Abstract
The Act of 1552 had been passed largely at the instigation of the Merchants of the Staple, with the object of bringing new life to their sinking export trade.1 Following this measure the Staplers’ fortunes did indeed revive somewhat. Shipments made by the members of the Company rose from 2,300 pockets2 in 1551, and 2,340 in 1552, to 6,300 pockets in 1553, 5,400 in 1554 and 4,700 in 1555.3 To attempt to account for these figures solely in terms of the anti-middleman legislation of 1552, would be to ignore the effects of other more important influences. The large jump in wool exports between 1552 and 1553 can be accounted for, in the first place, by the temporary fall in the price of wool — a fall partly resulting from the 1552 Act, but due mainly to the contraction in cloth exports; secondly, by the continued rise in the price of Spanish wool;4 and thirdly, by another collapse in sterling: factors which all made for the relative cheapening of English wool in the continental market.
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Notes
Fisher, Econ. Hist. Rev. x (1940), 103.
In 1559 Philip reacquired the seaport customs duties which in 1469 had been alienated from the control of the royal exchequer, and promptly undertook to exploit this new source of income by laying a series of heavy export duties on wool (J. Klein, The Mesta, A Study in Spanish Economic History, 1273–1836 (Cambridge, Mass., 1920), p. 46.
Fisher, Econ. Hist. Rev. x (1940), 96.
L. Stone, ‘Elizabethan Overseas Trade’, Econ. Hist. Rev. 2nd ser. ii (1949), 37.
P.R.O. S.P. 14/80/13. This is the well-known document printed as Appendix A, ii, in G. Unwin, Industrial Organization in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1904). The date should be December, 1615, and not January, 1615, as assigned.
Commons Debates, 1621, ed. W. Notestein, F. H. Reif and H. Simpson (1935), iv, 66, 96–7; ibid., v, 487, 504, 506–7; B.M. Add. MS. 43849, passim.
These were London, Canterbury, Exeter, Norwich, Worcester, Shrewsbury, Winchester, Reading, Cirencester, Kendal, Sherborne, Devizes, Rochdale, Taunton, Richmond, Wakefield, Halifax, Coggeshall, Oswestry, Northampton, Lincoln, Woodstock (Oxfordshire) and Brackley (Northamptonshire). Leicester was added early in 1618, at the request of the Mayor and Aldermen of the town. See P.R.O. S.P. 14/92/28(1); Records of the Borough of Leicester, 1603–1688, ed. H. Stocks (1923), pp. 170, 172.
Quoted in W. G. Hazlitt, The Livery Companies of the City of London (1892), p. 153.
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© 1962 P. J. Bowden
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Bowden, P.J. (1962). The Staplers in the Regulation of the Wool Trade. In: The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-81676-7_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-81676-7_6
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