Blockley is an old village within the Cotswold district of Gloucestershire. It is on the edge of that county not far away from the Four-Counties sign-post that once marked a rare meeting point of 4 counties – Gloucestershire, Warwickshire, Oxfordshire, and latterly Worcestershire until boundary changes took it away in 1931. Before then, indeed since 855BCE, Blockley had been an exclave, a part of Worcestershire separated from the rest of the County. Historically it was the Bishops of Worcester who oversaw the parish – apart from a short break under Cromwell – for over 900 years. The parish of Blockley is roughly a square with the village being situated in the centre, with the Fosse Way running three miles to the east, Moreton in Marsh three miles south east, Upton three miles to the west and Chipping Campden three miles to the north. The village sits on Blockley Brook which runs northwest to Knee Brook where the current turns east to Tidmington where it joins the River Stour. The waters then run north to the river Avon just short of Stratford where the flow then finally turns south-west to Tewkesbury and the River Severn and the sea. The village lies in a steep sided narrow river valley cut by the Blockley Brook on either side of which appear a large number of springs thrown out along the outcrop of Upper Lias clays higher on the south side than the north, and at places down to the level of the village itself.
King Burgred had granted the Bishop of Worcester permission for a “minster” at Blockley in 855BCE for 300 Solidi (gold coins weighing about 4.5g). Whilst probably not a monastery, this was intended as a centre from which “to convert and minister to the pagan uplanders of the North Cotswolds” (H Icely). The Domesday Book states that in 1087 the Bishops held an estate there of 38 Hides (a hide was an area that could support a family and its dependants and varied in size between 60-120 acres depending on the quality of the land). The C of E Parish Church of St Peter & St Paul is Norman, built around 1180, possibly as an improvement on the original building to respect the martyrdom of Thomas-a-Becket in 1170. The church is famous these days for being the Church used in the Father Brown TV series.
Twelve mills were recorded in the Blockley Manor in the Domesday Book – likely these were “stream wheels”, with the flow beneath (undershot) and the wheel hanging in the main current. Of those still known about today at least 8 or 9 were on Blockley Brook and three on the Coneygree streams that join to form the Colebroke with others further out of the village. A Fulling Mill for the treatment of finished woollen products, and a Corn Mill are both recorded in 1299. Others, before their conversion to silk would have been for the grinding of flour and grist.
With the streams and the mills situated thereon it was a rich and popular benefice in the heart of the Cotswolds – although in early years little of the income received from the fields and the livestock would have found its way into the Parish, most being siphoned off for Church use elsewhere.
Not until 1715 when the Vicar Erasmus Saunders opened a school in the village for the parishioners did Blockley residents see much benefit (this school was built in place of a private school previously run in the Vicarage by the Puritan vicar Giles Collier). In 1725 the crumbling Church Tower was repaired. Open field agriculture came to an end with enclosure of the common land from 1773 but Mere-stones that marked the boundaries of tithed and non-tithed land were still being ploughed in or deliberately moved 30 years later.
From around 1755 the Crown Inn is mentioned in the heart of the village probably operating as a “coaching inn”. Coaching Inns were busy places who “owned” the territory between it and the next Coaching Inn and this right was protected fiercely. As well as providing a resting place with food and accommodation for horses and passengers such places often also provided hire facilities for the wealthier clients of both men and horses for private carriages. Such coaches were not comfy ways to travel because the roads were rough and rutted, particularly suffering in wet periods, and the coaches had little in the way of suspension. Traditionally about 7 miles apart (but this could be as many as 12 or 15) Coaching Inns performed a vital role in the Country’s transport infrastructure, and in England they were also became a pick-up point for the Mail Coach.
The Royal Mail can trace its history back to 1516, when Henry VIII established a “Master of the Posts”. Later James I (1603-25) established a royal postal service between London and Edinburgh in an attempt to retain control over the Scottish Privy Council. The Royal Mail service was first made available to the public by Charles I in 1635, with postage being paid by the recipient. During the Civil War and under Cromwell the Parliamentary Post Service was run by Edmund Prideaux as a private arrangement run for his own profit but he did improve efficiency using both fair means and foul to maintain his monopoly. In 1655 the Post Office was put under the direct government control of John Thurloe, best known to history as Cromwell’s spymaster general. Previous English governments had tried to prevent conspirators communicating, but Thurloe preferred to deliver their post having surreptitiously read it first. In 1660 at the restoration of the monarchy the General Post Office (GPO) was officially established by Charles II.
Between 1719 and 1763, Ralph Allen, postmaster at Bath, signed a series of contracts with the post office to develop and expand Britain’s postal network. Allen organised mail coaches which were provided by both Wilson & Company of London and Williams & Company of Bath. The early Royal Mail Coaches were similar to ordinary family coaches but with Post Office livery. The post box usually was fixed to the back of the coach and was provided with an armed guard. With the coming of Turnpike roads in the late 1780s came the development of more efficient and more comfortable wheeled transport which until then had been crude affairs with little suspension. The main catalyst for change was the introduction by Allen of scheduled coach services designed specifically to speed up the distribution of Royal Mail across the country.
The first scheduled Royal Mail coach ran in 1784, operating between Bristol and London. Delivery staff received uniforms for the first time in 1793. By the 1820s a coach journey was not such a dreadful ordeal – as long as you could afford an inside seat. Both Stage and Mail coaches carried up to 4 passengers inside, but Stagecoaches allowed up to 12 on top with their legs dangling over the edge. Mail coaches initially allowed none on top, but later relaxed this to 4 outside passengers as long as they did not delay the mail.
The Uniform Penny Post was introduced in January 1840 whereby a single rate for delivery anywhere in Great Britain and Ireland was pre-paid by the sender. A few months later, to certify that postage had been paid on a letter, the sender could affix the first adhesive postage stamp, the Penny Black that was available for use from 6 May the same year. Pillar boxes were introduced in mainland Britain in 1853.
It was James I (1603-25) who kick-started the silk industry in England . He ordered the production of silk – and the breeding of silk worms – on a commercial scale but the plan was doomed to failure not merely because of the Civil War, but also because silk worms will only breed on white mulberry trees which will not flourish in this country. Additionally the actual methods and machinery for throwing spun silk thread were controlled by the Italians, who guarded the secret of their techniques on pain of death. But by 1718 John and Thomas Lombe of Derby had patented their specialist silk-throwing frame after a daring episode of industrial espionage in Italy, and English factories were ready to move. Sir James Rushout, MP for Evesham, acquired the Great House and estate of Northwick Park at Blockley in 1683. He came from an old Flemish Huguenot silk weaving family and came with family influence – his father had been Lord Mayor of London, his brother was Treasurer to the Admiralty under both Charles II and James II, with Samuel Pepys as Secretary, and all the family had major business interests not only in the Spitalfields silk business but also in the East India Company and in the Levant Company. It seems now to have been inevitable that he should have been interested in silk processes. The twelve flourishing watermills of Blockley gave him the opportunity to put his ideas into practice.
The import of unspun cocoons from China was impossible, because they have to be kept soft and wet, so that the resinous gum secreted by the caterpillars does not harden off and become unusable. Basically the cocoons would not survive a three-month sea-voyage in a sailing merchantman round the Cape. The thread that arrived in England had therefore already been spun into skeins, tightly twisted and packed into sacks ready for the next stage – the throwing or throwsting. It is this stage only that was carried out in Blockley. It was from Coventry that the spun skeins arrived each Friday by ox-cart, to be distributed to the throwing mills. The throwsting process consisted of winding threads from the skeins on to spindles suitable for the weaving looms back in Coventry. The skeins were mounted around an expanding drumshaped frame called a swift. The threads were led down through a series of rotating armatures, which not only spun them on to the spindles but also combined several threads together in a reverse twist creating a multiple thread which, like spun rope, would not double back on to itself and would also be sufficiently strong to bear the tension when mounted on to a weaving loom. Three qualities of thread were produced in Blockley, singles, tram and organzine. Singles was used only for very plain and – comparatively speaking for silk – rough material. Organzine was the most desirable and valuable, and produced the highest grade of silk cloth. Operatives often wore spectacles because the splicing or “rubbing-off” of broken threads required excellent eyesight and very deft, clean fingers. Russell (Malvern) Mill was certainly involved in this process, and Whatcott’s Mill which in 1680 was “a water-mill used as a spinning mill” was by 1716 Throwing Silk. Samuel Knight of Camden built a silk mill in Lord’s Orchard on the Colebrook. His daughter Martha was involved with Edward Whatcott who took a long lease on the Conygree where there was already a fulling mill which they converted into a silk-throwing mill in 1747. By this time there was already another silk mill owned by John Franklin.
By 1800 there were 8 mills along the Blockley and Cole Brooks employing 300 women and children in the Mills and maybe another 3000 in their homes within a ten mile radius in the Coventry manner of many owning and working their own equipment situated in their own homes. And wages were good – in the good times. Most of the product was taken by the Coventry silk industry which reached a peak in the mid 1820s only to fall heavily when William Huskisson, known as the ablest Financier of his time and a member of Lord Liverpool’s government, ended the prohibition on silk imports from France in the interest of Free Trade.
Although an import duty of 30% was retained for the next 30 years three of the eight mills working in Blockley had closed by 1850 and when even the 30% duty was removed in the mid 1850s, the industry collapsed entirely. In 1830 William Huskisson became the first person to be run over by a train and killed when he got in the way at the trials of Stephenson’s Rocket.
And with the growth of the silk industry the population of Blockley and the surrounding villages also grew, almost doubling from 700 in 1757 to 1300 in 1827. This growth was helped in no small part by the application of basic welfare under the Poor Laws by the Parish Officers, the Clergy, the Church Wardens and the Overseers under the guidance of two Vicars, Charles Selwyn (1761-1794) and William Boughton (1794-1831) not only as Chairmen of the Vestry but also as Magistrates of the County Bench. Whilst they had to wait for the Cholera epidemics of 1850s to drive improvements in sanitation, it was infant mortality (estimated at 1 in every 4 children by 1815) and morals (1 birth in 8 was illegitimate – and this only includes those baptised) plus the constant visitations of smallpox (until the arrival of the Jenner vaccine) and consumption (TB) that drove this application of social welfare. The cost to the Parish was large and the Blockley Poor Rate (a tax on property used to look after the poor and destitute) rose from £748 in 1795 to £1670 by 1830 when the Poor Law Amendment Acts brought an end to the process with the introduction of Workhouses requiring the poor to work for their support.
It was at this time of increased social welfare that Thomas Bearcroft’s name first appears in Blockley. Born probably between 1740 and 1750 it was in Blockley Church in 1774 that he married Mary Hows from Camden by Licence in a ceremony conducted by the Vicar Charles Selwyn.
But Came They All to Birmingham 