk cloth, though as 

 we have seen by no means all, was dressed and 

 dyed before export, gave it a special interest in 

 the eyes of the statesman and the pamphleteer. 

 Whenever it was proposed to remove the hind- 

 rances imposed by the law on the cloth trade of 

 the country at large, the cry was raised that the 

 valuable Suffolk industry would suffer. 7 When 

 courtiers sued for licences to export unfinished 

 cloth without regard to the law, they recognized 

 the force of public opinion or of vested interest 

 by excluding the cloth of Suffolk and of Kent 

 from the scope of their operations. 8 It cannot 



1 Stat. 5 and 6 Edw. VI, cap. 6, sec. 1 1 , I z. 



' Acts of P. C. 1577, p. 385;S.P.Dom. Jas. I,xl, 25. 



3 S.P. Dora. Chas. I, cxcii, z6, 42. 



4 Smith, Memoirs of Wool, i, 227. 



5 G. Schanz, Engfische Handelspolitlk, i, 454. 

 '' Schanz, op. cit. ii, 20. 



7 S.P. Dom. Eliz. xxv, 26 ; Ibid, ccvi, 67. 

 * Ibid, cclxi, 47, and cclxxi, 3. 



character of the restrictive legislation was univer- 

 sally recognized. One of the most flourishing 

 centres of the industry in the county had been 

 East Bergholt. In the Ipswich records for the 

 earlier years of Elizabeth it is the clothiers of 

 that then flourishing place who are oftenest 

 mentioned as supplying the Ipswich merchants 

 with goods for export. In the year of the 

 Spanish Armada the justices of the township, in 

 reply to a demand of the Privy Council that 

 they should make some reasonable contribution 

 to a ship and pinnace out of Colchester, ask for 

 compassion on account of 



the decayed state of this poor corner, growing chiefly 

 if we be rightly informed by restraint made by a 

 Statute prohibiting that no Suffolk cloth should be 

 transported and not here dressed before they were 

 embarked, thereby changing the accustomed gainful 

 trade . . . with such cloths as were best saleable in 

 Spain and now through long want of vent into those 

 parts we find the stocks and wealth of the inhabitants 

 greatly decayed. 9 



As far as the greater part of the English cloth 

 trade was concerned this restriction had very 

 little effect till after the accession of James I. 

 The merchants were interested in evading it and 

 the crown found the granting of licences for 

 the export of white unfinished cloth a valuable 

 fiscal resource. But by the beginning of the 

 seventeenth century, as we shall have occasion 

 to notice later, the influence of industrial capital 

 began to be much strengthened by grants of 

 incorporation. The clothworkers in different 

 centres, and especially in London, loudly insisted 

 on the law being carried out. The king and 

 his ministers, having quarrelled with Parliament 

 on the question of supply, were being led to 

 look to protective measures as a popular source 

 of revenue. Finally at the end of 1614, just 

 after a dissolution of Parliament, the Govern- 

 ment sanctioned an elaborate scheme based on a 

 large grant of monopoly for securing the dressing 

 and dyeing of all exported cloth. In the dis- 

 cussion that led up to the adoption of what 

 proved a disastrous policy, the case of the Suffolk 

 industry occupied a prominent place. A state 

 paper was prepared giving 



a survey of the benefits which cometh to this state by 

 colouring of the wools and cloth made in Suffolk 

 exceeding the like quantity of cloth made white 

 elsewhere. 10 



A very short acquaintance with this class of 

 document is sufficient to lead one to the con- 

 clusion that it would be quite unsafe to trust the 

 accuracy of the statistics thus put forward, but 

 the incidental details need not be viewed with 



1 Ibid, ccix, 1 02. 



10 Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and 

 Seventeenth Centuries, p. 182. 



26l 



