Counting Sheep

by Philip Walling

  Wool played a pivotal role at all levels of Saxon society. King Edward ‘sette his sons to scole, and his daughters he set to woll werke, taking example of Charles the Conquesterer’. The very name by which unmarried women in England are still designated, spinsters, is proof of the antiquity and importance of wool-working and how central sheep were to English national life and prosperity. The flocks must have been numerous and large to have given employment ‘to the unmarried women of all classes, from the daughter of a prince to the meanest person’.

  To spin with art in ancient times was seen, Thought not beneath the noble dame or queen: From that employ our maidens took the name Of spinsters, which the moderns never claim.

  Youatt on Sheep, p. 196

  Then after the Norman Conquest, and for about three centuries during the Middle Ages, English wool growing reached its apogee. Wool became so valuable that fortunes were made from growing it, dealing in it and manufacturing it and an unknown merchant could engrave into the windows of his house, ‘I praise God and ever shall – it is the sheep hath paid for all.’

  In 1189 King Richard, Coeur-de-Lion, succeeded to the English throne and almost immediately embarked on the Third Crusade. On his way back from Palestine in 1193 he fell into the hands of Henry VI, the Holy Roman Emperor, who held him for the exorbitant ransom of 150,000 marks, which was 75,000 oz, just over two tons of silver and the equivalent of three years’ income for the English Crown. The kingdom was scoured to raise the vast sum. Both laymen and clergy were required to give up a quarter of their income for that year. The Church was expected to donate most of its gold and silver plate and the Cistercian monastic houses were asked for a year’s clip of wool. Thus arose the saying that Richard the Lionheart’s ransom was paid in English wool.

  Throughout the Middle Ages long-staple wool from Lincolnshire and the Midlands was only matched in quality by the short-staple wool from the Welsh Marches. Staple is a measure of the length and fineness of wool fibres. Francesco Pegolotti, an agent for the Italian merchant and banking house of Bardi in Florence, travelled throughout England during the early part of the fourteenth century buying wool. In his merchant’s handbook, Pratica della mercatura, he recorded the prices for English wool between 1317 and 1321. The highest priced was the ‘Lemster Ore’, which came from sheep that grazed the lands of the Cistercian houses of Tintern Abbey and Abbey Dore. This was some of the finest wool in Europe. Queen Elizabeth I insisted that her hose be made only from Lemster Ore, refusing to wear any other. The sixteenth-century bucolic poet Michael Drayton celebrated its virtues:

  Where lives a man so dull, on Britain’s farthest shore To whom did never sound the name of Lemster Ore That with the silkworm’s web for smallness doth compare.

  Lemster Ore was worth 28 marks per sack of 364 lb. A mark was two-thirds of a pound – 13s 4d (66.6p) – but no mark coins were ever struck because a mark was always worth 8 oz of silver. At today’s silver price of £12.50 an ounce (approximately £200 a pound), 28 marks would be the equivalent of £3,000, whereas similar modern Shortwool fleeces would now be worth about £220 a sack.

  The Lemster Ore probably did not come from any uniform type or breed, but was created by the land the sheep grazed and the way the flocks were kept. The old type of sheep which gave the Lemster Ore was an ancient English shortwoolled heath sheep which, at some remote time, had occupied all the English and Welsh sheep-walks, but was pushed further into the west by the Saxon invasions. It was a small, fine-boned, very hardy animal with an exceptional ability to thrive on scanty pasture, and ‘deserved a niche in the temple of famine’. It was the sparseness of the unimproved ancient pastures that made the wool fibres so fine. When such sheep are grazed on lusher pasture, their wool deteriorates and becomes coarser.

  This, coupled with unwise crossing with modern breeds, particularly the New Leicester, in an attempt to improve the carcase, damaged the wool even more. Flockmasters discovered (often too late to repair the damage) in their zeal to grow a better carcase that improving the carcase reduces the quality of the wool. The modern descendant of the old type is supposed to be the Ryeland, which is a medium-sized solid square sheep, naturally polled in both sexes and covered in short, dense, fine wool all over its face and down its legs almost to its hooves. But the wool of the modern Ryeland is so much inferior to that of its forebears, having been ruined by injudicious crossing, that it is but a shadow of the sheep whose fleeces once rivalled the best of Spain. Its modern manifestation is the recherché interest of smallholders and sentimentalists, and a woolly relic from a vanished age.

  There is a stunning list showing the price range of wool in 1343 in marks per sack from different counties of England. We can see that the highest-priced wool came from a few counties that run in a swathe from the Lincolnshire Wolds through Leicester-shire into Staffordshire, the Welsh Marches and across into the Cotswolds. The highest price was 14 marks (£1,400 today) per sack, for the long-staple wool from Lincolnshire and Leicester-shire and for the short-staple wool from the Welsh Marches. By comparison, the 2012/13 price for lustre wool (of similar quality to Lincoln) is 380p per kilo, or just over £600 a sack.

  From ancient times, wool had its own special weights, which were used well into the last century:

  7 lb = 1 clove

  2 cloves = 1 stone (14 lb)

  2 stones = 1 tod (28 lb)

  6½ tods = 1 wey (182 lb)

  2 weys = 1 sack (364 lb)

  12 sacks = 1 last (nearly 2 tons)

  a ‘wool-pack’ was 240 lb

  Wool buyers and farmers would have kept two clove (half-stone) weights, often in the shape of a shield, and certified as accurate by the Crown, and stamped with the Royal Arms. The two weights were pierced and held together with a leather strap. When the wool buyer came to negotiate for their wool, farmers would put the buyer’s two 7 lb weights on one side of a scale and a stone on the other from which they would chip pieces until it weighed exactly 14 lb, which is probably the origin of a stone being 14 lb. The oldest known weight is a pear-shaped stone wool-weight, carved from limestone, pierced at the top and weighing 1.5 lb. It came from Lagash in Sumer and bears a cuneiform inscription: ‘Mina for wool issue, Dudu high priest.’ A mina was equal to 60 shekels and Dudu was high priest of Lagash in Sumer in about 2500 BC. (The stone is now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.)

  For centuries much English wool was exported to weavers in Europe, primarily to Flanders and Italy, who were still preeminent in its manufacture more than 1,000 years after the Romans had established the industry, and are still important today. It was valued for its fineness and smoothness, or handle, particularly the long-staple wools that came from the very sheep the Romans had introduced all those centuries earlier. Land-owning dynasties were founded on wool and the English Crown drew a large part of its revenue from it. Wool was the North Sea oil of its day, except its bounty lasted for four centuries rather than the four decades of oil. As an example of just how much the medieval Crown depended on its income from wool, in the last year of Henry V’s reign (1421–2), out of a total income of £55,750, £35,000 came directly or indirectly from wool.

  Wool growing created the landscape of Britain and, in a magnificent medieval symbol of the pre-eminence of the wool trade in England’s fortune, there are two Woolsacks in the House of Lords. One was occupied by the Lord Chancellor and a larger Judges’ Woolsack by the Law Lords. The Lord Chancellor occupied his from the fourteenth century, when Edward III commanded that his Chancellor should sit in the House of Lords on a sack stuffed with wool, until July 2006, when the Woolsack became the seat of the Lord Speaker as the presiding officer in the House of Lords. Both Woolsacks are large cushions covered with red cloth and stuffed with wool. The Speaker’s cushion has a back-rest in the middle but no back or arms. In 1938 it was found to contain horsehair and was re-stuffed with wool from all parts of the Commonwealth, as a symbol of unity.

  Until the middle of the fourteenth century the profit from wool growing accrued dis
proportionately to the feudal landowners. Most land was subsumed into the feudal pyramid and occupied by villein tenants with personal obligations to their superior lord. There were huge flocks of sheep grazing the prehistoric downs and feeding in their tens of thousands on the communal and inter-manorial marsh pastures, but there was limited scope for ordinary people to establish their own commercial flocks because most of the manorial land that could have been used for grazing was cultivated.

  The mass of villein tenants were also unable to accumulate significant capital, either in flocks or in land. They were not slaves or serfs; they had legal rights according to their status and carried out their obligations because custom and kinship demanded it rather than under coercion, but the flocks they tended benefited their feudal lord. Things were changing gradually under increasing pressure from a growing cash economy, and the tenants’ obligations were slowly being commuted into money payments, whose payment avoided them having to work personally for their lord. But the changes were slow and patchy, and only affected the edges of a system whose core remained largely unchanged. But within two years of the summer of 1348, all this was changed utterly when the whole fabric of English society was torn apart.

  A run of cold wet summers and terrible harvests culminated in the awful summer of 1348. By August grain crops were rotting in the fields, corn sprouted in the ear, beyond hope of harvest, and widespread starvation was predicted. But, as if to prove the old saying that a foreseen famine never happens, the plague that was sweeping its way across Northern Europe was something far worse than famine. The Black Death became a catalyst for the most fundamental change in land use in England for many centuries. Up to a third of the population of Europe is believed to have died in three years between 1347 and 1350. And in England it has been estimated that 2 million people perished out of a population of about 5–6 million. The infection spread so rapidly that its victims ‘took breakfast with their friends and dined with their ancestors in paradise’. Whole villages were abandoned and fields left uncultivated: the Winchester Estate Rolls typically recorded the rent received from numerous tenants as being ‘nothing, because he is dead’.

  Manpower was so scarce that the laborious manorial cultivation of the early Middle Ages became impossible. For the first time in history, large acreages of arable land that had been cultivated for many centuries became grassland, colonised by the grasses and wild flowers that grow naturally in the English climate. This proved to be a godsend to sheep keepers. The great value of grass is that it grows from the root, not the tip, so removing the leaf does not retard its growth; rather it causes it to tiller out and produce more stems and leaves. And as it is grazed, grassland gradually improves. Weeds are suppressed because removing their leaves kills them and the manure from grazing sheep and their treading increase soil fertility with every passing year. This grazing and treading by sheep is ‘the hoof that turns sand into gold’. The most beneficial grazing is with mixed cattle and sheep because sheep bite and nibble, whereas cattle tear at the grass, removing old and weak stems, and in combination this keeps the sward young and healthy.

  Very quickly the abandoned manorial fields became productive permanent pasture, which required little maintenance other than looking after the flock that grazed them. On many of the heavy clay soils, particularly in the Midlands, permanent pasture was a better way of farming, because ploughing and cultivating such land is a tricky business that must be done when the soil is exactly right: too wet and it’s too sticky to work and too dry it sets like concrete.

  In the ensuing century and a half great fortunes were made from keeping sheep on land that had fallen into permanent pasture. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, for example, in the Midlands, the Spencers made their fortune from wool growing. They were by no means the only ones, but they were among the most successful. By the end of the sixteenth century Robert, first Lord Spencer (1570–1627), had £8,000 a year from 20,000 sheep in the Midlands at a time when a head-shepherd (a position of some authority) earned about one mark a year – half a pound of silver worth about £150 at the value of silver today.

  Even by the middle of the seventeenth century wool was still the most valuable thing that sheep produced. In 1641 Henry Best, a yeoman farmer from Elmswell near Driffield in the East Riding, wrote Rural Economy in Yorkshire. Best’s father was a member of the rising Elizabethan mercantile class who had bought his little estate with money he made in the City. In 1641 Best sold his entire wool-clip for the year, 29 stones (406 lb or 184 kg) for £11 12s, and in the same year he records that he hired a man for £3 for the year. Louise Fairburn’s thirty breeding ewes clip an average of a stone of wool each (14 lb) – 30 stones from the flock; this is the same weight as Henry Best’s was 400 years ago. But, in 2012, she got £240 for all the wool from her flock and she would need a hundred times that just to employ one man.

  Soon after the Conquest the English Crown had set up the Wool Staple (from the old French estaple, meaning open market). This monopoly levied duty on all raw wool exported by requiring that it be sold only through depots controlled by the Staple. In the ensuing centuries much of the Crown’s revenue came from duty exacted by the Staple on the export of English wool to Flanders. (Interestingly, we still export more wool to Flanders than to any other country in the world.) This was why the Wool Staple was run from Antwerp until 1353, when Edward III brought it home and temporarily established it in fifteen depots in towns across the kingdom. Then in 1363 he moved it to Calais, where twenty-six English merchants formed the Merchant Staplers Company. They grew wealthy from this monopoly, and were protected by the English Crown, which in return expected to be entitled to borrow money from the Staplers whenever it needed it. This suited the Crown because it could avoid the inevitable concessions that Parliament would have exacted in return for granting money. The Staplers’ monopoly and the taxes imposed raised the price of woollen cloth in Europe. The combination of the resulting hardship to the Flemish manufacturers and the inducements offered by the Crown to settle in England was an offer they could not refuse. They moved to set up in business in England, which invigorated English cloth manufacture, reduced the export of raw wool and enhanced the revenues to the Crown from the increased trade and duty on manufactured goods.

  The British Wool Marketing Board is the modern incarnation of the Staple, with a statutory monopoly over the sale of British wool. The difference is that its role is to get the best price for the producer rather than collect revenue for the Crown. Its head office and warehouse are in Bradford, a city in a county whose very names are synonymous with British wool. The UK annually produces over 22,000 tonnes of wool from about 23 million sheep. Anybody who keeps more than four sheep is obliged to sell their wool to the Board, apart from Shetland producers, who negotiated an exemption. Most British wool is currently exported, because the indigenous textile manufacture has taken a hammering in recent years from foreign competition, notably from China and India, because its profitability is directly related to the cost of labour and the strength of the currency. Currently Britain is down and others are up (for obvious reasons) but there are signs that this is changing.

  All British fleeces arrive into the BWMB’s Bradford warehouse (or one of its regional depots) from the farm in ‘sheets’ – big sacks about six feet square, each packed with about fifty fleeces. Traditionally the sheets were made from woven jute fibre, but now they are white polypropylene because it is more durable. No wonder wool is losing out to man-made fibres when even the Wool Board eschews natural fibre in favour of man-made. Nearly all the annual clip of wool is sold at one of the twenty-two fortnightly auctions held in Bradford. These are the quietest auctions I’ve ever been to: there is no auctioneer, the bidding is done by the click of a mouse at a computer terminal and the bids and final price are recorded on a big screen at the end of the room.

  The Board pays the producer a guaranteed price based on an average of two years’ auction prices. There are over 115 grades of wool in the Board’s p
rice schedule, and the grader’s skill, learned over a long apprenticeship, is to sort each fleece into its proper grade by hand. The fleeces have been wrapped on the farm (there is a penalty for unwrapped fleeces) by folding the outside edges into the middle, then rolling the fleece from the tail end and twisting the neck wool into a band which is tied round the rolled fleece. The fleeces are tipped out of the sheets onto big tables and the grader goes through them, sorting them into their appropriate grade, and throwing each into the appropriate bin behind him. When the bin is full its contents are mechanically squeezed into bales which are then wrapped in orange plastic. A mechanical corer is then plunged into the bale to take a sample which the Board uses to assess and guarantee the quality of the wool in that bale.

  Wool is a unique and complicated substance. Each fibre consists of a protective layer of overlapping cuticle cells that lie, like the slates on a roof, towards the tip. Each cell has a waxy coating that repels water away from the root, but allows water vapour to penetrate and be absorbed by the fibre. That is why wool can absorb up to 30 per cent of its weight in water and not lose its insulating properties, and when removed from the sheep can absorb a large volume of dye. It is flexible, fireproof and resistant to stretching and folding, so it is simply the most versatile and valuable natural fibre we have. It has been much underrated in recent times, losing out to cotton in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to man-made fibres in the twentieth, but nothing can really replace wool. And Lincoln wool is some of the best.

  The global pre-eminence of English wool is reflected in the worldwide acceptance in the wool trade of longstanding English terms and standards. English wool graders devised the Bradford Count, a measure of assessing the fineness of wool. It is an estimate (relying on the skill of the grader) of the number of hanks (a hank is 560 yards) of single-strand yarn that can be spun from a pound of ‘top’, which is washed wool combed to make all the fibres lie parallel. A pound of top with a count of 56 could be spun into 56 hanks of 560 yards each, which is 17.8 miles of yarn. The Bradford Count was used across the world for centuries, until it was superseded by measurement by microscope expressed in microns (0.001 mm). A Bradford Count of 56 would now be 28 microns.