Occasionally too the murmurings of the people only tell of troubles that follow every industrial change. To an employer the new industry came to search out the extent of his resources and his activity. What with the haste to make wealth, and the hurry of keeping pace with the demands of foreign traders and of big markets, he was hard pressed by the necessity of cheap and swift production, and his attempts to improve his industrial methods brought him into collision with workers to whom ruder and more wasteful ways of doing business were often more immediately profitable. Labour disputes arose over questions of wages and piece-work, of holidays, of the employment of women[191] and cheap workers. Occasionally the master carried on an illicit industry—keeping workmen privately engaged in his own house or on board a ship in the port,[192] so as to withdraw his servants from the supervision of the town council, and his goods from charges for the town dues. If he had accumulated a little capital he perhaps moved out to the valleys of Yorkshire or Gloucestershire in search of water-power for his fulling-mills, or of finer wool for his weavers; or forsook the manufacturing town for some rural district where labour was plentiful, and where he could escape the heavy municipal dues which his business could ill afford to pay. While the valley of the Stroud was welcoming Flemish settlers and seeing mills spring up along every stream, London and Canterbury found their manufacturing trade slipping away from them;[193] and the glory of Norwich departed as cloth-makers pushed along the moorland streams of Yorkshire to Wakefield and Huddersfield and Halifax, and set up fulling-mills among the few peasant huts of remote hamlets.
Difficulties also arose when the manufacturer began to contrive the first rude form of a factory system, and so disturbed the occasional labour of his neighbourhood; after the manner of the brewers of Kent, who besides having to supply London and the big trading ports of the coast were also beginning to send out beer to Flanders, and who no longer as of old bought their malt from the people, making only some trifling hundred quarters or so in their own houses, but began to make at home as much as a thousand or even eighteen hundred quarters, to the hurt of those farmers and youths who had once gained a livelihood by preparing malt for sale.[194] Or perhaps enterprising masters began to introduce new machinery to keep pace with the increasing demand for their wares. Such an innovation was resisted as hotly as in our own century. The shearers of cloth raised a cry against a new iron instrument invented for raising the nap of cloth so that it could be quickly burned off without the old labour, while shearers were left idly loitering.[195] Among the cap-makers “some of the trade provided a water-mill for fulling their caps” in 1376, by which apprentices and freemen of the trade found themselves deprived of work and “at the point of perishing.” Their appeal to the town was of course on the ground that caps so fulled were bad wear for the community, and the mills were in consequence forbidden;[196] but a century of disobedience and evasions and wranglings followed until the working fullers appealed to Parliament itself, and in 1482 it was decreed that hats, bonnets, and caps, which “were wont to be faithfully ... thicked by men’s strength, that is to say with hands and feet,” should never again be fulled in fulling-mills invented “by subtle imagination to the destruction of the labours and sustenance of many men,” and to the “final undoing” of the cap-makers.[197]