Wool supply and distribution

Abstract

ENGLISH wool had for centuries been a much-prized commodity in international trade. In mid-thirteenth century it was being shipped abroad in prodigious quantities, often by Italian merchants, and it provided the essential raw material also for a flourishing textile industry in the Netherlands. In the fourteenth century, Edward III had fostered the organisation of the Company of Merchants of the Staple, a body of English wool-dealers through whose hands the wool traffic was canalised with the primary purpose of simplifying the collection of an export tax to enrich the king’s exchequer. From 1363 onwards the Staplers kept their sales market for foreign buyers — i.e., the Staple — at Calais, a fortress in English hands until 1558. They became increasingly involved in the royal finances and politics. From 1466, by a special and long-lived arrangement with the Crown, they took over direct responsibility for the wages of the garrison at Calais. In the history of English textile production, the Staplers must inevitably be cast as enemies: they comprised a rich and influential body of merchants whose livelihood depended upon whisking abroad the raw material upon which the English manufacturer had to rely, in order to sell it at Calais to his rival the Netherlands clothmaker.