Given the contribution to the nation’s economy made by the textile industry over the centuries, it is no surprise that a number of English surnames, including my own, derive from the occupations of those working in it.

The origins of Weaver, Webber and Webster are clear, as are those of Fuller and Dyer, but Tucker was not a name I had associated with cloth-making until I visited Witney’s local museum and its display focusing on Tuckers’ Feasts.

‘Tucker’, I discovered, is a west of England term for ‘fuller’ — the person employed to clean excess oil from woollen cloth and strengthen it by treading or beating it so that the fibres mat together.

The first feasts, or ‘Reckonings’, were held when weaving was still a cottage industry. The tuckers invited the master weavers to a biannual get-together where the guests would pay them for all their finishing work during the last six months. After factories took over the process of production in its entirety, the invitation was reversed, with the mill owners holding a knees-up for the tuckers.

The museum informs us that at Witney Mill, owned by the best-known cloth-producers in the town, the Early family, a tradition arose of holding the feast annually on Shrove Tuesday.

Features of the merry-making included presents of several clay pipes per person — each representing one year of attendance at the feast — and the singing of Wonderfully Curious, a curiously wonderful, but apparently irrelevant, song about the weather, written by a tucker at West End Mill, Joseph Fowler.

A second display, upstairs, gives a detailed history of local broadcloth-making, which finally ended in 2002. In the days before steam it prospered because of the superior hydraulic power of the Windrush, faster flowing than other rivers in the area and with a greater fall, allowing mills to be built at one-and-a-half-mile intervals.

The earliest reference to someone from Witney supplying blankets dates to the 1500s, and by 1677 the town was already trading them for furs with native Americans. Contracts to supply the Hudson’s Bay Company followed, and material for ‘tilts’ — wagon coverings — was another nice little earner.

Local sheep would obviously be hard put to provide all the wool required for such extensive business, so some was bought on the open market ‘from the furthermost parts of the kingdom’, as the museum tells us.

Carts took blankets to sell in London and returned with sheepskins — a by-product of meat production in the city and a cheaper source of wool than fleeces. Some poor soul had the job of scraping the stubble, known as ‘fell wool’, off the skin.

The museum’s volunteer professionals, curatorial adviser Stanley Jenkins, and archivist/family history adviser Jane Cavell, are quick to point out that there is more to Witney than blankets.

The town, whose name may mean either ‘white island’ or ‘Witta’s island’, was first mentioned in AD 969, on an Anglo-Saxon charter, which survives to this day.

The boundaries it records have been helpfully linked to their present-day locations and are displayed at the museum using a map and photographs. An entertaining example is ‘Occa’s slippery place’, which happens to be next to the modern sewage works. From 1044 the town became associated with the bishops of Winchester, one of whom, Stigand, started to build the palace whose foundations can be seen today on Church Green.

During the wars between Stephen and Matilda in the 12th century, the palace was fortified by the new bishop, who was Stephen’s brother but changed sides when Stephen refused him the Archbishopric of Canterbury.

The medieval bishops had a hand in encouraging the wool industry, and so were partly responsible for Witney beginning to exchange its village character for that of an urban settlement.

The museum displays a fascinating survey map, made in 1839 for the assessment of tithes, which shows how large and populous the town had become by the 19th century. Workshops, trading premises and dwellings are identified separately, and many can be linked, through the 1841 census, with occupants’ names, approximate ages and jobs.

Other topics that find a place amongst the exhibits include the coming (and going) of the railway, the history of Henry Box grammar school, religion in the town (which had a very large non-conformist community, split into numerous sects), Clinch’s Brewery, and the Bartlett family, to whom the museum building belonged in its days as a house and builder’s yard. The Bartlett Taylor Temporary Exhibitions Gallery on the first floor was its lath store, and downstairs were a blacksmith’s shop and the family’s original private quarters.

The first Bartlett, Malachi, a Victorian ancestor of the Bartlett Taylor who gave the building to the town ‘for charitable purposes’, owned property on each side and moved next door in the 1870s when his wife died of cholera from drinking the water in the well. He is said to have come to Witney from Devon, walking all the way with his possessions on the end of a stick, Dick-Whittington style. After the depression in the 1840s and the Great Exhibition of 1851, much of the town was rebuilt, and Bartlett’s scrupulously kept ledgers, which still exist, give a detailed picture of his own firm’s part in the process, right down to the box made for a boy to stand on in the Methodist chapel. Much other information valuable to local and family historians is stored in the museum’s archives and can be seen by appointment. It includes many letters, such as those of John Early, an atypically unsuccessful member of the famous family, whose brand new weaving shed was repossessed by the bank and who thereafter dedicated his life to Temperance, loitering on street corners and chatting, and writing to his children, who were scattered all over the world.

The archives also house lots of title deeds, the Worley photographic collection, a register from Witney workhouse, and a series of Quit Rent books, recording the payments by which tenants could avoid giving service to the lords of the manor.

Jane Cavell holds a drop-in ‘family history surgery’ at Witney library on Fridays from 2-5pm, which provides access to the archives, even when the museum is closed in winter.

Witney and District Museum, Gloucester Court Mews, High Street, Witney, OX28 6JA Admission £1.50. Open April to October, Wednesday–Saturday 10am-4pm, Sunday 2-4pm. Call 01993 775915 . Temporary exhibitions: Local villages, June 17–August 16; How to trace your family tree, August 19-October 18.