fact from the innkeepers, doubtless because prosperity in the town meant full tankards emptied at the inns. Every alehouse keeper had to have a signboard hung above his door with a woolsack painted on it, under a fine of six-and-eightpence; he had to buy the sign from the hall warden at the Town Hall, and pay two shillings for it. Woolsacks were added to the borough arms. Yet the prosperity of the trade was short-lived, after all. The pride of Guildford's industry fell. Less than fifty years after the alehouse signs swung woolpacks to guide thirsty clothiers, the business came down with a run. Godalming, Farnham, and Wonersh were other flourishing centres of the trade, and in 1630 one Samuel Vassall, the merchant who took the Godalming and Wonersh cloth for shipment abroad, failed his customers. He was under arrest, and no one else could be found to take up his contracts. All the Godalming eggs were in one basket, and Guildford and Farnham suffered in sympathy. Three thousand workers were in distress; it was the beginning of the end. It could not have happened, of course, if Samuel Vassall's failure had been the only difficulty. That would have been got over somehow. But there was another agent at work. The real cause of the destruction of the Surrey cloth industry was the fact that for years the Company of Merchant Adventurers and the London Drapers' Company had been working to get the cloth trade into their own hands, and they had practically succeeded. Godalming held on for a time; but Guildford, Wonersh, and Farnham went under. Aubrey is not content with so simple an explanation. He scents a swindler. The trade of Wonersh, he writes, "chiefly consisted in making blue cloth for the Canary Islands; the decay and indeed ruin of their trade was their avaricious method of stretching their cloth from 18 yards to 22 or 23, which being discovered abroad, they returned their commodity on their hands and it would sell at no market. The same fraudulent practice caused the decay of the Blews at Guildford." He probably muddled up musty scandals with the effect of pure business competition. He is not the last to make mistakes connected with a vanished trade. There still lingers a superstition at Guildford that Rack Close, not far from the Castle, is the place where unfortunate prisoners (perhaps the Jews whom Martin Tupper describes as suffering agonies of enforced dentistry and other tortures) were stretched upon the rack. It is, of course, the plot of ground on which were set up the wooden racks, or frames, on which the Guildford blue cloth was stretched and dried in the wind and sun.