f Leeds," published in 1724.

Wool Growing, and Woollen Manufactures.--Yorkshire is the ancient seat of a
great woollen manufacture, founded on the coarse wools of its native hills;
but coal and cheap conveyance, with the stimulus mechanical inventions have
applied in the neighbouring counties to cotton, have given Yorkshire such
advantages over many ancient seats of manufacture, that it has transplanted
and increased a considerable portion of the fine cloth trade formerly carried
on in the west of England alone, besides engrafting and erecting a variety of
other and new kinds of textiles, in which wool or hair have some very slight
part.

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 o