The wool, in fact, was being sold at home, and out of the ruin of the merchants of the Staple the cloth-makers sucked no small advantage. For the great revolution in trade was rapidly being completed—the revolution by which England was turned from being a country whose chief business was exporting wool into a country whose chief business was exporting cloth.[63] The people had indeed long manufactured rough cloth for common use.[64] But during the reigns of the three Edwards the idea had constantly gained ground that by working up their own raw material[65] Englishmen might easily retain for themselves the profits which foreigners had till now secured, and manufacturers were undoubtedly doing a considerable export trade in the middle of the fifteenth century.[66] Half a century later, in 1411, the very year when the subsidy on wool fell to a fifth, broad-cloths are first mentioned in an Act of Parliament; and from this time they became the chief cloths of trade. As though they had been for a while half forgotten by the Exchequer, the exporters of cloth found themselves free from all subsidy tax and only obliged to pay to the indifferent authorities tolls that amounted to less than two per cent. for natives and merchants of the Hanse occupied in the trade, and less than eight per cent. for aliens; and complacently measured this sum with the tolls of the Staplers—the thirty-three per cent. paid by merchants of the Staple, or seventy per cent. by all other traders,[67] a tax which perhaps explains why in 1424 Parliament had to forbid the carrying of sheep over sea to shear them there. The manufacturers, too, made alliance with the discontented wool-growers. A farmer who could sell his wool next door, did not trouble to send it with vexatious formalities over sea to Calais; and in course of time the cloth merchants insisted upon laws which gave to them during certain seasons the first choice of the wool before the Staplers were even allowed to enter the market.[68]
Under these circumstances trade grew apace. Carracks of Genoa carried English cloths to the shores of the Black Sea; galleys of Venice fetched them to the pits of the Venetian dyers; merchants of the Hanseatic League sold them in the fair of Novgorod; English traders travelled with them to the inland markets of Prussia, and gave them in exchange for casks of herrings in Denmark. At the close of the century the English Merchant Adventurers exported about 60,000 pieces of cloth yearly; and in the beginning of the sixteenth century the cloth dealers boasted that never before in the memory of man was so much cloth sold out of England. The 60,000 bales rose in 1509 to 84,789 pieces, and in 1547 to 122,354;[69] and the dealers claimed further gratitude and admiration of their country for the fact that they had “by their industry” raised by a fifth the price demanded from the foreigner.[70] Meanwhile the manufacturer was also getting hold of the home market, as the great religious corporations and landowners who had once provided on their own estates for all local wants recognized the new condition of things, and instead of making cloth at home as of old, sent every year far and wide across the country to the great clothing centres to buy material for the household liveries,[71] seeking from one place the coarse striped cloth of the old pattern and from another the goods of the new fashion. The fine black copes of worsted were favourite gifts of benefactors to churches, and a patriotic Norfolk gentleman, after seeing a “tippet of fine worsted which is almost like silk,” decided to “make his doublet all worsted for worship of Norfolk.”[72]
