Page:VCH Berkshire 1.djvu/486

 A HISTORY OF BERKSHIRE that the cloth trade was carried on at an early period. At these mills the cloth was scoured and thickened by being saturated with hot water, and made to shrink by being worked under the falling weight of the fulling stocks. The material is thus made to shrink up and thicken. A fulling-mill is mentioned as existing at Newbury as early as 1205.* The cloth produced by these early English manufacturers was very coarse and very different from that woven by Flemish looms. The manufacture was carried on in the houses of the people, who were ignorant of the arts and processes used by the cloth-makers of the Netherlands. They wove hempen linen and woollen coverings, suitable for sacks, dairy- cloths, wool-packs, sails of windmills and similar purposes. 3 It was not until the reign of Edward III. and the first immigrations of the Flemings that any improvements were effected in English manufactures. The Abbot of Abingdon had his fulling-mill, which was in ruins in 15 55, when the town received its first charter and was then to be rebuilt. A fulling-mill existed at West- brooke, near Newbury, in the time of Henry VI., when one Robert Curteys was lessee of a messuage with a fulling-mill in Benham manor. 3 One of the mills of Hungerford called Dun Mill was a ' tucking ' or fulling-mill, and was held in 1614 by Thomas Holmes of Alexander Chock, Esquire, of Avington. 4 As late as 1691 an action was brought by the owner or lessee of the Town Mill, which before the enfeoffment of the borough was the king's mill, in the Court of the Exchequer in order to restrain the owner of Dun Mill from grind- ing the corn of the inhabitants. The Court decided that the tenants of the Hungerford and Sandon fee were bound to have their corn ground at the Town Mill, and that Dun Mill must be either pulled down or converted into a tucking-mill again. It is stated, however, that it was found impos- sible to put the decree into operation, and the mill remains to this day a corn mill. 5 The Berkshire wool was of such good quality that it commanded a price con- 1 Rot. Normanniz, No. 35, quoted by W. Money, Hist, of Newbury, p. 66. 2 Gibbins, Industrial History of England, p. 51. 3 The heading of this document, with the date, is gone, but it is considered at the P.R.O. to belong to the reign of Henry VI. 4 Mutilated Hungerford Town Articles in the possession of the Corporation, 1614. From the information of Mr. W. H. Sum- mers, who is transcribing the documents in the possession of the Corporation of Hungerford. siderably above the average, ranking with other kinds thirteenth in the list of forty-four given in Professor Rogers' History of Agri- culture and Price, iii. 704, for the year 1454. A number of lists of prices of wool collected by Mr. Leadam 8 show that about the year 1547 the wool of Cotswold and Berkshire ranked, after Leicester and Marche, as the highest priced wools in England. Hence the Berkshire clothiers had excellent material for this cloth. The county in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries ceased to be a purely agricultural district, producing a large quantity of wool and exporting it as a raw material to the Netherlands to be made into cloth ; and the cloth manufactured on the Berkshire looms had a good reputation in the markets of the world. In 1549 the English envoy at Antwerp advised Protector Somerset to send to that city for sale a thousand pieces of ' Winchcombe's Kersies.' 7 These were the products of the looms of the famous Jack of Newbury, who figures largely in the history of the Berkshire clothing industry. This John Winchcomb, alias Smalwoode, commonly called ' Jack of Newbury,' was the most famous of the Berkshire clothiers who lived in the reigns of Henry VII. and Henry VIII. The romantic details of his life will be more abundantly set forth in a later volume in the topographical section. He became an apprentice of a rich clothier in Newbury at the time when the trade was most flourishing, married his master's widow, and became very prosperous. Deloney's Pleasant History of John Winchcomb is valu- able, not so much as an accurate story of his life, or for its literary merit, but as being highly illustrative of old manners and customs of the time when the industry was most flourishing, and of the scenes which the writer had doubtless witnessed in the old cloth manufactories. Deloney's description of a clothing establishment in the time of the Tudors is doubtless drawn from personal observation : Within one room, being large and long, There stood two hundred loomes full strong. Two hundred men, the truth is so, Wrought in their loomes all in a row. By every one a prettie boy Sate making quills with mickle joy; And in another place hard by An hundred women merrily Were carding hard with joyful cheere, Who singing sat with voyces cleere. And in a chamber close beside, Introduction to the Domesday of Inclosures, i. 69. ' Burnley, Wool and Woolcombing. 388