y
call them chronic.

At this period corn and wool were the two main products of the farmer;
corn to feed his household and labourers, and wool to put money in his
pocket, a somewhat rare thing.

English wool, which came to be called 'the flower and strength and
revenue and blood of England', was famous in very early times, and was
exported long before the Conquest. In Edgar's reign the price was
fixed by law, to prevent it getting into the hands of the foreigner
too cheaply; a wey, or weigh, was to be sold for 120d.[101] Patriotic
Englishmen asserted it was the best in the world, and Henry II, Edward
III, and Edward IV are said to have improved the Spanish breed by
presents of English sheep. Spanish wool, however, was considered the
best from the earliest times until the Peninsular War, when the Saxon
and Silesian wools deposed it from its pride of place. Smith, in his
_Memoirs of Wool_,[102] is of the opinion that England 'borrowed some
parts of its breed from thence, as it certainly did the whole from one
place or another.' Spanish wool, too, was imported into England at an
early date, the manufacture of it being carried on at Andover in
1262.[103] Yet until the fourteenth century it was not produced in
sufficient quantities to compete seriously with English wool in the
markets of the Continent; and it appears to have been the long wools,
such as those of the modern Leicester and Lincoln, from which England
chiefly derived its fame as a wool-producing country.

Our early exports went to Flanders, where weaving had been introduced
a century before the Conquest, and, in spite of the growth of the
weaving industry in England, to that country the bulk of it continued
to go, all through the Middle Ages, though in the thirteenth century a
determined effort was made to divert a larger share of English wool to
Italy.[104] During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the export
of wool was frequently forbidden,[105] sometimes for political
objects, but also to gain the manufacture of cloth for England by
keeping our wool from the foreigner; but these measures did not stop
the export, they only hampered it and encouraged much smuggling. It
commanded what seems to us an astonishing price, for 3d. a lb. in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is probably equal to nearly 4s. in
our money. Its value, and the ease with which it could be packed and
carried, made it an object of great importance to the farmer. In
1337[106] w