The last bank in England to print its own money was a cloth mill
We spent a day at a mill in Somerset recently, and came away thinking about banking.
Fox Brothers has been weaving on the same site in Wellington since 1772. Four years before the United States existed. The village around the mill was built to serve the woollen trade, the river running through it was used for steam power and for finishing the cloth, and the business is still in family hands two and a half centuries later.
That was not the part that stayed with us.
A wool company that printed its own money
In 1787 the Fox family opened a bank. Fox, Fowler and Company, set up as a side business to the sheep and the wool. It printed its own banknotes, which at the time was entirely ordinary. Hundreds of country banks did the same. If you needed to move money around a rural economy, you printed the money.
What is remarkable is when they stopped.
Fox, Fowler and Company was still issuing its own notes in 1921. By then it was the last commercial bank in England or Wales permitted to do so. Every other private issuer had gone. When Lloyds took the bank over that year, the right went with the deal, and the Bank of England became the sole note issuer in England and Wales. It has been ever since.
A cloth mill in Somerset printed the last private banknotes in England.
Why they were the last
This is the part worth understanding.
The Bank Charter Act of 1844 did not abolish private banknotes. It froze them. No new bank could begin issuing, and any existing issuer lost the right the moment it merged with or was bought by another bank. The privilege could not be created, only extinguished.
So the number of private issuers only ever moved in one direction. Every merger removed one. Every acquisition removed one. Over seventy-seven years the field emptied out, not through any single decision but through the ordinary business of consolidation.
Fox, Fowler and Company was the last one standing for the simplest reason available. It did not merge. It stayed independent longer than anyone else, and the right survived exactly as long as the independence did. The day the independence ended, so did the banknote.
What a cloth mill was doing with a bank in the first place
The bank was not a diversification. It was infrastructure.
The Fox family were already sheep farmers and wool makers. They brought spinning, weaving, drying, dyeing and finishing under one roof. They made their own baskets for the wool. They ran their own joinery for the timber, their own forges for the machinery, and their own bindery for the account books. They built a town around the trade.
A bank was the logical next thing to own. If you control everything from the animal to the finished cloth, and the town runs on your payroll, you may as well control the money moving through it.
We would call that vertical integration now. They were doing what made sense when nobody else was going to do it for you.
What survives, and why
The parts of this trade that have lasted are the parts that kept hold of their own inputs. The mills that still weave their own cloth. The tailors who still cut their own patterns. The businesses that decided the quality of the thing was too important to hand to somebody else, and accepted a smaller and slower shape in return.
That is not nostalgia. It is the reason a cloth first woven in 1935 can be pulled out of an archive in 2026 and put straight back into production. Because the archive was kept. Because the mill was still there. Because nobody sold it.
Every pattern that mill has woven since 1772 is still in the building. We turned pages from the 1700s.
Consolidation is usually the right answer. It is faster, it is cheaper, and most of the time it is what the numbers say. But it costs something that does not show up on a balance sheet until it has already gone, and by then there is nothing left to point at.
Fox, Fowler and Company printed money for a hundred and thirty-four years because it never sold. Then it sold, and that was that.
It is worth knowing where a suit actually starts. A long way before anyone picks a lapel, and a long way from London.
The facts, briefly
Fox Brothers has woven cloth on the same site in Wellington, Somerset, since 1772.
The Fox family founded Fox, Fowler and Company in 1787, issuing its first banknotes in October of that year.
It was the last commercial bank in England and Wales to print its own banknotes.
It kept issuing them until 1921, when it was taken over by Lloyds Bank and lost the right under the Bank Charter Act of 1844.
The mill developed khaki for the British Army during the Boer Wars, and supplied 852 miles of cloth to the Ministry of Defence for soldiers' puttees in the First World War.
Its pattern archive runs back to the founding in 1772 and is still held at the mill.
It remains family run and still weaves in England.
Questions people ask
Which was the last bank in England to print its own banknotes? Fox, Fowler and Company of Wellington, Somerset. It was the last commercial bank in England and Wales permitted to issue its own notes, and did so until it was acquired by Lloyds Bank in 1921.
When did private banknotes stop in England and Wales? 1921, when Fox, Fowler and Company was taken over. The Bank Charter Act of 1844 had already stopped new issuers and removed the right from any bank that merged, so the practice ended by attrition rather than by ban.
How old is Fox Brothers? The business dates to 1772 and has woven on the same Somerset site ever since, making it one of the few mills still producing cloth entirely in England.
Why does the mill matter to a suit? Because cloth is the first decision and the one that changes a suit most. Weight, weave and construction determine how a garment moves, how it holds its shape and how long it lasts. The cloth we work with is chosen for how a client actually lives and works, not for how it feels in the room.
Where is Fox Brothers? Wellington in Somerset, near Taunton. The nearest station is Tiverton Parkway.
Cloth first
Every suit we make starts with a decision about cloth, made before anything is measured and long before anything is cut. Get that right and everything after it becomes easier.
If you would like to talk it through, apply for a consultation.
