102 FOURTEENTH CENTURY LIFE IN BRIDPORT. 



always famous for its rope trade. Even back in the reign of 

 King John the town had supplied the ropes, sailcloth, hawsers,' 

 great cables, and all other tackling for the royal navy, and 

 when in 1322, the budding shipping port of Newcastle-on-Tyne 

 desired to start the same trade in the North, the Sheriff of Dorset 

 was ordered to send six ropers from the Wessex town, to teach 

 their northern cousins the mysteries of rope making. I suppose 

 that most of us have heard the well-worn witticism of the 

 "Bridport dagger" as an euphemism for the hangman's coil. 

 Just as the Parliamentary candidate, whose rival had charged him 

 with having an ancestor hanged for felony, assured his constitu- 

 ents that the said worthy had merely broken his neck by slipping 

 through a hole in a platform at a public meeting, so also the 

 little allusion to being stabbed with a Bridport dagger softened 

 any reference to life's ending, when the law secured its victim. 

 John Leland, the antiquary, was at Bridport in Henry VIII.'s 

 reign collecting materials for his History, and, of course, the 

 people told him the ancient joke, but he entirely missed the 

 point, and gravely wrote down "At Bridporth be made good 

 daggers." I mention this because the rope trade was at its 

 height here in the early fourteenth century, and there are several 

 references in these wills which shew that rope was not only 

 manufactured, but the raw material was also grown on the spot ; 

 for instance, such legacies as these: "To my granddaughter 

 Johana Clench one bottell of hemp, Item to Alice daughter of 

 Philip Doe two bottells of hemp and one piece of land sown 

 with hemp." The term ' bottell ' was evidently something to 

 do with the local manner of measuring this material, which is 

 alluded to as early as King John's reign, when the King orders 

 tackling for the navy ' according to Bridport weight.' " 



Another testator bequeaths "one rood of hemp land lying in 

 the culture which is called Pencheford." Some fields appear 

 to have been specially suited as regards soil for growing hemp, 

 and evidences of the cultivation thereof are still extant in the 

 present day, in the shape of the little hemp flowers still bloom- 

 ing in summer time in the hedge rows around Bridport, 



