Chapter 5 Flashcards
How agrarian was England?
England was still overwhelmingly an agrarian [i.e. farming] country for nine tenths of the people lived more or less directly from the land.
How many people worked in the cloth trade?
By 1500 the cloth industry, England’s major industry, possibly employed 30,000 people, or about 1.3 per cent of the population, full-time.
How significant was cloth compared to agriculture?
Although the cloth industry provided part-time work for a great many more people to support peasant agriculture, it was still insignificant as compared with the contribution of agriculture to the national economy.
Population size and where did they live?
The population of England at the beginning of the fifteenth century was around 2.2 million. The majority of people at this time were living in the countryside and relying on some form of farming for a living. Most of the 10 per cent of the population who were actually urban dwellers lived in towns which were small by continental standards. London was the obvious exception, with a population which probably exceeded 50,000, but probably no more than 20 towns had as many as 3000 people. Amongst provincial towns only Norwich had a population exceeding 10,000, with Bristol, York and Coventry having populations in the range of 8000 to 10,000.
Main industries in urban areas?
In these urban areas wool and cloth were the main industries. Other industries included mining tin, lead and coal; metal working; leatherwork; shipbuilding; and papermaking.
What was Henry’s general economic policy?
Although Henry VII was interested in building up his personal wealth, he had no specific economic policy as a modern leader would. The Acts of Parliament that dealt with economic matters were mainly the result of the private lobbying of merchants, who had a vested interest.
How did population affect income from the land?
Income from land had declined in the aftermath of the Black Death of the 1300s and early 1400s, though it has been suggested that there was something of a recovery in the 1480s and 1490s, as the population began to increase again.
How did types of farming practised change?
There was much evidence of a greater move towards sheep farming in the 1480s and 1490s. This was a reflection not only of the depressed profitability of arable (crop) farming, but also the improved profitability of sheep farming brought about by the increasing demand for wool, as the population grew and trade overseas developed.
How did agriculture differ regionally?
As a largely agricultural society, England could be divided into a lowland zone to the south and east (a line drawn from the Tees estuary to Weymouth) and a highland zone (roughly north and west of that line).
Mixed farming was the most common form of farming found in the lowland zone, though pastoral farming predominated in woodland areas and there were specialisms such as horse breeding in the Fenlands. The traditional manorial system of open-field husbandry could be found in such areas and was concentrated mainly in the grain-growing areas of the southeast and the east Midlands.
However, some parts of this region were increasingly experiencing change, with the wool and cloth trades making sheep farming relatively more profitable. The efficiency gains in terms of improved production and profitability came at a price for peasants who lost their access to land and common rights, and were often left destitute by the process. In the late fifteenth century this was not a frequent occurrence. It became more widespread in the first half of the sixteenth century, when it created both a moral outcry and political pressures which proved difficult to contain. On the whole, however, it would be fair to say that English agriculture underwent no significant changes towards the end of the fifteenth, and beginning of the sixteenth, century.
What was Open-field husbandry?
The ‘manorial system of open-field husbandry’ (or open-field system) was the form of landholding which predominated in most of lowland’ England. The manor was a specific landed estate whose tenants farmed strips of land found in open fields and who enjoyed common rights, particularly for keeping animals. This system came under increasing pressure by enclosure in some parts of the country as the sixteenth century unfolded.
What is pastoral farming?
farming involving the rearing of animals - either for animal by-products such as milk, eggs or wool, or for meat
What is mixed farming?
a system of farming which involves the growing of crops as well as the raising of animals as livestock
What were common rights?
denotes the legal right of tenants to use common land, for example for keeping animals; the exact nature of these rights varied from place to place
Who were the Merchants of the Staple?
incorporated by royal charter in 1319, they controlled the export of wool; the staple was based at Calais (an English possession] from 1363, but the eventual decline in the wool trade reduced the company’s importance
What was fulling?
a step in woollen cloth making which involves the cleansing of cloth (particularly wool] to eliminate oils, dirt, and other impurities, making it thicker in the process
How important was cloth regarding exports?
The cloth trade was responsible for about 90 per cent of the value of English exports.
How did the importance of cloth increase?
The trade certainly flourished in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Jack Lander has estimated that there was an increase of over 60 per cent in the volume of cloth exports during Henry VIIs reign.
In the earlier part of the century, the bulk of exports had comprised raw wool; this was shipped mainly from east-coast ports such as Boston, Lynn and Yarmouth and exported through Calais by the Merchants of the Staple. Increasingly, however, it was finished cloth which dominated the trade. This led to the development of weaving, usually done as a domestic process, and fulling and dyeing, which were
commercial enterprises. As a result, the industry offered opportunities for rural employment to supplement agrarian incomes.
In which regions was cloth important and successful?
Some cloth towns, such as Lavenham in Suffolk and Lewes in Sussex, were extremely prosperous. However, some historic cities such as Winchester and Lincoln had suffered significant decay as the cloth industry tended to move from older corporate boroughs to newer manufacturing centres in smaller market towns and villages in East Anglia, the West Riding of Yorkshire and parts of the West Country.
To where and from where was cloth exported?
An increasing proportion of the finished cloth was exported from London through the Merchant Adventurers. This reinforced London’s commercial dominance within the country and established a commercial axis with Antwerp which, during this period, according to the economic historian Donald Coleman, was the commercial metropolis of Europe and its main money market. From Antwerp, English cloth was transported all over
Europe.
Who were The Merchant Adventurers?
Founded in 1407 and dominated by members of the Mercers Company, the wealthiest and most influential company of the City of London, the Merchant Adventurers were a trading organisation which came the Mersey to dominate London’s cloth trade with Antwerp. The Merchan Adventurers’ domination of the cloth trade matched the dominance of he wool trade by the Merchants of the (Calais) Staple, whose economic position they increasingly supplanted. Their positive relationship with Pas Crown was immensely important. On the one hand, they could act as the voice of the industry when its commercial needs were subordinated to national policy; on the other hand, the king increasingly used their expertise in the negotiating of trade treaties such as the Intercursus Magnus and the Intercursus Malus. They had become the most powerfu English business organisation of the age.
What was the Hanseatic League?
a group of free cities originating in the thirteenth century, which came together to form a commercial union with the intention of controlling trade in the Baltic Sea; the league dominated commercial activity in northern Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century
What was metallurgy?
the scientific study of the extraction, refining, alloying and fabrication of metals, and of their structure and properties
Weakness of The Merchant Adventurers and why?
The Merchant Adventurers could not achieve complete domination of trad because they proved unable to overcome the trading privileges enjoyed by the Hanseatic League which had been reasserted by treaty in 1474 and again in
1504. Henry VII may have agreed to reassert this treaty because he needed to ensure that the Hanseatic League would offer no support to the Yorkist claimant to the throne, the Earl of Suffolk. However, this sacrifice of English commercial interests was, Jack Lander has asserted, out of all proportion to the feeble threat posed by the de la Poles.
Other industries besides cloth and where?
England remained dependent, in trading terms, on the cloth industry, especially as other industries remained small and failed to compete effectively with their continental competitors. Most industrial activities, for example weaving or brewing were small-scale craft operations which required little capital investment. Most such operations supplied the basic necessities of life, food and shelter. Mining required rather more capital investment, but remained fairly small scale. Tin was rained in Cornwall, lead was mined in upland areas such as the high Pennines and the Mendips, and coal was mined in Durham and Northumberland. Iron are was mined and smelted in the Weald of Sussex and Kent, where there was a blast furnace as early as 1496. Much of the coal from the northeast was shipped from Newcastle to meet the growing demand for domestic and industrial fuel in London, but there was also a small export trade to Germany and the Netherlands. The development of basic pumping technology, first recorded at Finchale in County Durham in 1486, enabled greater production.
