By the beginning of the seventeenth century the wool trade had become Leeds’ main industry. However, by the 1620s disreputable clothiers were seriously damaging the business by selling inferior cloth and claiming that it was the original Leeds product. To combat this, Leeds merchants argued that the town should be able to regulate the trade through its own corporation. Thus in July 1626, Charles I granted the town a charter and the first corporation of Leeds was established. However, the gradual economic prosperity of the town was halted as war and then pestilence swept the land. During the Civil War Leeds saw the Battle of Briggate fought out between Parliamentarian and Royalist forces in 1643. Two years later bubonic plague struck the town killing some 1,325 people.

Fortunately the town recovered fairly quickly from its setbacks and by 1720 when Daniel Defoe visited it he was able to remark of its cloth market that it was ‘a prodigy of its kind and not to be equalled in the world’. Knowledge of this period is considerably aided by the fact that the Leeds antiquarian, Ralph Thoresby kept a diary of the times and published, among other works, his famous Ducatus Leodiensis, the first history of the town. Not surprisingly, the premier historical society of Leeds, formed in 1889, was named after him.

The eighteenth century saw Leeds growing in strength industrially and economically as well as culturally. The textile trade was flourishing. The numerous coal mines in the area provided fuel for the increasing population and for the textile factories which were beginning to emerge as the Industrial Revolution began to develop. Predominant among the local entrepreneurs who led the way were Benjamin Gott and John Marshall.