ufacturing industry in this period was
organized according to the "domestic system," the beginnings of which
have been already noticed within the previous period. That is to say,
manufacturing was carried on in their own houses by small masters with
a journeyman and apprentice or two. Much of it was done in the country
villages or suburbs of the larger towns, and such handicraft was very
generally connected with a certain amount of cultivation of the soil.
A small master weaver or nail manufacturer, or soap boiler or potter,
would also have a little farm and divide his time between the two
occupations. The implements of manufacture almost always belonged to
the small master himself, though in the stocking manufacture and the
silk manufacture they were often owned by employing capitalists and
rented out to the small manufacturers, or even to journeymen. In some
cases the raw material--wool, linen, metal, or whatever it might
be--was purchased by the small manufacturer, and the goods were either
manufactured for special customers or taken when completed to a
neighboring town on market days, there to be sold to a local dealer,
or to a merchant who would transport it to another part of the country
or export it to other countries. In other cases the raw material,
especially in the case of cotton, was the property of a town merchant
or capitalist, who distributed it to the small domestic manufacturers
in their houses in the villages, paying them for the processes of
production, and himself collecting the completed product and disposing
of it by sale or export. This domestic manufacture was especially
common in the southwest, centre, and northwest of England, and
manufacturing towns like Birmingham, Halifax, Sheffield, Leeds,
Bolton, and Manchester were growing up as centres around which it
gathered. Little or no organization existed among such small
manufacturers, though their apprentices were of course supposed to be
taken and their journeymen hired according to the provisions of the
Statute of Apprentices, and their products were sometimes subjected to
some governmental or other supervision.

Thus in manufacturing and artisan life as in agricultural the period
was marked by an extension and increase of the amount of industry, on
the same general lines as had been reached by 1600, rather than by any
considerable changes.

*52. Commerce under the Navigation Acts.*--The same thing is true of
commerce, although its vast ext