The 17th century Dutch historian and genealogist Jean le Carpentier maintained the Dutch Carpentiers, the Paris Charpentiers and the English Carpenters were of the same origins, in Cambray, of what is now France; and tracable to the early 1000s. The descendants of Godefroy de Carpentier went to England about 1300 he maintained. Cambray was at that time a separate kingdom called Hainaut. In the late 1200s and early 1300s close relations existed with England. In 1328 the Queen of England was Philippa of Hainaut who brought with her to England a whole colony weavers and related people to form a colony in Norfolk. She took a personal interest in these people and visited them several times suggesting financial ties between the crown and Hainaut. The area of Norfork had even older ties to Hainaut through Alix de Avesnes, the Countess of Norfork. John Carpenter the Town Clerk of London can be connected to these events in two ways. First John was a lay member of the Charterhouse, a religious organization begun by Sir Walter de Manny, from Hainaut, who arrived in England with Philippa. Sir Walter was an important individual in events dealing with the English crown and events in te Low Countries and France.Secondly, in the civil unrest that took place in the later 1300s John the Town Clerk was asked to intervene in Norfork, where he apparently had great influence and interests. The great mystery of the English Carpenters is where was their source of wealth, enough means to produce a Town Clerk of London and a personal chaplain to a King and important Bishop. Were the Carpenters connected to the wool trade between Low Countries were they came and England where they settled? The tradition of wool is one that is central to the later Carpenter family in Wiltshire and on into America itself. Both Rehoboth and Providence Williams had extensive sheep holdings. The Carpenter family was central in the development of large scale wool processing in the Blackstone River Valley (see Early Rehoboth. vols 1-4).In my own line of Carpenters there was a tradition of weaving that lasted a century and a half and ended only with automation in the early 1800s. I suspect there were a good many other Carpenter cloth makers in Rehoboth than the we know of. A thousand year tradition? Sincerely revised, Bruce E. Carpenter Nara Japan and Clinton Washington