THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY 39 



War, when the Saxon and Silesian wools deposed it from its 

 pride of place. Smith, in his Memoirs of Wool^ is of the 

 opinion that England ' borrowed some parts of its breed from 

 thence, as it certainly did the whole from one place or another.' 

 Spanish wool, too, was imported into England at an early date, 

 the manufacture of it being carried on at Andover in 1262.^ 

 Yet until the fourteenth century it was not produced in 

 sufficient quantities to compete seriously with English wool 

 in the markets of the Continent ; and it appears to have been 

 the long wools, such as those of the modern Leicester and 

 Lincoln, from which England chiefly derived its fame as 

 a wool-producing country. 



Our early exports went to Flanders, where weaving had 

 been introduced a century before the Conquest, and, in spite 

 of the growth of the weaving industry in England, to that 

 country the bulk of it continued to go, all through the 

 Middle Ages, though in the thirteenth century a determined 

 effort was made to divert a larger share of English wool to 

 Italy.^ During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the 

 export of wool was frequently forbidden,* sometimes for 

 political objects, but also to gain the manufacture of cloth 

 for England by keeping our wool from the foreigner; but 

 these measures did not stop the export, they only hampered 

 it and encouraged much smuggling. It commanded what 

 seems to us an astonishing price, for 3^. a lb. in the thir- 

 teenth and fourteenth centuries is probably equal to nearly 

 4J. in our money. Its value, and the ease with which it could 

 be packed and carried, made it an object of great importance 

 to the farmer. In 1337 ^ we have a schedule of the price 



* Second edition, i. 50 n. See also Burnley, History of Wool, p. 17. 



"^ Gross, Gild Merchant, ii. 4, It is from the Spanish merino, crossed 

 with Leicesters and Southdowns, that the vast Australian flocks of to-day 

 are descended. 



' Cunningham, op. cit. i. 628. 



* Ashley, Early History of English Woollen Industry, p. 34. 

 " Calendar of Close Rolls, 1337-9, pp. 148-9. 



