THE BANK-NOTE PAPER ROBBERY 263 



London, population, and so forth, says : ' Shalloons l 

 and serges are manufactured : also paper for the 

 exclusive use of the Bank of England.' Bank-note 

 paper is yet manufactured at the Laverstoke mills. 

 The robbery of bank-note paper which took place 

 at these mills some thirty-four years ago was yet a 

 topic of conversation when John Porter came to 

 reside in the neighbourhood. Somewhat clumsily 

 conducted, and pursued with strange impunity for 

 some time, it had no pretensions to what con- 

 noisseurs in the fine art of criminality which 

 engages the novelists of the Gaboriau school of 

 fiction would call a first-class case of detected crime. 



1 Shalloon. 'A slight woollen stuff (Swift), said to be so called 

 from having been originally manufactured at Chalons, in France. 

 Professor Archer, in his Wool and its Application (British Manu- 

 facturing Industries), states that through Chaucer there is indication 

 that shalloon ' ranks amongst the most ancient manufactures of wool,' 

 finding proof for his assertion in this passage : 



A bedde 

 With shetes and with chalonnes faire y-spredde. 



but chalonnes here denoted painted coverlets, for the manufacture of 

 which Chalons was at one time famous. De Foe, in his Tour 

 through Great Britain, says that the little town of Newbury in Berk- 

 shire, once famous as the residence of Jack Winchcomb, 'the greatest 

 clothier that ever was in England,' is now ' generally employed in 

 making shalloon, which, though it is generally used only for the 

 lining of men's clothes, yet it is increased to a manufacture by itself, 

 and is more considerable than any single manufacture of stuffs in the 

 nation.' In 1835 shalloons were described as 'a worsted article, 

 which, like Calamanco, may be either hot-pressed or unglazed, but it 

 differs from the latter, particularly in the manner of weaving, being 

 twilled equally on both sides, or what is termed double-twilled.' It is 

 remarkable that The Drapers' Dictionary, from which part of the 

 present note is compiled, while quoting De Foe's reference to the 

 Newbury shalloons, makes no mention of the shalloons manufactured 

 at Whitchurch. And yet these were manifestly known to a con- 

 tributor to Knighfs Encyclopcedia. 



