appears by the register. Notwithstanding the opulence of the foundation, and the extent of the parish, at its suppression, in the reign of Edward VI., 1550, only a small portion of its revenues was reserved for the maintenance of the minister, payable from the Exchequer, the clear yearly proceeds amounting only to £22 6s. 8d. The following is a list of the benefices formerly belonging to the college, showing their annual value at different periods, according to the authorities quoted :

DARLINGTON COLLEGIATE CHURCH.

In Bishop Tunstall's Register, the Prebend of Rowe is styled Præbenda de Prestgate; in the Lincoln Taxation, the total annual revenue of the college is estimated at £73 6s. 8d.; and in Willis's Hist. of Abbeys, we are informed that, in 1553, yearly pensions, amounting to £19 6s. 8d., were paid to the incumbents of the religious houses and chantries here, out of the crown revenues from the receipt of the abbey lands.

"The Church, which is dedicated to St Cuthbert, is now a perpetual curacy, not in charge, of the certified value of £20, but of the real value of £110, having been augmented with £10 per annum by Lord Crewe, and with two sums of £400 each, half of which was obtained from the governors of Queen Anne's bounty, in the years 1720 and 1732, and the remainder was raised by the contributions of the parishioners at the same periods. The Earl of Darlington is patron of the benefice; the Rev. Wm. Gordon, of Lichfield, is the present incumbent. The church is in the form of a cross, with a tower and spire rising from the centre. The elegant frosted (sic) spire being struck by lightning, on the 17th of July, 1750, was so shattered, as to render it necessary to take down and rebuild the upper part, but the workmen did not replace the old ornaments, so that it has now lost much of its former beauty. There are six musical bells in the tower; and about the year 1822, a handsome organ was erected by subscription.

The church has been frequently repaired, and is kept in good order, but the appearance of the interior is greatly injured by the irregularity of the pews and galleries. There were formerly four chantries in this church, but the date of their foundation and the names of their founders are unknown, except the chantry of Robert Marshall, the endowment of which is now appropriated to the Grammar School. . . . The chantry of St James had revenues of the yearly value of £6, and the chantry of All Saints was worth £4 19s. od. per annum, but the revenue of the chantry of the Blessed Mary has not been ascertained. There was also a FreeChapel or perpetual Chantry of Badlifelde, otherwise Bedlefeld, or Battlefield, in the manor or parish of Darlington, and in the patronage of the bishop: the chaplain, or cantarist, had an annual sum paid him out of the bishop's exchequer ab antiquo. About a mile west of Darlington is a place called Baddles, where this chapel is supposed to have stood, but there are not now any remains of the edifice. The clergy who now officiate at the church are, the Rev. James Carr, the sub-curate; and the Rev. Thomas W. Minton, assistant-curate."

England's Oldest Handicrafts.

BY ISABEL SUART ROBSON.

I.-WORKERS IN WOOL AND FLAX. "The history of the loom is the history of human progress."

HE most ancient of all human inventions is the weaving of cloth of one kind or another, and though before the coming of the Normans the handicrafts of this country were few and simple, this industry had its place in the daily life of every homestead. Sheep were the chief possessions of the Anglo-Saxons, and their wool was combed, carded, spun, woven and dyed by the women, from the King's daughter to the wife of the churl. Queen Boadicea wore in her last great stand for freedom, "under her cloak a tunic of Englishmade wool chequered with many colours," says the Roman historian, Dion Cassius, and

he goes on to speak admiringly of the brilliant tints the Britons gave to their wools : light-red, green, blue, madderpink, sometimes violet and mulberry colour, no doubt woven into plaids much like those the Scottish Highlanders use to-day.

The Romans always paid special attention to textile manufactures, and one of their earliest acts, after subjugating Britain, was to set up a linen and woollen factory in the fortified town of Winchester. No doubt the soldiers of the various cohorts were supplied with raiment from its stores, for it was a Government establishment, with a manager, called by Tacitus "the procurator," appointed by the Emperor of Rome. To some extent the trade of Winchester languished when the Romans withdrew from the country, but four centuries later we find the people of England using Winchester linen. Evidently its linen was preferable to its woollen goods. Among the Saxons, to wear wool next the skin was a penance for heinous misdoing, and all persons of rank were buried in linen shrouds.

Until the Normans came to England the wool woven produced only a coarse cloth and a rough kind of blanket. English wool was then, as now, the best known and most highly prized, but the Saxons had not acquired the art of weaving it with any degree of perfection. They did little more than collect the fleeces over and above what were needed for actual clothing, and send them to Flanders, then and throughout the Middle Ages the centre of woollen manufacture.

what date wool was first exported from England we cannot tell. It must have been very early indeed, for we read of merchants going to Marseilles and attending the great French fairs at Rouen and St. Denis in the ninth century. Before that time commercial intercourse was carried on, for we have a most interesting document-our first treaty of commerce, in fact-dated 796 A.D., by which Charlemagne grants protection to certain English merchants trading between France and Mercia. Henry of Huntingdon, writing in the twelfth century, alludes to the extensive exportation of fine English wool "to the main" an exportation which eventually reached such proportions that a stoppage of supplies used to throw half the population of Flanders out of work.

VOL. XXXIV.

Taxes, until almost the close of the Plantagenet period, were calculated not in money but in wool. In one year the Parliament granted Edward III. 20,000 sacks of fine wool, and in another year 30,000. In 1339 he was to have "the tenth sheep, fleece and lamb." The Cistercian monks, since their settlement in England, were notable woolgrowers, an order of Benedictine monks contracting for all they could supply. Indeed, England supplied, during the fourteenth century almost all the wool used in Northern Europe. Spain also grew wool, but it was far more difficult to carry goods from the Peninsula to Flanders than across the German Ocean, whereon light crafts plied constantly. The monks also grew much flax, some affirming that the soil of Great Britain was more suitable for its production than that of any other country, and its crops the largest, toughest, and finest in the world. Such natural advantages marked England for a manufacturing country; and though unnoted and unheeded by knight and by baron in medieval towns, in merchant and craft gilds silently but surely was growing up the slow structure of England's commercial wealth and influence.

In the train of William the Conqueror had come certain Flemings skilled in textile art, and what had been a languishing and undeveloped handicraft received impetus and improvement. Winchester remembered its old glory, and made efforts to revive its trade, gaining permission from William to hold a great annual fair on St. Giles's Hill, where its manufactures might be displayed, and to which merchants of other districts might resort. This fair was a great centre of trade for several centuries. Its duration, limited by William to one day, was gradually extended, until by a charter of Henry II. it was allowed to last for sixteen days. During the time it was held the shops of Southampton, as well as Winchester, were closed, and all wares sold outside the fair, within a radius of seven miles, were to be forfeited to the bishop. Tolls were established on every bridge and roadway, and the revenue thus levied on goods taken to the fair and on persons going there to sell, was very considerable. The great common was covered with booths and divided into temporary streets, called after

C

the goods exposed for sale therein, "The Drapery," "The Spicery," "The Pottery," and so on. Many hard bargains were driven on Winchester Common in those days. In the famous old allegory of the fourteenth century, "The Vision of Piers Plowman," Covetousness was among those who "To Winchester went to the fair," carrying goods that

Had been unsold These seven years, Had there not gone The grace of guile Among my chaffer.

The cloth fair in St. Bartholomew's Churchyard was one of the oldest and most important commercial institutions of early times. Founded in the reign of Henry I., it lasted, though in a gradually diminishing state of prosperity, until 1855, when the nation having outgrown it, a municipal court quietly decreed its extinction. The fair in its early and prosperous days consisted chiefly of the booths and standings of the "clothmakers of all England and the drapers of London, who there closed within walls of which the gates were locked and watched every night for safety of men's goods and wares. A "draper was then the London name for clothier, very few of the Drapers' Guild living beyond the boundary of the city.

Of all institutions for organizing the craft of the wool-worker in the Middle Ages, the most important was the Staple. Certain towns were named by the King as "Seats of the Staple," or places where alone staple goods, such as wool, cloth, linen, leather, lead and tin could be sold. To these staples foreign merchants went regularly to buy and sell, and English traders met there for a like object. Every article sold had to bear the seal of the staple upon it before it could be offered for sale, thus ensuring, as far as possible, honesty, weight, measure, and quality. Calais was at one time the chief staple, but the places were frequently changed, to the great inconvenience of those who came from abroad. Edward III., in 1361, removed the staple from Calais to nine English towns, one of which was Westminster, changed seventeen years later by Richard II. to the spot still known as Staple Inn, in Holborn. More than once the staple was abolished and re-established, until, in the sixteenth century, it ceased to be of any com

mercial importance. Edward III., perhaps, did more than any other king for the development of textile manufacture. It is true that Henry II. had allowed numbers of Flemings to settle in this country, and established the cloth fair in the churchyard of St. Bartholomew, and personally interested himself in the growth of the handicraft, " even to the length of purchasing of the same;" but Edward III. had an influence prompting him wholly sympathetic to the foreigners, that of his wife, Phillipa of Hainault, and the settlement of Flemings was invariably encouraged. Two Flemings established themselves in York in 1331, and one, John Kemp, founded in Westmorland the manufacture of the famous "Kendal Green." Thomas Blanket, about the same time, commenced in Bristol that industry which has always borne his name; but Norwich was the Manchester of the Middle Ages, supplying the country and also exporting plain, unpretending cloths which had until the coming of the Flemings never gone beyond a simple weave or twill, made from yarn which had been spun on a distaff with a primitive spindle, scarcely different to that Penelope must have used for the spinning of her famous web. During medieval times the loom used in England was always horizontal, such as is shown in the Bedford Book of Hours, preserved in the British Museum, at which the Virgin Mary is seated weaving curtains for the Temple.

Norfolk may, indeed, be regarded as the cradle of the woollen manufacture. Long before the earliest records a considerable industry had been carried on there in coarse cloths and among them a stuff called "burel,” in wool or thread, or in both woven together. We read that St. Paul's Cathedral had, in 1295, a light-blue chasuble of this texture, and Exeter, in 1277, possessed "a long burel pall." Burel, and, in fact, all coarser fabrics, were wrought by men, sometimes in monasteries, for the old Benedictine rule obliged the monks to give a certain number of hours each day to some handicraft. Of monks of Bath Abbey, says one writer, "shuttle and the loom employed their attention at this early period, and among them the art was so well carried forward, that Bath became one of the most considerable cloth-weaving towns in Western England." In Chaucer's time

Of cloth-making she hadde swiche an haunt
She passed hem of Ipres and of Gaunt.

The village of Worstead, twenty miles from Norwich, by a new method of its own for the carding of wool with combs of iron well heated and then twisting the thread harder than usual in the spinning, enabled its weavers to produce a stuff of a peculiar quality, which took the name of the place where it was first produced, and became immediately popular. Exeter Cathedral among its vestments had several of worsted, spelt variously "worsett' or "woryst," and York enumerates some in the rolls of the Minster. It was used for cushions, wall draperies, and bed hangings especially, and commanded very high prices. Elizabeth de Bohun, in 1356, bequeathed to her daughter, the Countess of Arundel, as something exceedingly valuable, "a bed of red worsted embroidered." This manufacture very early migrated to Norwich, and, with other fabrics, profited by the improved methods and skill of the Flemings.

Linen in medieval records seems often to be included under the generic term "cloth :" thus, we find the fine linen of Aylesham, in Lincolnshire, which was beginning to be noted as early as the fourteenth century, alluded to in church records as "Aylesham cloth," of which certain "hand towels" were to be made. Fine linen was manufactured in Sussex and Wiltshire in the middle of the thirteenth century, and it was to encourage this growing enterprise that Henry III. purchased in 1253, through the sheriffs of the two counties, two thousand yards for his own royal use." The jealous rivalry between the two industries, wool and flax weaving, has from earliest times formed a humorous feature in the history of the craft. Royal favours to linen-weavers provoked the complaints of the workers in wool, who saw in every advantage to their rivals a blow aimed at their own trade, whilst linen-weavers felt -so small comparatively was the demand for their goods-that the clothmakers should permit them a good many privileges.

In the reign of Elizabeth the city of Norwich advanced greatly, and when in 1685 Louis XIV., by the Revocation of the Edict

ill-feeling were frequent.

Peti

Protestant subjects, over 50,000 refugees fled to Norfolk and settled there. This large influx of foreigners did not please the good people of Norfolk, who saw, not the gain which would accrue to them from the superior skill of the newcomers, but a certain diversion of their own work among fresh hands. tions were drawn up, and Government aid demanded, whilst for years open displays of ill-feeling were frequent. For their part, the foreigners kept aloof from the jealous townsfolk, had their own quarter, their own places of worship and their own wardens, until lapse of time cured the soreness and the English were ready to recognise them as, not only peaceable and law-abiding, but skilled workmen, who were not averse to share their trade secrets. Among the many light fabrics the French introduced at this time was crape, a manufacture which added considerably to the wealth of Norwich. It was soon in enormous request, and gradually increased in popularity until, under the administration of Sir Robert Walpole, it was ordered for Court mourning.

It is interesting to note how much English charity to religious refugees has done to further our commercial prosperity. Harrison, in his description of Elizabethan England in the famous Holinshed Chronicle, touches on this point. After speaking of the incursion of those "whom the death of Mary had relieved of fear of persecution," he says, "While, in times past, the use of wool consisted for the most part in the cloth and woolsteds, now, by means of strangers succoured from domestic persecution, the same is employed into sundry other uses, such as mokados, bays, vellures, grosgrains, whereby the makers have reaped no small commodity." In 1623, Misselden writes that "clothmaking is the dowry of the Kingdom and the great revenue of the King, so diverse and so widespread had become its many branches."

English woollen goods achieved such a reputation in the sixteenth and the dawn of the seventeenth century, that Genoese and Venetian ship-owners came up the Thames and carried off large cargoes to supply the East, whilst Portuguese vessels bore them to India, Brazil, and the Barbadoes, and Germans on the Rhine wore Norfolk fustian. The linen

made at Ipswich at this time was so exception ally fine as to command the large sum of fifteen shillings an ell. Unhappily, this age of prosperity had its disastrous results. A haste to grow rich began to undermine the integrity of the weavers. When it was so easy to dispose of the work as quickly as it could be produced, it was a temptation to produce too quickly, and we read that, in 1550, huge bales of English goods were lying unsold on the wharves at Antwerp, "through the naughtiness of their making," and that "woollens, fraudulent in make, weight, and size, were exposed in the square of St. Mark's with the brand of the Senate upon them, to testify to the decay of English honesty." Somerset, at this time Lord Protector of England, at once interposed, and with a few rigid, summary measures, gave English weavers to understand that national reputation was a thing with which they must not lightly tamper. Throughout mediæval times the drift of all commercial legislative matters seems to have been to ensure quality rather than quantity. "Scamped work" and "doubtful measurements" were to be " things abhorrent" to all right-minded men. Any attempt to gain undue profit or any exhibition of trade dishonesty was resented as hurtful to the community at large and the wrong-doer was promptly dealt with. A forestaller, the very significant name by which our forefathers indicated a man who bought up goods before they came into the market and kept them to sell at a moment advantageous to himself, was described as "an open oppressor of poor people," " an enemy of the whole shire and county." There was no desire for cheapness, and it was believed possible to fix and enforce a fair price, so that manufacturers and sellers should only have moderate gains. Competition and speculation as they exist to-day would have seemed to medieval craftsmen little short of criminal, yet, in spite of such halcyon conditions, depreciations crept into manufacture more than once. William III. was obliged to pass an Act in which it was found advisable to describe most minutely how yarn was to be made and sold, and how cloth should be woven and measured. The possessor of cloth made for sale had, before exposing it in the market, "to bring it to a royal burgh, there to receive the public seal and stamp of the burgh upon both ends,

which shall be sufficient proof of the just length and breadth, evenness of working, and thickness thereof. To which effect there was to be in every burgh an honest man, well seen in the trade of linen and cloth, appointed to keep the said seal for marking therewith." The development of textile industries in early days was considerably limited by the fact that they were for the most part strictly local, and many of those who practised them did not look upon them as a sole means of livelihood. Weaving and farming were often combined, and in more than one instance weaving and pot-making. The isolation of separate communities and the national distaste for travel account largely for this peculiarity. Each township provided for its own wants, managed its own industries, and had its own guilds. No picture of the life of the medieval craftsman would be complete which did not give a prominent place to the influence and importance of his guild. Every man who had reached the requisite age allied himself with his fellows in this earliest form of trade co-operation, and in every town sufficiently large each trade had its separate guild. Even remote villages had their "gild-hall," where members met. The remains of some are still to be seen in country districts of Norfolk. In feudal times membership in a guild for a year and a day made a villein a free man, an item of very practical value in the eyes of the humbler craftsmen. Their fundamental principle was, that each member should work, not only for his private advantage, but for the reputation and good of his craft. For the furtherance of these objects, tools and methods of work were frequently examined and bad work was punished. It is curious to note that night-work was strictly prohibited, as likely to tend to inferior workmanship. A good supply of competent workmen for the future was ensured by training young men, from which practice undoubtedly rose the apprentice system, productive, at least at this stage, of considerable advantages. The guild also exercised a moral control over its members, provided against sickness and death, and fixed the number and length of holidays and the hours of work, enforcing its rules by fines, often consisting of drink, which was consumed at the periodic guild-feasts. The guild, or, as it was most commonly spelt, "gild," was a distinct forerunner of the modern trades