Variations in Colchester's fortunes during the fifteenth century were more dependent than in the past upon merchants from other ports. The town's own adventurers maintained direct contacts with Gascony and the Baltic until the middle of the century, but with faltering expectations and with no opportunity to expand their operations. The characteristic quality of Colchester cloth was raised to meet the challenge of new markets, with some temporary success. The good years for Colchester trade during the 1440s, when cloth output reached its medieval peak, were chiefly owing to the interest of Cologne merchants in Colchester's newer styles. But after 1450 exports decreased at the hands of both English and German merchants and the cloth industry contracted. The organisation of industry became more rigidly structured on capitalist lines as wealth accumulated in individual families and as smaller enterprises withdrew, but the number of men engaged in overseas trade fell. There was probably a decline in the number of merchants in the borough. The situation in the late fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries, when cloth exports for England as a whole were growing, is obscure in evidence from Colchester, but on balance it is unlikely that the cloth industry there revived and there is some reason to suppose that it was decaying. Industrial capitalism cannot be closely linked, therefore, with industrial growth in this period.