Introduction

Summary

This was a gallant clothier sure, Whose fame for ever shall endure.

Thomas Deloney, Jack of Newbury (1597)

A handful of clothiers earned vast fortunes making and marketing cloth in the later Middle Ages. Thomas Paycocke of Coggeshall, the Springs of Lavenham, William Stumpe of Malmesbury, and John Winchcombe of Newbury are still remembered in their communities, five centuries after their birth. These were the multi-millionaires of their day, often rising from humble origins to fame and fortune. In some cases, their children even joined the ranks of the gentry. Such rapid social mobility intrigues us even today. These clothiers extended, enlarged and rebuilt parish churches, and left instructions for elaborate remembrance practices to ensure that they and their families were commemorated after their deaths. Their names were celebrated in verse: the poet of the royal court John Skelton wrote of his contemporary, ‘Good Spring of Lavenham’, while two generations later Thomas Deloney celebrated the life of John Winchcombe as ‘Jack of Newbury’, a pioneer of factory production. This book examines these individuals, together with their less prominent and prosperous contemporaries, the far more numerous group of clothiers who might be described as the ‘jacks of all trades’. What were their origins and how did they accumulate their fortunes? To what extent were they responsible for transforming the cloth industry and their wider communities?

The Oxford English Dictionary defines a clothier as ‘one engaged in the cloth trade’. The entry in the dictionary also includes ‘a maker of woollen cloth’, ‘one who performs the operations subsequent to the weaving’, and ‘a seller of cloth and men's clothes’. For the purposes of this book though, we need to define the term more precisely. The clothier was involved in both the making and marketing of woollen cloth. He, or occasionally she, was not usually a maker of clothes, which was the role of the tailor. Both contemporaries and historians have seen clothiers as a distinctive group of entrepreneurs who emerged during the later Middle Ages to coordinate the different stages of production within the textile industry, and to control an increasing share of the cloth trade.