1556 Tudor Atherstone

Marion Alexander’s survey of sixteenth century Mancetter probate wills and inventories gives a fascinating and informative coverage of these local trades and occupations.

The 40 inventories listed for Atherstone include that of John Drayton (1556), here described as a butcher and elsewhere styled ‘yeoman’, and William Drayton (1557), a leather tanner. Hugh Drayton, who is also described as a tanner was probably related to the alehouse keeper of the same name mentioned in a 1597 Leicester archdeaconry court case relating to events which took place at the annual fair. Marion points out that tanners and butchers often engaged in farming and that many of these occupations were complimentary - farmers slaughtering their own cattle to provide tanned hides for shoemakers and saddlers.

Atherstone was also an important centre for weaving and clothmaking. The area marked ‘Tenter Flatt’ on the Bracebridge map were probably used for stretching and drying cloth. William Reppington, a forebear of the family that later bought the manor of Atherstone, was a weaver and among those who left inventories are Hugh Middleton, a prosperous draper and Henry Blew, a ‘haberdasher’, selling finished cloths and felt hats.

Late medieval manor court rolls provide clear evidence that local women brewed ale to sell in the local alehouses, and that two ale tasters were employed to supervise the trade. Benjamin Bartlett, the 18th century antiquary, author of the famous History of Mancetter, observed that the town was ‘walled with ale and paved with marble’. Francis Goddard’s reference to 32 alehouses in Atherstone in 1720 also suggests there was also a thriving alehouse trade in Elizabethan times as local villagers from the surrounding area crowded into the town on market days.

The sixteenth-century inventories reveal that the houses in Atherstone were quite modest in size, even though many were double-storied. Although many had ‘shops’ and there were numerous baking houses, dairies, malt-houses, kilnhouses, candlemaking rooms and tanneries attached to the premises, they rarely had more than four living rooms. Larger residences such as John Abel’s Mansion house with eleven rooms, and Nicholas Lawrence’s Oldbury manor on the outskirts of the town, which had sixteen rooms, reveal the town’s popularity as a haven for retired gentlemen.

Although only one of the surviving inventories - John Rampton’s - belongs to a miller (described both as a yeoman and a miller in 1557), there were probably others. Two mills are recorded in 1573, a windmill a watermill, grinding corn for bakers like Richard Knight, who also left an inventory. According to the antiquary John Nichols, as far back as 1388 several inhabitants of the town were fined for failing to bake bread in the public bakehouse in Bakehouse Lane, and as late as 1780 copyholders were still being obliged to grind their malt at a horse mill in this lane running off the market square.

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