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
Guildford is the county town, where Surrey County Council has never sat, based in London at Newington (Southwark), Lambeth, and finally today Kingston upon Thames, since 1965 within Greater London — it is outside its administrative area . The county has the highest proportion of woodland in England, being a rump (residual) county reduced by successive territory losses to London. Inhabited by about 1.1 million people, Surrey is the third-most-populous county of the nine in the South East, under the region's official definition which excludes Essex and other counties usually, colloquially, considered to be in the South East of England.