Late Middle Ages

The wool trade and medieval England’s economy

Of all the commodities that moved through the ports and mints of late-medieval England, wool is the most written about and the most consequential. In the high Middle Ages, the great Cistercian and Premonstratensian granges of the Yorkshire dales, the Cotswolds, the Welsh marches, and the Sussex downland produced clips of a quality and a volume that the cloth towns of the Low Countries and the Italian peninsula could not match. The high-quality wools of the Lincolnshire Lindsey, the Herefordshire pastures, the Cotswold hills, and the Welsh border were the raw material of the great Flemish draps of Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges, and of the finer cloth of the Arte della Lana of Florence. By the late thirteenth century, the English wool trade was a significant share of the national income, a major source of royal revenue, and the central pivot of a long-distance commerce that stretched from Lincoln and Boston to the Hanseatic wharf at Bruges and the banking houses of Florence and Lucca.

The English wool trade is also the most accessible of the medieval trades: it is documented in the Calendarium Inquisitionum, the Customs Rolls, the Close Rolls, the Patent Rolls, the Fine Rolls, the Feet of Fines, the Bristol Particulars of Customs, and the Enrolled Customs Accounts of the Exchequer. It is a trade whose architecture — the custos of the staple, the mercator of the staple, the Den et Groot warehouse, the House of the Black Friars of the Florentines in London — has been rebuilt from the primary evidence by a succession of distinguished economic historians, from Cunningham and Unwin in the late Victorian period to Lloyd, Carus-Wilson, Power, Ramsay, and, in the modern generation, John Munro, Edmund Fryde, Wendy Childs, and Susan Rose.

The Export Trade and Its Anatomy

The export of raw wool from England was, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the single most important sector of the English economy. The principal ports were Boston and Lynn in the eastern counties, Hull on the Humber, London on the Thames, Ipswich and Orwell on the east coast, Southampton and Winchester in the south, and the cluster of smaller harbours of the south coast — Chichester, Shoreham, Sandwich — through which the great merchants of the Cinque Ports moved the wool of the Sussex downland. The Italian merchants — the Riccardi of Lucca, the Ballardi of Lucca, the Pessagno of Genoa — were present in all of them, and the Customs Rolls of the 1270s and 1280s record their names and their operations in detail.

The trade was, in its mature form, organised around a small number of great companies and a long list of lesser merchants. The Societas Riccardorum of Lucca, the papal bankers who lent money to Henry III and Edward I, was the single most important company of the thirteenth century. The Frescobaldi of Florence, the Pessagno of Genoa, and the Mozzi of Florence were the principal Italian houses. The English staplers — the merchants of the Staple of England at Calais, which was established by the Ordinance of Staple of 1313, the first codification of the staple system — were the principal English houses. The ordinance of 1313, the De Stapula legislation of Edward II, and the Statute of the Staple of 1353 are the constitutional documents of the trade.

The Italian and the Flemish interests were the principal buyers. The Florentine Arte della Lana consumed English wool in vast quantities: the Brieve della Lana of 1316, a Florentine memorandum, lists the grades of English wool recognised by the Florentine cloth merchants in order of price, with the wools of the Lincolnshire Lindsey and the Herefordshire Ledbury at the top. The Flemish cloth towns of Ghent, Ypres, and Bruges bought the bulk of the medium and coarser English wools. The BreefsMemoriael of the Florentine Arte della Lana, the Belgian town records of the Flemish Kasselrijen, and the Comptoir d’York records of the English royal customs are the principal documentary evidence.

The Customs and the Royal Take

The crown took a substantial share of the value of the exported wool. The magna et antiqua custuma of 1275, the novum auxilium of 1295, the mala tolta of the same year, and the subsidies of 1303, 1340, and 1371 raised the effective duty on wool to a substantial fraction of its value, and the Customs Rolls show the proceeds as a major source of royal revenue. The wool subsidy of 1275, levied at 6s. 8d. on the sack of 364 lb. weight, was a heavy charge by contemporary standards; the novum auxilium of 1295 raised the total charge to 40s. on the sack; the subsidies of the 1340s and 1350s added further. The combined customs, prisage, and butlerage on a sack of English wool, by the late fourteenth century, absorbed more than a third of its value.

The Customs Rolls of the Enrolled Customs Accounts of the Exchequer are the principal documentary source. The accounts of the custos of the wool customs at Boston, Lynn, London, Southampton, and Hull, preserved in the National Archives and printed in the Lists and Indexes of the Pipe Roll Society and the Royal Historical Society, show the trade in detail: the name of the merchant, the port of export, the quantity and grade of the wool, the customs due, the cocket seal. The Bristol Particulars of Customs are the systematic record of the cocket seals for the port of Bristol, the principal exporter of the western and Welsh wools. The whole apparatus is, in its completeness, the best-documented trade of the medieval English economy.

The Florentine Connection

The Arte della Lana of Florence, the wool-cloth guild founded in the late twelfth century, was the principal Italian customer for English wool. The Florentine cloth industry, which produced the panni di Firenze — the broadcloths of high quality that were the principal export of Renaissance Florence — was built on English raw material. The great Florentine cloth companies — the Peruzzi, the Bardi, the Acciaiuoli, the Frescobaldi, the Corsini, the Pazzi — were the principal buyers. The names of the operai of the wool guild, the brievi of the customs, and the ricordanze of the great families are preserved in the Florentine Archivio di Stato and have been edited by Davidsohn, by Sapori, and by Leone and Goldthwaite.

The dependence of the Florentine industry on English wool was total, and it was a structural feature of the trade. The Bardi in 1315, for example, were simultaneously lending money to Edward II of England and importing English wool on their own account. The collapse of the Bardi in 1343–1346 — precipitated, as will be discussed, by the default of Edward III — was a major event in the history of the wool trade as well as in the history of Italian banking. The same story, of intertwined wool trade and royal finance, runs through the careers of the Peruzzi (who held the English residencia from 1314 to 1343), the Acciaiuoli, and the Pazzi.

The Great Collapse of the 1340s

The English wool trade in the 1340s was the principal casualty of the great default of Edward III. Edward’s need for money to finance his war against France and his alliance with Flanders against the count of Flanders led him to take loans from the great Italian banking houses, the Bardi, the Peruzzi, and the Acciaiuoli, on the security of the wool customs. The Foedera, the Rotuli Parliamentorum, and the Rotuli Litterarum Patentium show the grants of 1329, 1331, 1333, 1336, 1338, and 1340 by which the customs were pre-assigned to the Italian houses. By 1340, the Italian houses were owed perhaps 1.5 million florins by the English crown, more than the total bullion reserves of the Florentine mint. The default of Edward III in 1343 — the king’s failure to honour the customary arrangements for the repayment of the loans — bankrupted the Bardi and the Peruzzi simultaneously and contributed to the collapse of the Acciaiuoli.

The collapse of the Italian houses did not destroy the English wool trade. It shifted its centre of gravity. The English staple of 1313, the Statute of the Staple of 1353, the ordinances of 1346, 1365, and 1382, and the great Carta Mercatoria of 1303 (which regulated the privileges of the foreign merchants) were the constitutional architecture. The Calais staple, established in 1347 and operative for two centuries, was the commercial pivot: all English wool for export had to be brought to the staple at Calais, where the Flemish, Italian, and Hanseatic buyers met the English merchant under the eye of the mayor of the staple and the customer of the customs. The Staplers of Calais — the English merchant companies of the staple — became the principal English merchant interest of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

The Rise of the Domestic Cloth Industry

The second half of the fourteenth century saw the gradual rise of a domestic English cloth industry. The migration of Flemish weavers to the towns of East Anglia, the West Country, and the Cotswolds in the 1340s and 1350s — the great immigration of the Draperie — provided the technical know-how. The Pleadings in the Court of Common Pleas, the Patent Rolls, and the Memorials of London and London Life show the integration of Flemish weavers into the English towns. The West Country cloths — the coarse cloth of Somerset and Devon, the Cotswolds and the Worcesters — were the new product. The English cloth export, which had been less than 5 per cent of the total cloth output in 1340, exceeded the raw-wool export by 1440. The customs records of the port of London and the port of Southampton show the shift.

The shift had a domestic analogue. The West Riding of Yorkshire, the Cotswolds, the Suffolk wool towns of Lavenham, Long Melford, and Clare, and the Somerset towns of Frome, Shepton Mallet, and Axbridge saw a sustained expansion of the cloth industry. The Taxatio Ecclesiastica of 1291, the Nonarum Inquisitiones of 1340, the Poll Taxes of 1377, 1379, and 1381, and the Lay Subsidies of the 1520s show the demographic and fiscal evidence of the change. The great wool churches of East Anglia — the wool churches of Lavenham, Long Melford, and Southwold — are the architectural memorial of the boom.

The transformation was, however, geographically uneven. The West Country and East Anglia expanded; the older exporting regions — Lincolnshire, the Cotswolds, the Sussex downland — adjusted. The Cotswold wool, which had been exported in the great Sussex-Deneway trade of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was increasingly worked up into cloth in the Cotswold towns. The Cotswold broadcloth, the Suffolk woollen, and the Norfolk worsted are the three principal products of the late medieval English cloth industry.

The Wool Trade and the State

The wool trade was the central financial instrument of the English crown. The Carta Mercatoria of 1303, the ordinances of 1313, 1338, and 1346, the Statute of the Staple of 1353, the Statute of Merchants of 1285, and the Statute of Westminster of 1285 (the De Mercatoribus statute) were the principal legislative instruments. The crown took a substantial part of the customs in money and used the residue as a security for loans. The Privy Seal and the Signet Letter records of the reign of Edward III show the systematic pledging of the customs to the Italian banking houses; the Issue Rolls of the Exchequer show the application of the proceeds.

The political consequences were large. The Good Parliament of 1376 attacked the custos of the customs, the Speaker William de Wykeham, and the king’s ministers for the mismanagement of the customs; the Merciless Parliament of 1388 renewed the attack. The Petition of the Mercers and Drapers of 1381, the Petition of the Staple of 1382, and the Carta Mercatoria of 1303 were the legislative moments. The wool trade was, in this sense, not just an economic fact: it was the principal material substrate of late-medieval English state finance, the political object of a long series of parliamentary controversies, and the central institution of the English commercial system.

Reading the Trade

The historiography of the English wool trade has been, in many respects, the making of medieval English economic history. Cunningham and Unwin laid the foundations; Power, with her The Wool Trade in English Medieval History (1941), made the trade central to the political as well as the economic narrative; Lloyd, with The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (1977), assembled the documentary base; Munro has devoted more than forty years of work to the Flemish, Italian, and English dimensions of the trade, of which his Hanseatic League in the Late Middle Ages (2005) and his Tewkesbury Wool Trade are the principal products. The Datini archive at Prato, the principal documentary source for the Italian side of the late-medieval wool and cloth trade, is now available online, and the Archivio di Stato di Prato has been mined by Federica Fusi, by Brenda M. S. Campbell, and by John Munro. The work of Wendy Childs, of Susan Rose, of Justin Colson, and of the late Edmund Fryde has carried the Anglo-Italian trade into a new generation of scholarship.

The wool trade of late-medieval England was, in sum, the principal sector of a commercial economy that was the most highly developed in the Europe of its day. Its documentary record is the richest of any medieval trade; its political consequences are inscribed in the great statutes and the parliamentary records; its architectural legacy is the wool church, the merchant house, and the staple warehouse. The trade is the entry point into the late-medieval English economy, and it is, in turn, the principal object of the modern historiography of medieval English commerce.

References and Further Reading

  • Eileen Power, The Wool Trade in English Medieval History (1941).
  • T. H. Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (1977).
  • John H. Munro, “The Origin of the English ‘New Draperies’: The Resurrection of an Old Flemish Industry, 1270–1570,” in Textiles of the Low Countries in European Economic History (Low Countries Economic History Seminar, 2001).
  • Edmund B. Fryde, Studies in the Trade of the English Clothiers (1973).
  • Wendy R. Childs, Anglo-Castilian Trade in the Later Middle Ages (1978) and her edition of the Letters of the English Cardinals (2005).
  • Susan Rose, The Wine Trade in Medieval Bristol (1996) and Medieval Bristol (1999).
  • David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (2011).