facilitate and abridge, in a still greater proportion, the winding of the
worsted and woollen yarn, or the proper arrangement of the warp and woof
before they are put into the loom ; an operation which, previous to the
invention of those machines, must have been extremely tedious and
troublesome.Thirdly, the employment of the fulling-mill for thickening the
cloth, instead of treading it in water. Neither wind nor water mills of any
kind were known in England so early as the beginning of the sixteenth
century, nor, so far as I know, in any other part of Europe north of the
Alps. They had been introduced into Italy some time before.

The consideration of these circumstances may, perhaps, in some measure,
explain to us why the real price both of the coarse and of the fine
manufacture was so much higher in those ancient than it is in the present
times. It cost a greater quantity of labour to bring the goods to market.
When they were brought thither, therefore, they must have purchased, or
exchanged for the price of, a greater quantity.

The coarse manufacture probably was, in those ancient times, carried on in
England in the same manner as it always has been in countries where arts and
manufactures are in their infancy. It was probably a household manufacture,
in which every different part of the work was occasionally performed by all
the different members of almost every private family, but so as to be their
work only when they had nothing else to do, and not to be the principal
business from which any of them derived the greater part of their
subsistence. The work which is performed in this manner, it has already been
observed, comes always much cheaper to market than that which is the
principal or sole fund of the workman's subsistence. The fine manufacture,
on the other hand, was not, in those times, carried on in England, but in
the rich and commercial country of Flanders; and it was probably conducted
then, in the same manner as now, by people who derived the whole, or the