By the fourteenth century, the cloth industry, which had previously been centered mainly in Flanders (northern Belgium), and in Italy and Holland, transferred to England, where fewer property taxes and market restrictions made greater profits for cloth makers. In England, the industry's production methods yielded improved cloth and changed the economy.

A technique called fulling was widely used in England and caused manufacturers to relocate from urban areas of England to different rural villages all over the country. The process of fulling involves submerging a cloth in water (usually containing a natural clay detergent called fuller's earth) and beating it vigorously. Proper fulling will shrink the cloth, making the fabric tighter and stronger, and make the surface smoother and softer. Three traditional methods of fulling were used: a submerged cloth was beaten with the feet, with the hands. or with clubs. One of these is depicted in an ancient wall painting in Pompeii of a man standing in a trough containing water and pounding a cloth with his feet. These traditional methods were still used in Flanders, Italy, and, for a time England. But then, in the eleventh or twelfth century (historians disagree on the precise date), a new method was introduced: two wooden hammers were attached to a drum and a crank was turned to raise and drop the hammers on the cloth. The real breakthrough came when this device was hooked to a water mill (one probably constructed to grind grain). As a result, a single operator overseeing a series of hammers could perform the work that had previously required a crew of fullers-and he could do it much more quickly too.

This is why the historian Eleanora Carus-Wilson observed that the invention of the fulling mill "was as decisive an event [for the woolen industry] as were the mechanization of spinning and weaving in the eighteenth century." Whether fulling mills developed in the eleventh or twelfth century, they were so common in the thirteenth century that they revolutionized the English industry, leaving the Continent (the rest of Europe) far behind. Fulling gave English cloth a significant advantage on the international market With many fewer fulling mills, cloth makers on the Continent could full only some of their cloths, which entailed a large sacrifice in quality.

The ascendance of the fulling mill helps explain the English woolen industry's marked preference for villages and rural areas on good streams. Such locations had several additional advantages. Moving water was useful for dyers, who needed to rinse excess dye from their cloths. Moreover, locating in rural areas permitted firms to escape the repressive regulations imposed by guilds (professional organizations of practitioners of the trades) to avoid the higher taxes of towns and cities, and to pay lower wages (the cost of living was lower in rural areas than in cities).

Why didn't the woolen industry on the Continent similarly disperse to small towns and villages? Because in Continental Europe only the cities provided enough freedom and property rights to sustain industry. On the European Continent, the rule of the nobility prevailed in the countryside, and everyone had to fear the local lord's greed. But in England, freedom and security prevailed throughout the realm, and medieval English industrialists did not need to concentrate in crowded, expensive, dirty cities-many devoid of water power-as their counterparts in Flanders, in Holland, along the Rhine, and in Italy were forced to do. As a result, the English woolen industry was remarkably decentralized.

Finally, dispersion and relatively unimpeded capitalism may have contributed to the international dominance of English woolens by encouraging the production of more fashionable and attractive products. As the historian A. R. Bridbury put it, to explain the success of English woolen industry, it is not enough to cite better wools or lower prices; what should be stressed is "art and skill the exotic dyeing of these cloths and... the subtle blending of design and color in their creation... the search for making cloth which would be more fashionable internationally." In textile centers on the Continent, the guilds-very traditional in their outlook-often limited experimentation with colors and designs, and originality nearly always suffers when creative people are crowded together and fully aware of one another's work. England's dispersed woolen industry produced greater variations in styles and quality.