Shrewsbury Drapers Guild
Contents
The Drapers' Hall
10 St. Mary's Place,
Shrewsbury
SY1 1DZ
Charity No's: 213372 233903
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Introduction
The Guild or Company of Shrewsbury Drapers was founded by Royal Charter in 1462. It is one of the very few medieval merchants’ or tradesmen’s Guilds in England, outside the City of London, to have survived the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to be still able to use its sixteenth century Hall and its original purpose-made furniture.
At present there are 80 members who are elected to the Guild of Freemen of the Shrewsbury Drapers Company.
Drapers are first mentioned in Shrewsbury on 1209, when they occur as individuals in the first Guild Merchant Rolls of the town. In the late twelfth and the thirteenth centuries all trade in the town was administered by the guild merchants, but by the late fourteenth century the Drapers, like other trades, had achieved independent Guild Status as a religious, economic and political unit. The Guild’s position was further strengthened by the foundation of their almshouses adjacent to St Mary’s Church in 1444, and by the Company’s incorporation by Royal Charter in 1462. By the mid-sixteenth century the Drapers were of major economic importance and for the next 150 years dominated the political oligarchy which ruled the town.
Right: The original kitchen area, now part of the bar-brasserie.
The Drapers’ Hall, the Guildhall of the Company, has stood in St Mary’s Place since 1485. The frame of the present Hall was completed in 1576 by Roger Smith, a Shrewsbury carpenter of Welsh extraction, and is probably the only wooden-framed Guildhall still in uninterrupted use by the original Company. The interior finishes for the Hall are all detailed in the lease of 1577, as are wainscoting for the Hall and the Great Chamber above, the dais and benches around the walls and the stair and flooring tiles. The gable boards and extension beams were carved in the ‘Shrewsbury style’, with vine scrolls, quatrefoils and cable-mould pilasters, again by Roger Smith. Although changes were made in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the building remains essentially an Elizabethan Guildhall with a unique documentation.
As long as the roads in England and Wales remained evil, and as long as cottage industry prevailed, the Shrewsbury Drapers were relatively safe from competition, but in the eighteenth century, as the turnpike system revolutionised transport and as Welsh capitalism developed, the importance of the Shrewsbury merchants declined. By the 1790’s, the trade was dead. The company’s commercial activities ceased and it became not much more than a band of trustees of an almshouse charity. In the 1920’s the freehold of the Hall was transferred to that charity.
The charitable work of the Shrewsbury Drapers has been continuous from 1444 when the first almshouses were established in the churchyard facing St Mary’s Street. The almshouses have been rebuilt several times and most recently in 1964 in Fairford Place, Coleham. In the late 1960’s the Charity Commissioners persuaded the Company to become trustee of the almshouses known as ‘The Hospital of St Giles’ which was on the site of the early twelfth-century leper hospital of that name. The Company replaced the row of four derelict Georgian cottages with four attractive bungalows.
In 1991, the London Drapers’ Company bought the Hall and generously undertook preservation of the building and its extension to include a restaurant. In 1998 a Preservation Trust was set up by the Company to buy back the Hall, which it achieved in 1999, and then to preserve and manage it for the indefinite future. The ground floor is leased to The Shrewsbury Drapers Company as a centre for a provincial guild, for social activities, and for administration of their almshouses and their other charitable work. The interior of the Hall is still furnished with its seventeenth century furniture and fittings where you can dine at The Drapers Hall Restaurant.