Innovation and Design in Tudor and Stuart Britain
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In 1549, in his Discourse of the Common Weal of this Realm of England, the politician Sir Thomas Smith railed against the number of haberdashers’ shops that had recently appeared in London. His anger centred on the attractive imported goods they stocked in such profusion – ‘French or Milan caps, glasses, daggers, swords, girdles, and such things.’ Many of these goods were, Smith complained, mere fripperies, made from cheap materials – paper, pins, needles, knives, hats, caps, brooches, buttons, laces, gloves, tables, playing cards, puppets, hawks’ bells, earthen wares – yet in importing them, the kingdom wasted its resources. England was ‘overburdened with unnecessary forrayn wares’, things ‘that we might ether clene spare, or els make them within oure owne realme’.
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