t with their
hands nor did they own machinery and supervise the labour which worked
with it. They were, as has been shown above, merchant-middlemen. The
clothing trade being the most highly developed, evolved several
species of middlemen, including under that term all collectors and
distributors of the raw material or finished goods.

(_a_) One important class of "factors" engaged themselves in buying
wool from farmers and selling it to clothiers, and appear to have
sometimes exercised an undue and tyrannous control over the latter by
an unscrupulous manipulation of the credit system which was growing up
in trade.[53]

(_b_) The "clothiers" themselves must be regarded in large measure as
middleman-collectors, analogous in function to the distributors, who
still rank as one of the grades of middlemen in the cheap clothing
trade of London to-day.[54]

(_c_) After the cloth was made three classes of middlemen were engaged
in forwarding it to the retailer--(1) travelling merchants or
wholesale dealers who attended the big fairs or the markets at Leeds,
Halifax, Exeter, etc., and made large purchases, conveying the goods
on pack-horses over the country to the retail trader; (2) middlemen
who sold on commission through London factors and warehousemen, who in
their turn disposed of the goods to shopkeepers or to exporters; (3)
merchants directly engaged in the export trade.

With the exception of shipping and canal transport (which became
important after the middle of the century) there were no considerable
industries related to manufacture where large capitals were laid down
in fixed plant. Even the capital sunk in permanent improvements of
land, which played so important a part in the development of
agriculture, belonged chiefly to the latter years of the eighteenth
century. Almost the only persons who wielded large capitals within the
country were those merchants, dealers, or middlemen, whose capital at
any given time consisted of a large stock of raw material or finished
goods. Even the latter were considerably restricted in the magnitude
of their transactions by the imperfect development of the machinery of
finance and the credit system. In 1750 there were not more than twelve
bankers' shops out of London.[55] Until 1759 the Bank of England
issued no notes of less value than L20.

Joint-ownership of capital and effective combination of the labour
units in a business were only beginning to make progress. The Funded