Industry

The making of woollen cloth was the main industry in England in 1500. (English wool was the best in Europe.) Nearly everyone in England dressed in woollen clothes. England's most important export was cloth. It was sold for high prices in Flanders (modern Belgium).

By 1500 most cloth was no longer made in towns. Country people, working for low wages in their own homes, spun yarn and wove cloth. Rich clothiers from the towns sent them the raw wool, collected the woven cloth, and paid their wages.

Between 1550 and 1600 the weavers learned to make a new, lighter kind of cloth, called worsted. (They were taught by men from Flanders who settled in eastern England.) The lighter cloth was popular in warm countries, such as Spain and Italy.

Another growing industry was coal-mining. In the Middle Ages, wood fires kept houses warm in the winter. But by the sixteenth century there was not enough wood for all the houses in London. Instead, they burned coal, most of which was brought by ship from north-east England.

Experts think that the mines of the north-east produced about 65,000 tons of coal in 1550. By 1690, this had grown to well over a million tons. Londoners wanted more coal, so the mines had to be bigger and deeper on Tyneside. (Most of the coal near the surface had been mined.) Deeper mines meant more danger for the miners - a greater risk of flooding, roof-falls and explosions.

Walter Robson: Crown, Parliament and People; Oxford University Press, 1992/2002, page 12