It is quite certain that woollen garments were among the first manufactured among barbarous tribes.  We have seen this year, in the Exhibition in Hyde Park, specimens of white felted cloth from India, equal, if not superior, to anything that we can manufacture for strength and durability, which must have been made with the rude tools, of the form which has been in use for probably at least two thousand years.

English coarse wools have been celebrated, and in demand among foreign nations, from the earliest periods of our history.  In the time of William the Conqueror, an inundation in the Netherlands drove many clothiers over, and William of Malmesbury tells us that the king welcomed them, and placed them first in Carlisle, where there are still manufactories, and then in the western counties, where they could find what was indispensable for their trade—­streams for washing and plenty of wood for boiling their vats.  Very early the manufacturers applied to restrain the exportation of English wool.  In the time of Edward I., we find a duty of twenty shillings to forty shillings per bag on importation.  Edward iii. prohibited the export of wool, at the same time he took his taxes and subsidies in wool, which became a favourite medium of taxation with our monarchs, and sent his wool abroad for sale.  Under his reign, Flemish weavers were encouraged to settle here and improve the manufacture, which became spread all over England thus—­Norfolk fustians, Suffolk baize, Essex serges and says, Kent broadcloth, Devon kerseys, Gloucestershire cloth, Worcestershire cloth, Wales friezes, Westmoreland cloth, Yorkshire cloth, Somersetshire serges, Hampshire, Berkshire, and Sussex cloth:  districts from a great number of which woollen manufactures have now disappeared.  We have Parliamentary records of the mutual absurdities by which the woollen manufacturers, on the one hand, sought to obtain a monopoly of British wool, and the wool growers endeavoured to secure the exclusive right to supply the raw material.  Act after act was laid upon everything connected with wool, so that it is only extraordinary that, under such restrictive trammeling, the trade survived at all.

   “Odious!  In woollen! ’twould a saint provoke! 
   Were the last words that poor Narcissa spoke.”

In 1781, when, the price of wool being low, the Lincolnshire woolgrowers met under the chairmanship of their great landowners, and resolved on petitions praying “that British might be exported and that Irish wool might be excluded from England;” thereupon the Yorkshire manufacturers met and resolved that “the exportation of wool would be ruinous to the trade and manufactures of England,” that the manufacturers would be obliged to leave the kingdom for want of employment, and that the importation of Irish woollen yarn ought to be interdicted.

The manufacturers were under the impression that no other country than England could produce the long wools suitable for the manufacture of worsted.