medieval-atlas/economic-development/246

Transcription

Restructuring urban economies in the later Middle Ages Edinburgh's gradual consolidation of a majority share of the major exported commodities, though clear from these figures, is understated; the capital had by the sixteenth century a uniquely wide industrial and trading base which affected the structure of towns both in the Forth basin and much further afield. The dependence of Linlithgow on the trade in hides and fells, when combined with the data showing the steep decline of these sectors in the fifteenth century, reveals a town in serious Edinburgh linlithgow decay, unable to diversify into more lucrative areas and increasingly reliant on its position as a royal centre. Stirling, with a similarly shaped economy but a more modest exporting base in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, survived into the sixteenth century better. Haddington, an important wool centre until the end of the fifteenth century, saw its nascent cloth industry collapse during the English invasions of the 1540s, leaving a narrowly based economy, dependent on hides, fells and skins, in serious decline. Englishmen's imports English wool Wool Stirling Woollells Hides Cloth Skins Salmon Herring Cod Salt Coal Haddington Customs on exports by commodity 1327 -1590 ML,ASt 246

  Transcribers who have contributed to this page.

None