The importance of the wool trade in English history was clearly recognised by the first generation of native economic historians in the late nineteenth century. The index of the medieval volume of W. Cunningham's The Growth of English Industry and Commerce, for example, lists no fewer than 41 entries under the heading ‘wool’ and 19 under ‘staple’. Despite certain changes in interpretation, Cunningham's work, like that of his great contemporary, J. E. Thorold Rogers, may still be read with far less consciousness of its being ‘dated’ than is experienced in reading most of the political histories written in that period. With economic history established as a discipline the wool trade did not wait long for researchers who singled it out for special treatment. R. J. Whitwell's ‘English Monasteries and the Wool Trade in the Thirteenth Century’ (1904) remains a classic, although, like other notable pieces of English scholarship of the early twentieth century, it appeared in a German publication. Some other specialist works of the same period are best passed over in silence, but mention must be made of the study by Adolf Schaube (1908). Although not without its limitations, Schaube's article has been used, or at least acknowledged, by every succeeding generation of historians.