Industry I: Cloth and Tin

Industry is one of the most poorly documented sectors of the medieval English economy, but we do have useful statistical information about the production of cloth and of tin. For cloth the main source is alnage which, from 1353, was payable on the commercial sale of woollen cloth. In the past, historians have been sceptical about the validity of this evidence but more recent studies have shown that the alnage returns can be used to trace the development of the industry and, in particular, the shifts in its geographical distribution. For tin mining, we can follow the fluctuations in the output of the Devon and Cornwall stannaries (the administrative divisions of the tin industry) from the receipts from the tax of coinage which was levied on production and can see how the location of the industry changed, both between and within the two counties. A variety of taxation returns also allow us to estimate the number of workers within the industry within each county.