Nor was the growth of manufacturing enterprise confined to the making of cloth. For a couple of centuries the iron trade had made of the Weald the Black Country of those days, and had stirred the Forest of Dean with the din of its seventy-two moveable forges; and now, what with the metals and what with the coal of the country, “the merchants of England maintain and say that the kingdom is of greater value under the land than it is above.”[73] In the reign of Edward the Fourth when there was a riot among the Mendip miners, and the Lord Chief Justice went down to “set a concord and peace upon the forest of Mendip,” it is said ten thousand people appeared before him at the place of trial.[74] But for all this miners could no longer keep pace with the demands of the country, now that new industries on all sides required metal that had once gone to supply the wants of the farmer only; and though stores were brought from Sweden and Spain, the price of iron increased to double what it had been before the Plague.[75] Shipbuilders at the end of the fourteenth century were fitting out vessels for foreign as well as for English buyers. English gunsmiths began to send out of their workshops brazen guns and bombards superior to anything made in France, and which were said to have given England its success in the French war under Henry the Fifth.[76] A number of towns, big and little, boasted of their bell-foundries, as for example London, Salisbury, Norwich, Gloucester, Bridport, and others.[77] The copper-workers of Dinant had traded with England since the thirteenth century, and in the fourteenth century had an entrepôt at Blackwall; but in 1455 the founders set up their industry in England, stealing away secretly from Dinant to profit by the cheaper labour and ready sale in this country.[78] Flemish experts taught to Englishmen the art of brickmaking, and native builders were setting up throughout the country the first brick houses that had been seen in it since the departure of the Romans.[79] A whole series of industrial experiments proclaimed the enthusiasm with which the people accepted the challenge to secure for themselves the profits of foreign manufacturers. Artificers often more ambitious than skilful tried to establish a native industry of glass painting.[80] Instead of fetching from abroad carpets and the tapestry used for churches, manufactories were set up at Ramsey,[81] whence came perhaps also some of the “counterfeit Arras” which adorned the humbler tradesmen’s homes. Frames “ordained and made for the making of silk” were at work;[82] lace-makers and ribbon weavers begged the protection of the government; and English workers sent into the market large quantities of the linen called Holland from its first home. The export of raw material fell altogether out of fashion. Traders no longer carried skins over sea undressed to be prepared by foreign labour, but had the work done by English artizans at home. And whereas at the beginning of the fifteenth century merchants brought beer from Prussia to England, at its close they were carrying beer from London to Flanders.[83]