The Cloth Trade - The cloth trade was responsible for about 90 per cent of the value of English exports. The trade certainly flourished in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. Jack Lander has estimated that there was an increase of over 60 per cent in the volume of cloth exports during Henry VIl's reign.
In the earlier part of the century, the bulk of exports had comprised raw wool; this was shipped mainly from east-coast ports such as Boston, Lynn and Yarmouth and exported through Calais by the Merchants of the Staple. Increasingly, however, it was finished cloth which dominated the trade. This led to the development of weaving, usually done as a domestic process, and fulling and dyeing, which were commercial enterprises. As a result, the industry offered opportunities for rural employment to supplement agrarian incomes.
Some cloth towns, such as Lavenham in Suffolk and Lewes in Sussex, were extremely prosperous. However, some historic cities such as Winchester and Lincoln had suffered significant decay as the cloth industry tended to move from older corporate boroughs to newer manufacturing centres in smaller market towns and villages in East Anglia, the West Riding of Yorkshire and parts of the West Country.
An increasing proportion of the finished cloth was exported from London through the Merchant Adventurers. This reinforced London's commercial dominance within the country and established a commercial axis with Antwerp which, during this period, according to the economic historian Donald Coleman, was the commercial metropolis of Europe and its main money market. From Antwerp, English cloth was transported all over Europe.
The Merchant Adventurers could not achieve complete domination of trade because they proved unable to overcome the trading privileges enjoyed by the Hanseatic League which had been reasserted by treaty in 1474 and again in 1504. Henry VII may have agreed to reassert this treaty because he needed to ensure that the Hanseatic League would offer no support to the Yorkist claimant to the throne, the Earl of Suffolk. However, this sacrifice of English commercial interests was, Jack Lander has asserted, ‘out of all proportion to the feeble threat' posed by the de la Poles.
The Merchant Adventurers: Founded in 1407 and dominated by members of the Mercers’ Company, the wealthiest and most influential company of the City of London, the Merchant Adventurers were a trading organisation which came increasingly to dominate London's cloth trade with Antwerp. The Merchant Adventurers' domination of the cloth trade matched the dominance of the wool trade by the Merchants of the (Calais) Staple, whose economic position they increasingly supplanted. Their positive relationship with the Crown was immensely important. On the one hand, they could act as the voice of the industry when its commercial needs were subordinated to national policy; on the other hand, the king increasingly used their expertise in the negotiating of trade treaties such as the Intercursus Magnus and the Intercursus Malus. They had become the most powerful English business organisation of the age.
Hanseatic League: a group of free cities originating in the thirteenth century, which came together to form a commercial union with the intention of controlling trade in the Baltic Sea; the league dominated commercial activity in northern Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century
Merchants of the Staple: incorporated by royal charter in 1319, they controlled the export of wool; the staple was based at Calais (an English possession) from 1363, but the eventual decline in the wool trade reduced the company's importance
Fulling: a step in woollen cloth making which involves the cleansing of cloth (particularly wool) to eliminate oils, dirt, and other impurities, making it thicker in the process