enter) and other engines wherewith 100
cloths of white wool called kerseys, rough and unwrought and made for
sale at Guildford, were stretched and strained in breadth and length."
On another occasion five clothiers were summoned to answer a charge of
having used "a certaine engine called a rope" to stretch their cloth. So
important a part of Guildford's life had clothmaking become under
Elizabeth that the Corporation required special acknowledgment of the
fact from the innkeepers, doubtless because prosperity in the town meant
full tankards emptied at the inns. Every alehouse keeper had to have a
signboard hung above his door with a woolsack painted on it, under a
fine of six-and-eightpence; he had to buy the sign from the hall warden
at the Town Hall, and pay two shillings for it. Woolsacks were added to
the borough arms. Yet the prosperity of the trade was short-lived, after
all. The pride of Guildford's industry fell. Less than fifty years after
the alehouse signs swung woolpacks to guide thirsty clothiers, the
business came down with a run. Godalming, Farnham, and Wonersh were
other flourishing centres of the trade, and in 1630 one Samuel Vassall,
the merchant who took the Godalming and Wonersh cloth for shipment
abroad, failed his customers. He was under arrest, and no one else could
be found to take up his contracts. All the Godalming eggs were in one
basket, and Guildford and Farnham suffered in sympathy. Three thousand
workers were in distress; it was the beginning of the end. It could not
have happened, of course, if Samuel Vassall's failure had been the only
difficulty. That would have been got over somehow. But there was another
agent at work. The real cause of the destruction of the Surrey cloth
industry was the fact that for years the Company of Merchant Adventurers
and the London Drapers' Company had been working to get the cloth trade
into their own hands, and they had practically succeeded. Godalming held
on for a time; but Guildford, Wonersh, and Farnham went under.

Aubrey is not content with so simple an explanation. He scents a
swindler. The trade of Wonersh, he writes, "chiefly consisted in making
blue cloth for the Canary Islands; the decay and indeed ruin of their
trade was their avaricious method of stretching their cloth from 18
yards to 22 or 23, which being discovered abroad, they returned their
commodity on their hands and it would sell at no market. The same
fraudulent practice caused the dec