By the end of the medieval period, there were at least five watermills on the River Wey and its tributaries near Haslemere. The oldest, at Pitfold, was most likely established in Saxon times and operated as a corn mill until the 1340s, when it appears to have become a fulling mill for wool. The original Shotter Mill, now in West Sussex, was founded in the 1640s and a hamlet grew up to the north, adopting its name. Until 1880, the area was dominated by the farms belonging to Pitfold Manor and the mills were mostly used for grinding corn. From the mid-18th century, some of the mill sites were converted for other purposes, including Sickle Mill, owned by the Simmons family, which was used for paper manufacturing from . Paper making took place at three sites around Shottermill until the mid-1850s. Between the 16th and the 18th centuries, Shottermill was a centre for iron making. A mill at Pophole (located at the modern-day tripoint between Surrey, West Sussex and Hampshire) harnessed water power to drive bellows for smelting and had a hammer for making iron bars. Production was well established by 1574 and it is probable that the mill supplied iron for the manufacture of cannons for the Navy. Much of the history of Pophole Mill is unclear, but it appears that activity at the site ceased shortly after 1732. The civil parish was also a centre for textiles manufacture. Until , around 200 local inhabitants were engaged in silk weaving, which was carried out as a cottage industry. There was also a crape factory in Church Lane. In 1835, the Appleton family installed machinery for spinning and weaving at Pitfold Mill and began to make worsted lace and epaulettes for military uniforms. By 1851, Thomas Appleton was employing 100 workers and in 1854 he expanded his business with the purchase of Sickle Mill. The company moved to London in the 1880s. The Peasant Arts Society was founded in Haslemere in the 1890s, when the weaver Maude King and her sister, the tapestry maker Ethel Blount, moved to the area. It was one of a number of organisations associated with the Arts and Crafts movement, that were founded in rural England at around the same time. Members, all drawn from the local working class, produced fabrics, rugs and tapestries, which were sold at exhibitions around the country. Ethel Blount and