Welsh Journals

Dr. Tann's conclusions about Gloucestershire mills are very relevant indeed to Wales (and to the rest of England), but her pioneering fieldwork has been emulated, without comparable analyses, only in the Monnow and Trothy basins. 11 Dr. Tann's findings were quite simply that fulling-mills might be built anywhere, that the western edge of the Cotswolds, so beloved of Miss Carus-Wilson, was no more preferred than the meandering streams of the Severn Valley, that men were prepared to invest in building fulling-mills, as well as grist-mills, in places where summers were often uncomfortably dry or where floods were frequent. In short, the geographical imperatives for the location of mechanised fulling have been eroded. It has long been appreciated that proximity to raw materials had little influence on the siting of centres of the medieval and early- modern cloth industry. The supply of wool from local flocks was not of critical importance in Britain, except perhaps for Devon and Somerset serge. 12 It might be convenient, but it was not at all necessary, to have nearby outcrops of fuller's earth. Partly this was because fuller's earth could be obtained elsewhere, like the wool: the East Anglian cloth centres brought fuller's earth from Kent, for example. The lack of dependence is also emphasised by the existence of partial substitutes or complements: cleansing soap made from animal fat was easy to produce and there was another less salubrious but much cheaper solvent universally available and constantly renewable. If, then, one concludes that fulling-mills might, as a conscious industrial decision, be situated almost anywhere, on the upper Ffrwdwyllt or in Carmarthen town or on Swansea's seashore, explanations of the phenomenon become more subtle, more diverse, more personal and more interesting than the geographical determinism of Miss Carus-Wilson and Mr. Pelham. Mrs. Joan Thirsk has produced some possible general explanations for the location of the textile industry in early- modern England. These are in terms of partibility of inheritance, surplus population, a pastoral economy and a working unit which S. D. Coates and D. G. Tucker, Water-Mills of the Monnow and Trothy and their Tributaries (Monmouth, 1978). Cf. the important analysis for part of the west country of England in K. H. Rogers, Wiltshire and Somerset Woollen Mills (Pasold Research Fund Publication, V, Edington, 1976), pp. 5-17. 12 A. R. H. Baker, 'Changes in the Later Middle Ages', in H. C. Darby (ed.), A New Historical Geography of England before 1800 (Cambridge, 1973), pp. 222-26; J. Thirsk, 'Industries in the Countryside' in F. J. Fisher (ed.), Essays in the Economic and Social History of Tudor and Stuart England in Honour ofR. H. Tawney (Cambridge, 1961), pp. 72 74. 13 Thirsk, op. cit., p. 72; J. G. Jenkins, The Welsh Woollen Industry (Cardiff, 1969), pp. 83, 177.