HISTORY OF FROME
The market town of Frome (pronounced Froom) has existed for almost 1300 years. It is the fourth largest town in Somerset with a current population of about 13,800. It occupies a position which originally was a stony and inhospitable hillside, facing North and sloping steeply down to a marshy plain bounded by a sluggish stream and, before the Mills interfered with the natural flow of the water with their weirs and sluices, subject to frequent and severe flooding.
The site of the future town bordered on the edge of a huge area of woodland known to the native British as the great wood but later renamed by their Saxon, or English, conquerors, Selwood from the number of Willows which grew in its swampy depths. The Selwood ridge which divided Somerset from Wiltshire gave birth to several rivers including the Wylie, the Stour and the Brue.
The first permanent settlement began in about 685, when St Aldhelm, the Abbot of Malmesbury, set up a mission on the banks of the River Frome. At that time, the settlement was on the edge of Selwood Forest and was a convenient crossing place over the river. There were ample water supplies from springs which were to be so important in the development of the cloth industry in the 14th Century. Frome was also ideally situated, being on the route which passed through the Mendip Hills/Salisbury Plain Gap.
The original church built was dedicated to St. John the Baptist. It was probably built of stone. The settlement grew, on land owned by the King, and in the Domesday Book (1086) there is a reference to a market, which would indicate that Frome was already a place of some importance.
After the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539, the Church lands passed into the hands of the Thynne family, who later bought more land in the area to develop the Longleat estate some 4 miles south-east of the town.
The town was to become a centre of the weaving trade. Sheep grazed in large, profitable flocks on the Mendips not far away and streams and springs of good water ran rapidly down into the town and the river through. One of them, open to the sky in the centre of Cheap Street, is running to this day.
The cloth trade, which began in the 14th Century, grew in importance. Following the Monmouth rebellion, Frome entered a period of great prosperity, based on an upsurge in the wool trade. During the 17th Century, Frome experienced a boom in this industry. The growth was such that, for a time, contemporaries could rank Frome with Manchester. The town's new prosperity produced a need for many workers. The subsequent population growth, in turn, led to a great increase in the demand for new housing. The result was a period of intense urban growth. Defoe, visiting Frome in 1726, declared it to be the wealthiest inland town in the country and more populous than the City of Bath, though he may have been exaggerating.
From 1630, the town, which had formally made heavy, undyed broadcloth now responded to the demand for lighter coloured broadcloths or medleys, and the cloth trade boomed. Workers flocked into the old town of narrow streets and lanes, scattered about steep, confining hills. It is said, to this day, that its geography is what makes Frome such a friendly place. People have to stop for a rest halfway up the steep slopes, so they are happy to chat to passers by.
By 1660, Charles II had been restored to the throne, religious toleration of a sort was promised and Frome Weavers were demanding building sites. A large area known as Oadground (corrupted from Woadground, and where woad for indigo dye had been grown) became available command followed by enclosed fields nearby - an area which became known as Trinity.
In the second half of the 17th century, largely because of the prosperity of the cloth manufacturing industry, the town of Frome experienced a rapid increase in population. Between 1660 and 1685, the number of rateable inhabitants quadrupled.
The rapid growth of Frome, so evident in the 1720s, did not continue beyond the 18th century. The relative prosperity of the town declined in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and only since the 1950s has Frome again experienced a significant increase in population.
Much of the new housing provided in the late 17th and early 18th centuries was in the area which has since been named Trinity after the Church built in 1837 in Trinity Street, similarly so named. The first reliable estimate of the population of the town as a hall, a survey of occupation of heads of households in Frome, made for Lord Weymouth, shows that in 1785, out of a total of 8,125 persons, 2,084 lived in this area.
By the middle of the 20th century, housing conditions in parts of the Trinity area had deteriorated, particularly in those areas most subjected to 19th century infilling. In the 1950s, two successive redevelopment schemes involved the demolition of considerable numbers of houses. A third scheme was planned to begin in 1975, but this has now been replaced by proposals for rehabilitation of the remaining houses.
From about 1670 the Weavers leased plots upon which they could build whatever site and shake of house they could fit in. There was planning - indeed the Trinity area has been called the earliest surviving example of planned industrial housing in the country.
In building the Weavers houses of Trinity, much attention had to be paid to the windows. They had to let in good, unobstructed light, facing North where possible. It is said that a cottage weaver with a small loom would have taken his loom round the house from window to window as the day wore on, to get the best of the daylight. After dark, light for the poor would have come from guttering tallow candles, so it was probably wise, at that time, not to have attempted good weaving.
As the Trinity area of Frome developed, so did Nonconformity in the town. There was a connection between religious dissent and the weaving trade. Early on, the spinners and weavers of Frome developed strong sympathies with the Puritans, so, not surprisingly, the town's sympathies were with parliament in the civil war and for Monmouth in 1685.
Clergy who could not accept the Act of uniformity of 1660 to had to leave their livings and were later prohibited from going within five miles of them. This meant that new Puritan clergy, driven out by the law, came to Frome at a time when the town was expanding hugely. Between 1660 and 1685 the population quadrupled.
In 1689, Dissenters were allowed to have their own meeting houses, provided they registered them and, by this date, wealthy clothiers and merchants, as well as their workers, supported dissent in its various forms. A Moravian sect, Baptists, Congregationalists, Quakers, and later, Methodists, all set up their own meeting houses as a consequence. It is interesting to note, as one walks around present day Frome, how many secular buildings, from furniture repositories to cow stalls, were once Nonconformity chapels.
Why were the Trinity Weavers particularly placed to embrace Nonconformity? The answer lies partly in the nature of their work: they were weaving at home. They could prop the Bible up beside the loom as they wove and, as they were at home, neighbours dropped in. This meant that the Frome weaver, who had been taught to read for the benefit of his religion, knew his Bible. Moreover, when neighbours dropped in from the huddled cottages of the narrow streets they could all discuss and argue about the literal truth of the passage in the Open Bible.
Weaving, dissent and the literal truth of the Bible were thus inextricably intertwined and, for the general run of unprotected piece-workers, membership of the chapel gave very great benefits. It made Sunday special - a day when they left the loom, heard long and inspiring sermons and sang fervent hymns (Methodist hymns particularly addressed this need).
The chapel gave them a common culture and common moral code, a sense of belonging of being in the in-group, with the hope of belonging in heaven. The Particular Baptists required their members to reply satisfactorily to the question, " do you solemnly give up yourself to the Lord and to the Church, to watch over, to be watched over? "
This meant, in practice, the scrutiny of members conduct in their private lives and an even more determined scrutiny of their religious beliefs and practices. The result of this made meant a lot of argument and uproar. There were exclusions, sometimes of whole groups from the various Nonconformity so sects. On the other hand, the noise, gossip and general commotion accompanying these upheavals probably brightened up the hard, dull lives of many a Trinity weaver and his family.
Another (less exalted) influence upon the life of the Trinity weaver, which should not be underestimated, was drink. Brewing had been an important industry in the town for many generations and a particularly strong beer named "October" was brewed and sold in large quantities to all classes. The town teemed with pubs and alehouses, drunken brawling was commonplace and it is said that the uproar at the Lamb and Fountain Inn regularly disturbed patients at Castle Street Hospital opposite.
The promise of rising prosperity at the end of the 17th century had drawn scoundrels, wasters, and tricksters to Frome along with honest workmen. Mugging and highway robbery increased and it was found that a great deal of strong liquor was being sold without a licence. There was even one occasion or more when the chapels reduced their members for being "in drink".
All the same, general prosperity was rising as the Trinity developed. The change to lighter coloured medleys in the 18th century meant there was a demand for dying on a large scale. By 1721 it was reported that Frome was: " very famous for the manufacture of broad and narrow woollen-cloths, in which it employs thousands of the poor, both old and young, so that girls of seven or eight years of age are able to earn half a crown per week in a good time of trade."
By the 1760s the Trinity area was complete - full as could be of stone roofed little houses with walled gardens large enough for a potato patch and a few fruit trees.
We must not, though, run off with the idea that a bucolic life for merry peasants was to be had there. Smallpox and cholera broke out at intervals, diphtheria and scarlet fever carried off infants, and young people fell prey to consumption. In any case, the cloth industry suffered periodic depressions before picking up again, and from time to time there were riots-against the masters, between groups of weavers and against the high price of food.
After 1740 though, there was a huge rise in demand for cloth and, in 1743, a letter stated, "they cannot make it fast enough to satisfy the call for it... and get labourers to bring in the harvest because all the poor people are employed by the clothiers."
By 1746, seven wagons of cloth made by Frome and the surrounding villages were sent off weekly from "The Waggon and Horses" near Frome for the London trading centre at Blackwell Hall.
France was one of the chief customers for our exports of cloth in the 18th century but, when war broke out with France in 1743, that trade ended. However, there was then an increased demand for uniform cloth. Livery cloth for upper servants' uniforms had traditionally been made in Frome; now scarlet cloth was woven for military uniforms and blue cloths for naval ones. In addition, in 1726 the Frome Selwood Volunteers (a local defence organisation set up against a French invasion) required blue cloth. Their uniform consisted of a blue coat and two pantaloons based with red.
Blue dyed cloth was very important to Frome's cloth making. In 1732 a school for poor boys had been founded and the boys wore a uniform of long blue coats, while the "blue women" of the adjoining almshouses (the Blue House) received a blue gown every two years. Sheppards opened a dye house in Willow Vale and, to this day, splashes of blue dye can be seen on the walls of outhouses there. These are perhaps too vivid to be 200 years old but it is tempting to think that they may have been made when cloth was being dyed in the war against Napoleon.
That war, which ended in 1815 at Waterloo, had disastrous consequences for the weavers of Trinity. One of the Sheppard family remarked that the battle injured them as well as Napoleon, and indeed it was so.
Competition from the woollen towns of the north was keen. The Industrial Revolution brought about modernisation which Frome was reluctant to follow. Frome clung to the old ways of working and continued to use English wool for livery cloth when, all the time, Yorkshire had discovered that foreign wool alone, or mixed with English wool, produced a much better material. The result, by 1819, was assisted immigration - in that year the parish sent 25 families to the Cape of Good Hope. A few years later, hundreds of unemployed weavers were to be seen grinding stones for roadmaking, and moving earth, as a form of parish relief.
Although the last traces of the cloth trade did not die out until the 1960's, other industries, particularly printing, flourished bringing prosperity, but no growth, to the town. Interestingly, the population of Frome remained static for over 100 years, until the mid 1960's. Since that time, the population has almost doubled.
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