K.H. Rogers, in Wiltshire And Somerset Woollen Mills, published by the Pasold Research Fund Ltd., in 1976, noted:
Horningsham Mills
There were two fulling mills at Horningsham in the eighteenth century. One on the lower side of the road was held with an adjoining grist mill by Bennett Sanger under a lease of 1696. When it expired in 1746 the fulling mill was re-let separately to William Meares, a clothier from Corsley. He already held the other fulling mill on the upper side of the road, and may have been responsible for building it on a new site. The original lease of 1734 refers only to a house, buildings and pools, and the place was perhaps only a dye-house then.
Both mills passed in 1766 to William Everett, son of a Heytesbury clothier, then twenty-four years old. He evidently converted one mill into a gig mill, by which one man and a boy could do as much work in two hours as thirty men could do in a day. This was destroyed by s mob of 500 shearmen of Wiltshire and Somerset on 2 August 1767, a riot so celebrated that it found a place in Marx’s Capital.
A letter from ‘Constant Reader’ to the Salisbury paper gives the background to the episode:
For many years the Gloucestershire clothiers have manufactured a great quantity of naps, shags, and a sort of woollen goods called Bath beavers, for the dressing and preparing of which they have used gig mills, which are allowed to be a more expeditious and much better as well as cheaper method than dressing by hand only. Indeed, they cannot be dressed properly and as they ought by any other means than by the gig mill. Now Mr. Everett and his family have for thirty years and upwards manufactured the above sort of goods, and have been obliged to send them upwards of 30 miles to be dressed at gig mills; consequently he was at a much greater expence than if he had dressed them himself at home, besides that of carriage to and fro, and even then he could not make near the quantity that he would have done, supposing he had a mill of his own. Therefore can Mr. Everett’s design be injurious to the workpeople in his neighbourhood? Was it not on the contrary, procuring them that work to be done here, which otherwise must have been done in Gloucestershire?
He ended by pointing out the increase in the trade in Gloucestershire since the gigs had been used there.
Everett kept on the mills, presumably for fulling only; by 1793, he was using machinery, for he advertised for a man who could take care of three or four engines, and had a perfect knowledge of spinning. He also had a dye-house, the equipment of which was offered for sale after his death in 1806. No machinery was included in the sale. The upper mill was let to John Bleeck, a Warminster clothier, but it had apparently been pulled down before 1820. The lower mill must have been converted for the silk trade by 1812, when it was described as a ‘silk house’, occupied by John Ward. On the upper site the fine clothier’s house still stands, and there is a range of buildings, now converted to houses, which probably formed part of the dye-house, for at one end stands the hexagonal former drying stove.
WRO, 845, lease books, etc.;
SJ, 10.8.1767, 24.8.1767, 21.1.1793, 21.4.1800, 25.5.1807.