Frome in Wessex
Frome: Commercial History
Abstract
Contents Updated: Thursday, 26 October 2006
- St Aldhelm. The founder of Frome, 685 AD
- Frome in the Domesday Book 1086 AD
- The Wool Industry
- Engineering, Printing, Chemicals
- The Mendips, Quarrying and Associated Work
St Aldhelm and the foundation of Frome 685 AD
The Abbot of Malmesbury and Bishop of Serbourne, not two but one man who later became known as St Aldhelm, was seeking a place to found a new monastery. With a group of monks sometime around 685 AD he came to a level clearing on the edge of the Great Selwood Forest on a hillside overlooking a river. Some say it was simply known by the Saxon word for river but others say it derived from a Celtic word, ffraw meaning fair or brisk, whence Frome. The Abbot indicated that this was the spot and the monks set about clearing away the brush and they built a small wooden church dedicated to John the Baptist as the basis of a monastery. The Abbot was rich and influential, a relative of King Ine of Wessex. He could afford to spend money on his initially modest enterprise and, before long, monks and kings were visitors. This church served as the foundation of Frome and a church dedicated to St John the Baptist still exists on the spot, though it is now rather grander than the original.
Frome in the Domesday Book 1086 AD
The settlement began to grow and King Edred died in Frome. 400 years later (1086 AD) it was host to a Witan or Great Council of the Realm and was assessed by the conquering Normans in their valuation of the land they had acquired a few decades before by virtue of their victory over the unlucky Saxon, Harold, at the battle of Hastings (1066 AD). The Norman assessors wrote down their findings in the Domesday Book, so called because, like the Judgement Day, it would be the final word on the worth of England which would then be the basis of Norman taxation. In it Frome was a thriving town with a market and three mills and the forest of Selwood was a hunting forest for the king who owned the manor.
The Wool Industry
Frome, nestling in the foothills of the Mendips, low hills which were ideal for raising sheep, became a centre of the woollen industry along with its neighbours, Bradford on Avon and Trowbridge. Its reputation for good cloth grew and fleeces from further afield—Salisbury Plain and the Cotswold Hills—started to come to the area for combing, spinning and weaving. The peak of the local woollen industry came in the period from the 1500s to the 1700s, the town growing rapidly in population to about 10,000 and Trinity, a conservation area of characteristic cottages, being built for the workers between 1660 and 1720. This is the period of most of the surviving buildings of Frome, preserved because the industry shortly after went north and Frome never recovered its former glories. The Round Tower, which now houses the Tourist Office, is a restored stove formerly used for drying out dyed cloth.
In 1713 Frome had 54 tradesmen busy in the cloth trade compared with 25 at Bradford, from which Bradford in Yorkshire, the later centre of the wool industry, was named, and only 4 in Trowbridge. Besides these, the surrounding villages provided work for another 33 businesses. In 1745, the trade with London amounted to 1000 lengths of cloth despatched to the metropolis in 7 wagons a week.
Signs of the old wool business still exist in local names. Cut Hedges where Gould’s Ground now is was where the cloth was laid out to dry in the wind and the hedges were cut to allow the air to move freely over the fabric. Similarly, Rack’s Close was where the dyed cloth was laid out on racks to dry. A popular dye until the coal tar dyes were brought in as the local industry declined was the blue dye, woad, reputedly the colour used by the ancient Britons who faced up to Caesar. A local area until the Trinity was built was called the Oad Ground (Woad ground) showing that the dye was indeed grown there. During the Napoleonic wars the demand for woollen cloth for uniforms, especially blue cloth, led to a short suspension of Frome’s textile decline.
Engineering, Printing, Chemicals
However, as wool textiles disappeared to the growing cities of West Yorkshire, Frome began to grow in stature as a centre of the engineering industry. From about 1685 Cockeys had cast church bells in Frome and at the beginning of the nineteenth century it turned to casting iron components for the gas industry. Frome in 1832 AD already had gas lit streets.
A watchmaker in the Market Place, John Webb Singer, undertook to make a pair of brass candlesticks for a local church, found there was a demand and finished up with a large foundry. In the 1880s Singers started casting statues, many of which today are famous, though by sight not by association with Frome. Look up at the statue of justice next time you are at the Old Bailey (no aspersions meant!). It was cast at Singers, as was the statue of Boadicea (Queen Boudicca) swishing off legs on London’s Embankment, King Alfred at Winchester and the lions of the Rhodes memorial in South Africa.
A similar serendipitous event was the setting up of a small printer’s press by a chemist (pharmacist), William Langford, on Bath Street requiring labels for his medicines. From this small nativity was to grow Butler and Tanner, still an important employer in the town, and competing successfully despite publishers chasing lower printing costs in Italy and the Far East. The company is now in a factory down by the railway station but for many years was housed in a wonderful, Italianate or rather Byzantine multi-storied factory in Trinity. Regrettably this remarkable building has been left empty for many years, though doubtless many uses could be found for it if there were the start-up capital. Frome is also home to the household name, Cuprinol, who have a factory near to Butler and Tanner.
The Mendips, Quarrying and Associated Work
But a staple emplyment of the town is quarrying and the endeavours stemming from it. The Mendips is the source of the local building stone, a pretty honey coloured but soft limestone called Bath stone because the dominant Georgian buildings of nearby Bath are made of it. To the west of Frome are many large quarries which yield this stone and employ some of the workers of Frome. Not many, though. Quarrying is no longer a labour intensive industry. The offshoot of the quarries is the hardcore which they supply and which provide a major source of employment to Frome men—roadmaking. Frome is the centre of the Boys from the Blackstuff—tarmackers.
Tarmackers are latter day navvies. They work hard, having to travel away from home to wherever the roads are being made, and have a big thirst. They are urban cowboys and sometimes give the town the feel of a frontier town when they are enjoying themselves on a Friday or Saturday night. Still they are mainly kind-hearted and are bringing into the town money earned elsewhere, and readily putting it into the town’s economy.
Meanwhile the Singer factory, overlooking the town centre, carries on employing a few hundred people. Often there is talk of the company relocating to an edge-of-town site releasing a large site for development of a comprehensive shopping mall in Frome but so far, nothing has happened.
On the other hand the cattle market has been moved to an out of town site, about three miles away. It is hard to see how that could have been of commercial benefit to Frome, even though the town was uncomfortably crowded with people, animals and traffic on market days. The truth is that small towns like Frome can be quiet and die, or attract some commerce or tourism, with whatever discomfort it carries with it, and survive or even grow. Apparently some, even commercial people, cannot understand this simple truth.
The population of Frome has doubled in the last forty years to about 27,000. Mainly the new people have been accommodated in estates on the town’s outskirts so the medieval centre is still relatively unaffected. Where changes have been made they have, in the last few years been done tastefully and in keeping with the air of the town. Frome has tons of potential. Will it ever be properly realised?
