A HISTORY OF SUFFOLK 



ready money. No clothier was to take advances 

 of money or wool from any gentleman, yeo- 

 man, &c, on agreement to make him a partner, 

 or was to pay more than 2s. in the £ for such 

 advances. But perhaps the most significant 

 clause in the regulations was one requiring that 

 every person exercising the above trades shall be 

 contributory to the masters, wardens or their 

 deputies all such reasonable sums for taxes, tall- 

 ages, &c, ordinary or extraordinary, as shall be 

 thought good by the masters, wardens and 

 associates, either for the king's use or that of the 

 company, or towards the charges of obtaining 

 the king's grant and the ordinances. 



The charter had not long been granted before 

 a number of tailors, weavers, and others of the 

 district petitioned for its suppression, declaring 

 'that the corporation was obtained by some few 

 men of the meaner sort without the consent of 

 the majority as a means to draw money from 

 the poorest sort by divers unjust taxations, and 

 to vex those they have a grudge against ; that 

 they exact money to admit men into their 

 society, and having compounded with them 

 allow them to do as they please ; that they draw 

 all the men over whom they can get any de- 

 mand to travel from all places of the said fran- 

 chise (about eight score towns) to attend the 

 common hall of Bury or else to undergo a 

 fine.' ' 



We hear nothing of the Ipswich Corporation 

 of Clothworkers and Tailors except from its op- 

 ponents. On 4 February, 1620, the privy 

 council received a bundle of petitions praying for 

 its dissolution. The bailiffs, portmen, common 

 council, and chief burgesses of Ipswich complain 

 of the many inconveniences and disorders caused 

 by the promoters of the new organization, who 

 have contemptuously demeaned themselves against 

 the ancient and well-settled government of the 

 town. The merchants point out that the char- 

 ter gives them the oversight of their own work- 

 manship whereby the clothworking for which 

 Ipswich used to be famous is much impaired. 

 The clothiers of Ipswich complain that the 

 privileged clothworkers prevent them from 

 dressing their own cloths, and do it so badly 

 themselves that the town has lost the best trade 

 of the London drapers, and of many country 

 clothiers. And finally that some of the cloth- 

 workers and tailors themselves ask that the charter 

 may be revoked, as the corporation is being 

 managed by poor and unworthy persons, and is 

 only made a means of levying money from them. 2 

 The government caused inquiry to be made, from 

 which it appeared that the members of the new 

 corporation had been full of suits among them- 



1 Copy of charter of the constitutions, and of the 

 petition preserved in Bury Town Hall ; see Hist. 

 MSS. Com. Rep. xiv, pt. viii, 141. 



' Acts of P. C. 4 Feb. 1620 ; S. P. Dom. Jas. I, 

 cxii, 62-4. 



selves, and had made ordinances that put more 

 than necessary charge on their company. At 

 the same time the commissioners, while con- 

 sidering under-corporations in cities generally in- 

 jurious, did not hold it fitting that the whole 

 making and dressing of cloth should pass through 

 the hands of the clothier, as this may give rise to 

 abuses. Much depends on the clothworkers, who 

 set many poor at work in the towns. They do 

 not therefore advise the revocation of the cor- 

 poration's patent, but rather its better manage- 

 ment by associating some of the magistrates as 

 governors, admitting none but freemen of the 

 borough, and making provision for a more im- 

 partial examination of the dressing of cloth. 3 

 These recommendations were embodied in a set 

 of new ordinances which the justices of assize 

 made for the corporation in the following May. 

 The bailiffs were to appoint yearly two free- 

 men, one a merchant and the other a clothier, 

 who were to join with the wardens of the com- 

 pany in a monthly search. 4 The clothworkers 

 were thus obliged to content themselves with a 

 very modified form of independence. It seems 

 highly probable that the Bury Corporation suc- 

 cumbed to the opposition it aroused. If any- 

 thing approaching to its far-reaching powers had 

 been realized a great deal more would have been 

 subsequently heard of it. 



The policy with which these experiments 

 were intimately connected, of forcing dressed and 

 dyed English cloth on the reluctant foreigner, 

 provoked general retaliation, and led to a speedy 

 breakdown in the cloth trade, the effects of 

 which were felt for a number of years. 6 The 

 Suffolk industry, indeed, never seems to have re- 

 covered from the shock. Other more permanent 

 causes were no doubt at work leading to the 

 migration of the broad-cloth manufacture to the 

 west country and to Yorkshire, but the crisis of 

 1 6 16— 1 7 served to give a painful emphasis to 

 their operation. This is shown clearly enough 

 by a petition of the justices of Suffolk to the 

 Privy Council in 161 9. 



Not many years since (they say) our country tasted 

 of an extraordinary calamity in the breaking of one 

 Cragg a merchant beyond the seas, by occasion where- 

 of divers merchants in London bankrupting likewise 

 overthrew the estates of divers clothiers in our country. 

 . . . And this loss not yet recovered . . . one 

 Gerrard Reade a merchant of London having gotten of 

 the clothiers' estates about £20,000 into his hands for 

 cloths bought of them doth now withdraw himself 

 into his house and hath set over his goods unto his 

 friends answering the said clothiers that he is able to 



1 S. P. Dom. Jas. I, cxii, 1 05 ; and Lansd. MS. 162, 

 fol. 208. 



4 Jets of P.C. 26 May, 1620; and S. P. Dom. 

 Jas. I, exx, 26. Later on we find the bailiffs putting 

 pressure on the company to enforce these regulations ; 

 see S. P. Dom. Chas. I, ccxxi, 62. 



5 F. H. Durham, ' Relations of the Crown to 

 Trade under James I ' ; Roy. Hist. Soe. Trans. 1899. 



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