INDUSTRIES 



The industry, therefore, was well established 

 in the town at an early period of its history. 

 The ' fowlling ' or fulling-mill is mentioned 

 in the years 1540 and 1553.* 



We have seen that the cloth trade fur- 

 nished much industry, not only to the towns, 

 but also to the surrounding villages. Every 

 cottage had its spinning wheel, and every 

 week the clothiers used to send out their men 

 among the villages, their packhorses laden with 

 wool, and every week they returned, their 

 packs laden with yarn ready for the loom. 

 The village of East Hendred was a prosperous 

 clothing centre before the dissolution of 

 monasteries. There is a picturesque field 

 near the church where terraces still remain, 

 which was used for drying cloth, and a piece 

 of land called ' Fulling Mill Meer,' where, 

 according to the statement of Mr. Woodward, 

 rector in 1759, ' ancient people remembered 

 the ruins of a mill in the stream hard by.' 2 



This fulling-mill is mentioned in 1547, 

 and was held of the king by John Tyson, 

 alias Eston. In the church are brasses to the 

 memory of Henry and Roger Eldysley, ' mer- 

 catores istius ville,' and of William Whitwey, 

 ' pannarius et lanarius,' both of the fifteenth 

 century. The village had also a flourishing 

 fair, which was held on the Downs, and 

 reached from Scutchamore Knob to Hendred, 

 along a straight green road once known as the 

 Golden Mill. It was abolished by James I. 

 in 1620. All this testified to the industrial 

 importance of the little village in former days, 

 and of the flourishing manufacture of cloth 

 carried on there. 



We have now entered upon the period of 

 the decline and fall of Berkshire's once great 

 industry. The days of the great clothiers 

 had passed away. They attained to great 

 honour and wealth, and left noble legacies to 

 the towns that gave them birth. One dis- 

 tinguished clothier exclaimed : 



I thank God, and ever shall ; 



It was the sheep that paid for all. 



The times had however changed, and 

 prosperity had deserted the Berkshire looms. 

 Daniel Defoe in his Tour through Great 

 Britain, published in 1724, wrote of New- 

 bury : ' The town of Nubery is an ancient 

 cloathing town, though now little of that 

 part remains to it, but it still retains a manu- 

 facturing genius, and the people are greatly 

 employed in making shalloons, a kind of stuff, 

 which though it be used only for the lineing 

 and insides of men's cloathes, for women use 



but little of it, nor the men for anything but as 

 above, yet it becomes so greatly worn, both at 

 home and abroad, that it has increased to a 

 manufacture by itself, and is more consider- 

 able than any single manufacture of stuffs in 

 the nation. This employs the town of 

 Nuberry, as also Andover, and abundance of 

 other towns in other centres.' 



Still the cloth trade lingered on. The 

 wars of the eighteenth century had a dis- 

 astrous effect upon the industry, paralysing 

 trade, and diminishing the numbers of 

 workers, who were reduced to great poverty. 



In order to revive the industry, the Weavers' 

 Company issued an advertisement in 1792, 

 setting forth that they had agreed to dis- 

 annul their powers and right of settling the 

 price which any person in the trade shall 

 give for making any kinds of goods and giving 

 free liberty for strangers to come into the 

 town and to manufacture silks, muslins, 

 cottons, linen, worsted, etc., without any 

 interference from the Company of Weavers. 

 The announcement concludes with the follow- 

 ing paragraph : 



' Newbury is a town well supplied with 

 water, and an extraordinary good market to 

 supply its inhabitants with every accommoda- 

 tion that can make life comfortable, and it is 

 well situated to carry on an extensive trade, 

 having an easy conveyance to and from Lon- 

 don by the River Kennet.' 3 



But this action of the Weavers' Company 

 came too late. Not all the attractions of the 

 town, nor the abandonment of an obsolete 

 monopoly, could attract the trade to its 

 former haunts. One Newbury clothier, how- 

 ever, accomplished a task which, as far as we 

 are aware, no other manufacturer ever con- 

 ceived or attempted, and that was to convert 

 wool cut from the sheep's back into cloth 

 and fashion it into a coat between sunrise and 

 sunset on a summer's day. This difficult 

 task was accomplished by Mr. John Coxeter, 

 a cloth manufacturer at Greenham Mills in the 

 early years of the last century. Mr. Money, 

 the historian of Newbury, has told the story 

 of this achievement in his history of the town, 

 and only a brief account need now be given. 

 Mr. Coxeter employed 100 hands in his mill 

 at Greenham, and introduced there the best 

 and more improved machinery. His mill was 

 turned by water, and stood partly on the 

 site of the present lanyard and flour mill. 

 Sir John Throckmorton had such confidence 

 in the man that in the year 1811 he wagered 

 1,000 guineas that between sunrise and sun- 

 set a coat should be made from wool that had 



1 Hist, of Wallingjord, ii. 255, 419. 



8 Hundred of Wanting, by W. K. Clarke, p. 132. 



i 393 



3 Money, Hist, of Newbury, pp. 242, 243. 



50 



