Lavenham, Suffolk
Timbered houses and passage for a carriage.
Houses at Water Street.
Lavenham started as an agricultural village. At the time of the first charter on markets issued by Henry III in 1257, people of Lavenham bwere already engaged in trade. From 1257 until the late eighteenth century the town boasted a thriving market and fair. By the middle of the fourteenth century it was one of the centres of weaving and spinning of wool, making use of the know-how that Flemish craftsmen btought with them; no-one knows whether the Flemish actually settled in Lavenham. The town quite soon specialised in the production of thick, wall-to-wall carpets (the blue broadcloth), the yarn of which had been dyed in woad; hence the expression “dyed in the wool”.
This brought great prosperity to Lavenham. When Richard II, in the last years of his reign, demanded a loan from the 70 richest towns in 1397, Lavenham was in place 52, on a par with Bath and Plymouth. As explained by Alex Betterton the citizens accrued even greater wealth in the next 120 years: "The Muster Roll of 1522 and the returns to the great Lay Subsidy of 1524 offer detailed insight into the wealth and occupations of Lavenham's Tudor citizens. In his Local History in England (1972), the late Professor W.G. Hoskins constructed a table ranking provincial towns according to their total contributions to the Subsidy. This revealed that Lavenham in the 1520s, when the Guildhall was built, ranked fourteenth richest in the land."
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Alex Betterton
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