Wool church

A wool church is an English church financed primarily by donations from rich merchants and farmers who had benefitted from the mediaeval wool trade, hoping to ensure a place in heaven due to their largesse.

Wool churches are common in the Cotswolds and in East Anglia, where enormous profits from the wool business spurred construction of ever-grander edifices. A wool church was often built to replace a smaller or less imposing place of worship, in order to reflect the growing prosperity of the community in which it was situated. Many such building projects were undertaken by a small number of families in each village or town, who used the new church building to display their own wealth, status and faith. The building of wool churches largely ended with the English Reformation and the simultaneous decline of the wool trade between 1525 and 1600.

The Holy Trinity Church, Long Melford, Suffolk, is widely regarded as one of the finest wool churches in East Anglia. Built largely from 1467–1497 with funding from local cloth merchants, primarily John Clopton, the structure contains magnificent stained glass from the fifteenth century, the Clopton family chantry chapel and the soaring Lady Chapel, which extends at Holy Trinity's east end. The Flushwork employed by the builders of Holy Trinity is some of the finest in England. The church stands as testimony to the wool business and its dizzying success in medieval times.

Another grand Suffolk church is St. Edmunds in Southwold, but it is not a "wool" church which boasts extraordinary painted chancel screens, although nearly all the medieval stained glass is gone, thanks to zealous Puritans during Cromwell's reign. Ironically, Peter Hobart, who served as assistant vicar of St. Edmunds, later left Suffolk for the Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony, where he was instrumental in the building of Old Ship Church in Hingham, Massachusetts, the oldest church in continuous use in the United States. (A more vivid contrast to England's wool churches can hardly be imagined. Old Ship Church is a hand-hewn wooden structure with a modified Hammerbeam roof and not a shard of stained glass in sight.)

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