• COUNTRY LIFE I LEARN from Mr. Ivor Morris, a
member of the Central Regional Committee of the Britisfi Wool Marketing Board and a discriminating bookseller' of Chipping Campden, that this jewel in the Cotswold crown, a place whole in its architecture but by no means integer vitae, after hiding its lustre for so long a period, may once more become a centre for the marketing and despatch of fleeces. This is great news ; it must make the bones of William Grevel, the mediaeval wool-stapler whose house remains intact in the High Street, dance in their sepulchre. Wool and Chipping Campden were inseparable for centuries. This news, too, lends particular significance to the Festival Exhibition of Cotswold crafts, stonework and husbandry held at ,Cirencester and . only recently closed. I saw it in June and was enchanted at the enthu- siastic taste, understanding and ingenuity with which the exhibits were displayed. The straw giants of shepherds, huntsman, Pope and others in their Cotswold-woven clothes and the totem-pole with a stylised cornfield of wickerwork below, the golden fleece of a Cotswold ram in the middle and a Cotswold wool-church made of rope at the top, expressed in their way as masterly a craftsmanship as the traditional trades did themselves. What a day for dispirited and over-centralised England if the Cotiwold 'wool-industry, the foundation of English prosperity in the fourteenth Licentury, were to rise from the dead !
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