A HISTORY OF SURREY 



leaves his shop-gear and tools as shearman 

 and clothworker to his wife Margery on i6 

 March 1595-6.' The few instances we 

 have of men in this part of Surrey being 

 summoned during the reign of Elizabeth to 

 the Court of Exchequer to answer informa- 

 tions laid against them of unlawfully exercis- 

 ing the dyer's art, show them as clothiers 

 who, in carrying on dyeing operations, had 

 infringed the statute of apprentices. Thus 

 Nicholas Wilson and John Woods, both of 

 them Godalming clothiers, were accused in 

 Hilary term, 1567-8, of dyeing, an art in 

 which they had not been educated for the 

 statutory period of seven years.' A similar 

 charge was made in 1586 against Nicholas 

 Shorte of Shalford, shearman. It was in the 

 city of Westminster however that he was 

 alleged to have exercised the art of a dyer, 

 but he was found not guilty and discharged.' 



On the other hand, that there were dyers 

 in this district, a separate class from the 

 clothiers there and evidently of some repute, 

 is seen in the incident of 1608, which we 

 have already noticed in the account of the 

 cloth manufacture, when the Guildford 

 dyers were ordered to make trial of the 

 originality and value of a supposed new in- 

 vention for dyeing wool. 



John Purchase, described as * the elder, of 

 Godalming, dyer,' appears from his will dated 

 25 May 161 6,* to have been a man of con- 

 siderable wealth and in a large way of 

 business. In addition to being the owner or 

 lessee of several messuages and the mortgagee 

 of another, all in Godalming, he owned four 

 tenements at Basingstoke and had purchased 

 two others of John Westbrooke of Harting, 

 Hants {sic). He may have been of Hamp- 

 shire origin, and was possibly the son of 

 Thomas Purchys of Basingstoke, dyer, who 

 left by will dated I February 1585-6,* three 

 messuages in Basingstoke to his wife Amy for 

 life with remainder to his son John. John 

 charged his executors with the duty of repair- 

 ing out of part of the proceeds of his estate 

 the market-house and Fish-cross in Godalm- 

 ing * as well in timber work, ground-pinning, 

 walling, and other necessary reparations from 

 the ground-pinning to the plate of the said 

 houses.' He had leases of two dye-houses in 

 Godalming, and had apparently supplied the 

 plant for a third, for which there was due 

 from his uncle John Perrier the sum of ;^ioo. 



1 Prob. Archd. Ct. Surr. 8 April 1596. 



» Exch. K. R. Mem. R. Hil. 10 Eliz. 172. 



' Ibid. Mich. 28 Eliz. 393. 



« Prob. P.C.C. 6 Nov. 1616 {Co/>e, 100). 



» Ibid. 7 May 1586 (JVtndsor, 23). 



His bequest to his eldest son Thomas is in- 

 teresting, for it specifies a few of his principal 

 dye-stuis and shows the class of articles dyed 

 by him. Besides leaving to him the remainder 

 of his lease of one of the Godalming dye- 

 houses, he leaves also all the vats, furnaces, 

 dyers' weeds, madder, brazil, alum, and all 

 other utensils and vessels and implements 

 belonging to the said dye-house, and the debts 

 owing to him at his death for the dyeing of 

 list cloth and stockings and for other things 

 earned at the dyehouse. It may be noticed 

 that logwood, the dye-stufF whose use was 

 causing so much trouble at this time to the 

 dyers in the north of Surrey, is here not 

 specifically mentioned amongst the stock in 

 trade of a leading Godalming dyer. The 

 only dye-stufF mentioned here to which any 

 objection might have been made at the time 

 is brazil, a dye-wood described in an Act of 

 1532-3' as a subtlety 'first invented and 

 found by aliens out of this realm of England 

 to the great hurt and slander of woollen 

 cloths dyed within the said realm, which in 

 times passed have in all outward parts been 

 noted to have had the most substantial 

 coloured woollen cloths of all realms chris- 

 tened.' Its use was prohibited in dyeing of 

 scarlet. But this Act must have been a dead 

 letter long before Purchase's time, and despite 

 the inference conveyed by its wording, brazil- 

 wood was far from being a new thing in the 

 dyeing art at the time of its enactment. 

 Indeed its mention in this country is at least 

 as early as Chaucer : — 



Him nedeth nat his colour for to dyen 

 With brasil, ne with greyn of Portingale. 



But the great plenty in which the wood had 

 been found in the newly discovered region 

 in South America, to which in consequence it 

 had given its name, must have vastly increased 

 its use in England in the time of Henry 

 VUL' The fact that for so many years dye- 

 ing had been carried on in south-west Surrey 

 as an industry subsidiary to the cloth manu- 

 facture may in part remove from the county 

 that reproach which Sir Walter Raleigh in 

 1603 cast upon the English cloth industry 

 that the greater part of the cloths were sent 

 to Holland to be dyed.* 



The history of the dyeing industry in 

 Southwark and the northern parts of the 

 county demands more particular attention. 



• Sut. 24 Hen. VIII. cap. 2. 



■> See the note by Prof. Skeat in The Works of 

 Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford, 1894), v. 258. 



8 Observations concerning the Trade and Commerce 

 of England tvith the Dutch and other Foreign Nations. 



364 



