Written by John Bishop
In the hundred years from 1450 to 1550 the English woollen industry enjoyed great success and brought great wealth to the nation. Sales were to the continent through Antwerp and beyond. This was the result of clothiers organising the rural cloth industry in the West Country, Suffolk/Essex, the Kentish Weald and Newbury and its surrounds to produce cloth that London merchants required. To do this they allocated extensive capital to cloth production: buying wools, sorting and dyeing them, organising their carding and spinning, putting the yarn out for weaving. In some cases they owned the mills that fulled the cloth. Finally it was sheared in-house.
One of the most famous men of this period was John Winchcombe, known as Jack of Newbury. He was the son of a clothier, taking over the business in 1520. At his peak in the 1540’s he sold over 6000 kerseys of cloth in one year. A kersey is a roll of cloth one yard wide by eighteen feet long, made from wool. Wool with a short staple came from local sheep, including his own four hundred ewes. It was spun by hand, dyed using imported woad (a blue plant based dye), then pounded with water to make a felt. It was then trimmed with giant shears to produce a high-quality finished product.
Dr David Peacock, a former student of Martin Parsons, spoke to a full audience at the Cricket Pavilion on the subject of his doctorate. He said that John Winchcombe was producing cloth on an industrial scale two hundred years before the Industrial Revolution. As such he acquired status and wealth, and with it bought land directly from Henry Eighth at Bucklebury, Thatcham and Lockinge. The Bucklebury Estate cost him £2619-13-4p which in today’s value was over £1.1 billion. David had authenticated the claims made about the scale of John Winchcombe’s activities. Documents were shown where Thomas Cromwell, Chief minister to Henry in 1539 had ordered 1000 kerseys of cloth, while Winchcombe had imported 27 tonnes of dye. The cloth was highly sort after, and production probably involved about 50 weavers working on looms in buildings alongside the Kennet in Newbury. Jack became an important property owner in Newbury, with a very large house in the centre. He rose in status to someone who kept company with royalty, had his own coat of arms, became an MP. He also had his portrait painted in which he showed his purse, merchants mark and coat of arms to prove he had “arrived” (although he looked fairly miserable). When Henry died and the Catholic Church was re-established he switched sides and was part of the jury sentencing two Protestants to death. Earlier he had provided men from Newbury to resist rebels in the north, and then in 1543 ten foot-soldiers for the Boulogne campaign. Later documents showed him heading up a company of 150 named Newbury men, and as he left 20 sets of armour in his will that was probably true. He died in 1557 aged 68 years old.
And so John Winchcombe became Jack of Newbury and with it many myths and legends, plays and musicals about this extraordinary man. His name continued through pubs and drinking houses, and the Jack of Newbury Hotel on the site of the present Marks and Spencers. Another excellent evening, if not a little cool!