A HISTORY OF GLOUCESTERSHIRE 



these were the Canynges, cloth merchants, whose wealth and pious muni- 

 ficence have a permanent memorial in Redcliffe church. 1 



The other towns of Gloucestershire also owed their prosperity largely 

 to wool. Gloucester must have early had a weavers' guild, though I can find 

 no authentic mention of such a body before 1545 ;* and the only answer 

 to an inquiry as to the age of the fraternity in 1635 was that it had 

 existed 'during the tyme whereof the memory of man is not to the 

 contrary.' 8 But at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the 

 thirteenth century, when the rest of England was still clothed mainly in 

 foreign cloth, ' Fuller,' ' Dyer,' and ' Weaver,' were already common names 

 in Gloucester, and the tolls on wool and woad imported into the city show 

 them to have been articles necessary to her craftsmen in the fourteenth 

 century. Cloth was, however, still imported from Ireland and from Worth- 

 stede (probably the new ' worsted' manufacture of the Flemings).* In the 

 fifteenth century ' Gloucester reds ' were famous. 6 At Tewkesbury there was 

 a 'Fullers' Street' as early as 1 257.' In Cirencester, which is said to have been 

 a clothing town in the first century A.D., the cloth trade had been encouraged 

 by foreign merchants as early as 1315, 7 and even in the twelfth century we 

 hear of merchants established there, and of Ralph the Weaver, Henry the 

 Dobber (or Dyer), and Norman the Fell-monger. 8 Henry II is said to have 

 granted a charter to weavers at Cirencester.* By the reign of Henry IV 

 the weavers' fraternity was sufficiently important to be endowed with a 

 hospital for poor members, though the guild did not actually secure a charter 

 till the reign of Philip and Mary. 10 The town as a whole continued to 

 flourish, though not a chartered borough, and though its only royal privilege 

 was a guild-merchant, illegally granted by Henry IV in 1403, declared null 

 by Henry V, 11 and not confirmed till Elizabeth. 12 But it could hold two fairs 

 a year ls and two markets a week, 1 * when its merchants could buy up the 

 produce of the upland districts. 16 In 1318 a Cirencester townsman, Geoffrey 

 Merston, was purchasing of the prior of Llanthony his ' Coteswolde wool ' 

 at the rate of ii| marks (7 13.;. 4*/.) the sack, the wool to be only 'good 

 wool, dry and well cleaned.' 16 In 1341 there were ten wool merchants in 

 the town, and Cirencester wool was known as far away as Florence. 17 

 That the county as a whole had a recognized position in the clothing trade 

 by the end of the fourteenth century is shown by an Act of Parliament in 

 1389, regulating its sale in the counties of Somerset, Devon, Bristol, and 

 Gloucester. Winchcombe too was an emporium for raw wool and other 

 necessities of the cloth trade. Among the tolls on imports to the town 18 in 



1 H. R. Fox Bourne, Engl. Merchants, ch. iv. Sir Richard Whittington, the most famous of the 

 fourteenth-century merchants, was a Gloucestershire man. ' Glouc. Cal. No. 1237. 



3 Exch. Dep. Mich. 1 1 Chas. I, No. 45. * Glouc. Cal. No. 46. 



6 Rogers, Hist, of Agric. and Prices, iv, 567. * Ann. Monast. i, 1 60. 



1 Madox, Firma Burgi, Lond. 1726, p. 273. 



8 Cir. Abb. Reg. A. 65 a. Cotton MSS. Vitellius, A. xi, 131-4. Quoted, E. A. Fuller, Brist. and 

 Glouc. Arch. Sac. Trans, ix. * Rudder, Hist, of Gloucestershire. 



w Hist, of Cir. and Tewkesbury, Ciren. 1 800. " Chancery County Placita, Glouc. 47^. 



" Confirm. R. 31-7 Eliz. ls Granted by John and Hen. Ill, Inq. a.q.d. 4 Hen. IV, No. 13. 



14 Ibid. l6 For these references see E. A. Fuller, Brist. and Glouc. Arch. Soc. Trans, xviii. 



16 Reg. Ant. Llanthony Priory, A. ix, 2, No. 87. Transcript at Thirlestone House, Cheltenham. 

 E. A. Fuller, Brist. and Glouc. Arch. Soc. Trans, xviii. " E. A. Fuller, Brist. and Glouc. Arch. Soc. Trans, ix. 



18 The list is interesting as showing the articles in use even in a small fourteenth-century town. They 

 include herrings, sea-fish, salmon, cattle, skins and hides, corn, salt, butter, tallow, wax and cheese, pepper, 

 onions, almonds, figs and raisins, cinnamon, wire, coal, lead, pitch, oil, and tar. Landboc, Introd. p. xxxi. 



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