These entries in the parish registers from neighbouring
Whitchurch, recording burials in a woollen shroud, were mirrored in Preston and
every other community across Britain. This illustrates how, by the 18th
century, the world was shrinking and how
a country across the Atlantic could rewrite the British economy.
Britain rose from obscurity on the back of the wool trade. Th
trade had been thriving since the 13th century and many fortunes had
been made, especially in the Cotswolds, a short distance from Preston. The
quality British wool was in high demand by the weavers of continental Europe
and sheep comprised the majority of livestock in Britain until the 18th
century. Many farmers kept vast flocks and humbler labourers kept a handful of
sheep on their village's common pastures. In some areas, particularly during
Tudor times, villages were forcibly depopulated and their arable land converted
to more valuable sheep-walks.
By the 16th century, Europeans were settling the
newly-discovered lands across the Atlantic. The value of cotton was recognised
and exploited. Within a century it was flooding into Europe. Cheaply produced
on vast plantations using slave labour, it swamped the market and the wool
trade began to collapse.
An Act of Parliament in 1678, a desperate measure to boost
the trade, decreed that all corpses were to be buried in a shroud of wool. That
this had been done was sworn before the rector and noted in the burial
registers, as shown above. A £5 fine was payable if it wasn't done.
The Act was widely unpopular among
the wealthy, who wished to be buried in all their finery. 'Odious! Woollen!
'Twould a saint provoke!' wrote poet Alexander Pope in 1735. Many of the
wealthier classes opted to pay the fine.
The Act did little to help. The fortunes made were now lost, and the vast
sheep-walks began to disappear. The Cotswold sheep, once so carefully
cherished, clings on today as an endangered breed.
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