Early modern rural industry lacked locational stability. That may not be the most important thing to say about rural industry before the Industrial Revolution (one side of ‘instability’ is, of course, deindustrialization, with no few modern echoes in the transiently industrialized world), but it is well within the General View. The evidence of earlier chapters may more have suggested exuberant industrial growth. Earsdon and Shepshed lost their agricultural seasonality in Figure 2.4; the relative number of X-Type, non-agricultural, parishes increased in Table 3.3. And the movement of the X-Type's centroid to the north and west (Figure 3.12) may have evoked visions of industry in the Midlands, the West Riding, and Lancashire. But the aggregate measures of those chapters masked spatial and temporal variation within the sample. Chapter 4, it will be remembered, showed that the pastoral centroid's western shift was in part caused by the withdrawal of vernal seasonality from the east, and the arable centroid's eastward drift by the near disappearance of autumnal seasonality in the west. The X-Type's centroid was drawn north and west in the seventeenth century not only by industrialization there, but also because deindustrialization in the south and east had cut the industrial centroid adrift from its southern anchor. In the next pages, further evidence for the instability of rural industrial location will be presented. The causes of the volatility will then be examined, first independently from the agrarian changes sketched in the last two chapters, as if their lessons had not been learned.