One of the main instruments of that policy was the company of Merchant Adventurers. This was a _cartel_ of English merchants, mainly Londoners, which had gradually gained a control of the export trade of cloth to Antwerp--the chief Continental market. Throughout the sixteenth century it sought to prevent the English clothier from exporting his own cloth and the foreign merchant from coming to buy it in England. At the same time it restricted the number of its own members and limited the amount of trade done by each. So far, therefore, from having been, as is commonly supposed, the main organ for the expansion of English trade, it constituted, in fact, the main hindrance to that expansion. In 1551-1552 the government of Edward VI., in order to raise from the Adventurers a desperately needed loan, gave an official sanction to their monopoly. It stopped the trade of the Hanseatic merchants who had recently been exporting over one-third of the rapidly increasing output of English cloth,[16] and it authorised the Adventurers to exclude other native merchants from the trade. As the Adventurers could not find a market for the whole national output, they complained of over-production.[17] The corporate boroughs which were the older privileged centres of the industry naturally supported this complaint, and a series of enactments from 1552 to 1563 (including the Statute of Weavers and the Statute of Apprentices) which endeavoured to restrict the expansion of the textile manufactures in the country districts were largely due to the combined influence of these two vested interests and to the fiscal needs of the Government. [Footnote 16: J. M. Lappenberg, _Urkundliche Geschichte des Hansischen Stahlhofes zu London_, p. 175.] [Footnote 17: _Acts of the Privy Council for 1550_, p. 19.] The Hanseatic trade was restored under Philip and Mary, and during the first half of Elizabeth’s reign the German merchants continued to find a market for a considerable quantity of English cloth.