Abstract
When the sixteenth century commenced, the exportation of English wool, which throughout the Middle Ages had been the basis of the country’s export trade, was steadily giving way to that of cloth. The change from raw wool exporter to cloth exporter had been proceeding since the early years of the fourteenth century, when England had exported more than 30,000 sacks of wool a year and only about 5,000 cloths. But the transition had been a slow one, and by the end of the fifteenth century the wool-export trade, though declining, was still of considerable proportions.
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Notes
For the evolution of the Staple system, see E. Power, The Wool Trade in English Medieval History (Oxford, 1941);
E. Power, ‘The Wool Trade in the Fifteenth Century’, Studies in English Trade in the Fifteenth Century, ed. E. Power and M. M. Postan (1933), pp. 30–91;
The Ordinance Book of the Merchants of the Staple, ed. E. E. Rich (Cambridge, 1937).
But the price of Spanish wool was also rising in the early sixteenth century (E. J. Hamilton, American Treasure and the Price Revolution in Spain, 1501–1650, Harvard Economic Studies, xliii (1934), p. 285). It was almost certainly the upward trend in the price of Spanish wool, rather than exchange depreciation, which caused a temporary revival in English wool shipments in the early 1540’s.
P.R.O. S.P. 10/13/81; B.M. Lansd. MS. 113/21; Hist. MSS. Coram. Salisbury MSS. xiv, 55; Rich, op. cit., pp. 13–18; Tudor Economic Documents, ed. R. H. Tawney and E. Power (1924), iii, 102, 114.
M. W. Beresford, The Lost Villages of England (1954), pp. 142, 148.
M. W. Beresford, ‘The Poll Tax and Census of Sheep, 1549’, Agric. Hist. Rev. i (1953), 9–15; ii (1954), 15–29.
zz Fisher, Econ. Hist. Rev. x (1940), 96, 103;
G. Unwin, Studies in Economic History (1927), p. 148.
In return for the financial services of the Merchant Adventurers, the government in 1552 abolished the privileges of the Hansards. See Unwin, Studies, pp. 146–147, 149–50; Fisher, Econ. Hist. Rev. x (1940), 108–9.
P. J. Bowden, Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. ix (1956), 48, n. 5.
See R. H. Tawney, The Agrarian Problem in the Sixteenth Century (1912), pp. 14, 352;
A. F. Pollard, England under Protector Somerset (1900), p. 271.
M. W. Beresford, Agric. Hist. Rev. ii (1954), 21–2.
A.P.C. 1556–8, p. 414; Cal. Pat. 1555–7, pp. 81–2; W. R. Scott, Joint Stock Companies to 1720 (Cambridge, 1910), i, 28.
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© 1962 P. J. Bowden
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Bowden, P.J. (1962). Regulation by Act of Parliament. In: The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-81676-7_4
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