A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK 



till a century later. Even concerning Ipswich 

 and Bury, which were the natural centres of the 

 manufacture, there is little information available 

 at this period. The General Court of Ipswich 

 issued an order in 1447 that all fullers both of 

 Ipswich and the country should hold and 

 exercise their market for sale of their goods 

 above the Motehall on all market days on pain 

 of forfeiting every cloth sold outside the Mote- 

 hall, and similarly that the market of all clothiers 

 of town and country should be under the Mote- 

 hall, and that of all men selling wool over the 

 woolhouse. 1 



Concerning the weavers of Bury we have a 

 much more interesting document — the ordi- 

 nances granted at their request by the sacristan 

 of the abbey in 1477. The craft gild, which 

 contained both linen and woollen weavers, was 

 probably of long standing, as half the fines that 

 may be inflicted are assigned 



to the maintenance of the pageant of the Ascension 

 of our Lord God and the gifts of the Holy Ghost 

 as it hath been customed of old time out of mind 

 yearly to be had to the worship of God among other 

 pageants in the feast of the Corpus Christi. 



It is ordered that every man ' as well masters, 

 householders, apprentices, servants hired by the 

 year or by the journey, as all other men occupy- 

 ing the craft in the town,' are to assemble yearly 

 to choose four discreet persons of the craft, 

 having freehold within the town, to be wardens 

 with power to swear all members of the craft to 

 obedience. Apprenticeship is to be for not less 

 than seven years, and no one is to set up in Bury 

 unless he has been apprenticed. A journeyman 

 if he stays a year in the town is to pay 4^. to 

 the pageant. The entrance fee of the foreigner 

 setting up is I 7,s \d., and every foreign weaver 

 that fetches yarn to weave out of the town shall 

 be contributory to the pageant 'as a deyzin 

 wever oweth to be.' Of all fines, fees, and 

 amercements, the sacristan is to have half, and 

 his sub-bailiffs are to assist in collecting these 

 dues street by street along with the wardens, 

 and to receive along with them id. in the shilling 

 for the trouble of collecting. Perhaps the most 

 curious feature in the ordinance is the arrange- 

 ment for summoning a leet jury of the weavers 

 at the same time as the town leet. The sub- 

 bailiffs and the wardens are to call twelve or 

 thirteen honest and discreet persons of the craft 

 to be sworn before the bailiffs of the town to 

 present all offences. 



There are not wanting signs in these ordi- 

 nances of the increasing influence of capital on 

 the industry. The necessity of limiting the 

 master weavers to four looms apiece and the 

 reference to a class ' having sufficient cunning 

 and understanding in the exercise of the said 

 craft and not being of power and havour to set 



1 Add. MSS. 30158. 



up looms,' are clear indications of this. But 

 the master weavers were not the only employers 

 nor the largest capitalists. The penalties 

 attached to fraudulent detention of yarn indicate 

 that the smaller weavers were employed by the 

 clothier, who also gave out work to the country 

 weaver and kept a multitude of women and 

 children engaged in preparing yarn. 2 A century 

 and a half later we shall find the employing 

 class in Bury trying to reduce the industry of 

 south-west Suffolk into dependence upon them. 



At the end of the fifteenth and beginning of 

 the sixteenth century, however, it was not at 

 Bury, but at the new centres of Lavenham and 

 Hadleigh that the power of industrial capital 

 was most fully developed. It was at this period 

 that the churches of these two places assumed 

 their present imposing dimensions, that their 

 Gildhalls were built, and their charities 

 founded. The story of the Springs of Laven- 

 ham affords an authentic parallel to the partly 

 legendary achievements of the famous Jack of 

 Newbury. The first Thomas Spring died in 

 1440. The second, who died in i486, and to 

 whom there is a monumental brass in Lavenham 

 vestry, left 100 marks to be distributed among 

 his fullers and tenters, 300 marks towards build- 

 ing the church tower, and 200 marks towards 

 the repair of the roads round Lavenham. But 

 it was the third Thomas who was the rich 

 clothier par excellence. In his will, which was 

 proved in I 523, he left money for 1,000 masses 

 and £200 to finish Lavenham steeple. His 

 chief triumph, however, was the marriage of his 

 daughter Bridget to Aubrey de Vere of the 

 noble family of Oxford who held the lordship of 

 Lavenham manor. Sir J. Spring, to whom his 

 wealth descended, held in 1549 no less than 

 nine manors in Suffolk and two in Norfolk. 3 



The social and political problems raised by 

 the rapid development of capitalistic industry 

 which are revealed in the resistance aroused, 

 nowhere so strongly as in the clothing districts 

 of East Anglia, to the proposed war taxation of 

 1525, 4 will have to be dealt with in the social 

 and political sections of this history. From the 

 point of view of industrial history, the main feature, 

 so admirably seized by the chronicler and borrowed 

 by the dramatist, is the economic dependence of 

 all branches of the manufacture on the capitalist 

 ' entrepreneur.' 



For, upon these taxations, 

 The clothiers all, not able to maintain 

 The many to them 'longing, have put off 

 The spinsters, carders, fullers, weavers, who, 

 Unfit for other life, compelled by hunger 

 And lack of other means, in desperate manner 

 Daring the event to the teeth, are all in uproar, 

 And danger serves among them. 1 



' Hist. MSS. Com. Rep. xiv, App. pt. viii, 133-8. 

 3 Suff. Inst. Arch. vi. 107. 

 ' Brewer, Reign Hen. Fill, ii, 59. 

 Shakespeare, Hen. Fill, Act i, Sc. 2. 



256 



