The Opening of Southern Trades

Abstract

THE markets into which English cloth exports flowed in increasing quantity from the fifteenth century onward were on the whole those of the central and north European lands south of the North Sea and Baltic, and north of the Alps and Pyrenees. In this area they competed with great success against the older Flemish industry in a range of fine and coarse woollen cloths, and, during the later fifteenth century, Flanders adapted itself to this situation by transferring its efforts to lighter, generally worsted cloths. Central European prosperity, a change of fashion among the well-to-do that substituted heavy cloth for furs, and the final triumph over Flemish competition, all contributed to the rapid rise of English exports in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. But southern European markets were almost untouched by English products, beyond modest sales in Spain in exchange for wine and oil. The kerseys that went to Italy were finally sold in the Turkish Balkans, Hungary and Asia Minor (which could not be approached across their German frontiers) rather than in the main Mediterranean markets. Powerful and well-established industries in Italy and Catalonia, and a growing Castilian woollen industry, with ample supplies of Spanish wool, met most of the needs of the countries round the Mediterranean, and only the new Flemish worsteds penetrated their markets at all seriously in the first three-quarters of the sixteenth century.