ABSTRACT
The muster-lists prepared by Smyth of Nibley 104 years earlier, in 1608, show that the industry was well established even then. Forty-three per cent (746) of the able-bodied men between 20 and 60 who attended the musters in the Stroudwater Valleys-the valleys of Saxton’s Stroude fluensis, and the Wick, Slad and Nailsworth streams flowing into it from various watersheds on the central-eastern scarp of the Cotswolds, ‘the Edge’—reported a clothworking occupation as their principal means of support.5 A few miles south-west of Stroud in the Vale of Berkeley lay a branch centred on the market town of Dursley, spread through the villages of Woodmancote, Uley, Owlpen, Cam, Coaley, Stinchcombe and Slimbridge. Here 53 per cent (338 of 633) were clothworkers. The district around Wotton-under-Edge, another market town in the Vale of Berkeley, nestling under the towering Cotswold escarpment or ‘Edge’, was slightly more agricultural. In the lists for Wotton and its surrounding villages 39 per cent gave cloth-working occupations.6
