By Linda Mowat.
The house on the north-west corner of the Playing Close, now No 3 Brown’s Lane, must have changed a great deal over the centuries. However, the original cottage was one of the properties leased to the people of Charlbury, Fawler and Finstock by Thomas Gifford in 1592; and for this reason it was sometimes called the Town House. The cottage and the Playing Close itself, unlike the other Gifford properties, were intended only for the benefit of Charlbury, not Fawler or Finstock.
This is the story of one man who owned this cottage. His name was Francis Wyatt, he was a hempdresser, and in March 1761 he bought the cottage from the Gifford Trust for £15 15s.[1] We have an indenture to prove it.
Who was Francis Wyatt? We know from Charlbury’s Manor Court Rolls that his family had owned a house called the World’s End, tucked behind Brown’s Lane and Market Street. The Wyatts were a large family, frequently short of money, and in 1744 they took out a mortgage on their property.[2] The debt was supposed to be paid in six months, but it seems the Wyatts couldn’t find the money and after six years, in 1751, Francis’s father and elder brother Peter sold The World’s End to Sir Robert Banks Jenkinson ‘in Trust for the benefit of the Town of Charlbury’.[3] By 1757 The World’s End had become Charlbury’s Workhouse,[4] the walls of which can still be seen today if you walk up Friendship Lane.
The sale of their house probably helped the impoverished Wyatts to settle their debts and make a fresh start, but it seems unlikely they got rich on it. Francis’s brother Peter moved away to Bampton, where he worked as a gardener; and Francis as we know was a hempdresser, which was a lowly occupation. However, the brothers had an uncle, Henry Barnes, who was a tailor; and when Henry died in 1758 he left a piece of land to Peter, out of which he was to pay £40 to his brother Francis.[5] Francis was also to get Henry’s ‘second best Suit of Cloaths’ which, considering he was a tailor, was probably a gift worth having. The will was proved in 1760, and probably on the strength of it, Francis bought this cottage on the Playing Close in 1761.
There may have been some wheeling and dealing going on here, and maybe some philanthropy as well. The Gifford Trust had owned this cottage on behalf of Charlbury, but perhaps the trustees felt that, unlike the Playing Close itself, it was too insignificant to be a public asset and that they would rather convert it into cash. Also, as the Wyatt family had sold their home for the benefit of the town, there may have been some feeling that the town could part with one of its houses for the benefit of the Wyatts. But this is just conjecture.
When Francis moved in, he and his wife Hannah were in their early thirties and had already produced eight children, two of whom had died in infancy. Another one would be born the following year.[6] So Francis had a lot of mouths to feed. Just a few months after he bought the house, Robert Spendlove the baker granted him a mortgage of £6[7] which suggests that perhaps the £40 he was supposed to inherit from his uncle hadn’t materialised in full, or not yet, or had already been spent.
We assume Francis carried out his trade of hempdressing at his new cottage. Hemp was used for ropemaking and also for coarse textiles such as sailcloth and sacking. There’s no evidence that it was ever grown around Charlbury, so Francis may have obtained it from elsewhere.
A hempdresser worked with bales of hemp that had already been soaked, peeled, washed and bleached; his job was to prepare it for spinning by beating it with heavy wooden mallets and dragging it over toothed iron implements called heckles. This was hard and repetitive work. The idea was to separate the fibres and remove the natural gum, so that the hemp became soft and smooth enough to spin.[8]
Dust from the fibres was a real health hazard, so a hempdresser needed to work in the open air to avoid breathing too much of it into his lungs. Francis probably extended his workshop on to the Playing Close, as did other craftsmen who lived here. Hempdressing was not an easy or pleasant occupation. His wife and children may have assisted him with some of his tasks, probably to the detriment of their health. He may have supplied local rope-makers, or possibly he worked for a merchant who brought him bales of raw fibre and took away the finished product. Another hempdresser in Charlbury around this time was John Grace, who died in 1752;[9] unlike Francis he left a will, but unfortunately it doesn’t tell us anything about his work.
Francis Wyatt’s story doesn’t have a happy ending. It seems he was not very successful in his occupation, as he didn’t own his cottage for long: only about five years. He was unable to repay his £6 mortgage and the premises became forfeit to Robert Spendlove, who bought the cottage from him in 1766 for £17. Maybe Francis was allowed to stay on as a tenant. Spendlove owned the cottage until 1814, when he sold it to Richard Kibble for £35.[10] The Kibbles, who were stonemasons, then ran it as an inn called the Mason’s Arms, which closed in the 1860s.[11]
[1] Gifford Trust: 1761 Indenture
[2] Charlbury Manor Court Rolls 1745 04 15 (28) Wyatt to Poulton – Out of Court 6 July 1744
[3] Charlbury Manor Court Rolls 1750-1 01 04 (07) Poulton to Wyatt; 1750-1 01 04 (08) Wyatt to Jenkinson
[4] Charlbury Manor Court Rolls 1759 04 16 (03) Coleman to Box
[5] Will of Henry Barnes, Tailor, CH408, 1760
[6] Charlbury Parish Registers
[7] Indenture of 1 March 1766 between Francis Wyatt & Robert Spendlove (Lois Hey handwritten notes p 115)
[8] Marcandier, M. 1996 [1764] A Treatise on Hemp. Lyme Regis: John Hanson
[9] Will of John Grace, hemp dresser, CH481, 1752.
[10] Indenture of 1 March 1766 between Francis Wyatt & Robert Spendlove (Lois Hey handwritten notes p 115)
[11] Rudlin, D. 2023. The Life and Times of the Inns, Taverns and Beerhouses of Charlbury, Oxfordshire, p3