Writing in 1597, Thomas Deloney was clear about the benefits that clothiers and cloth-making brought to the wider economy and society, particularly through providing employment.

There were faint local echoes of these sentiments in summer 2017 when Newbury Town Council applied for planning permission to install a life-sized bronze statue of Jack of Newbury, or John Winchcombe II, the subject of Deloney's work. Depicting Jack holding a yard of cloth on his right arm while raising his left hand, ‘as if to dramatically capture the moment he conceived the idea to scale up the process of dyed-cloth production’, the statue is intended to draw the eye to the remains of the Winchcombe's Tudor residence in Northbrook Street and, according to the planning application, celebrate the town's rich cultural heritage and promote ‘a greater sense of civic pride among the whole community’. One online respondent, however, posted that they would not want this ‘Tudor fat-cat industrialist’, ‘Newbury's most notorious social climbing despot’, and ‘the town magistrate who executed the Newbury martyrs by having them burned alive’, to be commemorated in this way.

While historians usually tend to shy away from making moral judgements, they have also been uncertain about the impact that clothiers made in the wider economy and society.