How sheep farming transformed the architectural face of the Cotswolds

Laid in the chancel floor of St James’ Church, Chipping Campden, Gloucestershire, are the brass portraits of a husband and wife. Each full-length figure is framed beneath an arch and is shown with their hands pressed together in prayer. The former has a neatly forked beard and the latter wears her hair braided and bound in a net. The portraits are not of a knight and his lady, although both are dressed in flowing robes and the former carries a sword. Rather, the Latin inscription reveals them as William Grevel (or Greville) and his wife, Marion, who died respectively in 1401 and 1386. The former is strikingly styled as ‘sometime citizen of London and the flower of wool merchants of the whole of England’.

This was a considerable boast considering that, at the time, wool was the principal product and export of the kingdom. Whether strictly true or not, however, Grevel was a figure who grew wealthy as a wool merchant. The descendant of a family with Flemish or Norman roots that had settled in Chipping Campden by the late 13th century, Grevel became a considerable landowner and is credited with building a large surviving house in Chipping Camden. By the terms of his will, he also gave 100 marks ‘towards making the new works’ of the church (Fig 1). His monument, in fact, is ornamented both with a coat of arms — a mark of gentility — and his merchant’s mark, used to identify his wool.

Grevel was representative of a much larger group of individuals and institutions that grew rich in the late Middle Ages on the proceeds of Cotswold wool. This area of limestone upland that spans parts of Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire and Warwickshire provided excellent pasture. Too dry for cattle, it was perfectly suited for sheep and its wool became internationally prized. One of the ways in which the profits of the wool trade were invested was in the construction and furnishing of parish churches.

The history of sheep grazing in the Cotswolds can be traced back archaeologically to the Roman period. Little is known, however, of its scale or importance in this remote period. Nor does the Domesday Survey, commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1086, shed much light on the subject. What it does record is that wool from Cirencester, Gloucestershire, was reserved for the use of the Queen. Presumably, therefore, it was already recognised as being of high value. The real pioneers of England’s medieval wool production, however, were monasteries.

Caen Abbey in Normandy, for example, had a flock of 467 sheep on Minchinhampton Common, Gloucestershire, in the early 12th century. Coincidentally, this Common is one of the few medieval sheep runs to survive today in the Cotswolds (most have been ploughed up and turned to arable). Nor was farming the only means of profiting from wool. In about 1220, Gloucester Abbey founded a borough at Northleach and established an annual three-day fair there, timed to coincide with the shearing of the sheep flocks in late June. Northleach was well placed on the road network to receive wool from other Cotswold farmers and quickly became prosperous.

This growth in sheep farming was part of a much wider phenomenon across the kingdom in areas such as East Anglia, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Shropshire and Somerset. The climate generally was well suited to fine wool and the Cistercian Order in particular, with its monasteries in remote rural sites, grew wealthy on sheep. So valuable was this commodity to the Cistercians that, in 1193, the Order was compelled to make a gift of the year's clippings towards the ransom of Richard I. By the 13th century, there developed a trade in future wool production, with all the financial risks that involved.

In the Cotswolds, meanwhile, the same period witnessed the first documented attempts at breeding the best sheep for the region. The subject of the pedigree and history of Cotswold sheep remains controversial, so, too, the purposes for which the breed was initially kept, whether for wool or milk. What is clear, however, is that rams were being introduced to the region from elsewhere in the country by the 13th century.

As wool production grew, so did the cottage industry of weaving cloth. The Cotswolds had naturally occurring fuller’s earth to use in the mills where the cloth was washed and cleaned. By 1200, Minchinhampton Common had four such fulling mills alone and, not long afterwards, a cloth called Cotswolds — presumably a local weave — is recorded. That said, the finest woven cloth was produced in Flanders and, during the 13th century, this connection between Flemish traders became firmly established. They were soon joined in the Cotswolds from the 1290s by Italian merchants.

Seeing the profits generated, in 1275 Edward I became the first English king to levy tax on wool exports as a quick means of raising large sums of money. For the remainder of the Middle Ages, the Crown attempted to manage the sale of wool to its own financial advantage and as a tool of economic embargo. It was in symbol of the perceived importance of this national product that at some point in the mid 14th century, during the reign of Edward III, the Lord Chancellor famously took his seat on a woolpack in the House of Lords.

One result of these changes was that the wool trade suddenly became documented in great detail and also that it came under the control of big and vastly wealthy interests, many of them predatory. This shift in the character of the trade was further exaggerated by the impact of the Black Death from 1346. The collapse in population not only emptied the landscape, opening it up to more intensive farming, but it simultaneously left big landowners without the manpower to manage their own estates. A new mercantile class now emerged, of whom Grevel at Chipping Campden is a perfect example.

This change in the structure of the wool trade had an important architectural effect, encouraging investment by wealthy members of the laity in parish churches. It should be said that monasteries, notably Winchcombe, Cirencester and Hailes (Fig 6), continued to build on a lavish scale until the end of the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, however, the Reformation has swept away nearly all trace of what they created and the loss is important. These were the institutions that probably set the architectural pace of change and which retained the most important masons.

Patterns of investment in parish churches could be complex and the process of construction prolonged. A wealthy family might simply build a burial chapel and attach it to a church with little regard for the existing fabric. An early example of such a project probably funded by wool is the extraordinary transept of Minchinhampton (Fig 8), which by tradition was constructed by a local landowner, John of Ansley. The design, dated stylistically to the 1330s, evokes the forms of a great church executed in miniature; the transept has a stone roof (rather than a vault), a massive rose window and two richly ornamented tombs of a knight and his lady.

More commonly, however, parishioners contributed to larger collective building works, each contributing as their means allowed. Such projects sometimes focused on the construction of a grand church tower, which might be designed in overt competition with those of neighbouring buildings. Alternatively, they might involve the reconstruction of the nave, which in a parish church was the particular responsibility of the laity. The wool trade created a number of outstanding individual donors, as in the case of John Fortey at Northleach. At his death in 1459, his will included a bequest of £300 towards ‘the new middle aisle… already begun by me’. His brass in the church shows his feet resting on a sheep and a woolpack, clear evidence of the source of his wealth (Fig 7).

The nave of Northleach is a very coherent interior (Fig 5) with restrained detailing and it compares closely in design to the nave of Chipping Campden (although the relative dates of the two are uncertain). Northleach is made imposing by the visual extension of the arcade columns into the clerestory and there are integral stone brackets to support a lost tomb tester. This was almost certainly intended to dignify Fortey’s monument. In technical terms, the design reflects an awareness of early-15th-century buildings in Bristol, Oxford and Coventry. The name of the mason who conceived it, however, is unknown. Might both interiors be based on a lost monastic original?

There were different ways of making money from wool and at different times into the 16th century, taxes and royal policy variously gave advantage to those who produced it; those who acted as intermediaries in its sale; or those who wove it into cloth. In nearly all its forms, however, wool trading involved complex financial transactions of high value over long distances and was intensively regulated both by government bureaucracy and also by specialist guilds.

For example, a local woolman in the late 15th century might contract to assemble a stipulated quantity and quality of wool on behalf of a buyer. The buyer, perhaps a London mercer, then appointed a ‘packer’ to assess the quality of what was supplied. This was weighed and packed into so-called sarplers, bundles of two or three sacks of wool. Each sarpler was then marked with a merchant's mark and taken to the king’s beam for weighing and payment of duty. Only with proof of that payment could wool be legally shipped to the Staple at Calais for sale to foreign merchants.

By 1500, the profits of wool were encouraging the further intensification of sheep farming in the Cotswolds. This in turn encouraged a further burst of building in the decades leading up to the Reformation. Two outstanding church building projects in the Cotswolds deserve individual mention. The new porch and nave (Fig 2) of Cirencester parish church St John the Baptist were collective undertakings of quite exceptional ambition, the former partly funded by a gift of 40 sheep in 1492 by Robert Stone, and the latter begun from 1514. Given how the building commands the market place today, it’s hard to believe that it once stood in the immediate shadow of an even greater abbey church (Fig 3).

No less remarkable is Fairford, Gloucestershire, rebuilt largely through the generosity of John Tame, a wool merchant, who died in 1500, and his son Edmund. In creating this splendid building, Tame was in part seeking to stake Fairford’s claim as a commercial rival to Cirencester. The interior is now famed for its outstanding and coherently planned cycle of stained glass, begun in the first decade of the 16th century and attributed to the King’s Glazier, Bernard Flower (Fig 4).

The magnificent windows of St Mary’s in Fairford are a reminder that architecture was only one aspect of the late-medieval investment in parish churches. Large sums of money could also be paid towards fixtures such as stained glass and rood screens that tend not to survive, as well as for costly vestments or for the stipends of clergy employed to celebrate services. Rich as the architectural legacy of the late Middle Ages remains in the Cotswolds, we only see a shadow of what once existed.

This feature originally appeared in the September 16, 2026, issue of Country Life. Click here for more information on how to subscribe.