The industrial component of the district's rural economy, as has already been shown, was large and diverse enough to employ a significant fraction of the local population. In most respects this industrial sector and its participants are documented only fleetingly and tangentially, and much remains to be discovered about its organisation. But one industry was large and important enough to lend some critical insights into more general questions of the area's economy and social structure.

Northern Essex, along with districts of southern Suffolk just across the River Stour, was among the premier clothmaking regions of England in the later middle ages, although the fortunes, organisation and geography of the local industry were by no means static throughout the period. By the last decade of the fourteenth century, the only other English region of comparable geographical size, to which Essex and Suffolk ranked second in production of cloths of assise, was the southwestern area of Wiltshire, Somerset and Bristol with its hinterland. But by contrast with this latter region, the rise to prominence of Essex and Suffolk was relatively late, and the second half of the fourteenth century was a time of fairly rapid development of local textile production.

Within Essex during this period manufacturing cloth, mainly cheaper, medium- to lightweight grades of woollens, achieved an importance within the local rural economy second only to agriculture, at least in terms of relative numbers of persons employed. Such is indicated by the 1381 poll-tax returns: among ‘households’ whose heads were recorded with occupational designations in all listings surviving for the entire county, textile workers (weavers, fullers, dyers, tailors, or drapers) were outnumbered only by agriculturalists and labourers.