The intentions expressed in William Sheldon's will of 1570 suggest an attempt to introduce tapestry weaving at Barcheston, Warwickshire. Interpreted in the 1920s as resulting in a commercial venture – the only production centre in Elizabethan England – tapestries were attributed to it without documentary evidence, without stylistic comparison with continental work and without study of the records of émigré Flemish weavers settling in London from 1559 onwards. Their presence and more easily available comparative material, in both documentary and tapestry form, combine W question the previous picture, never revised. On re-examination, the historical evidence used to link tapestries found at Chastleton House with Sheldon's enterprise appears weak. Challenging the time-honoured belief that those tapestries should be regarded as key pieces in the Sheldon corpus also calls into question subsequent attributions made by association, and opens the way for a new exploration of the tapestry industry in sixteenth-century England.

The article examines the arrangements for the ongoing care of the royal tapestries under Queen Elizabeth, based on the continuous series of accounts for the arras men found in the National Archives LC 9, AO 3 and E 351. Taken on 'at need', the men worked a variable number of days per year in the Great Wardrobe, south of St Paul's. The majority were émigré tapestry weavers resident in London, though a gradually increasing number of Englishmen entered service. An attempt is made to identify tapestries repaired or sent to an external firm for 'refreshing' and 'cleansing'. worked as a freelance researcher after completing a doctorate at Oxford. Always fascinated by puzzles from the past, she came to tapestry after seeing the tapestry map of Warwickshire, once the property of Ralph Sheldon. She has since investigated, and published, the story behind their weaving, and looked at the reality of the family's attempt to introduce tapestry weaving into sixteenth-century Warwickshire.

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William Sheldon's proposals to establish tapestry weaving at Barcheston, Warwickshire, were outlined in his will of 1570. The image of Barcheston products, long forgotten, was first established in the 1920s, by a process of assumption and association. No attribution is documented. Examination here of nine tapestries displaying a single theme, classified as Sheldon only by analogy with examples themselves insecurely attributed, reveals widely disparate possible origins. Evidence for settlement of émigré tapestry weavers in London, not previously known, indicates that Barcheston was not the only production centre and suggests an embryonic tapestry industry centred in London. That same evidence must also, therefore, change perceptions of Sheldon's venture and the assessment of tapestries called Sheldon.