It is no wonder that Northleach Church is so full of woolmen's brasses, for often they knelt there, and often the village hummed with the buyers and sellers, exchanging orders and examining samples.

The Celys bought chiefly from two Northleach wool dealers, William Midwinter and John Busshe.

The relations between dealers and sellers were often enough close and pleasant: Midwinter even occasionally tried to provide a customer with a bride as well as with a cargo, and marriageable young ladies were not unwilling to be examined over a gallon of wine and much good cheer at the inn.[32] It is true that Midwinter was apt to be restive when his bills remained for too long unpaid, but he may be forgiven for that.
Thomas Betson favoured the wool fells of Robert Turbot of Lamberton,[33] and dealt also with one John Tate, with Whyte of Broadway (another famous wool village),[34] and with John Elmes, a Henley merchant well known to the Stonors.

Midwinter, Busshe, and Elmes were all wool dealers, or 'broggers'-- middlemen, that is to say, between the farmers who grew and the staplers who bought wool, but often the staplers dealt directly with individual farmers, buying the small man's clip as well as the great man's, and warm friendships sprang from the annual visits, looked forward to in Yorkshire dale and Cotswold valley.

It strikes a pleasant note when Richard Russell, citizen and merchant of York, leaves in his will, 'for distribution among the farmers of Yorkes Walde, from whom I bought wool 20 l., and in the same way among the farmers of Lyndeshay 10 l.' (1435).[35] The 'Cely Letters' give a mass of information about the wool buying at Northleach.