Wool church

A wool church is an English church financed primarily by donations from rich merchants and farmers who had benefitted from the medieval wool trade, hoping to ensure a place in heaven due to their largesse.^[1]

Wool churches are common in the Cotswolds and in the "wool towns" of upland 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.