These men grew rich; they amassed capital; they could set many folk at work.

Soon they began to set to work all the different workers who combined to make a piece of cloth; their servants carried wool to the cottages for the women to card and spin; carried the spun yarn in turn to dyers, weavers, fullers, shearers; and carried the finished piece of cloth back to the industrial middleman--the clothier, as he was called--who in his turn disposed of it to the mercantile middleman, who was called a draper.

The clothiers grew rapidly in wealth and importance, and in certain parts of the country became the backbone of the middle class.

They pursued their activities in country villages, rather than in the old corporate towns, for they wished to avoid the restrictions of the gilds, and gradually the cloth industry migrated almost entirely to the country.

In the west of England and in East Anglia (though not in Yorkshire) it was carried out by clothiers on this 'putting out' system, right up to the moment when the Industrial Revolution swept it out of the cottages into the factories and out of the south into the north.