my wevers, ffullers and shermen that be not afore Rehersed by name xij d. apece, And will they that have wrought me verey moch wark have iij s. iiij d. apece.  Item, I bequethe to be distributed amonge my Kembers, Carders and Spynners summa iiij li.’[5] Here are all the branches of the cloth industry at a glance.  It is Thomas Paycocke, clothier, round whom the whole manufacture revolves.  He gives the wool to the women to comb it and card it and spin it; he receives it from them again and gives it to the weaver to be woven into cloth; he gives the cloth to the fuller to be fulled and the dyer to be dyed; and having received it when finished, he has it made up into dozens and sends it off to the wholesale dealer, the draper, who sells it; perhaps he has been wont to send it to that very ‘Thomas Perpoint, draper’ whom he calls ‘my cosyn’ and makes his executor.  The whole of Thomas Paycocke’s daily business is implicit in his will.  In the year of his death he was still employing a large number of workers and was on friendly and benevolent terms with them.  The building of his house had not signalized his retirement from business, as happened when another great clothier, Thomas Dolman, gave up cloth-making and the weavers of Newbury went about lamenting: 

Lord have mercy upon us, miserable sinners.  Thomas Dolman has built a new house and turned away all his spinners.[6]

The relations between Paycocke and his employees evinced in his will are happy ones.  Such was not always the case, for if the clothiers of this age had some of the virtues of capitalists, they also had many of their vices, and the age-old strife of capital and labour was already well advanced in the fifteenth century.  One detail Paycocke’s will does not give us, which we should be glad to know:  did he employ only domestic weavers, working in their own houses, or did he also keep a certain number of looms working in his house?  It was characteristic of the period in which he lived that something like a miniature factory system was establishing itself in the midst of the new outwork system.  The clothiers were beginning to set up looms in their own houses and to work them by journeymen weavers; as a rule the independent weavers greatly disliked the practice, for either they were forced from the position of free masters into that of hired servants, obliged to go and work in the clothier’s loom shop, or else they found their payment forced down by the competition of the journeymen.  Moreover, the clothiers sometimes owned and let out looms to their work-people, and then also part of the industrial independence of the weaver was lost.  All through the first half of the sixteenth century the weavers in the cloth districts kept on petitioning Parliament against this new evil of capitalism.  It was as though, long before it established itself in England they had a prevision of the factory system and of the worker no longer owning either his raw material, his tool, his workshop, or the produce of