The production of woollen cloth made Guildford a wealthy town in Mediaeval and Tudor times. There were certain natural advantages in south-west Surrey that favoured the growth of the wood trade here. First of all there was pasture, rough grazing on the downs and commons for the sheep that provided the basic raw material. The Cistercian monks of Waverley Abbey, founded in 1128, were keen and professional exponents of sheep-farming on a large scale, and they may have done much to introduce commercial wool production into the area. Both Waverley Abbey and Merton Priory exported wool to the continent throughout the Middle Ages. Running water was plentiful, too, not only for washing and dyeing, but also to power fulling-mills. In the Godstone area there are deposits of fuller’s earth, a mineral used to clean the natural grease from the woollen cloth.
Making the cloth was very much a cottage industry. The sheep having been shorn, the wool would be combed or carded to straighten out the fibres, then spun into yarn with a spindle and woven into cloth on a simple loom. Perhaps a whole family would be involved, the children combing or carding, the mother spinning and the father weaving. The raw cloth would then have to go to be finished, which involved two main processes; fulling and dying. Fulling is the pummelling of the wet cloth to mat the fibres together and produce a knap on the material. If fuller’s earth is added to the water, then the natural grease in the wool – a useful lubricant when spinning – would be cleaned out so that dye could be absorbed more easily. At first fulling was done by treading the cloth in wooden tubs, but from the mid 13th century it became increasingly to be done at fulling mills – where large wooden mallets were raised and released by a cam-shaft turned by a waterwheel. The King built a fulling mill at Guildford in 1251, one of the earliest mentioned in England. This closed in 1267, but by the end of the Middle Ages there were at least four working in the Millmead area, two on the site of the town Mills, one across the river near Saint Nicholas’ called Artington Mill, and another on the site of the present sluice gates, known as the Upper Fulling Mill. The two at the Town Mills may date from the later 13th century; they were certainly there in 1439.
Typically, Guildford cloth was dyed blue with woad, a vegetable dye imported from the Mediterranean until it began to be grown in this area in Elizabethan times. The leaves were picked, crushed, formed into balls and left to ferment. In use the woad was boiled up in a vat like the one in the illustration and the fulled cloth put in, being stirred around continually to ensure an even colour. The dyed cloth was then stretched on a rack or tenter-frame to dry; the selvedges were attached to two rows of tenterhooks, which kept the drying cloth taut and any shrinkage even. Artington Mill had racks in Millmead in 1394, and ‘Rack’s Close’ probably derives its name from tenter-frames like these. After drying, the knap on the cloth was brushed up with teazles and trimmed off with large shears to produce a smooth surface. The finished cloth was known as ‘kersey’ – perhaps rather like a thick blanket material – and most of it went for export, some at least as far as Florence and Venice.
Guildford cloth had already gained a reputation by 1391, as an Act of Parliament states: ‘ ….. of old times divers cloths were made in the town of Guildford and other places within the county of Surrey, Sussex and Southampton, called Cloths of Guildford, which were of good making and of good value and did bear a great name……’ but then it goes on to say that this reputation was being threatened by unscrupulous manufacturers who were stretching the cloth before drying. This damaged the eave and, of course, it shrank back to its true length as soon as it became wet again. Stretching continued to be a problem for the next three centuries. In 1607, for example, Thomas West of Guildford was accused of having ‘.. a tenter…. Wherewith 100 cloths of white wool called kerseys rough and unwrought and made for sale at Guildford were stretched and strained in breadth and length’ Aubrey, writing in the late 17th century, claims that it was stretching that ruined the wool trade of Guildford.
A law passed at the beginning of Elizabeth I’s reign attempted to restrict cloth-making to market towns. In theory this would have meant only Guildford, Godalming and Farnham in our area, but accusations later make it clear that other villages in south west Surrey continued to produce cloth, notably Wonersh. Another act in 1572 tried to limit the length of the pieces of cloth to 18 yards: cloth was taxed by the piece, rather than by length. The tax collector or ‘aulnager’ fixed a lead seal to the piece both as a tax receipt and a guarantee of quality. However, several Guildford clothiers at the end of the century were said to be weaving from 20 to 28 yard pieces in order to reduce the amount of duty they would pay per yard.
The mid-Elizabethan era was clearly one of prosperity for Guildford’s clothiers; in 1582 Robert Broadbridge donated glass windows to the Grammar School, which included a representation of his ‘clothing mark’ or trademark. When Thomas Baker, another charitable benefactor of the town, presented a sliver tankard to the Corporation in 1584, his clothing mark of three interlocked triangles was inscribed on the base.
The 17th century saw the decline of the wool trade in Guildford, as elsewhere in England. Apart from any considerations of dishonest manufacture, new textiles were increasingly replacing woollen cloth. By the beginning of Charles I’s reign the slump was said to threaten the livelihoods of 3,000 people in the area – a very large proportion of the population. In 1629 George Abbot, Archbishop of Canterbury, founded a retraining establishment behind his Hospital on the High Street. Here he subsidised weavers to produce linen cloth, hoping that this would replace wool in the area. The new enterprise did not flourish and ten years later it changed over to wool weaving. This finally failed in 1656, when the Cloth Hall was converted into a poor-house. After 1649 there was only one fulling mill left in Guildford, and when this closed in 1713 it spelt the end of clothmaking on a commercial scale. All that survives to remind us of the one-prosperous wool trade in Guildford are the two woolpacks on the Borough’s arms.
Guildford Museum, Castle Arch, Guildford, Surrey
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