TRADE IN THE SIXTEENTH AND EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

English overseas trade at the end of the Middle Ages

At the end of the Middle Ages England's place in the international economic order was not many degrees removed from that of the colonial economy, dependent upon sales of primary products to more advanced regions and purchasing manufactures and services from them. It is true that her principal export was manufactured woollen cloth, but this was the only manufacture exported, and in truth the English cloth trade was in large part a trade in semi-manufactures. Perhaps as much as half was exported ‘white’ to be dyed and finished on the Continent, and since the former process was technically complicated, and both demanded a high degree of skill, they accounted for a high proportion of the final selling price. This might be as much as one third, or even a half, so that foreigners benefited as much or more from the trade than did Englishmen. Apart from cloth virtually all other exports were, as they always had been, the immediate products of farming, mining or fishing. England, indeed, was still a source of raw wool of some importance to the cloth-making cities of the Low Countries and northern Italy, shipping abroad an average of something over 7800 sacks of wool a year in the 1490s (Carus–Wilson and Coleman, 1963). This was far less than had been exported in the mid fourteenth century, but even so at 364 lbs per sack was equivalent to over 2,840,000 lbs a year.