The Symbiosis of Towns and Textiles: Urban Institutions and the Changing Fortunes of Cloth Manufacturing in the Low Countries and England, 1270-1570

Abstract

This paper, a contribution to the "proto-industrialization" debate, examines the relative advantages of urban and rural locations for cloth manufacturing in later-medieval England and the Low Countries. From the eleventh to the mid-fourteenth century, when the English cloth trade began its seemingly inexorable expansion, the Low Countries had enjoyed a virtual supremacy in international cloth markets, then chiefly located in the Mediterranean basin. The traditional view has attributed the ultimate English victory to the advantages of a rural location, using cheap labour and water-powered fulling. The proponents of this view further contend that in late thirteenth-century England a new rural industry had displaced a centuries-old "traditional" urban cloth industry through such superior cost advantages. To challenge that view, this paper puts forth the following propositions : (I) that England's traditional urban industry had declined, abruptly from the 1290s, chiefly because of steeply rising, war-induced, transaction costs in Mediterranean markets for its chief products: i.e., cheap and light fabrics, which they had sold as price takers; (2) that the Flemish/Brabantine cloth industries, having had a similar industrial-commercial orientation, suffered from the same industrial crisis; and more quickly responded by reorienting production, as price makers, to the very high-priced luxury woollens; (3) that rural locations were not always more advantageous, in lower labour and other costs; (4) that urban locations offered important benefits for luxury-cloth production : a more highly skilled, productive, better regulated labour force; urban and guild institutions to enforce necessary quality controls and promote international reputations for high quality; (5) that England's cloth industry, when it revived from the 1360s, followed suit in shifting to more luxury-oriented exports, while gaining its chief advantages from the fiscal burdens imposed on high-quality wool exports to its overseas competitors ; (6) that English export-oriented cloth production also remained more urban than rural until the late fifteenth century (for many complex reasons explored in this paper).

Spanish merino wools and the nouvelles draperies: an industrial transformation in the late medieval Low Countries1

“…110–48; Munro, ‘Origins of the English “New Draperies” ’, pp. 35–127; Munro, ‘Symbiosis of towns and textiles’; Munro, ‘Industrial crisis’. For the traditional view, indicating a luxury‐orientation during this period, see Pirenne, Histoire de Belgique , I and II, passim .…”

“…110–48; Munro, ‘Origins of the English “New Draperies” ’, pp. 35–127; Munro, ‘Symbiosis of towns and textiles’, pp. 1–74; Munro, ‘New institutional economics’, pp.…”

“…10–12 and 38 above; and also Munro, ‘Urban regulation’, pp. 41–52; Munro, ‘Symbiosis of towns and textiles’, tab. 2, pp.…”

“…74 74 Munro, ‘Medieval woollens: struggle for markets’, tabs 5.5–5.6, pp. 308–11; Munro, ‘Symbiosis of towns and textiles’, tabs 1–2, pp. 42–3, 50–1. …”

Wage-stickiness, monetary changes, and real incomes in late-medieval England and the low countries 1300–1500: Did money matter?

“…216-218). The available evidence does not permit us to ascertain whether such conditions, especially in the depression era of the mid-fifteenth century, led to increased unemployment -apart from evident unemployment in the declining Flemish and Brabantine cloth industries (Munro, , 1999a. Some evidence, discussed above, does suggest that employment for most craftsmen, was normally discontinuous or "discrete" in this late-medieval era; and such conditions may well have reduced the number of days in which they secured paid employment.…”