the Wool and Cloth Custer
England developed a strong and vibrant cloth/wool cluster out of the enclosure period, and it survived the horrors of the Plague. It rose rapidly in the back half of the fifteenth century (late 1400’s) with the ascendancy of Tudor Henry VII. Taking advantage of the rise of England’s guild system, and the protections of England’s new system of local government.
A ready market and workforce developed to the benefit of the wool and cloth cluster which having “first advantage’ for capital and workers spread to the larger urban areas, producing in its wake sizeable companies and the beginnings of dynastic families which became important economic leaders, that carved for themselves advantages and for their guilds privileges for from the towns and cities in which they were located. This was a period in which urban/town incorporations and government filled in the political-economic vacuum of urban geographies taken over by William the Conqueror in 1066. By no means inclined to “democratic-style decision-making” these merchants turned their companies into larger producers of wool and cloth and jealously pursued ambitions that almost inevitably led them to concentrate around and in England’s larger ports, London of course being the foremost. To be sure the enclosure movement opened up the craft and fed into its manufacture. generating wealth, providing a steady workforce, as its size and scale wealth generator. Bristol and other outer ports, inland regional centers, as well as London morphed into small wool/cloth centers, but again London was the center. By the late fifteenth century guilds reached a point they encountered obstacles such as foreign (Dutch and Flemish the most aggressive) businesses establishing a presence in England and setting up businesses usually in London “suburbs” outside the city limits, attracting workers and apprentices and setting them up in sweat shops joining guilds, and competing with domestic businesses without fear of London guilds or city regulation. The havoc and social discontent this created directly caused a large and particularly violent “xenophobic riot”, accusing foreign workers of stealing jobs and eating our bread”, looting foreign houses hanging many, on Evil May Day 1517 (p. 247). By the 1520’s the guilds were able to mobilize support and through Parliament in 1524, and in 1528 ruling by the Star Chamber came to grips with “alien” workers and business. A century later many of these gilds are found to be engaged in a struggle with a newly constituted municipal authorities who refuse them the rights of freemen… The weavers of London gained their first charter from Henry I at about the same time as the city received its charter… Now the effect of the charter granted to the weavers was to place them effectively on a level … with the barons and religious houses that possessed “sokes” in London. The grant of a gild gave them a private jurisdiction, a soke, a collective leadership over their trade”. [99] George Unwin, The Gilds and Companies of London (Frank Cass & Company, 1632, Fourth Edition), pp. 43-45. Unwin describes the development of guilds that preceded the pivot had evolved and over a century lodged itself into the heart of English town and City of London policy-making. Due to this “first advantage” wool and cloth guilds, and their member merchants and manufacturers secured a special niche in the making of local policy, and in their local elites. By the time of the pivot period after 1500 and certainly by the 1550’s this sector played a disproporsionate role in English urban affairs, which as we shall see marginalized others who wanted to export other products to other geographies than northern Europe. Cloth, wool, textile guilds, with this first advantage, achieved scale, access into local and national policy, and exercised considerable influence in policy-making. As Unwin further states “The first weavers were not mere craftsmen. Their ability to purchase a charter, the amount of their farm, which was twice that of the bakers and their possession of a court of merchant law, all point to their having a body of well-to-do traders amongst them [However] During the 12th century, a body of influential citizens who were interested in the cloth trade and had an unchartered gild of their own“–attempted to buy out the weaver charter and were successful. While the old guild would fight back, it is clear there was money in cloth making and intense competition to enter the profession. [99] Unwin, pp. 45-6. Unwin’s observation is an important one for understanding the emerging dominance of England’s cloth/wool makers. Their guild was not simply composed of craftsmen who spun cloth/wool product, but also wealthy merchant. In London, the latter would in time gain leadership of the guild transforming them into a “livery” guild that ordered and ran the affairs of one sector; by 1515 twelve such livery guilds were placed on a list issued by the Lord Mayor, a list based primarily on its wealth and exercise of power. These twelve livery companies occupied a compelling position over the policy making of London, as well as guild members of their chose profession. The Clothworkers Livery Company was included on that list. Other London guilds merged to acquire scale that could exert economic power of its members across the English economy. In 1508 the Shearmen’s Company obtained from the king (Henry VII) a charter that included a variety of privileges for the industry and its members, and the guild was awarded a monopoly over the industry. The impact of the cloth/wool nexus was so remarkable that the cloth/wool nexus became the standard for both guilds and later trading companies. To say it another way, the guild’s top wealthy oligarchs that served in their governance were highly motivated to keep their guild pure of “mere Merchants” for a number of reasons, but foremost was to protect their own positions and wealth generating companies. The result was a hierarchical series of decision-making oligarchies set into place within the cloth and wool; the top levels, what we would call the board of directors and its executive committee, developed into the chief decision-makers of guild affairs, and those with most impact in the guilds external relations .Using municipal corporations (city governance) and institutions like the City Guild Merchant, livery and craft guilds strengthened powers of membership and workforce skill training which combined with Tudor willingness to decentralize England’s policyimplementation exerted considerable impact on England’s economy and prosperity-growth. Also, the rise of livery guilds, with membership based on larger merchants and distributors led to accumulation of great wealth by a very few, and then the perpetuation of that wealth by developing family dynasties that controlled the companies through generational succession. To be sure, other of the twelve chief livery/craft guilds expanded their corporate structures, developed their own memberships, oligarchies and hierarchies, leaving a great deal of England’s economy under the sway of self-operating guilds, whose elites and membership companies also enjoyed their measure of insulation from the Crown. Each created their own bureaucracy and network of oligarchies. But cloth and wool took this one step further: they exported their products to Antwerp and from there to northern continental Europe. Succinctly, cloth/wool companies and guild membership amassed great wealth and stability which they levered to access Crown/sovereign support. Cloth merchants and manufacturers entered into the City of London’s administrative and elective positions thereby achieving great power and impact over the City’s governance. By this point, the cloth/wool manufacturing and merchant cluster had turned itself into England’s chief, and for all practical purposes, only non agricultural-land ownership force in the English economy. The cloth industry elites occupied through its relevant guilds considerable power over London economy, society, and economic life. In 1528 the Clothworkers Guild combined the Shearmen, Fullers, and Weavers–the industry had not only organized itself, but had secured its autonomy from other guilds creating in the process a relationship of power and access into crown politics and a relationship with the king. A great deal of that power and wealth originated through cloth and wool trade to the northern continent and those powerful merchants involved in it decided to cement their own position and standing through the incorporation of a second autonomous overlapping layer of elites that controlled its exports. They did this through the great trading company, the Company of Merchant Adventurers, that operated and serviced their continental trade to Europe. In 1505, Henry VII further awarded the latter yet another new and “improved” charter that enhanced their export monopoly. and solidified the the company’s governing oligarchy, making it nearly impregnable to attack from its members-shareholders. Company of Merchant Adventurers The Company, called the Company of Merchant Adventurers, was the first of England’s great merchant trading companies. That model set in place the pattern that other groups of companies would use in the great post-1550 pivot to overseas trade and commerce. The wool/cloth cluster and the one-export economy will be discussed first because they infused the decision-making of much of England’s overseas-relevant elite. When the cloth merchants and associated guilds formed the first merchant trading company, the Company of Merchant Adventurers, they formalized and set apart their export to northern Europe, based on a trade monopoly given to them by several kings [see below]. This charter was important for many reasons, but foremost was that it gave to the London-based cloth and wool livery guilds the power, access, and resources of the capital city–placing enormous pressure and competitive burdens on those wool and cloth companies and guilds located around the Outer Ports of the country. Wool manufacture was widespread. At least twenty-five counties had flourishing wool/cloth production clusters; heavy cloth tended not to be exported, but lighter blends were likely to be exported, and they concentrated near port cities. Supple concluded these exports injected lifeblood into local economies, but London was the chief beneficiary. … perhaps as much as 90 per cent and certainly over 75 per cent of England’s exports were of articles made from wool. No wonder to contemporaries it appeared ‘the cloth trade is … the axis of the commonwealth, whereon all the other trades … do seem to turn and have their revolution’, or that it could be called ‘the flower of the king’s crown’ …the milk and honey of our Canaan, the Indies of England. [p.6] As London became king of the wool export trade, it compelled England’s outer ports to devise their own path. England’s post 1550’s overseas pivot followed a bimodal development pattern: London and the Outer Ports. The rivalry and bitter competition played a notable role in England’s invasion of Ireland, and global discovery and exploration. London’s approach to overseas trade, the trading factory, and the great merchant trading companies differed radically from that used in the Outer Ports. With the power emanating from their privileged monopolies London-based cloth merchants pleaded their case to the nearby central royal government that “artificial restrictions on mobility–limitations on the number of looms to be owned or managed by individual entrepreneurs, Formation of the Company of Merchant Adventurers In 1496, a few of the larger more wealthy and powerful wool/cloth magnates joined together to establish a joint stock corporation formed explicitly to build upon already existing export to their products to Antwerp (Holland) for finishing manufacturing and export to northern Europe. By the time of Henry VII, (1496) exporting wool merchants, operating out of a guild-like joint stock corporation, “the Company of Merchant Adventurers” established a significant institution that effectively oversaw what constituted England’s overseas trade and commerce. With the monopoly granted to them from Henry VII , the Company secured a trade monopoly to northern Europe, with Antwerp, as its headquarters. Henry further secured the monopoly’s position through treaty with the Low Countries. The Company of Merchant Adventurers was England’s first great merchant trading company. in essence, cloth and wool export was one-way, i.e. no imports of note in the return trip. This one way trade gives us insight into the mentality of the cloth and wool overseas: they remained at heart cloth and wool manufacturers and merchants. They were not committed to overseas trade as a profession or national goal, but rather as key if not essential to the cloth and wool profitability and their wealth. The nonexistent import trade as far as the English economy was equivalent to one hand clapping. The principal tool the elite cloth merchants used to assemble their power and wealth was through their control of the exporting great merchant joint stock trading company, the Company of Merchant Adventurers. Through use of internal hierarchies, the membership was limited by restrictions on who could be members, and the use of company offices and election procedures to construct and than make permanent a small, stable group of merchants that dominated the key activities and performance of the trading company, making it difficult to near impossible for non-members to either secure membership or to use the resources of the Company to expand export and import. No new products entered England, and England’s commercial trade consisted of principally one product. Raw cloth/wool was exported; offshore European companies and guilds refined and produced the finished product for sale in northern Europe. One-way export of raw cloth/wool products effectively deadheaded the cloth merchant sector, leaving the innovative and most profitable refinement to foreign Antwerp-resident companies, which the English companies ownership secured their personal stake, or worked out a trade relationship which they could personally benefit. The self-serving and narrow perspective of the English cloth and wool elite smothered the already clogged Tudor English policy-making process, and marginalized the influence of an emerging English merchant elite. As this wool/cloth cluster transformed into a semi-modern industry sector, the number of competing cloth/wool companies who were not original members of the Company sought membership, but found the approval of the Company’s elite very difficult to obtain. This was because the Company membership realized that this pressure would dilute their share of the profits and opportunities of trading in Europe. That was unacceptable and empowered by the terms of the royal charter, the oligarchy of the Company of Merchant Adventurers’ board centralized its corporate organizational structure thereby weakening the role and impact of the Company’s non-board membership. The board’s oligarchy then replicated the restrictive procedures employing committees that were mini hierarchies that flowed from its board of directors. Instead of being bottoms-up shareholder corporation, the Company of Merchant Adventurers had been tuned upside down in ways reminiscent of a Leninist political party. In essence the Company’s corporate organization resembled Russian Matryoshka nesting dolls, with each doll an autonomous grouping of its membership that worked its way through to the executive committee, retaining a measure of influence, wealth and protection of interests. Over a remarkably short period, the oligarchies made themselves into a small number of corporate family dynasties that constituted its top leadership. The development of an internal hierarchy based on wealth, industry scale, status and individual activism fostered an oligarchy whose ambitions and desire to maintain and increase their position and wealth not only through dominating their guild and/or the Company, but extending its influence into the larger English economy and polity. Insulated by its charter and the trade monopoly granted to it, the Company was able to assume great autonomy from Crown (and guilds); indeed, the corporation’s headquarters function was lodged in Antwerp, and a number of its prominent players resident there as well. Whatever the goals, promoting or joining a joint stock [corporation] in early modern Europe was as much a form of ‘civil self-presentation’ [keeping up with the Joneses] as a financial choice, where a shareholder was understood not just as an investor but also an undertaker [believe it or not, that was the term attributed to those that developed plantations, often overseas], and an adventurer [an occupational term applied to those in overseas trade/commerce] in a society association, fellowship, brotherhood, and–in the sense, the term applied to any group of people, from friends to soldiers, come together for some reason–company. In an medieval guild dominated economy was in reality a “closed and tightly regulated world, which valued expertise enforced by elaborate rules and norms and centuries-old commercial and social associations like the guilds and livery companies … though it would be centuries before shareholders would be thought of as owners, even at these early stages they often took some part in deciding how a company was run, or at least in selecting some among their number to do so on their behalf” [99]Phillip J. Stone, Empire Incorporated, pp. 3-4 The realities of the Company of Merchant Adventurers monopoly of northern European trade translated into an unplanned, almost insurmountable, unconcerned and unmotivated behemoth that was of no use to the expansion of English commercial trade to other countries and regional markets. (T)he Company of Merchant Adventurers, which still included by far the greatest number of the City’s wealthiest merchants provided relatively little investment support “to the network of new, growing and dynamic overseas trading companies, “becoming even more obsessively focused on their short-route cloth trade with northern Europe” [99] Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550-1653 (Verso, 2003), pp. 21-3. Members of the Company held the city’s key offices, its Lord mayor and the Aldermanic City Council, and by the 1550’s passed them on to their progeny: Customer Smythe held key positions, which his son, Thomas inherited. Thomas Jr in his day was Sheriff, not of Nottingham, but London. Both sat on London’s governance council. Both were directly allied to the sovereign of the time, ensuring the sovereign held sway over the capital city—the center for foreign trade. In this way, London merchants had access to royal policy-making—and to the sovereign. To the extent cloth/wool export to Europe generated profits, they were not available to other English companies to use for trade of non-cloth products. Profits in this export stayed in the coffers of a very few cloth elites, and were not available as discretionary investment for other priorities and opportunities. English Innovation and multi-product import or export to most other markets was stifled. To be sure, a group of powerful English merchants who did not base their wealth and corporate activities around export did also develop and establish itself with access to the Crown and policy-making (Customer Smythe, for example) By 1550, this trade already occupied such a compelling economic position in the English economy that it overwhelmed other trade opportunities, and England was almost by default drifting into to a one product export overseas trade. At that point England’s non wool/cloth continental trade was limited to some Levant and Iberian peninsular ports. Supple concluded these small volume exports injected lifeblood into local economies, but London was still the chief beneficiary. … perhaps as much as 90 per cent, and certainly over 75 per cent of England’s exports were of articles made from wool. No wonder to contemporaries it appeared ‘the cloth trade is … the axis of the commonwealth, whereon all the other trades … do seem to turn and have their revolution’, or that it could be called ‘the flower of the king’s crown’ …the milk and honey of our Canaan, the Indies of England. [p.6] Add to this the cloth and wool merchants wanted more “artificial restrictions on mobility–limitations on the number of looms to be owned or managed by individual entrepreneurs, apprenticeship requirements, general industrial control–in the hope of making the influx of factors [labor] of production more difficult. This had clearly happened in the 1550’s with the Cloth Acts, and in 1563 with the Statute of Artificers after a period of boom and slump. There is little doubt that the attempted regulatory measures in the early years of the seventeenth century were a response to structural difficulties which the broadcloth industry was experiencing as a consequence of a prolonged period of low overseas demand“. [99] Supple, p.28-9. In essence, these London cloth merchants were able to dominate, if not control, the fortunes of the cloth cluster and the one export overseas trade.
Ron W. Coan 