In 1412 the citizens of Bristol and Gloucester went to Parliament to complain about Bewdley. Certain men of the town, they said, owned great boats called trows and had banded together so that nobody could pass this stretch of the Severn with goods unless they hired those boats first. On the eve of St Michael a party of them had lain in wait near Bewdley “with great force and arms”, seized a raft of timber heading down to Gloucester and made its crew cut it to pieces in the water, the alternative being that the Bewdley men would cut off their heads instead.
It is not the town’s finest hour, and the Victorian historian who recorded it noted drily that the men of Bewdley do not appear here in a very favourable light. But it tells you two things. By the early fifteenth century this was already a place of consequence on the river, and the people who ran the boats knew exactly what their position was worth.
What came up the river
The trade ran on trows, shallow flat-bottomed sailing vessels built to carry heavy loads in little water. They came up from Bristol, which was then the first seaport in the kingdom, and Bristol merchants thought Bewdley important enough to keep permanent depots here and across the water in Wribbenhall, with large storehouses built to hold the goods.
What they brought was the produce of the Atlantic trade: sugar, rum, tobacco and spices from the West Indies, along with everything else that moved through a great port. Pottery came from as far as Stoke-on-Trent. From the quay it went onward by land, in long trains of packhorses heading west into Wales and east to Birmingham and the Black Country, and those trains came back loaded with Manchester and Sheffield goods to be shipped downriver again.
Some of that wealth has an uncomfortable source, and it is dealt with properly in a separate piece on Bewdley’s connection to Bristol and the slave trade. It belongs in the story of the quay rather than being kept out of it.
What went down it
Outbound cargo was mostly what the town and the forest made. Timber from the Wyre Forest, tanned leather from the tanneries, horn worked into combs and drinking cups, and thousands of Monmouth caps, the knitted woollen caps that Bewdley produced in quantity. Malt was another substantial trade, and the number of malt houses scattered through the town was still noticeable in the nineteenth century, though the market for it faded once a turnpike road gave Shropshire an easier route to Worcester.
The people who ran it
Two words turn up again and again in the records and both are worth knowing. A grocer in this context was not a shopkeeper but a wholesale merchant dealing in bulk. A wharfinger owned a wharf or a warehouse and very often carried goods on the river as well, so he was landlord, storekeeper and haulier at once. Both lived in the town rather than at a distance from it, and the quaysides on the Bewdley and Wribbenhall banks were dominated by their warehouses.
Around them worked everybody else the river needed. The parish registers of Elizabeth’s and James I’s reigns record trowmen and bargemakers alongside coopers, ropemakers, glovers, parchment makers and fishermen. The boats going upstream against the current were hauled by gangs of men on the bank before horses took the work on, which was among the hardest paid labour on the river.
Where the money went
Stand on Severnside today and you can still see what the trade paid for. River House was built at the end of the seventeenth century and Kimberley House at about the same time, both of them handsome and both of them built on river money by men who wanted the fact understood. They are not alone. Through the eighteenth century Bewdley’s merchants took older timber framed buildings and refronted them in fashionable red brick, which is why so much of the town centre looks Georgian while a good deal of it is considerably older behind the facade.
The other clue is round the back. Many of the old houses have long ranges of buildings running away from the street behind them, storehouses and workshops on the medieval burgage plots, largely disused by the Victorian period and now converted or quietly forgotten. The wealth did not go into one grand civic gesture. It went into houses, and the houses are still lived in.
The end of it
The trade did not stop suddenly, it was diverted. When the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal reached the Severn three miles downstream in 1771 it created Stourport out of nothing and gave the Midlands a direct water link to the river below Bewdley. The figures for 1797 show what that meant within a single generation: seventeen regular trows a week working between Bristol and Bewdley, and twenty-eight between Bristol and Stourport. The warehouses emptied over the following decades, and what had been the busiest thing about the town became the prettiest.