Gainsborough’s Countryside (S/LIB/9/8/1)
A talk given by CFD Sperling: to an unknown audience probably in the
town of Sudbury, Suffolk, early 1930s.
The paper was found in the Society’s archives.
The descent of Thomas
Gainsborough from a worthy Sudbury family, engaged in the Cloth trade, is well
known to all, and may be found, fully set out, in the various Bibliographies of
the artist which have been published.
But, today, I propose to consider his early environment, and to tell you
something about this part of the Stour Valley in which he was nurtured and
about the surrounding villages which were not without their influence upon him.
The country around Sudbury is
eminently calculated to stimulate a love for landscape. The scenery of the
Stour Valley could never fail to charm a mind formed by nature to feed on the
beautiful. Thomas Gainsborough, indeed,
never quitted England, but spent his infancy, and matured his artistic
education, in this country, teeming with homely rural associations, and, amidst
such unambitious scenery, he found congenial food for his mind and subjects for
his pencil.
The river Stour was ever dear
to him and fifty years residence in other parts of the country could not alienate
his affections from the river of his boyhood.
This southern part of the
county of Suffolk is today a district of rich in cornfields, winding lanes, and
beautiful churches. It is difficult to
believe that these country villages were once the centre of a thriving
cloth-making industry. Four hundred
years ago there was scarcely a village that had not something to do with the
making of broad-cloth.
In the 11th and 12th
centuries little woollen-cloth was woven in England for trade purposes, though
no doubt in many a home, sufficient cloth was woven for the use of the
household. To supply the demand for the
finished material, English Wool was exported in the raw state to Flanders,
where it was worked up into cloth and sent back to be worn in this country.
By the beginning of the
thirteenth century, the cloth weaving industry grew until England became a
great cloth-making country exporting cloth all over the world, and the time
came when the clothiers were amongst the wealthiest men of the land, owning manors
and houses, and gaining knighthoods and other high distinctions.
The manufacture of Woollen
Cloth had its chief centre in the eastern counties, though it was more or less
diffused through the length and breadth of the country.
As early as the beginning of
the fourteenth century, it is recorded in the Ipswich Domesday Book, that a
duty was there payable on export of the woollen cloth of “Coggeshall, Maldon,
Colchester and Sudbury” from the port of Ipswich.
The weaving industry, in this
corner of Suffolk, was of native growth and not affected to any great extent by
immigration of Flemish weavers. There
was indeed a rapid increase of the alien population in the 15th
century, but the greater number were settled on the coast, and were occupied chiefly
as brewers, coopers and shoemakers. In 1486 only five Flemings were entered in
the Return as settled in the cloth-making district.
In the fifteenth century the
development of this trade was the one bright feature in the economic history of
the time.
Commercially and industrially
the eastern countries were then in the vau: their ports gave access to the
highway of commerce with the Dutch and the Low Countries, and it was indirectly
due to this that they became the most thriving centres of the weaving and textile
manufactures.
The flourishing state of the
trade and the liberating of the wealthy clothiers led to the reconstruction on
a larger scale of the greater number of the Parish Churches of this
neighbourhood. Again and again brasses or
ledger-slabs bear the wool merchant’s mark, and Chantry-chapels or
Church-extensions sprang from their benefactors.
Country towns vied with one
another in enlarging and beautifying their shrines of worship, and it is
interesting to see how each endeavoured to outdo its neighbour’s lead. Sudbury was not minded to lag behind in its
provision for worship, of which there is evidence in the three fine Churches
standing in the town, each of them rebuilt or added to at the end of the fifteenth
century.
Sudbury is the centre of this
once flourishing manufacturing district: a district which included Lavenham,
Lindsey, Kersey, Boxford and Hadleigh, on the Suffolk side, and Dedham,
Colchester, Coggeshall, Braintree, Bocking, and Halstead, on the Essex side.
This district is throughout
famous for its large Perpendicular Churches: the magnificent Church at
Lavenham, six miles to the North of Sudbury, was practically rebuilt at the end
of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries by the
wealthy Spring family, cloth manufacturers of that place. The carved oak screen of the Spring Chapel in
Lavenham Church is one of the gems of Suffolk art.
The fine Church of Long
Melford, three miles away, was there rebuilt by the generosity of the Clopton
and Martin families, and the contemporary stained glass, much of which still
remains, is noteworthy. Stoke Church,
with its lofty tower and fine brasses, and Nayland, with its painting of
Constable, were reconstructed or enlarged at this period.
In this district, too, are the
towns of Bildeaton and Hadleigh, which took their share in the production of
woollen cloth; close by are the little villages of Lindsey and Kersey, famed
for their association with the wool trade, which should alas be visited for
their rural beauty. “Lindsey Woolsey, Carsey cloth, with Sudbury Says and
Colchester Bays” were in use throughout the countryside.
Further down the river at
Stratford St Mary the wealthy families of Smith, and Morse, Clothiers, have
left their marks carved in stone or painted in glass, in the walls of the
Church. At Dedham the Webbes and the
Gurdons carried on a flourishing trade and contributed largely to the
reconstruction of the Church.
Here too may be seen a late 15th
century building of much interest, said to have been formerly the ‘Bay ad Say’
factory.
The beginning of the 16th
century saw the Suffolk cloth trade at its height; slowly but gradually the
demand for Suffolk Broad Cloth declined, and changing fashion led to the demand
for “the New Draperies” made in London, Norwich and other places. In Sudbury, cloth continued to be made up to
and after the time of Thomas Gainsborough.
His father, John Gainsborough, we are told, introduced the manufacture
of “burying crepe” into this town. A
zealous government having hoped to revive the woollen trade by decreeing that
woollen cloth should be the Englishmans Shroud.
Arthur Young, the great agricultural writer, when travelling in the
district in 1767, visited Sudbury and reported that it was a great
manufacturing town wherein a great many hands earned a living “by working up
the wool from the sheep’s back to weaving it into says and burying crepe, which
are their principal articles. The whole
manufactury works chiefly for the London markets, but some says go down the river
(which is navigable from here to Manningtree) for exportation”.
It was in this neighbourhood,
richly endowed with beauty, and studded throughout with the picturesque
manor-houses and the humbler timber cottages of those engaged in the clothing
trade, that Thomas Gainsborough was brought up, and passed the most
impressionable years of his life.
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