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 booksellers, shopkeepers of many sorts, shipowners, and clothing contractors for the army and navy. For example, we find Susanna Angell, a widow, and her daughter petitioning the king in 1636 for the right to land a cargo of gunpowder and sell it in the kingdom or transport it to Holland. Court records tell of Ellenor Woodward, an ironmonger, up on a charge of selling short weight. Joan Dant, a Quakeress, widow of a poor weaver, embarked in trade as a pedlar and amassed a fortune of £9,000 in merchandizing, which she devoted to charity. "I got it by the rich," she quaintly said, "and I mean to leave it to the poor."

In industry, no less than in trade, women were active, often combining production with selling. They were bakers and sometimes members of the bakers' companies; the court records of old Manchester tell us of one Martha Wrigley in durance vile for giving her customers short weights. Occasionally they were butchers; of the twenty-three meat dealers in Chester, three were women. They managed flour mills and sold flour. They were in earlier days brewers and innkeepers—brewster being only the feminine of brewer—but when the state made the trade a monopoly their enterprise was confined to the domestic vat. In many of the staple crafts the labor of women was a factor of importance, especially after the guild system commenced to disintegrate. For instance, toward the close of the seventeenth century, when woolen goods formed in value one-third the total export trade of England, there were eight women to every man in the woolen industry, according to one estimate, and on the most conservative reckoning at least three to one.

To a large extent the silk industry, once, almost, if not entirely a feminine monopoly, was still in the hands of women—though it had sunk to the status of a sweated trade in the reign of James I. While men tried their best to control the lucrative broadcloth manufacture for their own benefit, women, especially widows, engaged in it in