Episode 156 of the Renaissance English History Podcast was all about the Medieval and Tudor Wool Trade. Check out the resources and rough transcript below.
Rough Transcript of Episode 156: The Tudor Wool Trade
Hello and welcome to the Renaissance English History Podcast, a part of the Agora Podcast Network. I’m your host, Heather Teysko, and I’m a storyteller who makes history accessible because I believe it’s a pathway to understanding who we are, our place in the universe, and being more deeply in touch with our own humanity.
This is episode 156 – and we’re going back to the tour of the Tudor home that we started with the kitchen back in the summer. Today, we’re moving on to the bathroom, and looking at how medieval and Tudor friends kept their bodies clean, and handled getting rid of their waste.
But first, admin and announcements. First, the holidays are coming up, and I’ve got some amazing holiday gift ideas for you. Black Friday has come early! For this week only, my new audio course Kickass Tudor Women is now 50% off on Himalaya Learning, an audio learning platform that provides an extensive library of courses from the world’s greatest minds like Malcolm Gladwell, Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin, and more. Take advantage of this discount and learn something new this year. Go to himalaya.com/heather to claim your 50% off discount now. I hope to see you there!
Second, Tudorcon Tickets for 2021 – because why not start planning some fun stuff for 2021, right? And they will be discounted for Black Friday starting on Friday – because I’m old school like that. So check it out at englandcast.com/Tudorcon2021 – three days of Tudor talks, music, bonding with your new best friends, and fun in beautiful Lancaster County Pennsylvania, October 1-3. Englandcast.com/Tudorcon2021. I have just about 35 tickets left, so they will very likely sell out, and you don’t want to miss out on this amazing event.
Speaking of missing out, I’m sorry to say that the Tudor Planner is completely sold out. Gone. Done. I contacted the printer about getting another batch made, but they wouldn’t arrive until February even if I placed the order today, and with the minimum order they require, I just don’t feel comfortable doing that. So I’m very sorry if you missed out on that – next year I will order more, and you can stay tuned for the IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign in June to ensure that you get your copy!
So, moving on. This episode is going to be about something that I’m surprised I never talked in greater detail about before – we’ve skirted around it several times talking about the economy, and particularly the land enclosures that reached a peak during the reign of Edward VI, but it’s not something I have ever devoted a complete episode to. And that is… wool. Wool was England’s number one export from the medieval period, and it was a huge part of life for everyone in Tudor England. Very few people weren’t impacted by the wool trade.
Interestingly, the wool trade began out of the Black Death. With the population decimated, wealthy landowners had to find other ways to make money from their land. Sheep farming became the answer. The English climate was a perfect fit for sheep, and it took far fewer people to tend to the sheep versus ploughing a field.
The timing was perfect. There was a hunger for raw wool in the Low Countries, and pretty soon English landowners were able to sell all the wool they made. The scale of their success is evident in the growth of wool towns where wool churches towered over the landscape. Wool churches are the name for a church specifically made with wool profits donated by a merchant who had benefitted from the trade in order to secure his place in heaven. Wool churches are common in the Cotswolds and in East Anglia where the huge profits led to the construction of grand churches, which often replaced smaller places of worship in order to show just how prosperous the community had become. The practice of building wool churches ended during the Reformation in England. If you are in England and want to do a bit of sight seeing, there are some wonderful examples of wool churches at Holy Trinity Church of Long Melford built in the 15th century with money from local cloth merchants.
And we saw it in a huge scale in Norfolk. At St. Mary’s Church at Worstead, Norfolk, the village which gave its name to the cloth, the village church built by local weavers in the fourteenth-century towers over the small community, its tower jutting strikingly above the landscape. In other East Anglian communities, the wealth from wool poured in: Wymondham, Diss, North Walsham, East Harling, Attleborough, Aylsham. The churches basked in the refracted glory of wool wealth. Even in Norwich, which boasts more medieval churches than anywhere in Europe, it was wool money[8] that got the stone lifted, the glass stained and the panels carved. Norfolk wool was best suited to heavier cloth, and so Norwich and Norfolk eventually gained almost a complete monopoly on worstead. Those profits fueled an extraordinary ecclesiastical building boom.
By the way, I’ll have links to these buildings, and sources, at englandcast.com/wool. Englandcast.com/wool.
As the wool trade grew and these towns became successful, the Crown got their share of the profits. Wool taxes formed the majority of income for the Crown, and in 1454 Parliament decreed the making of cloth within all parts of the realm is the greatest occupation and living of the poor commons of this land.
The crown needed middlemen to handle the taxation of the wool, and in came The Company of Merchants of the Staple of England, the Merchants of the Staple, also known as the Merchant Staplers, is an English company incorporated by Royal Charter in 1319 (and so the oldest mercantile corporation in England) dealing in wool, skins, lead and tin which controlled the export of wool to the continent during the late medieval period. From 1314, the Crown required all wool for export to be traded at a designated market, called ‘The Staple’. This allowed the Crown to monitor the trade and levy tax on exports. After Calais was conquered in 1347 by the English, Calais was the staple from 1363, after that right had been assigned in turns to Bruges and Antwerp in the first half of the 14th century. A group of twenty-six traders was incorporated as the Company of the Staple at Calais. In exchange for its cooperation in the payment of taxes, the company was granted a total monopoly on wool exports from England. The company was important to the English crown, both as a source of revenue, and through its role in the defence of Calais against the French.
As domestic cloth production increased, raw wool exports were less important, diminishing the power of the Merchants. In 1558, with the loss of Calais to the French, the staple was transferred to Bruges where the Merchant Staplers continued to enjoy their monopoly on exports.
Another middleman was a brogger, who handled the large quantities of wool for the merchants, and organized it into classifications of the wool into good, or middle quality wool. Inferior wool included wool that came from sheep who were already found dead, or locks, what was left after the main fleece had gone – like from the legs. It was still worth trading, though, as it could be used to make rougher cloth. Weights were used during packing the wool, and a load was 28 pounds. Wool merchants used the same kind of methods for weighing wool into the 20th century as they did in the medieval period, balancing out 14 pound stones on a scale with the sacks of wool on the other side. The woolman would deliver it all, and merchants would mark their wool showing the name of the merchant, and the quantity and quality of the wool. Large sums of money were involved – often the balance was paid off in three installments. One at the weighing, and then two more payments in between four months. The wool left in convoys by sea where they were less likely to be hit by pirates, and it let merchants spread their cargo across ships. Sailings happened in Spring, Summer, and Autumn, but generally not winter.
The wool trade had the power to make or break an entire town. For example, Southampton. A considerable boost was given to the wool trade in Southampton in 1320 when Edward II decreed that the town would be one of only eight ports from which the export of wool would be allowed. This would provide huge business for the town, and create lots of jobs – not just for the middlemen, but also serving the boats, pubs, inns, and all the jobs associated with the people who would be staying in Southampton. It meant so much to them that they built a wool house which still exists (though these days it’s an artisanal brewery). It is the only medieval building in Europe that was built solely for storing wool – prior to shipment. It was built after a French raid in 1338, with two stories built of stone. During the 14th and 15th century it was used solely for storing wool, but the changing economics – as people began to navigate the Thames more easily and sail directly to the Low Countries from London – meant that the Wool House had to diversify. And in the 16th century The Wool House was now referred to as Alum Ceilar and used as storage for alum, a double sulphate salt used for dyeing cloth. So it was still linked to cloth, but not just storing wool. The wool trade through Southampton was buoyant until the mid 16th century when, as I said, people began to sail directly from London.
Another example of the prosperity that wool brought about is the Heydon family in Norfolk. John Heydon I died in 1480, but he had become wealthy as a lawyer and chief agent in East Anglia of William de la Pole, who was the Duke of Suffolk. He began building his Baconsthorpe Castle in the 1450’s. But its rise would skyrocket during the 16th century under the Tudors thanks to the wool trade. The following comes from the English Heritage website on Baconsthorpe Castle, which you can still visit today.
By the mid-16th century Baconsthorpe was at the heart of a huge estate. Sir Christopher Heydon I (1518/19–79) once entertained 30 head shepherds of his own flocks at Christmas dinner, which suggests that there were 20,000 to 30,000 sheep on his lands. Sir John Heydon II (c.1470–1550) transformed the east range of the castle into a ‘factory’ for processing the wool from his huge flocks. They added large windows to provide light for the spinners and weavers to work. The fine cloth produced at Baconsthorpe was sold both in England and the Netherlands.
The ability to produce raw wool, and then process it into textiles on site, made the Heydons even more rich and powerful.
Their prosperity peaked in the 1560s, when Sir Christopher I had 80 servants, and ran his own coach with two horses. Profits were spent on fine living and extensive building works. Sir Christopher built an elaborate outer gatehouse and created a large park, to which one of his successors added ornamental gardens and a lake.
Despite their wealth, though, there were already signs during Elizabeth I’s reign that the family were living beyond their means.
Although there was a decline in the wool and cloth trade at this time, the Heydon estates should still have been more than paying their way. But Sir Christopher I died in debt in 1579. He and his successors were not shrewd businessmen like the earlier Heydons, but lived as extravagantly as ever, throwing spectacular parties.
Sir William Heydon II tried to balance the books by selling land, but he too died in debt, in 1593. His eccentric son and successor, Sir Christopher II, preferred writing treatises on astrology to sheep farming. Finally, Sir John Heydon III, who plumped for the wrong side in the Civil War, gave up the struggle. He sold off all the Heydons’ Norfolk estates and, in about 1650, dismantled much of the castle to sell as building materials. In barely 200 years, the Heydons had risen from proud beginnings to immense wealth before falling into ignominious decline.
When we talk about the wool trade, how many sheep are we talking about? The average number was between 20-30, but the large landowners had thousands. This, of course, led to them eventually closing in the common lands in order to graze more sheep, and that led to rebellions like the famous Kett’s Rebellion during the reign of Edward VI (which also features in the newest CJ Samson book Tombland, which I highly recommend!).
In the 16th century the government tried to put caps and limits on how many sheep a landowner could own. In 1533, the maximum was set at 2,400, and you couldn’t JUST own sheep. For every 60 animals, at least one milking cow was required by a statue of 1555, and a calf for every 120 sheep. So the government wanted to keep people from only grazing sheep to the exclusion of everything else.
During the period 1540 – 1547, annual raw wool export averaged 5,025 sacks, and the equivalent of 28,790 sacks of finished cloth. About half the amount of cloth was retained for the home market, so a total of 50,723 sacks has been estimated as the annual production of wool for England and Wales in those years. This has been calculated as equating to 10,700,000 sheep (including lambs and yearlings).
The wool trade led to one of the worst jobs in medieval Europe – which is saying something: The Fuller. The fuller (one of the worst jobs in history) played an important part in the production of wool by treating it with urine. The wool was placed in a barrel of stale urine and the fuller spent all day trampling on the wool to produce softer cloth. Not a particularly good time.
We talked about the wool churches, but there were also wool towns. Lavenham in Suffolk is acknowledged as the best example of a medieval wool town in England. In Tudor times, Lavenham was said to be the fourteenth wealthiest town in England, despite its very small population. Its fine timber-framed buildings and beautiful church were built on the success of the wool trade. By the fifteenth century, not only was England producing enough cloth for her own use, materials were now being sold abroad. Working in their tiny cottages the weavers and their families transformed the raw wool into fine cloth, which would eventually end up for sale at the markets of Bristol, Gloucester, Kendal and Norwich.
In the 1570’s to 1590’s the clothing sumptuary laws required Englishmen except nobles had to wear a woollen cap to church on Sundays, part of a government plan to support the wool industry.
The wool trade began to shift during the Tudor period as we’ve seen, and it also moved into the sale of finished cloth. Plain wool exports, not weaved in any cloth, was decreasing sharply by the 1520’s. Meanwhile, the exports of woollen cloth was growing. Initially, this was due to the popularity of thick broadcloth in Central and Northern Europe. Later throughout the sixteenth century, a new type of cloth – kersey, which was lighter but coarser – became popular. The coarseness of kerseys was due to less thorough fulling and therefore felting, and they became very popular in Southern Europe.
Both of these kinds of cloth were usually shipped undyed and undressed to Antwerp, in the early years of the trade. By the mid sixteenth century and later the English began shipping finished and dyed cloth to Europe, which provided a greater profit. The term ‘undressed woollens’ (also known as ‘unfinished’) refers to woollens that not have not undergone a fulling and shearing.
In 1552 act of Parliament was enacted that decreed that wool could not be bought unless it was for the buyers’ own use (and woven at home), or for export through the Staple (the official wool markets). The law stifled trade and brought great hardship to wool smaller producers, and by 1555 it was repealed.
By the middle of the 16th century the middlemen, the dealers in wool, emerged as three separate classes. There were the Staple Merchants at the top, dealing in large quantities and with the export market. They were generally wealthy and owned a large country house in an area where wool was produced, as well as a town house where they carried on their business. The Merchant’s middleman, who travelled his area collecting the great bundles of wools, collecting from the growers. If the purchase was very large he might buy in three instalments. These were at set times. The Feast of St Bartholomew, (August 24, the Feast of All Saints (1st November) and the Feast of Purification (2nd February).
Next came the commodity dealers such as glove makers, who bought for their own leather products. They purchased wool fells (sheepskins) and removed the fleece before processing the skin, selling the wool to dealers and other manufactures.
After the middle of the sixteenth century, however, the large-scale woollen trade with the Northern and Central Europe began to slow down. Partly this was due to the stress in the relationship between England and much of the rest of Europe, but Germany also began to develop their own wool industry, and protected it with heavy tarriffs. The taste in clothing by the end of the 16th century had shifted to lighter and thinner clothing as well,
At the same time, there began the rise of what is called the New Draperies, which were the worsted and semi-worsted fabrics produced in England during the second half of the sixteenth century. This type of a fabric was not even a woollen technically, as it was not carded (broken up and ordered woollen fabric where the threads are somewhat parallel with each other); nor were the New Drapery worsteds fulled. Most of all, however, they were made from the long wool thread that England began producing so much of due to the changing conditions for the sheep. Therefore, this shift in fabric-making was one of necessity. Fortunately for the English, however, this cloth proved to be popular in Southern Europe.
In the later sixteenth century Huguenot weavers, persecuted in France, sought refuge in England and brought their skills with them. England began to surpass Flanders in woollen manufacture which, by the end of the seventeenth century, comprised two-thirds of the value of her exports.
‘So that’s it for this week. You can get show notes with sources at englandcast.com/bedroom. And do let me know what you thought about this episode -You can get in touch with me through the listener support line at 801 6TEYSKO or at the new Tudor Learning Circle, tudorlearningcircle.com
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