Tudor Weston: The Wool Boom, the Reformation and a New World (1485–1539)

The Economics of Wool and a New Dynasty (1485–1535)

When Henry Tudor won the crown at Bosworth in 1485, the new dynasty brought stability and with it a surge in European demand for English cloth.¹Fisher, F. J. ‘Commercial Trends and Policy in Sixteenth-Century England.’ The Economic History Review 10, no. 2 (1940) pp. 95–117. Prices stayed high for decades.

Dorset was part of this boom, though at the lighter end of the market. Local wool wasn’t suited to the heavy fabrics the Antwerp finishers wanted; instead it went into kerseys and ‘Dorset dozens’ – coarser, narrower, ribbed cloths, popular for everyday wear and exported in volume as well as meeting demand at home.²Eric Kerridge, Textile Manufactures in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), pp. 34–35. Sherborne, eight miles from Weston, was already a significant cloth town; Leland, writing around 1540, rated it the best in Dorset for the woollen trade.³Crick, M.M. ‘Cloth.’ In The Victoria History of the County of Dorset, edited by William Page, 2:360–361. London: A. Constable and Company, 1908.

The industry ran on a putting-out system: master clothiers in the towns sent wool out to surrounding villages weekly, collected the spun yarn, and returned it to the loom. Whether the women and children of Weston were among those spinners we can’t say, but the geography and the organisation of the trade make it plausible that they contributed to the family income in this way.

But the Tudor period also brought fresh uncertainty. The first Tudor king faced multiple rebellions and pretenders, and while Dorset stayed largely quiet, the constant demands for taxation to fight wars and suppress uprisings continued.

Then came the sweating sickness, a mysterious disease that killed with terrifying speed.⁴Paul Heyman, Leopold Simons, and Christel Cochez, ‘Were the English Sweating Sickness and the Picardy Sweat Caused by Hantaviruses?’, Viruses 6, no. 1 (2014): 154–55; John Caius, A Boke or Counseill Against the Disease Commonly Called the Sweate, or Sweatyng Sicknesse (London: Richard Grafton, 1552), 10–12. The outbreaks of 1485, 1508, 1517, 1528 and 1551 struck without warning, killing within hours. Unlike plague, which you could sometimes flee, the sweat killed so fast that you might be healthy at breakfast and dead by supper. The 1528 outbreak was particularly severe, killing thousands across England. Each outbreak meant the same grim arithmetic: which families would be devastated? Who would succeed to which tenancies when the bodies were counted?

Yet between the outbreaks, life went on. By 1535, Sherborne Abbey had largely withdrawn from direct farming at Weston. The Valor Ecclesiasticus – Henry VIII’s great survey of ecclesiastical wealth, the instrument that would lay the groundwork for the Dissolution – reveals a manor run on rentier principles.⁵Valor Ecclesiasticus temp. Henr. VIII, vol. 1, eds. Joseph Hunter and John Caley (London, 1810), p. 283, Diocese of Salisbury (Dorset), entry ‘Manerium de Weston’. Fixed rents brought in £10 10s; demesne lands leased to several persons yielded a further £6 7s. Sales of underwood added 15½d, and the manorial court (entry fines, heriots, amercements and the like) contributed 13 shillings 13d [sic]. The bailiff, Michael Watts, received 7s 5d for his trouble. No sheep grazed the demesne on the abbey’s behalf; no grain was grown for its own use.

This was part of a broader shift. Where monastic houses had once worked their demesnes directly, most had long since concluded that a steady rental income beat the uncertainties of direct farming. Sherborne was no exception.

For the tenants, it was much as it had always been. They managed their own land and livestock, paid their fixed customary rents, met the inevitable entry fines and heriots when the time came, and got on with the business of living. The abbey sat in Sherborne – near enough to collect what was owed, distant enough to leave daily life alone. As arrangements went, it could have been considerably worse.

The Lay Subsidies: Counting Heads and Shillings (1513 and 1525)

The Valor Ecclesiasticus tells us what the abbey was getting out of Weston. The lay subsidies tell us who was actually living there and, roughly, what they were worth.

A subsidy roll⁶‘Dorset Subsidy Roll (Tithing of Weston)’, Somerset & Dorset Notes and Queries 3 (1893–94): 192, 200. reportedly for 1513 survives among the papers of the Weston family of Callew Weston. It is described as a fifteenth and tenth: the old parliamentary levy which by this date had become, in effect, a fixed quota laid on each community and apportioned locally among its inhabitants, rather than a fresh proportional assessment of every person’s movable goods.

In the list of 20 taxpayers in Weston tithing, Hew Weston (lord of the manor of Callew Weston) heads the list at 4s, with Thomas Lymon next at 3s 6d. The total seems to lie somewhere between 28s and 29s, since the figures as printed do not reconcile neatly; even so, it was a modest sum, reflecting a modest place.

The roll reads like a register of the more comfortable and the getting-by. After Hew Weston and Thomas Lymon comes a middling band: William Lock (2s 4d), William Hoper (2s 3d), Henry Snoke (1s 6d), Johne Bracke (20d), William Chamberlyn (18d), and Robert Touker (15d). Below them came lesser contributors: Johne Baylle, Hew Locke, and Johne Chamberlyn at 12d apiece, and a cluster at 10d including William Snok, Rychard Gawterell, Johne Chyllys, William Chyllys, Henry Towker, and Johne Palentone. At the bottom, William Gooslyng appears at just 4d.

However, the roll should not be read as a census. It shows how Weston’s quota was distributed among named inhabitants. There were almost certainly others in the tithing who do not appear here, because they lacked the means to contribute or they contributed to the payment attributed to another member of their household. Taken together, the names and amounts suggest a small, rural community with a few leading men, a modest middling group and a lower tier contributing only in pence or not at all.

A second subsidy survives from 1525⁷The National Archives (TNA), E 179/103/120: Lay subsidy roll for Dorset, 1525.. By then the community had grown, or at any rate more people were paying: 26 names appear, up from 20 twelve years earlier. The total assessment was £2 18s 6d. Among the taxpayers were five widows – Margaret Weston, Edith Hoper, Alianora Lymyn, Margaret Lymyn and Margaret Snoke – heading households in their own right. Women ran farms when their husbands died, whatever the legal niceties of tenure might say. Margaret Weston, presumably Hew’s widow, headed the roll alongside William Weston, very likely her son.

What stands out, though, is the continuity. The same family names recur across both rolls and forward into the 1539 muster: Weston, Lock, Snoke, Chamberlyn, Chyldes, Hoper, Baylle/Baylly, Gauterell and Touker/Towker. These were settled families, rooted in the manor, farming the same fields their parents had farmed. The Locks had multiplied: William Lock, Hew Locke and Johne Locke in 1513 became William Locke, William Lock Junior and Thomas Lock by 1525. The Snokes were everywhere in both rolls – William, Henry, Thomas, Richard, Thomase, Margaret.

This is what stability looked like in early Tudor Dorset. Not dramatic or wealthy, but persistent. Families clinging to their tenancies generation after generation, absorbing the deaths and taxes and carrying on. By 1525, some names had disappeared (Gooslyng, Palentone) and new ones had appeared (Gove, Milward, Peers), but the core families were still there. They would still be there fourteen years later when the muster commissioners came knocking.

The 1539 Muster Roll: A Community Portrait (and an Invasion Scare)

The year 1539 was a tense one. In January, France and the Holy Roman Empire signed the Treaty of Toledo – a ten-year truce between two traditional enemies. The Pope, having excommunicated Henry VIII, was urging both Catholic powers to invade England and depose the heretic king.⁸James Gairdner and R. H. Brodie, eds., ‘Preface’, in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII, Volume 14 Part 1, January–July 1539 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1894), pp. v–vii, xii; nos. 62, 199–200, 279–280, 297.

Henry and his Privy Council took the threat seriously. On 1 March 1539, Letters Patent were issued appointing Commissioners of Array for every county,⁹‘Grants in March 1539’, 1 March 1539, in Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, eds. James Gairdner and R. H. Brodie, vol. 14, part 1 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1894), doc. 652. ordering a Great Muster of the entire armed force of the kingdom. Every able-bodied man was to be counted, his equipment inventoried and the results recorded.

The 1539 muster roll for Weston Tithing¹⁰T. L. Stoate (ed.), Dorset Tudor Muster Rolls, 1539, 1542, 1569 (Bristol: The editor, 1978). (which included Weston, Callew Weston and Antioch) was part of this nationwide military survey. By midsummer the immediate invasion threat had faded – France and the Empire were at each other’s throats again – but the muster had already been completed, leaving us with a picture of this community’s structure and relative prosperity.

William Weston, lord of the manor of Callew Weston, headed the list with full harness – marking him as the single gentleman in a roll otherwise composed of yeomen, husbandmen and labourers. Below him came five men who between them maintained two shared harness sets, representing families with moderate resources who pooled costs to meet their military obligations. Then came the archers with varied equipment: Nic Jabarde with twelve arrows, Thomas Snoke with six, Michael Watts with a sheaf (twenty-four), each quantity demonstrating a subtle gradation of household wealth. The tithing collectively owned one additional harness, held for those who could not equip themselves.

In all, the muster listed eleven men in the main roll with sixteen names on an alternative roll, suggesting a community of perhaps fifty to eighty souls across ten to twenty households. This was not a wealthy place, but neither was it in grinding poverty. It was solidly agricultural, meeting royal obligations adequately if not lavishly. The kind of community that had weathered wars, plagues and economic upheavals for centuries and would probably weather whatever came next.

They were about to find out.

The Break with Rome and the Dissolution (1533–1539)

1539 wasn’t just about military musters. It was the culmination of a religious revolution that had been building for years.

In 1533, Henry VIII broke with Rome. For most people in Weston, the immediate impact was probably minimal: the Latin mass continued to be held in the same church by the same priest. But the theological battles raging at the top would eventually reach even Dorset manors.

Thomas Cromwell’s agents began enforcing religious conformity. The old certainties of Catholic worship began to crumble. For people who’d grown up making pilgrimages to local shrines and praying to particular saints for particular problems, this was disorienting at best and terrifying at worst.

Then came the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The writing had been on the wall since 1535, when the previous Abbot of Sherborne resigned and Sir John Horsey, local magnate and royal servant, paid Thomas Cromwell 500 marks under the table to get his own man, John Barnstaple, elected as the new abbot.¹¹‘Houses of Benedictine monks: The abbey of Sherborne’, in William Page (ed.), A History of the County of Dorset, vol. 2 (London: Victoria County History, 1908), pp. 62–70. Sir John Horsey’s letter to Cromwell thanking him for arranging Barnstaple’s appointment is cited there from Letters and Papers of Henry VIII; also see History of Parliament: House of Commons 1509–1558, ‘HORSEY, John (by 1489–1546), of Clifton Maybank, Dorset’. https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1509-1558/member/horsey-john-1489-1546. It was an investment in the future: Barnstaple could be counted on to co-operate when the time came.

Sherborne Abbey surrendered to the crown on 18 March 1539.¹²‘Houses of Benedictine monks: The abbey of Sherborne’, in William Page (ed.), A History of the County of Dorset, vol. 2 (London: Victoria County History, 1908), pp. 62–70. The deed of surrender was signed by Abbot Barnstaple and his sixteen monks. Six hundred years of continuous monastic ownership ended in a day, with all the paperwork neatly signed and sealed.

Barnstaple did well out of it: Horsey moved him to the lucrative rectory of Stalbridge. For the monks, it meant forced retirement on a pension (a better fate than the abbots of Glastonbury, Reading and Colchester, who were hanged, drawn and quartered for resisting). For the people of Weston, it meant… well, at first, very little. The only difference was that instead of paying Sherborne Abbey, they now paid the Crown. The king was even more distant than the abbey had been, which probably seemed fine at the time.

But everyone knew the arrangement wouldn’t last. The Crown didn’t dissolve monasteries to become a landlord. It dissolved them to raise cash. Weston was going on the market, and nobody knew who the buyer would be.