Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [428]
“I could even be mayor one day,” he thought with a thrill of excitement.
Once again it was the old fulling mill which was central to the family’s success.
In recent decades the cloth business of England had been changing. The lighter cloths, the rays or kerseys that Salisbury had made so successfully, were no longer in such demand; the city with its medieval craft guilds, proud of their skills and set in their ways, tried to continue as before. But the old Italian trade through Southampton had almost gone; even in England rays were less in fashion.
But for the Shockleys with their fulling mill, there was a new opportunity. “Forget the Italian trade,” John Shockley urged his son. “Get to Antwerp if you can.”
It was the heavy cloth that was in demand – the simple undyed broadcloth, twenty-five ounces to the yard, as heavy as a modern overcoat – thick, felt-like material that the mighty hammers of the fulling mill could pound day and night. This was the cloth that the merchants from the Netherlands and Germany were clamouring for, and their great market at Blackwell Hall in London was the focus of the trade that then flowed to Antwerp, the Baltic and beyond.
But it was the men of west Wiltshire, not the craftsmen of Salisbury who flourished: for the conditions of the new trade were different. The western cloth-makers had suffered before from a disadvantage: for although they had swift-flowing streams to drive their fulling mills, the water in those streams from the chalk and lime ridges of the west was so hard that it would not take the dyes properly and it was hard to obtain an even colour. But for the growing trade in undyed broadcloth these conditions were perfect.
There were other changes too. Though the cloth was still woven in the same way on a two-man loom, enterprising merchants in the west had brought them together near to their fulling mills in what were sometimes almost factory conditions. Indeed, when the monasteries were dissolved, one western clothier had bought up the ancient Abbey of Malmesbury and turned the place into a huge cloth-works.
This was the way in which fortunes were being made, but few at Sarum, with its rich old market, its medieval guilds and their long established practices, were doing so. Some were, however.
“Look at the Webbe brothers,” he would cry admiringly. “They’ve not only gone into broadcloth but they actually export it to Antwerp themselves.”
This powerful pair of merchants had done exactly that, cutting out the middlemen on the way and making themselves a fine name in the town.
The trouble was, as he ruefully acknowledged, that he had not the resources to invest in such a large scale enterprise.
But now Thomas Forest had offered to supply his young friend Edward Shockley with exactly that. His plan was well-calculated to suit both men.
Thomas Forest was a gentleman. Of that there was no doubt. At the manor of Avonsford, which he had largely rebuilt, his father had added to the family’s social status in several ways. He had acquired an imposing coat of arms – a splendid if garish creation featuring a lion rampant on a field of gold, which was proudly displayed over the fireplace in the hall and also on his tomb in the little village church. As well as this proof of gentility, he had commissioned, shortly before he died, another addition for the manor: a fine portrait of himself. It was not, admittedly, by the great Holbein who had painted the king and the leading figures in the land; but it was by a competent follower, a young man from Germany who had given his narrow, cunning face an austere dignity which it certainly never possessed. This painting of portraits was a new fashion in England, at least amongst the gentry: but Forest had shrewdly realised its value in stamping the family’s importance on the minds of anyone who visited the house, and though he groaned at the price, he paid