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1921 REVIEWS OF BOOKS 591 of the Yorkshire industry. His use of the Freemen's Roll of York and of the Poll Tax Returns seems decisive ; in the latter, for example, the whole Halifax area contains only a single Flemish name. In relation to the general economic history of the country, probably the most important result which emerges from this perfectly unbiased examination of what, throughout the whole period under review, was England's greatest industry, is the continuous, and one might say auto- matic failure of nearly all governmental regulations in turn, not excepting those of the Tudors. Medieval state regulation of the actual manufacture, under the ulnager, was based on the assumption that ' the same quantity of cloth of the same quality must always pay the same contribution to the national chest ' (p. 126). It affected only the better marketable cloths. To this was added the local regulation of the crafts. Mr. Heaton inclines to think that both failed : ' it seems to have been impossible effectively to regulate the industry even when it was largely confined to the towns ' (p. 130). But government was not discouraged. ' So we get a bewildering maze of legislation, throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, regulating every detail ' (p. 130). This culminates in the Act of 1552, which tried to ' bring all existing varieties of cloth under the power of the law ' (p. 135). ' The Act, full of good intentions, achieved very little ' (p. 137). Still government strives to assert its own conception of industrial morality ; and we get the Act of 1597, with the usual Tudor preamble to the effect that all previous acts have rather increased than diminished the evils they set out to remedy. It was aimed especially at the over-stretching of Northern cloth on the ' tenter '. The Yorkshire justices went on strike and would not administer it (p. 141). The omnipotent Tudor council thundered. The justices remained on strike. The council eased the law, and an Act of 1623 finally registered its defeat. The early Stuarts were enthusiasts for ' control '. As Mr. Heaton points out (p. 219 n.), there is a wide field for inquiry into the provincial aspects of this movement, whose London side has been studied by Professor Unwin. There were plans for county corporations to control the now half -rural clothing industry. Leeds received its charter in 1626 largely with a view to the maintenance of closer control in the woollen and other industries : ' they shall have all reasonable gilds, and . . . shall divide themselves into separate fraternities, Societies and mysteries ', the charter runs. The town's leading magnates tried to live up to their charter. Under Cromwell they are agitating for ' one bodie politick ', incorporated, to ' run ' the whole Yorkshire broadcloth industry (p. 231). They got it, but ' of its actual working we know nothing ' (p. 234). It maintained a nominal existence for about thirty years. With the Restoration a slackening of continental demand, due to ' Colbertian ' forcing-house methods applied by various princes (pp. 251-2, 270), led to the woollen burial and other well-known acts of the period for making a home demand. They were in part effective. But in spite of centuries of failure, the government of the early eighteenth century loaded the statute-book again with laws about lengths, breadths, and weights. In 1738, however, size-regulation was abandoned for narrow