What is the number one industry in the county of Surrey in England?
Surrey
Surrey's most significant source of prosperity in the later Middle Ages was the production of woollen cloth, which emerged during that period as England's main export industry. The county was an early centre of English textile manufacturing, benefiting from the presence of deposits of fuller's earth, the rare mineral composite important in the process of finishing cloth, around Reigate and Nutfield. The industry in Surrey was focused on Guildford, which gave its name to a variety of cloth, "gilforte", which was exported widely across Europe and the Middle East and imitated by manufacturers elsewhere in Europe. However, as the English cloth industry expanded, Surrey was outstripped by other growing regions of production.
Though Surrey was not the scene of serious fighting in the various rebellions and civil wars of the period, armies from Kent heading for London via Southwark passed through what were then the extreme north-eastern fringes of Surrey during the Peasants' Revolt of 1381 and Cade's Rebellion in 1450, and at various stages of the Wars of the Roses in 1460, 1469 and 1471. The upheaval of 1381 also involved widespread local unrest in Surrey, as was the case all across south-eastern England, and some recruits from Surrey joined the Kentish rebel army.
Surrey
Surrey's cloth industry declined in the 16th century and collapsed in the 17th, harmed by falling standards and competition from more effective producers in other parts of England. The iron industry in the Weald, whose rich deposits had been exploited since prehistoric times, expanded and spread from its base in Sussex into Kent and Surrey after 1550. New furnace technology stimulated further growth in the early 17th century, but this hastened the extinction of the business as the mines were worked out. However, this period also saw the emergence of important new industries, centred on the valley of the Tillingbourne, south-east of Guildford, which often adapted watermills originally built for the now moribund cloth industry. The production of brass goods and wire in this area was relatively short-lived, falling victim to competitors in the Midlands in the mid-17th century, but the manufacture of paper and gunpowder proved more enduring. For a time in the mid-17th century the Surrey mills were the main producers of gunpowder in England. A glass industry also developed in the mid-16th century on the southwestern borders of Surrey, but had collapsed by 1630, as the wood-fired Surrey glassworks were surpassed by emerging coal-fired works elsewhere in England. The Wey Navigation, opened in 1653, was one of England's first canal systems.
George Abbot, the son of a Guildford clothworker, served as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1611–33. In 1619 he founded Abbot's Hospital, an almshouse in Guildford, which is still operating. He also made unsuccessful efforts to revitalise the local cloth industry. One of his brothers, Robert, became Bishop of Salisbury, while another, Maurice, was a founding shareholder of the East India Company who became the company's Governor and later Lord Mayor of London.