Castle Combe: The Making of a Cotswold Wool Village

Castle Combe is usually photographed from the bridge: the brook in the foreground, the stone cottages climbing the street, the church tower above. It is a lovely view, but it hides the more interesting story. Castle Combe’s history is industrial. In the fifteenth century this small Wiltshire village was a cloth-making centre known far beyond the county, its brook turning fulling mills and its clothiers building dozens of new houses. The houses, the market cross and the church tower that visitors admire today were paid for by red cloth. Castle Combe is the first Cotswold village on our small group tour of England’s villages, and this article explains how to read it beyond the postcard.

A castle above, a brook below

The village takes its name from two features. The “combe” is the steep-sided valley cut into the oolitic limestone by the By Brook. The castle stood on a promontory about 600 metres to the north, overlooking the brook. Historic England attributes it to the de Dunstanville family around 1140: a motte about eight metres high with four baileys, where the walls of a rectangular tower and the footings of some seventeen buildings survive among the trees. People had lived here long before. A Roman villa site lies just over the parish boundary, and the Fosse Way, the Roman road from Exeter to Lincoln, forms part of the parish’s north-western edge. Domesday Book records 33 households and three mills in 1086.

Wiltshire Council’s community history puts it neatly: the By Brook, which made the steep-sided combe, also made the village. The castle explains the name, but the brook explains the prosperity.

Who owned Castle Combe?

The castle and barony passed from the de Dunstanvilles to the Badlesmere family in the early fourteenth century, and in 1315 Edward II granted Bartholomew de Badlesmere a weekly Monday market and an annual fair at St George’s tide. Later in the century the estate came to the Scrope family. In 1409 it passed to one of the most famous soldiers of the age, Sir John Fastolf, who married Millicent, Lady Scrope, and held Castle Combe until his death in 1459. After him the Scropes returned and kept the estate until 1866, when it was sold to the Gorst family. It was sold again, with the Manor House, in 1947.

Fastolf matters to Castle Combe’s history for a practical reason. As a commander in the Hundred Years War he needed cloth for his soldiers’ liveries, and the Victoria County History records that every year his receivers bought more than £100 of red and white cloth from his tenants at Castle Combe, perhaps 40 broadcloths, from his first campaign in 1415 until he retired from the wars around 1440. Wiltshire’s community history puts the run at 22 years. For a single village, it was a large and dependable market.

Water, mills and the cloth trade

Making woollen cloth involved several stages, and the most mechanised was fulling: beating the woven cloth in water to shrink and thicken it. Water-powered fulling mills needed a reliable, fast-flowing stream, and the By Brook supplied one. The manor had its own fulling mill by the fourteenth century, and the Victoria County History counts at least five along the three-mile course of the brook in the fifteenth. In 1440 the clothier Richard Halwey took over two fulling mills near Colham Wood.

Castle Combe was famous less for weaving than for dyeing. The county history describes it as renowned far and wide for the making, and still more the dyeing, of woollens, especially reds. Its cloth was sold at Blackwell Hall, London’s cloth market, in the 1430s, and by 1457 a red woollen cloth called a “Castlecombe” was a recognised name in the trade. A Cirencester clothier even sent white cloths here to be dyed red.

The industry left a clear mark on the village plan. A survey of 1454 describes Castle Combe as two settlements: an upper one where the husbandmen who farmed the land lived, and a lower one, by the brook, where the cloth-makers lived. That division still helps visitors make sense of the place, with the market place at the top of the street and the water and the old mill sites at the bottom.

Street form and building fabric

The cloth boom was a building boom. The Victoria County History records that no fewer than fifty new houses went up during Fastolf’s lordship, most of them built by clothiers. Richard Halwey alone built about ten. The industry was almost wholly unregulated, and Fastolf let holdings to whoever would pay the highest entry fine, so new money flowed quickly into new building.

Some of that money was considerable. When the clothier William Haynes, a villein who owed labour services to the manor, died in 1435, Fastolf’s council first valued his goods at 3,000 marks, a sum a manor-court inquest later reduced to 300 marks. Either figure was a fortune for an unfree tenant, and it shows how far cloth could lift a family in a single generation. Wardens for the dyers, fullers and weavers were appointed in 1444, a sign of how many people the trade now employed.

The houses are of the local oolitic limestone, quarried nearby, with stone-tiled roofs, the same material system described in our article on Cotswold stone. Around a hundred buildings in the conservation area are listed. At the top of the street stands the market cross, a late-medieval structure with a stone-tiled pyramid roof on four corner piers, still in its original position at the centre of the village. Historic England notes that it was repaired by the inhabitants in 1590, and that a market house beside it was dismantled around 1840 to widen the road.

The church of St Andrew shows the same wealth. Its fine three-stage ashlar tower was begun in 1434, with help, the county’s church history notes, from Fastolf, who left money in 1459 for the tower and a chapel. A carved panel of around 1576 on the tower shows the tools of the cloth trade: a comb, shears and a shuttle. Inside are a fourteenth-century font, a fifteenth-century pulpit, an effigy of a knight of about 1300 traditionally identified as Walter de Dunstanville, and a faceless clock believed to have been made by a local blacksmith in the 1380s. Most of the church apart from the tower was taken down and rebuilt to its original plan around 1850.

The wool wealth that paid for St Andrew’s paid for churches right across the Cotswolds, and our article on the Cotswold wool churches explores that wider pattern.

Why did Castle Combe’s cloth industry decline?

Mainly because the water failed. Wiltshire’s community history records that after Fastolf’s death the level of the By Brook fell, and in some summers the stream was nearly dry. Without reliable water power the fullers moved to the Avon valley and other Cotswold valleys, and the population declined. By the seventeenth century, sheep farming had become far more profitable than cloth-making here. Later mills on the brook ground corn or made paper; the last closed in the twentieth century.

Decline may also help explain the village’s survival: with the cloth money gone, there was less reason to rebuild on a grand scale. Later building kept to the same materials. The cottages on Water Lane, beside the brook, are eighteenth-century, built of the same rubble limestone under the same stone-tiled roofs, so that the village still reads as a single whole.

Conservation and the picturesque image

Castle Combe’s modern reputation began in 1962, when, as Wiltshire’s community history records, a national newspaper named it the prettiest village in England and visitor numbers rose sharply. Film-makers followed. For Doctor Dolittle, released in 1967, parts of the village were altered and the By Brook was turned into a fishing harbour; for War Horse the road was covered with mud and modern fittings hidden to recreate 1914. Our article on English villages on screen considers what that attention means for places like this.

The picturesque image brings its own pressures. The parish council’s minutes record concern about the growing volume of traffic circling the market place and note that around half the visitors now come from overseas. The village is still a place where people live, and the challenge is the same one faced at Lacock and Avebury: how to share a preserved village without wearing it out.

How much walking is involved in visiting Castle Combe?

A short but hilly walk. Visitors are asked to leave vehicles in the car park at the top of the hill, as there is almost nowhere to park in the lower village, and walk down the narrow lanes, which have few or no pavements. The return is uphill. The tour as a whole is rated Level 2 (Moderate), with three to five hours of activity a day, and sturdy shoes are worth wearing.

Reading the village beyond the postcard

When you stand on the bridge at Castle Combe, look for the evidence. The brook beneath you powered the mills. The houses climbing the street were built by clothiers with dyeing money. The market cross at the top marks a market granted in 1315. The church tower was raised by cloth wealth and a famous soldier’s patronage, and its carved shears and shuttle tell you so. Read that way, Castle Combe is not merely pretty; it is one of the clearest small-scale records in England of how a medieval industry made a village.

The ninth day of the tour passes through Castle Combe on the way into the Cotswolds, before continuing by Cirencester and Bibury to Rodborough. Our guide to the England’s villages itinerary shows how it fits into the wider journey, and if you would like to see the village with someone who can point out the evidence, the England’s villages small group tour is a good place to start.