The concentration of iron merchants in Birmingham was significant in the development of the town's manufacturing as well as its commercial activities. Able to serve a wider market due to the town's extensive trading links, the metalworkers of Birmingham could diversify into increasingly specialised activities. Over the course of the 17th century the lower-skilled nail, scythe and bridle trades – producing basic iron goods for local agricultural markets – moved west to the towns that would later make up the Black Country, while Birmingham itself focused on an increasingly wide range of more specialist, higher-skilled and more lucrative activities. The hearth tax returns for Birmingham for 1671 and 1683 show the number of forges in the town increasing from 69 to 202, but the later figures also show a far wider variety of trades, including hiltmakers, bucklemakers, scalemakers, pewterers, wiredrawers, locksmiths, swordmakers, and workers in solder and lead. Birmingham's economic flexibility was already apparent at this early stage: workers and premises often changed trades or practiced more than one, and the presence of a wide range of skilled manufacturers in the absence of restrictive trade guilds encouraged the development of entirely new industries. The range of goods produced in late-17th century Birmingham, and its international reputation, were illustrated by the French traveller Maximilien Misson who visited Milan in 1690, finding "fine works of rock crystal, swords, heads of canes, snuff boxes, and other fine works of steel", before remarking "but they can be had better and cheaper at Birmingham".