"The making of Bone-lace has been an ancient Manufacture of England, and the Wisdom of our Parliaments all along thought it the Interest of this Kingdom to prohibit its Importation from Foreign Parts.... This has revived the said Languishing Manufacture, and there are now above one hundred thousand in England who get their living by it, and earn by mere Labour £500,000 a year, according to the lowest computation that can be made; and the Persons employed on it are, for the most part, Women and children who have no other means of Subsistence. The English are now arrived to make as good lace in Fineness and all other respects as any that is wrought in Flanders, and particularly since the last Act, so great an improvement is made that way that in Buckinghamshire, the highest prized lace they used to make was about eight shillings per yard, and now they make lace there of above thirty shillings per yard, and in Dorsetshire and Devonshire they now make lace worth six pound per yard.... "... The Lace Manufacture in England is the greatest, next to the woollen, and maintains a multitude of People, which otherwise the Parishes must, and that would soon prove a heavy burthen, even to those concerned in the Woollen Manufacture. On the Resolution, which shall be taken in this affair depends the Well-being, or ruin of numerous families in their Country. Many laws have been made to set our Poor on Work, and it is to be hoped none will be made to take away work from Multitudes who are already employed."[1143] PLATE LXXXVIII. [Illustration: ENGLISH, DEVONSHIRE. REPRODUCTIONS OF OLD HONITON WITH THE VRAI RÉSEAU.--Made under Mrs. Fowler's direction. Widths about 4 inches. Photo by A. Dryden.] _To face page 402._ {403}Even in 1655, when the variety of points furnished matter for a letter from the members of the Baptist Church assembled at Bridgewater, the "Beleeven men," unwilling to injure so nourishing a commerce, merely censure "points and more laces than are required on garments," and these they desired might be proceeded against "with all sweetness and tenderness and long-suffering."[1144] The conciliatory measures of the Puritans, maybe, affected the trade less than the doing of Lord Cambury and Lord Churchill's dragoons in the suppression of Monmouth's rebellion in 1680, by which time the lace-making art was carried on in many small country places in Devon. They pillaged the lace-makers right and left, and, when quartered at Colyton,[1145] these unruly soldiers broke into the house of one William Bard, a dealer in bone lace, and there stole merchandise to the amount of £325 17s. 9d.[1146]