Our History

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; As 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.

The dangerous journey from Shrewsbury to Oswestry via The Old Three Pigeons Inn at Nesscliffe

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.