f those
multifarious regulations which fix the staple, or market for wool, in
certain towns, either in England, or, more commonly, on the continent.
To these all wool was to be carried, and the tax was there collected. It
is not easy, however, to comprehend the drift of all the provisions
relating to the staple, many of which tend to benefit foreign at the
expense of English merchants. By degrees the exportation of woollen
cloths increased so as to diminish that of the raw material, but the
latter was not absolutely prohibited during the period under
review;[585] although some restrictions were imposed upon it by Edward
IV. For a much earlier statute, in the 11th of Edward III., making the
exportation of wool a capital felony, was in its terms provisional,
until it should be otherwise ordered by the council; and the king almost
immediately set it aside.[586]

[Sidenote: Manufactures of France and Germany.]

A manufacturing district, as we see in our own country, sends out, as it
were, suckers into all its neighbourhood. Accordingly, the woollen
manufacture spread from Flanders along the banks of the Rhine and into
the northern provinces of France.[587] I am not, however, prepared to
trace its history in these regions. In Germany the privileges conceded
by Henry V. to the free cities, and especially to their artisans, gave a
soul to industry; though the central parts of the empire were, for many
reasons, very ill-calculated for commercial enterprise during the middle
ages.[588] But the French towns were never so much emancipated from
arbitrary power as those of Germany or Flanders; and the evils of
exorbitant taxation, with those produced by the English wars, conspired
to retard the advance of manufactures in France. That of linen made some
little progress; but this work was still, perhaps, chiefly confined to
the labour of female servants.[589]

[Sidenote: Baltic trade.]

The manufactures of Flanders and England found a market, not only in
these adjacent countries, but in a part of Europe which for many ages
had only been known enough to be dreaded. In the middle of the eleventh
century a native of Bremen, and a writer much superior to most others of
his time, was almost entirely ignorant of the geography of the Baltic;
doubting whether any one had reached Russia by that sea, and reckoning
Esthonia and Courland among its islands.[590] But in one hundred years
more the maritime regions of Mecklenburg and Pomerania, i