Shrewsbury Drapers Guild
Contents
The Drapers' Hall
10 St. Mary's Place,
Shrewsbury
SY1 1DZ
Charity No's: 213372 233903
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The Shrewsbury Drapers Guild
In medieval and Tudor times ‘Drapers’ was the name given to merchants dealing in woollen cloth, and in Shrewsbury’s records of 1204 the names of individual drapers are recorded in the town’s first ‘Guild Merchant Rolls’. In the late twelfth century and throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the ‘guild merchants’ administered all trade in the town, but by the fifteenth century, the Drapers had achieved independent guild status as a unit of religious, economic and political influence; A s an organised body, the Shrewsbury Drapers became prominent by their founding of almshouses in 1444, and became even more important when their guild was incorporated by Royal Charter in 1462. In this Charter the Shrewsbury Drapers were given the title ‘A Fraternity or Gild of the Holy Trinity of the Men of the Mystery of Drapers in the town of Salop’ and this title had religious connotations; the Charter required the Guild to appoint a chantry priest to say Mass for the Guild and to pray for the souls of Richard, Duke of York, and his son Edward, Duke of Rutland, both of whom were killed in the Wars of the Roses. Both the Guild and Chantry Chapel in the nearby St Mary’s Church were dedicated to the Holy Trinity, and Chapel still contains part of an altar, decorated with the symbols of the Trinity, erected by the Drapers in 1501. The symbols of the Trinity also appear in the Company’s Common Seal which was authorised in 1462. The Company’s coat of arms, as allowed by Richard Lee, Portcullis Herald, in 1585, is the same as that of the London Drapers and is depicted on the painted hatchment dated 1625 hanging in the restaurant. The religious obligations of the Guild, along with the chantry priest, were swept away in 1547 during the Reformation.
Right: Original service area, where the buttery and servery have been opened up to provide an extension to the Meeting Room.
The prosperity of the Drapers lay in their role as ‘middlemen’ in the woollen-cloth trade of north and central Wales. Much of the wealth of early medieval England and the Welsh Marches was built on the wool trade, but in the late Middle Ages the trade in cloth became more important than the trade in wool. During the fifteenth century, as Wales became more settled, and particularly in the sixteenth century (after the Act of Union of 1536), the light coarse Welsh cloths, known as ‘cottons’ and friezes, and later ‘flannel’, found an export market through the Shrewsbury Drapers. The Welsh trade, well established by 1450, was most prosperous from the middle of the sixteenth century until about 1660. The name ‘Staple’ referred to the official trading centre for woollen cloth; this was located sixteen miles north-west of Shrewsbury in the town of Oswestry, until moved to Shrewsbury in 1620. The Shrewsbury Drapers bought cloth at the weekly market in Oswestry. The Guild rules required their members to be armed, presumably for the protection of body and cloth; they met at “The Old Three Pigeons Inn” at Nesscliffe, where they congregated until a strong enough group was formed to venture upon the dangerous ride to Oswestry. When they returned to Shrewsbury they put the cloth out to ‘shearmen’ to be finished. Thereafter it was sent on weekly packhorse trains to the City of London cloth market at Blackwell Hall, whence the London merchants exported the cloth to Rouen, the Bay of Biscay and the Iberian Peninsula and eventually to distant parts of the known world. In good times the trade was straightforward and profitable but wars, both in England and on the continent, could severely interrupt the trade with serious consequences for the Welsh weavers and everyone else involved.
The Welsh cloth trade in Shrewsbury was not originally exclusive to the Drapers as the Shearmen, who were cloth finishers, and the Mercers, who were essentially retailers, also claimed a share. During the early sixteenth century the Drapers effectively excluded the Mercers from the wholesale trade and reduced the Shearmen to a state of total dependence upon them. Thus the Drapers established a virtual monopoly. For a century the economic and political power of the Drapers was such that they virtually ran the town. In 1582, despite the unpopularity of the Drapers, the townspeople united with them to defeat an attempt to divert the trade to Chester, a city in economic decline. King James’s Royal Charter of 1609 confirmed the constitution and rights of the Drapers Company and its possession of land. Virtually all the leading men of the town were Drapers. They built fine town houses, established county families, held office and enjoyed high social status. When, in 1638, Charles 1 granted Shrewsbury its first Mayor it was not by coincidence that the man chosen was Thomas Jones, a leading Draper, who had been one of the two Bailiffs in the town on a number of occasions; his fine house is now incorporated into the Prince Rupert Hotel.
It was against this background of wealth and influence that the main part of the present Drapers Hall was built in 1576. It was designed as a guildhall for the business meetings and social gatherings of the Drapers. From this ‘headquarters’ the Drapers Company dominated the town and provided a regular flow of prominent men. They recruited their members from town and country, from burgesses, yeomen and the ranks of the gentry; c county family was founded by William Jones (d.1612) whose splendid effigy is in Shrewsbury Abbey. In addition to Jones, David Lloyd, Robert Ireland, Richard Owen, William Rowley and others whose names are remembered even to the present day built fine town houses.
The Guild received a setback during the Civil War and at the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Many drapers were Parliamentarians and therefore suffered the consequences. Furthermore, the cloth trade slowly declined, the Guild became smaller and by the nineteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution well under way, the trade guilds became an anachronism. The Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 abolished their regulatory powers; but although the Drapers lost both power and influence, they retained their ownership of the Hall and of their almshouses which, in the 1830’s were established within a charitable Trust. The Drapers acted as trustees and co-opted their successors, but never became a hereditary livery. The form of the Guild remained, with Master, Wardens and Freemen. Above all, they retained possession of the Elizabethan guildhall and its seventeenth-century furniture.