it back again when the work was done.  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.  Then the thriving villages emptied themselves, so that today we must needs re-create again from scattered traces and old buildings, and still older names, the once familiar figures of the East Anglian clothier and his swarm of busy workmen.

Such a familiar figure was once old Thomas Paycocke, clothier, of Coggeshall in Essex, who died full of years and honour in 1518.  His family originally came from Clare, in Suffolk, but about the middle of the fifteenth century a branch settled at Coggeshall, a village not far distant.  His grandfather and father would seem to have been grazing butchers, but he and his brother and their descendants after them followed ‘the truly noble manufacture’ of cloth-making, and set an indelible mark upon the village where they dwelt.  Coggeshall lies in the great cloth-making district of Essex, of which Fuller wrote:  ’This county is charactered like Bethsheba, “She layeth her hand to the spindle and her hands hold the distaffe."...  It will not be amiss to pray that the plough may go along and the wheel around, that so (being fed by the one and clothed by the other) there may be, by God’s blessing, no danger of starving in our nation[2] All over Essex there lay villages famous for cloth-making, Coggeshall and Braintree, Bocking and Halstead, Shalford and Dedham, and above all Colchester, the great centre and mart of the trade.  The villages throve on the industry and there was hardly a cottage which did not hum with the spinning wheel, and hardly a street where you might not have counted weavers’ workshops, kitchens where the rough loom stood by the wall to occupy the goodman’s working hours.  Hardly a week but the clatter of the pack-horse would be heard in the straggling streets, bringing in new stores of wool to be worked and taking away the pieces of cloth to the clothiers of Colchester and the surrounding