John Oldland's comprehensive study of the English woollen industry from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries very much means business. Oldham, himself a former businessman, has spent many years compiling this meticulously researched, (primarily) economics-focused account of England's production and trade in woollen textiles in the later medieval period. And the result is impressive: drawing on the full range of relevant scholarship—particularly that of the late Eleanora Carus-Wilson and John Munro—the study conducts a thorough and probing analysis of the industry and its shifts and permutations up to the interventionist policies of the Tudor period. The prose is consistently data-driven, and there is a skilled historian's use of the scholarship, some primary documents, and statistical analysis.
Oldland's study does not offer any radical new arguments. But it does draw together various threads of historical analysis into a comprehensive overview. For example, he rightly details how, during the fifteenth century, the improving quality of England's rurally produced woollens became a competitive threat to its urban craft monopolies. He also demonstrates how the organic competition in the local industry, along with light-touch regulation, ultimately gave English traders competitive advantage in the European cloth markets (33). And there are some new approaches: for example, Oldland convincingly argues for the examination of changing weight of woollen textiles, alongside the period's legally mandated and much better represented dimensions for cloth (14). Despite relatively stable prices by size in the period, he suggests that “English woollen textiles had been gradually becoming heavier since 1200,” contributing further to a competitive advantage (41). Such subtleties add thoughtful texture to the work's historical sweep.
And there is more here than economic history. Indeed, one of the work's chief contributions is more nuanced consideration of how various textiles differed in both construction and quality, and how these changed over time. Individual chapters frequently offer adept entry points to the complexities of the evolving textile industry. For example, the first chapter offer useful description of the production of greased and dry woollens. This helps to more easily contextualize some of the reasons behind England's growing commercial advantage in Northern Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries (chapter 2). Chapter 3 introduces three main aspects detailed in the rest of the book: “Dress, the Wool Supply, [and] Industry Regulation.” On the whole, the twelve short chapters which follow proceed chronologically. They take in a variety of relevant issues, including urban revival during the fourteenth-century, changing working conditions in town and countryside, what Oldland calls the “Clothiers’ Century” of 1450 to 1550 (the subject of his recent article in Rural History), and the increasing control of exports by the London Merchant Adventurers at the end of the period.
Oldland is usually very good at contextualizing the material for the non-expert. For example, when discussing rural production in latter part of the period in chapters 10 and 11, he adapts Eric Kerridge's helpful distinction between the “merchant clothier” and the “complete clothier” (217)—the first bought local cloths to sell at distant markets; the second, between 1450 and 1550, transformed the entire industry. The use of such shorthand archetypes allows more probing discussion of changes in production and trading conditions in various parts of the country, above and beyond the individual examples cited as evidence.
This book is very much the work of an economic historian (albeit an excellent one). Its macroeconomic overview occasionally results in repetition, and sections and chapters frequently end in medias res. The sometimes breathless delivery of facts and figures occasionally wants further critical reflection or more detailed exemplars, and the macroeconomic approach leaves some areas unexamined (for example, there are gaps in the geographic coverage; production and trade in some areas—e.g., Durham—are left unmentioned). Further, while the period terminology is usually handled with care, occasionally analysis takes historical textile terminology at face value or else relies on past assumptions (we note there is no reference to University of Manchester's Lexis of Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Britain database, which has been available for almost a decade and which could have proven useful to the study: http://lexisproject.arts.manchester.ac.uk). However, these are only very minor complaints. Indeed, the book's coverage and evidence base are extremely impressive and do a fine job of handling the topic's inevitable complexity. Overall, Oldland's The English Woollen Industry is a comprehensive, thoroughly researched, and much needed study of England's late medieval textile industry.