De-industrialisation and the Staple: The Cloth Trade

Abstract

Essex has a long association with textile manufacture. Broadcloth production was an established business in medieval Essex, concentrated in Colchester and the towns of the north-east of the county.² This traditional industry formed the edge of the prosperous Suffolk cloth area which has left a legacy in the great medieval churches and corporate buildings of the former wool towns.³ For Essex, a new regime of production started in the second half of the sixteenth century with the ‘new draperies’, a type of light worsted cloth which found favour in the markets of southern Europe.⁴ This chapter will describe the traditional industry, then the process of de-industrialisation and the effect of women’s employment in the industry in particular.

the whole county, large as it is, may be said to be employ’d and in part maintained by the spinning of wool

D. Defoe, Tour through the Eastern Counties, (1724)¹