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Articles

Boom-Time Freaks or Heroic Industrial Pioneers? Clothing Entrepreneurs in Sixteenth- and Early Seventeenth-Century Berkshire

Pages 145-171 | Published online: 19 Jul 2013

References

  • John Skelton, The Complete English Poems ed. John Scattergood (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983); Lucy Toulin Smith ed., The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543, Vol. 1. Parts I-III (London: Centaur Press, 1964); Francis O. Mann ed., The Works of Thomas Deloney (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912); John Aubrey, Brief Lives: a Modern English Version, ed. Richard W. Barber (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1982); Thomas Fuller, The Worthies of England ed. John Freeman (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952); Daniel Defoe, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1st publ. 1724–26, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).
  • British Library, 1079.i.14 (13), The History of Jack of Newbury, called The Clothier of England; D.287(1), Jack of Newbury, written by James Hook and published in London c. 1750.
  • Donald C. Coleman, Industry in Tudor and Stuart England (London: Macmillan, 1975), pp. 11–12; Anthony R. Bridbury, Medieval English Clothmaking (Basingstoke: Heinemann, 1982 ), pp. 26–27.
  • F. M. L. Thompson, Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture: Britain 17801980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 ), p. 5.
  • The guild system was never well suited to the production of cloth because of the number and diversity of the manufacturing processes. The putting-out system facilitated expansion with minimal overheads because outworkers were employed on piece-rates in their own homes and often provided their own tools and equipment. Centralization was pursued through progressive investment in successive stages of manufacture (vertical integration) on one or more sites and in exceptional cases led to the development of proto-factories (large unmechanized workshops).
  • See above, pp. 155–56.
  • Reading broadcloths were heavyweight woollen cloths, plain woven and dyed in the wool. By the late sixteenth century the cloths were often described as medley or mingled cloths because of the distinctive finish achieved by mingling coloured wools before carding and weaving. The royal charter granted to Reading weavers in 1520 specified that Reading cloths were to contain seven quarters and a half at least in breadth throughout the cloth, six and 20 yards in length when thickened at the water and two yards in breadth when dry and thickened. The 1552 Act for True Making of Woollen Cloth specified that long broadcloths made in the town of Reading and the counties of Kent, Sussex and Yorkshire were to measure 28 to 30 yards in length and seven quarters in width between the lists at the water, whilst weighing at least 90 lbs (reduced to 86 lbs in 1557) when dry after fulling. The maximum length and minimum breadth of ‘long broadcloths and cloths which shall be made of died wools and mingled colours’ were further revised in 1607. Kersey was a smaller and lighter woollen fabric. The 1552 statute specified that each ordinary kersey was to measure between 17 and 18 yards in length at the water (revised to 16–18 yards in 1557) and to weigh at least 20 lbs when dry after fulling, whilst each sorting kersey was to measure between 17 and 18 yards in length at the water, but when dry after fulling was to weigh at least 23 lbs (reduced to 22 lbs in 1557). The specifications were revised in 1606. Berkshire Record Office, R/HMC/1, no. 16, Reading Weavers’ Charter of Privileges; Statutes of the Realm, 5 & 6 Ed. VI, c.6; 4 Phil. & Mary, c. 5, 4 Jas. I, c. 2, 27 Hen VIII, c. 12; 33 Hen VIII, c. 18, 5 & 6 Ed. VI, c. 6; 4 Phil. & Mary, c. 5, 3 Jas. I, c. 16.
  • William G. Hoskins, Social and Economic History of England, 5, The Age of Plunder: the England of Henry VIII, 1500–47 (Bath: Longman, 1976), pp. 94–95; Alan D. Dyer, The City of Worcester in the Sixteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1973), p. 81.
  • Christine A. Jackson, ‘The Berkshire Woollen Industry 1500–1650 ’ (unpublished PhD thesis, 1993, Reading University), pp. 19–22, 155. Reading Abbey was dissolved in September 1539.
  • Ibid., pp. 20–23.
  • Evidence for their business success is drawn from a range of sources including wills and inventories, merchants’ account books, commercial correspondence, borough records, state papers, Privy Council records and tax records.
  • Deloney uses material, for example, from Boccaccio’s Decameron. Warren E. Roberts, ‘Folklore in the Novels of Thomas Deloney’, in Winthrop E. Richmond ed., Studies in Folklore (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1957 ), p. 123. His interest in cloth-making may derive from his own early training and employment as a silk weaver.
  • Fuller, for example, writing mid-seventeenth century, clearly identifies his subject as John Winchcombe I and describes him as ‘the most considerable clothier (without fancy and fiction) England ever beheld’. Fuller, Worthies, p. 88. Defoe, writing half a century later, refers rather cautiously to ‘the famous Jack of Newbery’ whose story is ‘almost grown fabulous’ and mistakenly places the clothier in James I’s reign. Defoe, Tour, p. 268. Both John Winchcombes use the alias Smallwood, as do members of the succeeding generation.
  • The National Archives, prob/11/19 q. 27.
  • The National Archives, E315/464, Military Survey of Berkshire, 1522.
  • The National Archives, E179/73/132, E179/73/124, Lay Subsidy, 1524–25. Winchcombe’s assessment for the Anticipation of 1523 was based on moveable goods and amounted to £230. He contributed £28 to the subsidy of 1525, representing 23 per cent of Newbury’s tax bill of £120 3s 11d. See also Margaret Yates, Town and Countryside in Western Berkshire, c.1327–1600 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2007), p. 112.
  • Alec Betterton and David Dymond, Lavenham: industrial town (Lavenham: Terence Dalton Limited, 1989), p. 42. Eileen Power, The Paycockes of Coggleshall (London: Methuen, 1920), p. 49. Hoskins, The Age of Plunder, p. 39. William G. Hoskins, Provincial England: Essays in Social and Economic History (London: MacMillan, 1963), p. 73. Although Spring’s wealth was exceptional, Thomas Smyth of Long Melford was valued at £600 on moveables and several other clothiers in the Babergh Hundred of Suffolk at c. £400. John Pound ed., The Military Survey of 1522 for Babergh Hundred (Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, 1986), pp. 75, 83.
  • Florence Edler, ‘Winchcombe Kersies in Antwerp’, Economic History Review, 1st ser., vii (1936 ), pp. 57–58.
  • Stanley T. Bindoff ed., The History of Parliament: the House of Commons, 150958, iii (London: HMSO, 1982), p. 632.
  • Edler, ‘Winchcombe kersies’, p. 59.
  • Easter fell on 6 April 1539. The National Archives, SP/1/143, Letter from Winchcombe to Cromwell.
  • Edler, ‘Winchcombe Kersies’, p. 60.
  • Mercers’ Company Archives, London, Sir Thomas Gresham’s Daybook, 1546–52.
  • Mann, Works of Thomas Deloney, pp. 20–21. Deloney appears to contradict himself in the title-page to his novel when he claims that Winchcombe ‘set continually five hundred poore people at worke, to the great benefite of the Common-wealth’. But this may refer merely to the number of unskilled workers employed.
  • Bindoff, Commons, iii, p. 405; Peter H. Ditchfield ed., Victoria County History of Berkshire, iv (London: St Catherine’s Press, 1924), p. 110.
  • Barbara McClenaghan, The Springs of Lavenham (Ipswich: W. E. Harrison, 1924), p. 7.
  • Mercers’ Company Accounts, London, Gresham’s Daybook, entry no. 5250; Southampton Record Office, Southampton Brokage Books, SC5//45. See David Peacock, ‘Dyeing Winchcombe Kersies and Other Kersey Cloth in Sixteenth-Century Newbury’, Textile History, xxxvii, no. 2 (2006 ), pp. 190–92; and Yates, Town and Countryside, p. 84.
  • The National Archives, prob/2/345. In his will of the previous year, Winchcombe valued the lease of his dyehouse ‘with the howse and furniture p[er]teyning thereunto’ at £60. The National Archives, prob/11/40 q. 26.
  • David Peacock, ‘The Winchcombe Family and the Woollen Industry in Sixteenth-Century Newbury’ (unpublished PhD thesis, 2003, Reading University), pp. 55–57.
  • The National Archives, prob/11/19 q. 27.
  • Oxford Archaeology ‘24 Northbrook Street, Newbury’; Berkshire Record Office, Wills, D/ A1/132/183.
  • The National Archives, LR/2/187, fols. 112–23, Survey of the Manor of Newbury.
  • James Gairdner and Robert H. Brodie eds, Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic of Henry VIII, xv, no. 44, p. 109; no. 88, p. 113.
  • Ibid., xvii, 1154 no. 30, p. 634; SGCA, leases, xv. 5.4.
  • Bindoff, Commons, iii, pi 633. The inquisition post mortem value of Spring’s lands in 1523 was £370–£380 according to separate figures provided in the Chancery and Exchequer series. Hoskins, Age of Plunder, p. 39.
  • The National Archives, prob/2/345.
  • Kenneth H. Rogers, Warp and Weft: the Somerset and Wiltshire Woollen Industry (Buckingham: Barracuda, 1986), p. 24.
  • Mercers’ Company Archives, London, Gresham’s Day Book.
  • Berkshire Record Office, T/R255, p. 31, Transcript of Newbury Parish Register, Burials 1538–64; Jackson, ‘Berkshire Woollen Industry’, p. 147.
  • A tod was a measurement of quantity used for weighing wool in and was normally 28 pounds.
  • Berkshire Record Office, D/A1/132/183, Wills.
  • Warp and Weft, p. 24.
  • Coleman, Industry in Tudor and Stuart England, pp. 11–12; Bridbury, Medieval English Clothmaking, pp. 26–27.
  • Mercers’ Company Accounts, London, Gresham’s Day Book.
  • The National Archives, prob/11/57 q.47. His will was modified in 1575.
  • The National Archives, E179/73/43, Lay Subsidy 1543–45.
  • Michael MacLeod, Shaw House unmasked (Skye, 1999), p. 4.
  • Ibid., pp. 9, 17.
  • The conglomeration of six or more looms would have been considered substantial.
  • Mercers’ Company Archives, London, Gresham’s Daybook. Gresham purchased 1,322 kersies from Bennet, August 1548-May 1550.
  • The National Archives, E101 347/17, Exchequer Accounts, Aulnage, List of Clothiers; George D. Ramsay ed., John Isham Mercer and Merchant Adventurer, two account books of a London merchant in the reign of Elizabeth I, xxi (Gateshead: Northants. Rec. Soc., 1962 ), p. lv.
  • St George’s Chapel Archives, Windsor, xv. 54.91; xv. 30.38, xv. 29.2, xv. 29.4, leases; xv. 58.15, suits-at-law; The National Archives, C2/Eliz/C6/49, Chancery, Six Clerks Office, Pleadings 1558–1603.
  • The National Archives, prob/11/80, q. 87.
  • The National Archives, prob/11/136, q. 108; Money, Newbury, p. 549.
  • Berkshire Record Office, D/A1/54/74ab, wills.
  • Berkshire Record Office, R/HMC/I, no. 16, Reading Weavers’ Charter; Jackson, ‘Berkshire Woollen Industry’, pp. 104–05.
  • The National Archives, prob/11/59 q. 6; Berkshire Record Office, R/HMC/LVI, Reading Gild Rules.
  • The National Archives, prob/11/84 q. 58; prob/11/67 q. 29; prob/11/62 q. 27.
  • A stockard was a card fixed to a stock or other support which was used to prepare wool for spinning.
  • The National Archives, prob/2/411; prob/11/62 q. 18.
  • Thomas Bye, fuller, served as Mayor of the Merchant Gild of Reading, 1516–17. Walter Bye served as burgess and was related by marriage to the Watlingtons and Kendricks. John M. Guilding ed., Records of the Borough of Reading: Diary of the Corporation, i (London: James Parker & Co., 1892 –96), p. 103.
  • Drapers’ Company Archives, London, Freedom List, 1567–1656, FA1.
  • Guilding, Reading Records, i, p. 448.
  • The National Archives, prob/11/73 q. 9; Oxford Archaeology, ‘Reading Oracle’, i, pp. 22–36; Berkshire Record Office, D/QR/19/2/1, fols 1–2, 10–11, John Kendrick Accounts, Charity, 1625–50. In 1568, Thomas Kendrick received dispensation from the Privy Council to exercise ‘. . . the mistery of making woollen cloths long or short and kerseys, pynned whites and plaine streites and to sell the same . . .’. He acquired a substantial house and cloth-making premises in Minster Street and invested in land in Reading, Sindlesham, and Shinfield before his early death c. 1588. Calendar of Patent Rolls, iv, no. 1132, p. 197; The National Archives, prob/11/73 q. 9.
  • Berkshire Record Office, Reading Box 67, Bundle 3, item 2, Charity Papers.
  • Guilding, Reading Records, ii, pp. 433–35; Berkshire Record Office, D/A2 c. 61, p. 77, Berkshire Archdeaconry Court Records, Deposition Book, 1616–20.
  • Christine Jackson ed., Newbury Kendrick Workhouse Records 162741, viii (Reading: Berkshire Records Society, 2004), p. 211.
  • The National Archives, prob/11/73 q. 9.
  • British Library, Add. MS 72421, Privy Council Enquiry into the Kendrick Legacy.
  • M. Appleby, The Kendrick Book (Reading: Bradley, 1948), pp. 55–56.
  • Guilding, Reading Records, iv, p. 296.
  • Drapers’ Company Archives, FA1, Freedom List, 1567–1656; QB1Quarterage Book, 1605–18.
  • Leo Noordegraaf, ‘The New Draperies in the northern Netherlands, 1500–1899’, in Negley B. Harte ed., The New Draperies in the Low Countries and England (New York: Pasold Research Fund, Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 178.
  • Christopher G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 15001700, ii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984 ), pp. 109–10.
  • Peter H. Ramsey, ‘Two Early Tudor Cloth Merchants: Sir Thomas Kitson and Sir Thomas Gresham’, in Marco Spallanzani ed., Produzione, commercio e consumo dei panni di lana (nei secoli XII-XVIII) (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1976), pp. 388–89.
  • Jackson, ‘Woollen Industry’, pp. 149–50.
  • Ibid., pp. 233–49; Astrid Friis, Alderman Cockayne’s Project and the Cloth Trade (London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1927), pp. 129–30, 62–65.
  • Peter J. Bowden, The Wool Trade in Tudor and Stuart England (London: MacMillan, 1971), pp. 62–63.
  • Jackson, Workhouse Records, viii, passim; Peacock, ‘Dyeing Winchcombe Kersies’, pp. 187–202.
  • Both Reading and Newbury boasted several fulling mills within their boundaries and there were numerous other mills within easy reach of the two towns. Christine Jackson, ‘The Berkshire Woollen Industry c.1500–1650 ’, in Joan Dils edi, An Historical Atlas of Berkshire (Reading: Berkshire Record Society, 1998), pp. 52–53.
  • About 38.5 per cent of land in the region was enclosed compared with 23.9 per cent for the county as a whole. Ross Wordie ed., Enclosure in Berkshire, 1485–1885, v (Reading: Berkshire Record Society, 2000), pp. xxvi-xlxvii.
  • Calculated from the lay subsidy of 1523–27. Alan D. Dyer, ‘Ranking Lists of English Medieval Towns’, in D. Palliser ed., The Cambridge Urban History of BritainiI, 600–1540 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000 ), pp. 761–67.
  • Calculated using decadal count of baptisms. Jackson, ‘Berkshire Woollen Industry’, pp. 35–36, 190–91.
  • John Styles, ‘Embezzlements, Industry and the Law in England, 1500–1800’, in Maxine Berg, Pat Hudson and Michael Sonenscher eds, Manufacture in Town and Country Before the Factory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 175–78.
  • Berg, et al., Manufacture in Town and Country, pp. 6–8, 29.
  • Ibid., p. 5. Archives, prob/11/59 q. 6; prob/11/73 q. 9.
  • Ibid., prob/11/40 q. 26; McLeod, Shaw House, p. 6.
  • Joan Dils, Redding, 1540–1640 (Reading, 1981), p. 21.
  • The National Archives, LR/2/187, fols 112–32, 314–44, Survey of the Town of Reading. See also above, p. 153.
  • Berkshire Record Office, D/A1/132/183, Wills; Oxford Archaeology, ‘24 Northbrook Street, Newbury’; Reading Library, John Willis’s Plan of the Town of Newbury and Speenhamland, 1768, LM 756.
  • Bodleian Library, DOUCE, D225(1), Sketch by John Flaxman in Deloney ‘Jack of Newbury’.
  • Walter Money, ‘Archaeological Notes’, Transactions of the Newbury District Field Club, v (1895 –1911), p. 212.
  • The National Archives, prob/11/40 q. 26.
  • Berkshire Record Office, D/A1/35/188b, Wills.
  • Laurence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England, 15401880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984 ), p. 70; TNA, prob/11/40 q. 26.
  • The National Archives, prob/11/73 q. 9.
  • The National Archives, prob/11/57 q. 47; McLeod, Shaw House, p. 15.
  • The National Archives, prob/11/59 q. 6.
  • Stone and Stone, An Open Elite, pp. 3–4.
  • Michael Mascuch, ‘Social Mobility and Middling Self-Identity: the Ethos of British Autobiographers, 1600–1750 ’, Social History, xx, no. 1 (1995 ), pp. 45–61.
  • Thomas More, Utopia, trans. Paul Turner (London, 1965); Aquinas, Selected Political Writings, ed. Alexander P. D’Entreves, trans. J. G. Dawson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970); James R. Farr, Artisans in Europe, 1300–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 10–15.
  • Although Protestant writers and preachers promoted the value and dignity of labour, and Puritans such as William Perkins advised that wealth was a sign of God’s blessing and could be enjoyed in good conscience provided it was deployed wisely, their preaching merely brought greater appreciation for industrial and commercial success and had a negligible impact upon the social status of clothiers. Laura C. Stevenson, Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984 ), p. 134.
  • Martin Weiner, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 18501980 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981 ), p. 97.
  • George D. Ramsay, The Wiltshire Woollen Industry in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1943), pp. 46–47.
  • Walter Money, The History of Newbury (Newbury: W. J. Blacket, 1905), pp. 206–07.
  • Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic of Henry VIII, xv, no. 14, p. 6.
  • Bindoff, Commons, iii, p. 633.
  • Catalogue for Exhibition of the Royal House of Tudor, London, 1890, no. 201.
  • Bindoff, Commons, iii, p. 633. have sat in earlier Parliaments but the records are missing. Bindoff, Commons, iii, p. 633i
  • Guilding, Reading Records, i, pp. 220, 253–54, 563, 309.
  • P. W. Hasler, The History of Parliament, the House of Commons, 15581603, ii (London: HMSO, 1981), p. 333.
  • Money, Newbury, p. 511.
  • Letters and Papers Foreign and Domestic of Henry VIII, xiv, Part 1, no. 396, p. 157; xvi, no. 625, p. 297.
  • The National Archives, prob/11/19 q. 27.
  • Ibid., prob/11/19 q. 27.
  • Ibid., prob/11/62 q. 18.
  • Ibid., prob/11/40 q. 26.
  • BRO, T/R269, Transcript of Newbury Parish Register, Baptisms 1538–1634.
  • The National Archives, prob/11/144; prob/11/167.
  • Whilst Stumpe’s industrial pragmatism in developing a redundant abbey site and investing in former monastic mills is impressive, his organizational innovation was less exceptional than that of his Berkshire contemporaries because he produced semi-manufactured cloths and thus operated a less complex manufacturing cycle. Bindoff, Commons, iii, p. 405.
  • Betterton and Dymond, Lavenham, p. 30.
  • Herbert Heaton, The Yorkshire Woollen and Worsted Industries from the Earliest Times to the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2nd edn 1965 ), p. 92; Alan D. Dyer, The City of Worcester in the Sixteenth Century (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1973), pp. 94–98.
  • Michael Zell, Industry in the Countryside: Wealden Society in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: CUP, 1994), pp. 164–86.
  • Robert S. Duplessis, Transitions to Capitalism in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 130; Angel García Sanz, Desarrollo y crisis del antiguo regimen en Castilla la Vieja: economiá y sociedad en tierras de Segovia 15001814 (Madrid: Akal, 1977), pp. 213–20 i
  • Of the 27 clothiers listed in Reading’s guild lists c. 1570 only four (Walter Bye, Thomas Kendrick, Thomas Turner and Richard Watlington) boasted descendants in business in 1623. Only the Byes were active in cloth-making in Reading for more than a century.
  • Berkshire Record Office, Wills, B222d; The National Archives, prob/11/62 q. 18.
  • See above, pp. 151–52, 154–55.
  • See above, p. 152.
  • Jackson, ‘Berkshire Cloth Industry’, pp. 233–49.
  • Hoskins, Plunder, p. 157; Frederick J. Fisher, ‘The Development of the London Food Market, 1540–1640 ’, Economic History Review, x (1939 –40), p. 51; James A. Galloway ed., ‘One Market or Many? London and the Grain Trade of England’, in J. A. Galloway ed., Trade, Urban Hinterlands and Market Integration c. 1300–1600 (London: Centre for Metropolitan History, Institute of Historical Research, 2000), pp. 28–29. For example in 1601 the former clothier, Richard Watlington, left his dwelling house to his daughter Elizabeth and her husband William Iremonger, together with ‘my brewehouse, my scalles, my woodbarton, all my brewing vesseles, furnaces and moveables in my brewhouse and whatsoever to my brewehouse belongith, w[i]th the horse and carte used about the same . . .’. The National Archives, prob. 11/98 q. 60.
  • Defoe, Tour, pp. 493–94, 500.
  • William B. Crump, The Leeds Woollen Industry 17801820 (Leeds: Thoresby Society, 1931), pp. 24–25, 31.

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