X-Nico

Worshipful Company of Clothworkers

Famous Clothworkers included King James I, Samuel Pepys, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Baroness Burdett-Coutts, George Peabody, Sydney Waterlow, Edward VII, Lord Kelvin, Viscount Slim, Robert Menzies and the Duke of Kent.

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From the later Middle Ages, cloth production gradually moved away from London, a situation exacerbated by the Great Fire of London and the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries.

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The original craft of the Clothworkers was the finishing of woven woollen cloth: fulling it to mat the fibres and remove the grease, drying it on tenter frames (from which derives the expression ‘to be on tenterhooks’), raising the nap with teasels (Dipsacus) and shearing it to a uniform finish.

see also