For most of the seventeenth century the biggest employer in Bewdley was not the river. It was knitting. The town made woollen caps in enormous numbers, sold them across England and well beyond it, and nobody called them Bewdley caps. They were Monmouth caps, and they kept that name long after Monmouth had stopped making them.
How the trade got here
The caps are named for Monmouth, down on the Wye, where knitting them was well established by the fifteenth century and Capper was a common surname in the town. Then it left. Thomas Fuller set out what happened in The Worthies of England, published in 1662:
“The best caps were formerly made at Monmouth, where the Cappers’ chapel doth still remain . . . but on the occasion of a great plague happening in this town, the trade was some years since removed hence to Bewdley in Worcestershire, yet so that they are called Monmouth caps unto this day. Thus this town retains, though not the profit, the credit of capping.”
Fuller does not date the plague and neither can we. What he does tell us is that by the middle of the seventeenth century the move was old enough to be described as having happened “some years since”, and that the name had already stuck fast to the object rather than to the place.
What a Monmouth cap actually was
A round cap, knitted in one piece from coarse two-ply wool, worked from the lower edge upwards and gathered at the crown into the small lump that people usually call a button. The brim was doubled by picking up stitches inside the body of the cap. Then the whole thing was felted, which shrank it and made it weatherproof.
It was working headgear. Soldiers wore them, sailors wore them, labourers wore them, and they were ordinary enough to go almost unremarked. Shakespeare could put one on stage in Henry V around 1599 and expect the audience to know exactly what Fluellen meant by leeks worn in Monmouth caps. The sponsors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony ordered them in the 1620s to outfit their settlers, describing them as thick, warm and much favoured by seamen. Peter the Great is said to have worn one while working for the East India Company in 1697.
Parliament propping up the trade
Capping had a statute behind it. The Caps Act of 1571 required every person over the age of six, with a long list of exemptions for gentlewomen, knights and anyone holding twenty marks of land, to wear an English-made woollen cap on Sundays and holy days, on pain of forfeiting three shillings and fourpence for every day they did not. It was an attempt to prop up a domestic industry against imported and increasingly fashionable alternatives, and it did not work. The Act was repealed in 1597 as unenforceable.
How big it was here
Very big. Cap-making became the most important trade in Bewdley in the first half of the seventeenth century and is said to have employed nearly a thousand people. For a sense of what that means, the first census of 1801 counted 3,671 people in the whole borough.
Fuller reckoned the trade “set no less than fifteen callings to work”, which is the more useful figure, because a cap needs wool, spinning, knitting, fulling, dyeing and carriage before anybody wears it. Capper duly appears as a calling in the parish registers alongside the shermen, fletchers and trowmen in the town’s other trades. When Richard Symonds came through with the King’s army in 1644 and wrote down what Bewdley made, he named cap-making and nothing else.
The long decline
By 1677 the trade was described as being “in a very low condition, like in a few years to fall to the ground”. It took rather longer than that. Evans and Britton, writing about Monmouthshire in The Beauties of England and Wales in 1810, recorded that the Welsh trade “has long been removed to Bewdley, in the county of Worcester, where numbers of caps are made, and still sold under the name of Monmouth caps”.
So a century and a half after Fuller, and more than a hundred and thirty years after that gloomy assessment, Bewdley was still turning them out and still selling them under a Welsh town’s name. There was a brief revival at the end of the eighteenth century, which is presumably what Evans and Britton saw. Then it went. By the time John Richard Burton wrote his history of the town in 1883 the trade had died out completely.
What is left of it
Almost nothing, and for a good reason. These were cheap, hard-wearing, everyday objects, worn until they fell apart, and knitting unravels. Very few Monmouth caps survive anywhere at all. The earliest known example is in Monmouth Museum.
Bewdley made them by the thousand, shipped them down the Severn from the quays along with the leather from the tanneries, and has nothing whatever to show for it. Fuller’s line reads rather differently from this end of the trade. Monmouth kept the credit of capping. Bewdley took the profit and never got its name on a single one.