By Ines Keane
In May 1902, according to the Court Barn museum, C. R. Ashbee and the younger members of his Guild of Handicraft stepped off the train at Moreton-in-Marsh and cycled the final five miles over the hills to Chipping Campden. Fifty Guildsmen and their families followed from the East End of London that summer, with their workshop equipment. The town they arrived in was already old, built in stone, and used to trade.
The town they found
Wikipedia describes Chipping Campden as a market town in the Cotswold district of Gloucestershire, and says it was a wool trading centre in the Middle Ages. It names the merchant William Greville, who died in 1401, and says a plaque in the church of St James calls him “the flower of the wool merchants of all England.” The same article says the terraced buildings of the High Street, dating from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries, are built of locally quarried oolitic limestone, known as Cotswold stone. It dates Grevel’s House to about 1380 and the Church Street almshouses to 1612, built by Sir Baptist Hicks.
The market hall
The National Trust says the Market Hall was built in 1627 by Sir Baptist Hicks, the town’s wealthy benefactor, to give traders shelter. The Cotswold Way trail’s own sights page calls it an open-sided Jacobean produce hall of honey-coloured limestone, with a steep gabled roof on a timber frame and a cobbled floor it describes as thought to be original. That page says it was a produce or butter market and not a wool hall, where farmers and cottagers sold cheese, eggs, butter and poultry under cover. A marker stone near the hall, it adds, is the official start and finish of the Cotswold Way, whose first stage runs to Broadway.
The Guild
The Guild of Handicraft was founded by Ashbee in the East End of London in 1888, according to the Court Barn museum and to Wikipedia, which cites Historic England for the date. The museum says Ashbee moved the craftsmen to Campden to give them a healthier life. They took over a disused silk mill in Sheep Street. At first things went well. Ashbee built a swimming pool, started a craft school and staged Elizabethan plays. Sales began to fall around 1904. The museum’s reading is that the Guild was better suited economically to a city than to the country, and could not respond.
Here the two sources part. The museum says the Guild went into liquidation in 1908. Wikipedia says it ceased operation in 1907. We show both and choose neither.
Some Guildsmen stayed on and worked under their own names, and the museum says the silk mill has housed craft workshops ever since. It sums the episode up as both a beginning and an end: the end of Ashbee’s project, and the beginning of the story of craft and design in Campden.
Court Barn
The museum is a project of the Guild of Handicraft Trust, which the Chipping Campden town website says was founded in 1990. The website dates the museum itself to 2006 and 2007. It says designers and craftspeople began to gather in the north Cotswolds from 1900 onwards, and that the museum tells the story of craft and design in the north Cotswolds. Its logo is a stylised pink carnation, based on an emblem Ashbee designed in 1890.
Dates in order
- 1627: Market Hall built, according to the National Trust.
- 1888: Guild founded in London, according to the museum.
- May 1902: Guildsmen arrive, according to the museum.
- 1907 or 1908: the Guild ends; the sources differ.
- 2006 to 2007: Court Barn museum created, according to the town website.
Side by side
The market hall’s fate in the 1940s is told two ways. Wikipedia says locals raised funds to buy it and gave it to the National Trust after a plan to sell it. The Cotswold Way page says it was nearly sold, taken down and shipped to the United States, that the Campden Trust bought it, and that it later passed to the National Trust. Both agree it was nearly lost and is now in Trust hands. Our reading: several people probably acted, and each source kept a different one.
What kind of sources these are
The Court Barn page is the museum’s own account of itself. The town website is a local community site. The National Trust is the owner of the hall. The Cotswold Way page is a trail organisation’s guide. Wikipedia can be edited by anyone. We read no Historic England listing, and we give no opening hours or transport.
Questions a buyer would ask
If a maker’s story mentions the Campden tradition, ask what it means: trained here, working here, or inspired by the Guild? The museum says some Guildsmen stayed on under their own names, so a Guild link is a claim to ask about.
What we left out
The 2011 population figure, the Cotswold Games, prices, grants, and the names of today’s craftspeople and businesses.
Quick answers
When did the Guild of Handicraft move to Chipping Campden? According to the Court Barn museum, in May 1902, with fifty Guildsmen and their families arriving from London that summer. It had been founded in the East End in 1888.
Who built the Chipping Campden Market Hall? The National Trust says Sir Baptist Hicks built it in 1627 to shelter traders. Wikipedia gives the same builder and date.
Where does the Cotswold Way start? According to the Cotswold Way trail’s own sights page, a marker stone near the Market Hall marks its official start and finish, and stage one runs to Broadway.
Related on this site: pure-new-wool-label-what-it-means, brown-betty-teapot-red-clay, robins-christmas-cards-postmen
Roam first. Shop later.