The parish registers kept during the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I did something useful without meaning to. When a man was baptised, married or buried, his trade was written down beside his name, and the result is a list of how a small river town actually earned its living four hundred years ago.
Some of the trades are recognisable at once. There were butchers, bakers, tailors, masons, carpenters, joiners, coopers, saddlers, weavers and shoemakers, as there were everywhere. Others need translating. A sherman sheared the nap off woollen cloth. A walker was a fuller, who trod cloth in water to thicken it. A fletcher made arrows and a bowyer made the bows to go with them. A cardmaker made the toothed boards used to comb wool before spinning. A lathmaker split the thin strips of wood that went behind plaster walls. A bedder made beds, a stay maker made corsetry, and an aqua vitae man distilled spirits. There was also, in a town that had no obvious use for one, a salt peter man, whose job was to collect the nitrous earth from stables and cellars for gunpowder.
Then there are the ones that could only be here. Trowmen crewed the flat-bottomed sailing barges that worked the Severn. Bargemakers built them. Glovers and parchment makers worked the leather that came out of the town’s tanneries, and fishermen worked the river that fed everyone.
Horn
Of all Bewdley’s manufactures the one that lasted longest is the least expected. Horn was worked here into combs, drinking cups and small objects of every kind, softened by heat and pressed or cut into shape. The trade had been carried on for more than a century by the 1880s, and by then it was described as the chief special manufacture of the town, which is to say that after the river trade collapsed and the malt houses closed and the tanneries shut one by one, the horn workers were still going.
Brass
Bewdley brass had a reputation well beyond Worcestershire. The works were described in the nineteenth century as one of the oldest manufactories in England and as maintaining a high name for the excellence of their brass work. Alongside it the town supported pewterers, and the two trades between them kept metalworking alive here long after the port had gone quiet.
Malt, rope and the rest
Malt houses were scattered all through the town, enough of them that a nineteenth century writer used their number as evidence of how extensive the trade had been. The chief markets were in Shropshire, towards Tenbury and Ludlow, and the trade fell away once a turnpike road gave those towns an easier run to Worcester. Rope and twine making went on alongside, as it does in any place with boats.
The market that shrank
Nothing shows the change more plainly than the butchers. The shambles in the middle of Load Street once held thirty-two butchers’ stalls, part of a long range of timber buildings, the barley market and the butter cross, filling the centre of the road. The buildings were taken down in 1783. By the 1880s the market that survived had two butchers left.
Bewdley did not stop working. It stopped working at scale, and the trades that survived were the ones that needed skill rather than volume. That is roughly where the town still is.