By an Act passed in 1504 riparian owners along the Severn were authorised, notwithstanding the earlier enactment of the freedom of the river itself, to take "reasonable recompense and satisfaction" from every person going upon their land to draw a boat. There is no evidence that the landowners availed themselves of this authority; but in a later Act, passed in 1532, it was stated that although, "time out of mind," people had used, without any imposition or toll, a path {114}one foot and a half broad on each side of the river for drawing their boats, "of late certain covetous persons" had "interrupted" those so using the said paths, "taking of them fines and bottles of wine," and the Act imposed a penalty of forty shillings on anyone attempting to enforce such tolls, except as regards the reasonable recompense which the riparian owners could claim. This enactment seems to have been due to the action of local officials in Worcester, Gloucester and other places on the river in seeking, as told in Nash's "History and Antiquities of Worcestershire" (1781), to raise revenue for their cities or towns by taxing traders who used the Severn for the transport of their commodities. The importance of the Severn, from the point of view of trade and commerce, in the middle of the sixteenth century, is suggested by what William Harrison wrote of it in his "Description of the Sauerne" (1577): "As the said stream, in length of course, bountie of water, and depth of chanell commeth farre behind the Thames, so for other commodities, as trade of merchandize, plentie of cariage ... it is nothing at all inferiour to or second to the same." One reason for the early commercial prosperity of the Severn towns was the important trade in flannels which they carried on with Wales; though the industry was, also, considerably developed in the Severn counties themselves. Made mostly in the farm-houses and cottages of Montgomeryshire, Merionethshire and Denbighshire, before the days of factories, the flannels and webs were taken by the makers to the fortnightly market at Welshpool. This was a convenient centre for the drapers from Shrewsbury, who, journeying thither along the Severn, would, at one time, buy up the entire stock; though later on they had competitors in the traders from Wrexham and other places. Although carried on only as a domestic industry, the making of these Welsh flannels underwent considerable expansion, Archdeacon Joseph Plymley saying, in his "General View of the Agriculture of Salop," published in 1803, "The manufacture in Wales by means of jennies introduced into farm-houses and other private houses is four times as great, I am told, as it was twenty years ago." At Shrewsbury the wares thus brought down the Severn from Wales were purchased mostly by merchants from London who either sent them to Continental markets or else consigned {115}them to South America or the West Indies, for conversion there into clothing for the slaves.