was made in 1626 to employ the poor in
the spinning of cotton and weaving wool.[8]

Prior to Mr Price's discovery of the petition mentioned above, the
earliest known notice of the existence in England of a cotton industry
of any magnitude was the oft-quoted passage from Lewes Roberts's
_Treasure of Traffic_ (1641), which runs: "The town of Manchester, in
Lancashire, must be also herein remembered, and worthily for their
encouragement commended, who buy the yarne of the Irish in great
quantity, and weaving it, return the same again into Ireland to sell:
Neither doth their industry rest here, for they buy cotton-wool in
London that comes first from Cyprus and Smyrna, and at home work the
same, and perfect it into fustians, vermillions, dimities and other such
stuffs, and then return it to London, where the same is vented and sold,
and not seldom sent into foreign parts."[9]

Despite Lewes Roberts's flattering reference, the trade of Manchester
about that time consisted chiefly in woollen frizes, fustians,
sackcloths, mingled stuffs, caps, inkles, tapes, points, &c., according
to "A Description of the Towns of Manchester and Salford," 1650,[10] and
woollens for a long time held the first place. But before another
century had run its course cottons proper had pushed into the first
rank, though the woollen industry continued to be of unquestionable
importance. In 1727 Daniel Defoe could write, "the grand manufacture
which has so much raised this town is that of cotton in all its
varieties,"[11] and he did not mean the woollen "cottons," as he made
plain by other references to the industry in the same connexion; but it
was not until some fifty years later that the ousting of the woollen
industry from what is now peculiarly the cotton district became
unmistakable.[12] As a rule the woollen weavers were driven farther and
farther east--Bury lay just outside the cotton area when Defoe
wrote--and finally many of them settled in the West Riding. Edwin
Butterworth even tells of woollen weavers who migrated from Oldham to
the distant town of Bradford in Wiltshire because of the decline of
their trade before the victorious cotton industry. Much the same fate
was being shared by the linen industry in Lancashire, which was forced
out of the county westwards and northwards. The explanation of the three
centralizations, namely of the woollen industry, the cotton industry and
the linen industry, is not far to seek. The popularity of the