Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- 1 Credit in medieval trade
- 2 Private financial instruments in medieval England
- 3 Partnership in English medieval commerce
- 4 The trade of medieval Europe: the North
- 5 The economic and political relations of England and the Hanse from 1400 to 1475
- 6 Economic relations between eastern and western Europe
- 7 Italians and the economic development of England in the Middle Ages
- 8 The medieval wool trade
- 9 English studies of the customs accounts
- Index
8 - The medieval wool trade
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- 1 Credit in medieval trade
- 2 Private financial instruments in medieval England
- 3 Partnership in English medieval commerce
- 4 The trade of medieval Europe: the North
- 5 The economic and political relations of England and the Hanse from 1400 to 1475
- 6 Economic relations between eastern and western Europe
- 7 Italians and the economic development of England in the Middle Ages
- 8 The medieval wool trade
- 9 English studies of the customs accounts
- Index
Summary
I am told that it is a commonplace of English history as taught at school that wool, in the shape of fibre, as sheep grow it, or made up into cloth, was one of the mainstays of England's greatness throughout the centuries that separated the first arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in this island and the beginning of the cotton industry.
We are also told, and we know it is true, that wool could be found behind almost every manifestation of English economic and commercial activity in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth, seventeenth and perhaps the early eighteenth centuries. Yet I wonder how many of us realise how really important English wool was to England and to countries abroad throughout the Middle Ages. The barons of England, sitting in Parliament, asserted in 1297 that wool represented half of England's wealth or, as they put it, ‘half the value of the whole land’. Other medieval Englishmen, of course, were much more vague in their appraisal of the importance of wool. The merchants of the Staple might refer to it – it was the common way of referring to wool – as ‘the jewel of this realm’. That particular reference to the jewel of the realm dates from about the middle of the fourteenth century, but two centuries earlier the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon referred to wool as Britain's main national endowment.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Mediaeval Trade and Finance , pp. 342 - 352Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1973