A distinction should be made between the factory and the factory system. The latter was not new to England, having been employed during the Roman occupation; and with the introduction of the woolen industry under Edward III, we again find the factory system established on an extensive scale.
John Winchcombe, commonly called Jack of Newbury, who died about the year 1520, made use of the factory system on a very extensive scale. In Fuller’s Worthies you may read how he “was the most considerable clothier without fancy or fiction England ever beheld,” and how “his looms were his lands, whereof he kept one hundred in his house, each managed by a man and a boy.” Jack of Newbury was celebrated in a metrical romance, and the following lines taken from it contain an interesting description of his famous industrial establishment.
“Within one room, being large and long,
There stood two hundred looms full strong:
Two hundred men the truth is so,
Wrought in these looms all in a row;
By every one a pretty boy
Sat making quills with mickle joy.
And in another place hard by
A hundred women merily