and under the early monarchs of
England there were passed a number of statutes, which vainly
endeavoured to compel every manufacturer and dealer to be honest. The
wool-trade was an especial favourite of this kind of legislation.
Indeed, if any one be in search of violent legislative attempts to
force trade into artificial channels, he will be very sure to find
them if he turn up the acts on the wool and woollen trade. They would
fill some volumes by themselves. One great object of the government,
was to prohibit the exportation of wool, to export it only in the
manufactured article, and to sell that only for gold. A tissue of
legislation of the most complicated kind was passed to establish these
objects. Costly arrangements were made, by which not only in this
country, but also in others, the sale of the woollens was conducted
only by Englishmen. This, however, is not our immediate subject--it
relates rather to the curious efforts to make the manufacturers
produce a sound article.

An act of the 13th of Richard II. (1389), gives this melancholy
account of the dishonesty of certain cloth-makers, and provides a
penal remedy: 'Forasmuch as divers plain clothes, that be wrought in
the counties of Somerset, Dorset, Bristol, and Gloucester, be tacked
and folded together, and set to sale, of the which clothes a great
part be broken, brused, and not agreeing in the colour, neither be
according to breadth, nor in no manner to the part of the same clothes
showed outwards, but be falsely wrought with divers wools, to the
great deceit, loss, and damage, of the people, in so much, that the
merchants who buy the same clothes, and carry them out of the realm to
sell to strangers, be many times in danger to be slain, and sometimes
imprisoned, and put to fine and ransom by the same strangers, and
their said clothes burnt or forfeit, because of the great deceit and
falsehood that is found in the said clothes when they be untacked and
opened, to the great slander of the realm of England. It is ordained
and assented, that no plain cloth, tacked nor folded, shall be set to
sale within the said counties; but that they be opened, upon pain to
forfeit them, so that the buyers may see them and know them, as it is
used in the county of Essex.' One would think, that if the buyers
found themselves habitually cheated by made-up goods, they would find
the remedy themselves, by insisting on seeing them, and declining,
according to a Scottish saying