Merchant Adventurer or Jack of All Trades ?

The Suffolk Clothier in the 1460s.

 

Many historians have written about the great clothiers of medieval Suffolk, such as the Spryngs of Lavenham, who engaged in proto-industrial organisation and put out cloths to textile workers.  Few have studied their more humble neighbours who comprised the vast majority of clothiers at that time.  My work casts light on both the merchant adventurer and Jack of all trades, but this extract gives a voice to the humble majority. It considers what cloth they were making, where they lived, what proportion of the economically active population they comprised, what else they did for a living, how many children they had, how well they were doing, and how wide were their horizons. 

 

Research began by lining up in orderly fashion the clothiers named in the alnage accounts for Suffolk for the four years 1465/66 to 1468/69, before putting some flesh on their statistical bones from wills that they had left behind.  In focusing here on humbler clothiers, I have concentrated on the ninety whose wills were proved in the lower courts, rather than the higher courts of the Bishop of Norwich or Archbishop of Canterbury. 

 

The alnage accounts are a controversial medieval source.   In her study of the West Country cloth industry Professor Carus-Wilson took a very dim view, describing them as ‘second-hand compilations of doubtful veracity, often abbreviated, distorted, and repeated again and again’.  Historians have been kinder about the Suffolk alnage accounts prepared by William Whelpdale in the late 1460s.  In Professor Britnell’s opinion, William Whelpdale was ‘an experienced and trusted receiver of royal revenues’ and his accounts ‘if not a perfect mirror of reality, were at least the fruit of an attempt to make them so’.  They are, therefore, a unique source of evidence from the heartland of the most important industry in late medieval England.

 

They list towns, clothiers, the number of cloths each presented and the amount of tax each paid in the year.  Clothiers presented to the alnager whole cloths and straits in a proportion of about 3:5 in number and 12:5 in value.  Four fifths of the straits were presented in the first two years and none in the fourth.  Occasionally whole cloths are referred to as ‘brodes’ and just once straits are referred to as ‘kerseys’.  There are also references to ‘stricti’, but these almost certainly equated to straits and they are treated the same in the accounts.  No other type of cloth was recorded.  Straits were half the length, half the width and a quarter the weight of whole cloths.  There is no evidence that they were of different style or quality.

 

Location, rather than wealth, determined who made what type of cloth.  Babergh towns were strong on whole cloths and weak on straits.  Lavenham and Nayland production was entirely whole cloths and Long Melford’s clothiers presented only twenty straits in four years.  Only a few miles away Cosford towns around Hadleigh were concentrating on straits for the first three years’ accounts. 

 

Why this difference ?  The answer perhaps lies in tradition and technology.  At the close of the 14^th-century, when Hadleigh was in the forefront of the industry, the number of narrow cloths made in Suffolk outnumbered broad cloths by nearly thirteen to one.  Production of straits depended on narrow looms normally operated by one weaver, whilst whole cloth production depended on broader looms normally operated by two.  Both John Amyot the younger of Long Melford and John Risby of Lavenham owned their own ‘brodelomys’.  As whole cloths began to dominate the Suffolk market, the clothiers of Hadleigh and its satellites may have been reluctant to abandon practices, skills and technology that had served them so well in the past.  Perhaps at the end of the 1460s they finally conceded to new fangled ways.

 

In the four years 1465/66 to 1468/69 some 577 Suffolk men and women presented to the alnager for sealing a little over 20,000 whole cloths or their equivalent in straits, with production spread fairly evenly over these four years.  Nearly all clothiers were men. No more than fifteen women, scattered across seven different towns, appeared in the records.  Five of them, recent widows perhaps,  appeared only under their husbands’ names and just four presented cloth in more than one year.  Between them they presented 240 whole cloths or their equivalents in straits, a little more than 1% of the total.  Only one woman figured amongst the top hundred clothiers.

 

Some 285 of these clothiers lived in Glemsford, Lavenham, Long Melford, Nayland, Sudbury and the other towns and villages of the Hundred of Babergh.  Another eighty-two lived in Hadleigh and its surrounding villages in the neighbouring Half-Hundred of Cosford.  Communities of clothiers flourished, in descending order of prosperity, in the towns of Bury St Edmunds, Stowmarket and Ipswich.  But if the head of this great body of cloth-makers lay in south-west Suffolk and the spine ran along today’s A14 corridor, the tail wound its way around the perimeter of the county from Clare, Newmarket, Mildenhall and Brandon in the west, to Bungay and Beccles in the north, Lowestoft and Blythburgh in the east, and back down to East Bergholt and Stratford St Mary in the south, all of which had at least one resident clothier.  In no less than thirty-seven Suffolk towns and villages spread across fourteen of its twenty medieval Hundreds, clothiers were at work in the 1460s.

 

TABLE 1: THE LEADING CLOTH TOWNS

 

 

In four of  the six major centres of cloth-making in Babergh, namely Lavenham, Long Melford, Nayland and the Waldingfields as many as one in three of the taxable population was presenting cloth to the alnager.  In Hadleigh and Sudbury the cloth industry had been first established much earlier, so had had more time to establish itself and develop restrictive practices.  The proportion of clothiers in the taxable population was smaller – closer to one in five – and the cloth industry was more concentrated in the hands of a wealthy few.

 

            There appear to have been three quite different types of cloth economies within these towns - monopolies, oligopolies and free markets – depending on the degree of industrial concentration.  Bildeston best exemplified a monopoly with one clothier accounting for nearly 85% of the town’s cloth and another nearly all of the residue.  No other major town had a leading clothier with more than a 30% share.  Hadleigh well illustrated an oligopoly.  Six of its clothiers appeared in the county’s top ten and between them presented more than 70% of the towns’ cloth.  Elsewhere the top 10% in numbers in any town were presenting between 30% and 40% of total production.  Only four other Hadleigh clothiers figured in the county’s top one hundred and only six others were engaged sufficiently regularly in cloth-making to appear in at least three of the four annual alnage accounts. Lavenham had some characteristics of a free market in which a high proportion of the economically active population traded as equals.  Nearly two in five of its taxable population were making cloth and its top seven clothiers shared only a third of total production. Whilst only two of its clothiers figured in the county’s top ten, twenty-six figured in the top one hundred.   Nevertheless, most townsfolk were involved only intermittently in the cloth trade and only sixteen of seventy-two Lavenham clothiers appeared regularly in the accounts. 

 

Stowmarket offers an even better example of a free market, albeit on a more modest scale.  Nearly a hundred years before William Whelpdale drew up his accounts, the poll tax return of 1381 discloses that one in five of Stowmarket’s artificers was involved in textile production.  In the years that followed it became a much more populous town whose growth must be largely attributed to the cloth industry.  Whilst none of Stowmarket’s clothiers could claim to be merchant adventurers and only two figured in the county’s top one hundred, a third of its taxable population was making cloth, the share of its top three clothiers was limited to 30% of production and thirteen of its thirty one clothiers were appearing in the alnage accounts regularly.  

 

TABLE 2: CLOTHS AND CLOTHIERS

 

 

NB: This Table records the number of cloths presented, the number of clothiers presenting them and the amount of tax paid over the four year period.  An additional £7 9s.0d was paid by unidentified clothiers.

 

Assuming that a whole cloth sold for £3, that a sale would generate 10% profit and that a reasonably comfortable trading income was £10 a year - a clothier would have to sell 132 whole cloths over four years to make a living from the sale of cloth alone.  As Table 2 shows, this was unusual.  Only twenty-three clothiers, less than 4% of the total, presented 132 whole cloths or their equivalent in straits, although they accounted for nearly 40% of the total value of cloths presented.  Forty-one clothiers appeared in all four accounts against 344 who only ventured into the trade one year in four.    Medieval trade was a risky business and not even the cloth trade was sufficiently predictable or lucrative to rely on as a sole source of income. For the majority, cloth-making was very much a part time and intermittent activity.

 

Bequests of grain and livestock in their wills suggest that some clothiers were engaged in husbandry.  Alexander Sake of Sudbury left his plough with harness and horse to his son John to carry on the family farm.  Most, however, were working in one stage or another of the elongated chain of textile production.  Wool passed from spinsters to weavers such as John Amyot the younger, John Mey, Henry Pulcoo and John Risby; then to dyers such as Roger Crytott and John Hyne; then to fullers such as John Barker, Thomas Blowbolle, Adam Kechen, John Lacy, Roger Lynge and John Wyllymot; and then to shearmen – giving each of them some insight into how wool became cloth. At the far end of this virtual production line stood the draper John Odeham, the mercer John Flegge the elder and their like.  They sold cloth to their fellow countrymen, to those merchants who still shipped out of Ipswich and, through London’s great collecting point of Blackwell Hall, to merchant adventurers who carried it throughout Europe.  If not quite Jack of all trades, the clothier was Jack of all cloth trades. 

 

If their well being is measured by the size of their families then they were almost certainly doing a little better than their contemporaries.  Although large families were unusual, clothiers appear to have contributed to whatever population growth Suffolk may have experienced in the late 15^th-century.  Taking into account an imbalance between references in wills to sons and daughters, clothiers were producing on average marginally more than two children each.  That they appeared in their parents’ wills at all suggests that these children were the lucky ones who survived infancy.  Replacement rates in town and country differed markedly.  In the larger towns of Bury St Edmunds and Ipswich, where endemic plague exacerbated high levels of infant mortality, clothiers were producing on average less than one and a half children each and nearly half the Bury testators made no mention of any children.  Those in the country towns and villages were producing on average more than two and a half children each.

 

Another guide to clothiers’ fortunes is the amount they left to the high altar of their parish church for tithes forgotten.  Details are set out in Table 3.  Such bequests are only a ‘rough guide’ to testators’ wealth because they normally comprised only a tiny fraction of the estate.  Their value as a barometer of wealth lies in the fact that nearly all testators made such bequests.  Clothiers appear to have been doing significantly better than the average of all Suffolk testators over the period 1430-80.  Their relative wealth enabled them to give generously to church rebuilding, refurbishment and furnishing; long term employment of chantry priests; local friaries and religious gilds; and road repairs.

 

Table 3: Bequests to high altar of parish CHURCH of burial for tithes forgotten

 

 

NB: This Table records bequests made in Wills proved in the Courts of the Dean of Bocking, the Sacrist of St. Edmund’s Abbey, the Archdeacon of Sudbury and the Archdeacon Of Suffolk.  The figures for less than 5d include those wills in which the bequest is unknown.

 

Wills also illustrate clothiers’ interests outside their own parish.  Some had family and friends, others property, further afield.  A few probably had wider trading interests, such as the mercer Thomas Kyng who was a member of the Gild of the Holy Trinity in King’s Lynn and of the Penybrotherhood in London.  Nevertheless, nearly half made no reference to anybody or anything outside their own parish and less than one in four had interests more than ten miles from home.  One might have expected their engagement in the world of commerce to have given them wider horizons, but it seems that theirs was still a very parochial society. 

 

Suffolk men of all degrees and station, some alone and some with sons and brothers, were making cloth for national and international markets.  Some made a few, others a few hundred.  They were doing it well and they were doing well out of it.  Surviving evidence suggests that they were raising more children and accumulating more wealth than their contemporaries.  A few merchant adventurers were involved, but they were heavily outnumbered by Jacks of all trades who produced the majority of the cloths.

N.R. Amor (nra@gross.co.uk)

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