CHAPTER VII.
_Thomas Paycocke of Coggeshall_ AN ESSEX CLOTHIER IN THE DAYS OF HENRY VII This was a gallant cloathier sure Whose fame for ever shall endure.
-- THOMAS DELONEY The great and noble trade of cloth-making has left many traces upon the life of England, architectural, literary, and social.

It has filled our countryside with magnificent Perpendicular churches and gracious oak-beamed houses.

It has filled our popular literature with old wives' tales of the worthies of England, in which the clothiers Thomas of Reading and Jack of Newbury rub elbows with Friar Bacon and Robin Hood.
It has filled our shires with gentlemen; for, as Defoe observed, in the early eighteenth century 'many of the great families who now pass for gentry in the western counties have been originally raised from and built up by this truly noble manufacture'.

It has filled our census lists with surnames--Weaver, Webber, Webb, Sherman, Fuller, Walker, Dyer--and given to every unmarried woman the designation of a spinster.
And from the time when the cloth trade ousted that of wool as the chief export trade of England down to the time when it was in its turn ousted by iron and cotton, it was the foundation of England's commercial greatness.

'Among all Crafts,' says old Deloney, 'this was the only chief, for that it was the greatest merchandize, by the which our Country became famous thorowout all Nations.'[1] Already by the end of the fourteenth century the English clothiers were beginning to rival those of the Netherlands in the making of fine cloth, as witness Chaucer's Wife of Bath: Of clooth-making she hadde swiche an haunt She passed hem of Ypres and of Gaunt, and by the end of the sixteenth century all real rivalry was at an end, for the English manufacture was so clearly victorious.