Nature's Evil

Deprived of land, the peasants rebelled; the most famous example was Robert Kett’s Rebellion in Norfolk (1549), which was put down by the army: 3,000 peasants were killed and Kett was hanged. Thomas More, in his Utopia (1516), wrote of sheep ‘devouring men’ as the major problem of the kingdom: ‘the nobility and gentry, and even those holy men the abbots, … stop the course of agriculture, destroying houses and towns, reserving only the churches, and enclose grounds that they may lodge sheep in them.’ 17 The alarmed authorities limited the enclosures, but they continued. In the early seventeenth century, there were twice or three times more sheep than people in England, and, while sheep were producing income for the state, people were wasting it in their ‘consumption’. Pre-dating continental cameralism, the English bureaucracy revered science, collected statistics, invited craftsmen from abroad and scorned traditional rights. Wool became a mono-resource – the backbone of the state economy, the nourishment of the sovereign, the kingdom’s second body. This was exactly the period when the country’s elite adopted the fashion for wigs, which were made of sheep’s wool and horse hair.

From the fourteenth century onwards, the export of raw wool was gradually superseded by the trade in cloth. The Company of Merchants of the Staple, already incorporated in 1319, helped to regulate the domestic market, but the direct prohibitions on the export of raw wool were issued 300 years later. Still, the proportion of woollen cloth in English exports, and therefore the proportion of paid labour, was growing steadily. 18 The wool industry was structured like a pyramid that relied on land, with sheep and shepherds at the base, and turned into gold at the apex. The body of this pyramid was made up of the thousands of rural workers who produced wool. A flock of sheep supplied wool to a carder, three carders provided the roving – a bundle of fibre – for a spinner, three spinners produced the yarn for a weaver, and several weavers sent their cloth to a shopkeeper. Men, women and children took part in this continuous process. Located in lofts or outbuildings, small workshops were equipped with spinning wheels and hand looms. Work on a loom or spinning wheel could be fitted in with other sorts of agricultural work. The diffused character of wool as a resource, and the significant part played by labour costs in the export of cloth, counterbalanced monopoly trade and supported the English economy. Providing income to the poor, ‘cottage industries’ drew them into the larger economy and opened new prospects, but only after it had impoverished many thousands of families.

English raw wool was grey or whitish; the art of dyeing wool was unknown in England. Woven in thousands of cottages, the cloth was exported to Antwerp, where it was dyed and tailored, and then sold all over Europe. The strategy of the growing export revenue was clear: without the skill of dyeing, the lion’s share of profits would remain with the Flemish and the Dutch. If only the English masters could dye wool as well as their colleagues in India dyed cotton!