There are plenty of significant dates in the history of Leeds. But you can mark the year when this truly started to become the place we know today. It arrived in 1711.
By then, Leeds was a force in the marketing of broadcloth. Clothiers brought what they’d made to town at the twice-weekly cloth markets (Tuesdays and Saturdays). What had begun in a small way had grown and grown to become very big business for Leeds, with up to £20,000 pounds changing hands at every market, which is over £5 million today, a staggering figure. The merchants were growing very rich.
Originally, the cloth (undyed, hence white cloth) was displayed on the parapets of Leeds Bridge, but by 1684 the market had grown too large for that and moved to Lower Briggate, with trestle tables set up on either side for the clothiers.
The wool merchants of Leeds were outliers. They apprenticed in the trade, often with partners in Holland or elsewhere in Europe. But unlike cities like York, there was no guild of wool merchants in Leeds. That could have meant cloth of low quality was sold at the market. However, to ensure the town had a reputation equal to anywhere in England, Leeds had a cloth searcher. A merchant would serve for a year in the post, examining every piece of cloth sold to ensure it met the high local standards. It was certainly operating during Elizabethan times, indicating that the business was already important then.
The market followed a rigid format. The ringing of a bell at 7am would start trading, and another bell would end it at 9am. For the sake of secrecy, transactions were made in whispers. As the cloth market closed, the trestles were moved for the regular market, and the clothiers would deliver their cloth to the merchants’ warehouses, which before the 1600s were probably behind their houses and places of business, many on Briggate. Later, warehouses would be built alone the calls, by the river
Everything seemed to be flourishing. But something dark was lurking under the golden surface.
Competition.
Leeds was only one of several towns with cloth markets, all of them battling to take more and more business. The biggest rival was Wakefield, and Leeds merchants would travel there to buy cloth (and vice versa). Wakefield was more centrally located for clothiers and when they opened a covered cloth hall in 1710, a site that was protected from the weather, it sent a wave of panic through the merchants and the corporation in Leeds at the prospect of being overtaken by the town’s near neighbour.
One of the prime movers for change in Leeds was Ralph Thoresby, know these days as the first and greatest Leeds historian. But before completely applying himself to the past, he’d apprenticed as a wool merchant and invested in a failed rapeseed mill in Sheepscar (where he lost a great deal of money).
Thoresby knew all the great and the good in Yorkshire. One of them was Lord Irwin of Temple Newsam, a man of wealth and property, some of it in Leeds. Thoresby persuaded him to donate a plot of land on Kirkgate that has supposedly been almshouses. Leeds now had a site for its rival cloth hall, and once the merchants put together £1000, they had the money to build it.
Of course, it needed to offer more than Wakefield, and it was carefully designed with lockers for clothiers to keep their cloth, and easy access through what were then tenter fields (where the Corn Exchange stand today) to the warehouses along the Calls and the river for shipping. According to Thoresby, the Hall was “built upon Pillars and Arches in the form of an Exchange, with a Quadrangular Court within.”
It was a spectacular commercial addition to Leeds, and a real sign of the town’s ambition to be the leading market for cloth. But it was also a huge and expensive gamble. If it worked, the future for the merchants and the town could be beyond compare. Fail, and Leeds would become a second-rate wool town.
The opening of the White Cloth Hall came on May 29, 1711.
It proved a resounding success, soon leaving Wakefield in a very distant second place. In fact, there were too many traders to fit inside, and some were on Briggate, where writer Daniel Defoe found them on his tour of Britain the 1720s, describing a typical Leeds cloth market:
The street is a large, broad, fair, and well-built street, beginning, as I have said, at the bridge, and ascending gently to the north.
Early in the morning, there are tressels placed in two rows in the street, sometimes two rows on a side, but always one row at least; then there are boards laid cross those tressels, so that the boards lie like long counters on either side, from one end of the street to the other.
The clothiers come early in the morning with their cloth; and as few clothiers bring more than one piece, the market being so frequent, they go into the inns and publick-houses with it, and there set it down.
At seven a clock in the morning, the clothiers being supposed to be all come by that time, even in the winter, but the hour is varied as the seasons advance (in the summer earlier, in the depth of winter a little later) I take it, at a medium, and as it was when I was there, at six or seven, I say, the market bell rings; it would surprize a stranger to see in how few minutes, without hurry or noise, and not the least disorder, the whole market is fill’d; all the boards upon the tressels are covered with cloth, close to one another as the pieces can lie long ways by one another, and behind every piece of cloth, the clothier standing to sell it.
This indeed is not so difficult, when we consider that the whole quantity is brought into the market as soon as one piece, because as the clothiers stand ready in the inns and shops just behind, and that there is a clothier to every piece, they have no more to do, but, like a regiment drawn up in line, every one takes up his piece, and has about five steps to march to lay it upon the first row of boards, and perhaps ten to the second row; so that upon the market bell ringing, in half a quarter of an hour the whole market is fill’d, the rows of boards cover’d, and the clothiers stand ready.
As soon as the bell has done ringing, the merchants and factors, and buyers of all sorts, come down, and coming along the spaces between the rows of boards, they walk up the rows, and down as their occasions direct. Some of them have their foreign letters of orders, with patterns seal’d on them, in rows, in their hands; and with those they match colours, holding them to the cloths as they think they agree to; when they see any cloths to their colours, or that suit their occasions, they reach over to the clothier and whisper, and in the fewest words imaginable the price is stated; one asks, the other bids; and ’tis agree, or not agree, in a moment.
The merchants and buyers generally walk down and up twice on each side of the rows, and in little more than an hour all the business is done; in less than half an hour you will perceive the cloths begin to move off, the clothier taking it up upon his shoulder to carry it to the merchant’s house; and by half an hour after eight a clock the market bell rings again; immediately the buyers disappear, the cloth is all sold, or if here and there a piece happens not to be bought, ’tis carried back into the inn, and, in a quarter of an hour, there is not a piece of cloth to be seen in the market.
Thus, you see, ten or twenty thousand pounds value in cloth, and sometimes much more, bought and sold in little more than an hour, and the laws of the market the most strictly observed as ever I saw done in any market in England; for,
- Before the market bell rings, no man shews a piece of cloth, nor can the clothiers sell any but in open market.
- After the market bell rings again, no body stays a moment in the market, but carries his cloth back if it be not sold.
- And that which is most admirable is, ’tis all managed with the most profound silence, and you cannot hear a word spoken in the whole market, I mean, by the persons buying and selling; ’tis all done in whisper.
The reason of this silence, is chiefly because the clothiers stand so near to one another; and ’tis always reasonable that one should not know what another does, for that would be discovering their business, and exposing it to one another.
If a merchant has bidden a clothier a price, and he will not take it, he may go after him to his house, and tell him he has considered of it, and is willing to let him have it but they are not to make any new agreement for it, so as to remove the market from the street to the merchant’s house.
By nine a clock the boards are taken down, the tressels are removed, and the street cleared, so that you see no market or goods any more than if there had been nothing to do; and this is done twice a week. By this quick return the clothiers are constantly supplied with money, their workmen are duly paid, and a prodigious sum circulates thro’ the county every week.
One highlight for the clothiers who’d made the arduous journey from the out-townships and villages was the cheap meal they could obtain in the inns along Briggate, as Thoresby described in 1715: “the clothier may, together with his Pot of Ale, have a Noggin o’ Pottage, and a Trencher of either Boil’d or Roast Beef for two Pence.”
The wool trade made Leeds. In 1755 business had outgrown the White Cloth Hall and it was replaced by another, much larger, just south of the River Aire on Meadow Lane. 20 years after that, coloured or mixed cloth had its hall, close to what’s now City Square. In an indication as to how much trade had grown, this hall had room for over 1750 clothiers in two separate avenues, and a central courtyard capable of holding 20,000 people.
Around the same time, a third White Cloth Hall was built in the ground behind the first, a tiny part of which still remains.
The first White Cloth Hall fell into disrepair but was given an outstanding restoration that retained much of it character, along with original brickwork and wood trusses and beams; during the work, some of the wood was dated and found to have been felled in 1476 CE.
The gamble of 1711 paid incredible dividends, bringing wealth and fame to Leeds – the cloth was exported around the world, and Leeds became a byword for the wool trade. It all dates back to the 29th of May, 1711, when Leeds started to become the place we recognise today.
By the way – no Cloth Halls involved – but my most recent book, The Faces Of The Dead, has been out for less than three months, and I’d appreciare you buying it. Set in 1944, a tale of murder, the black market, and a woman police sergeant seconded to the Special Investigation Branch. Currently £1.99 on Kindle (cheap in the US, too). A warning though: you’ll be up late reading it.
Chris Nickson 