First published in 1965. This study was initially carried out in the years 1934 to 1937, with completion during 1939 at the outbreak of war which deferred publication. This second edition includes an extra appendix on the report of 'Clothing Committee of the Privy Council' dated 22 June 1622 and more background on the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries.
This is the first book to describe the early English woollens’ industry and its dominance of the trade in quality cloth across Europe by the mid-sixteenth century, as English trade was transformed from dependence on wool to value-added woollen cloth. It compares English and continental draperies, weighs the advantages of urban and rural production, and examines both quality and coarse cloths. Rural clothiers who made broadcloth to a consistent high quality at relatively low cost, Merchant Adventurers who enjoyed a trade monopoly with the Low Countries, and Antwerp’s artisans who finished cloth to customers’ needs all eventually combined to make English woollens unbeatable on the continent.
This book shows how England's conquest of Mediterranean trade proved to be the first step in building its future economic and commercial hegemony, and how Italy lay at the heart of that process. In the seventeenth century the Mediterranean was the largest market for the colonial products which were exported by English merchants, as well as being a source of raw materials which were indispensable for the growing and increasingly aggressive domestic textile industry. The new free port of Livorno became the linchpin of English trade with the Mediterranean and, together with ports in southern Italy, formed part of a system which enabled the English merchant fleet to take control of the region's trade from the Italians. In her extensive use of English and Italian archival sources, the author looks well beyond Braudel's influential picture of a Spanish-dominated Mediterranean world. In doing so she demonstrates some of the causes of Italy's decline and its subsequent relegation as a dominant force in world trade.
This book was first published in 1962. Until the era of the Industrial Revolution wool was, without question, the most important raw material in the English economic system. The staple article of the country's export trade in the Middle Ages, it remained until the nineteenth century the indispensable basis of her greatest industry. This book looks at the decline of cloth industry in East Anglia sine the mid-sixteenth century.
This is the first major study of a neglected yet extremely significant subject: the London middle classes in the period between 1660 and 1730, a period in which they created a society and economy that can be seen with hindsight to have ushered in the modern world. Using a wealth of material from contemporary sources--including wills, business papers, inventories, marriage contracts, divorce hearings, and the writings of Daniel Defoe and Samuel Pepys--Peter Earle presents a fully rounded picture of the "middling sort of people," getting to the hearts of their lives as men and women struggling for success in the biggest, richest, and most middle-class city in contemporary Europe. He examines in fascinating and convincing detail the business life of Londoners, from apprenticeship through the problems and potential rewards of different occupational groups, going on to look at middle-class family, social, political and material life--from relationships with spouses, children, servants, and neighbors, to food and clothes and furniture, to sickness, death, and burial. Stimulating, scholarly, and constantly illuminating, this book is an important and impressive contribution to English social history.
The century bounded by the Henrician Reformation and the Civil Wars marked an important stage in the development of urban institutions, culture, and society in England. At the outset of this period, England was still very much an agrarian society; by its end, it was well on the way to becoming an urban one as well. The complexity and subtlety of those developments become especially vivid when we experience them through the lives of more or less ordinary townspeople, which Tittler allows us to do here. These biographical studies not only have much to tell us about the time and milieu, but also provide an array of interesting and varied characters: Henry Manship, the historian of his native Yarmouth; Henry Hardware, who removed the giant, the naked boys and the devil in feathers from Chesters Midsummer Show; Robert Swaddon the swindler and John Pulman the thief-taker of London; Joyce Jeffries, the spinster money-lender of Hereford; John Brown, the speculator in dissolved monastic lands in Boston; John Pitt, the overseer of guildhall construction in Blandford Forum; John and Joan Cooke, the Mayor and Mayoress of Gloucester, the subjects of a most revealing posthumous portrait; and Sir Thomas White of London, the philanthropist and merchant hero. Tittler introduces these studies with a comprehensive but succinct description of English towns and cities of the time.
