The Rise of England 189

In this seventeenth-century woodcut, a country wife engages in domestic

industry, part of the expansion of textile manufacturing that transformed

England’s economy.

1590s, a decade in which popular tax rebellions shook France, Spain, Aus­
tria, and Ukraine, among other places, and again in the 1620s and 1630s.
England’s exceptional economic development drew upon the country’s
natural resources, including iron, timber, and, above all, coal, extracted in
far greater quantities than anywhere on the continent. New industrial meth­
ods expanded the production of iron, brass, and pewter in and around Birm­
ingham. But, primarily, textile manufacturing developed the English
economy. Woolens (which accounted for about 80 percent of exports),
worsteds (sturdy yarn spun from combed wool fibers), and cloth found eager
buyers in England as well as on the continent. Moreover, late in the six­
teenth century, as English merchants began making forays across the
Atlantic, these textiles were also sold in the New World. Cloth manufactur­
ers undercut production by urban craftsmen by “putting out’’ work to the vil­
lages and farms of the countryside. In such domestic industry, poor rural
women and girls could do spinning and carding (combing fibers in prepara­
tion for spinning) of wool in their homes.
The English textile trade was closely tied to Antwerp, where workers
dyed English cloth. Sir Thomas Gresham, a sixteenth-century entrepre­
neur, became England’s representative in the bustling river port. Wining
and dining the city’s merchants and serving as a royal ambassador, he so
enhanced the reputation of English merchants that they could operate on
credit, no small achievement in the sixteenth century. At home, he con­
vinced the government to end special privileges accorded the Hanseatic