Page:Craik History of British Commerce Vol 1.djvu/129

{{rh||BRITISH COMMERCE.|127} it than an abjuration of the foreign trade altogether. But it never was long before this precipitate resolution was repented of and revoked.

In the wars between Henry III. and his barons, the latter endeavoured to turn to account against the king the national jealousy of foreigners, which his partiality to his wife's French connexions had greatly exasperated. In 1261 they passed a law which may be regarded as the first attempt to establish what has been called, in modern times, the manufacturing system. It prohibited the exportation of wool, the chief staple of the country, and ordained that no woollen cloths should be worn except such as were manufactured at home. Whatever may be thought of the policy of nursing the infancy of domestic manufactures in certain circumstances by protections of this description, the present attempt was undoubtedly premature, and its authors confessed as much by appending to their prohibition against the importation of foreign cloth an injunction or recommendation that all persons should avoid every superfluity in dress. What were thus denounced as extravagant superfluities were evidently those finer fabrics which could not yet be produced in England. The effect of this law, in so far as it was enforced or obeyed, could only have been to add to the general distress, by embarrassing more or less all classes of persons that had been ever so remotely connected with the foreign trade, and above all others the chief body of producers in the kingdom. If the wool was not to go out of the country, much wealth both in money and in goods would be prevented from coming in, and all the branches of industry which that wealth had hitherto contributed to sustain and feed would suffer depression.

It would appear that, either from want of skill, or a scarcity of woad in consequence of the usual importations from the continent being checked, dyed cloths could not be obtained in sufficient quantity in England a few years after this time; for it is recorded that many people were now wont to dress themselves in cloth of the natural colour of the wool. Simon de Montford, it seems, professed to be an admirer of this plainness of apparel, and