SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC HISTORY 



Considerable confusion appears in descriptions of the industry at this 

 period. Probably it was increasing in bulk, but was rather irregular in its 

 profits, owing to the sudden influx of labour and capital, and owing also to 

 the disturbance of the currency by the earlier Tudors. But questions of 

 money value are notoriously hard to grasp, and in the sixteenth century high 

 prices were always attributed to the covetousness of some class, and believed 

 to be removable by government. The merchant of the staple died a natural 

 death, and we hear no more of him. By fair means or foul, the cloth trade 

 was evidently developing, for it now needed not only the home supply of 

 wool, but imports from Spain. In 1567 125^ hundred Ib. of Spanish wool 

 were imported. 1 The development of the Spanish sheep was indeed 

 encouraging other continental countries to make cloth, 8 another cause 

 probably of the anxiety of the English clothiers, who had hitherto had no 

 rivals of importance outside Flanders. 



In 1599 complaints were raised that the cloth dressers of England were 

 suffering by the export of undressed cloth by the merchant adventurers, to 

 be finished abroad.* Complaints were also raised that the alnager and sealer 

 interfered with the manufacture (1576).* Nevertheless, clothiers and dyers 

 rapidly assumed a leading part in the life of the southern Cotswolds, and 

 considerable fortunes were amassed by some of them. In 1615 Painswick 

 Court-house was purchased by Seaman, a wealthy clothier, and tithes of woad, 

 grown by the Painswick dyers, formed an important item in the tithes paid 

 to Painswick church. 1 In the second quarter of the century, however, a 

 period of real depression began. In 1621 the Justices of the clothing 

 counties received piteous petitions from the weavers, spinners, and fullers as 

 to lack of work ' and, consequentlie, of means of reliefe for themselves and 

 their families.' The clothiers were ordered to provide employment for the 

 discharged workmen, but in their turn complained of the high price of wool, 

 and of the monopoly in the export of cloth enjoyed by the merchant adven- 

 turers, who were not sufficient to 'take off' the bulk of the cloth. ' One 

 Will Bennett, a very ancient and good clothier, doth offer to live by brown 

 bread and water, rather than his great number of poore people should want 

 work, if he had means to keep them in work.' Many of them declared 

 they were forced to pawn their clothes to keep their people at work.' There 

 were at this time, we learn, 1,500 looms in the county, and some 2,400 

 persons engaged in the clothing industry. To aid their distress, government 

 could devise no better remedy than sumptuary laws, enjoining the wearing of 

 English cloth (22 June, 1622) ; and later on, it appeared that it was the 

 government regulations which were one cause of the distress. In 1 633 petitions 

 were presented to the Justices of Assize from 800 persons at Leonard Stanley 

 and King's Stanley, 'hitherto employed in clothing, and now likely never to be 

 employed again.' Proclamations forbidding gig-mills and the old-fashioned sort 

 of rack 7 had entirely disturbed the makers of red and white broad cloth. So 

 anxious were the ' red clothiers ' that they journeyed to London to further their 

 petition, explaining that they did not now use the ' gig mills, prohibited 



1 Exch. Q.R. bdle. 457, No. 35. ' S.P. Dom. Add. iv, 19. 



' S.P. Dom. Eliz. ccLot, 128. * Lansd. 22 (36). 



* Hiit. tf Painswick Chunk, S. Clair Baddeley. This may account for the prevalence of the common 

 ' Dyer's Weed,' on the unenclosed ground above Painswick. 



S.P. Dom. Ja. I, crxviii, 49. ' S.P. Dom. Cha. I, cclii, >i, and ccxxxvii, App. 16. 



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