n agriculture which Latimer deplored
undoubtedly favoured production. Not only was a larger capital brought
to bear upon the land, but the mere change in the system of cultivation
introduced a taste for new and better modes of farming; the breed of
horses and of cattle was improved, and a far greater use made of manure
and dressings. One acre under the new system produced, it was said, as
much as two under the old. As a more careful and constant cultivation
was introduced, a greater number of hands came to be required on every
farm; and much of the surplus labour which had been flung off the land
in the commencement of the new system was thus recalled to it.

[Sidenote: Growth of manufactures.]

A yet more efficient agency in absorbing the unemployed was found in the
developement of manufactures. The linen trade was as yet of small value,
and that of silk-weaving was only just introduced. But the woollen
manufacture was fast becoming an important element in the national
wealth. England no longer sent her fleeces to be woven in Flanders and
to be dyed at Florence. The spinning of yarn, the weaving, fulling and
dyeing of cloth, were spreading rapidly from the towns over the
country-side. The worsted trade, of which Norwich was the centre,
extended over the whole of the Eastern counties. Farmers' wives began
everywhere to spin their wool from their own sheep's backs into a coarse
"home-spun." The South and the West however still remained the great
seats of industry and of wealth, for they were the homes of mining and
manufacturing activity. The iron manufactures were limited to Kent and
Sussex, though their prosperity in this quarter was already threatened
by the growing scarcity of the wood which fed their furnaces, and by the
exhaustion of the forests of the Weald. Cornwall was then, as now, the
sole exporter of tin; and the exportation of its copper was just
beginning. The broadcloths of the West claimed the palm among the
woollen stuffs of England. The Cinque Ports held almost a monopoly of
the commerce of the Channel. Every little harbour from the Foreland to
the Land's End sent out its fleets of fishing boats, manned with bold
seamen who were to furnish crews for Drake and the Buccaneers. Northern
England still lagged far behind the rest of the realm in its industrial
activity. But in the reign of Elizabeth the poverty and inaction to
which it had been doomed for so many centuries began at last to be
broken. We see