History the Tudor cloth industry

 The Cloth Industry in Suffolk

Beginnings
There is evidence that South Suffolk was very strong in the woollen cloth industry as early as the late 12th Century. Nobody knows for certain why this district became so important, but :

a) Suffolk had a much higher proportion of free men (41%) than further south in Essex (7%). (This is probably a hangover from the pre-Norman Anglian kingdom, as opposed to the Saxon customs of Essex).

b) It is close (60 miles) to London (a big market in itself and essential as a staging post to others), and was connected by a decent road. Suffolk is also handy for ports on the East coast such as Ipswich, Dunwich, Woodbridge and Manningtree.

Free men had an incentive to better themselves through cottage industry, and in the early days weaving required relatively little capital to get started.
By the early 14th Century, Hadleigh and Lavenham were specialist cloth-working towns. In Sudbury and Long Melford the cloth work was important, but they never became one-industry towns to the same extent.

Not much of the raw wool was grown locally, as the soil is more suitable for arable farming than for sheep. It was mostly imported from places like Lincolnshire, the Midlands and Norfolk.

Prosperity
Until the later 14th Century, individual dyers, weavers, fullers and finishers were able to work for themselves and built up substantial businesses. Traces can still be seen today as lovely buildings of that period in villages such as Kersey, Monks Eleigh, Bures and others. Such trades were even more numerous in the larger towns like Hadleigh and Sudbury, but there such early buildings have generally not survived.

Edward III started to tax raw wool exports in the 1370s, so there was a new incentive to export finished cloth instead of wool. The initiative shifted from individual tradesmen to merchants who bought the raw wool and then paid subcontractors to spin, dye, weave, full it and finish it. Much more capital was required for overseas markets, too, leading to a concentration of wealth in fewer hands. Some of these entrepreneurial cloth merchants employed hundreds of workers in the villages round about, moving the material by packhorse at each stage of manufacture.

In the late 14th Century merchants from the East Coast and Suffolk first began to exploit the Hanseatic League ports of Northern Europe which had previously been closed to them. A hundred and fifty years later they were exporting cloth as far as Russia at huge profit, and built the likes of 16th Century Lavenham on the proceeds (knocking down and re-developing the earlier more modest houses which had been built by the local craftsmen in the previous century).

In 1522 we know from the tax returns that there were seven men in Long Melford worth £50 or more in movable goods alone, (around £250,000 in today’s money). Three of them were “clothiers”, or cloth merchants. The much larger town of Sudbury had nine, of whom two were clothiers, while Lavenham, the boom town of the period, had twenty three, all but two of whom were in the woollen cloth business. At that time almost half the people whose trades were recorded in Long Melford were working in some aspect of the cloth trade, though there were five carpenters (in contrast to Lavenham, which had none!).

Decline
From that high point the cloth trade in Suffolk began to decline. Overseas markets were lost through Henry VIII’s wars on the continent, while heavy taxation at home (to pay for those wars) reduced the local markets too. Meanwhile fashions changed in favour of lighter woollen fabrics than the traditional heavy “Kerseys” and broadcloths. The new lighter weaves were made further south, in the Essex towns like Colchester and Halstead, where refugees from the Continent settled (bringing their own weaving skills with them). The Suffolk towns survived by preparing yarn and other forms of outworking, but their leadership of the industry was gone for ever.

page created 20th October 2008