There is no mistaking the significance of these figures and facts for the second city of the kingdom. At least one generation passed before Norwich recovered something of its old prosperity. In the fifteenth century it was still the chief seat of the woollen manufactures; the county of Norfolk kept its old pre-eminence, although rival centres of industry had grown up. There were, however, causes at work which at length reduced the capital of East Anglia to a comparatively poor state. One of the intermediate glimpses that we get of it--they are not many, even in Blomefield’s history--is the statute of 1455, to put down the enormous number of “pettifogging attorneys” in the city and county[370]. Its real decline was in the early Tudor reigns. When Henry VII. visited Norwich in 1497, the mayor in presenting the Queen’s usual gold cup with a hundred pieces in it, took occasion to tell the monarch “howbeit that they are more poor, and not of such wealth as they have been afore these days[371].” When the town suffered much from fires about the year 1505, the city of London raised large sums in aid of its rebuilding. To the same period belongs a municipal order that no one should dig holes in the market-place to get sand, without the mayor’s licence. In 1525, there was a general decay of work, the clothiers and farmers being unable to employ the artisans and labourers, who began to rise in revolt against the heavy taxes. An Act of 33 Hen. VIII. recites that the making and weaving of worsteds is wholly decayed and taken away from the city of Norwich and county of Norfolk--by the deceit and crafty practices of the great multitude of regrators and buyers of the said yarn. These evidences of decline in prosperity are in part long after the Black Death; but they seem to have been continuous from that event.