This Golden Fleece

A Journey Through Britain's Knitted History

Esther Rutter

• Publisher: Granta Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781783784370
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Britische Geschichte

"A book about wool and sheep, the making of Scotland, England and farming, textile manufacture, folklore and, crucially, the essential craft of knitting." —Janice Galloway, author of Jellyfish Over the course of a year, Esther Rutter—who grew up on a sheep farm in Suffolk, and learned to spin, weave and knit as a child—travels the length of the British Isles, to tell the story of wool's long history here. She unearths fascinating histories of communities whose lives were shaped by wool, from the mill workers of the Border countries, to the English market towns built on profits of the wool trade, and the Highland communities cleared for sheep farming; and finds tradition and innovation intermingling in today's knitwear industries. Along the way, she explores wool's rich culture by knitting and crafting culturally significant garments from our history—among them gloves, a scarf, a baby blanket, socks and a fisherman's jumper—reminding us of the value of craft and our intimate relationship with wool.
This Golden Fleece is at once a meditation on the craft and history of knitting, and a fascinating exploration of wool's influence on our landscape, history and culture. "Wondrous." — BBC Countryfile "A yarn well told." — The Irish Times "A compelling literary journey through the social history of wool in the British Isles." —Karen Lloyd, author of The Gathering Tide "[Rutter's] stops on her journey around Britain also knit together the past and the present, the social, historical and the personal, in an altogether engaging way." — Books from Scotland

1

Dentdale Gloves

The thought of spending a year with wool feels like a homecoming. From the age of five until I was a teenager, I lived beside a sheep farm in Suffolk. My family had ended up there by mistake: my father’s bankruptcy had snatched away our house, and this cottage was the only place available to rent. With newspaper stuffed under the floorboards for insulation and a bathroom in a lean-to out the back, Farm Cottage was a messy, working house, its dark-brown acrylic carpet chosen to resist stains from muddy boots. Once a dairy, the cottage was the width of a single room, ensuring that at least two walls in every room were kept cool by the outside air. Opposite was a muddle of barns and farm buildings, where rats hid in feed bins and swallows nested in the rafters. The air was ripe with the smell of mud and muck and straw.

‘If I see a sheep, I have to have it.’ These words have been a family joke since we first heard them on the doorstep of our new cottage, the greeting of a stocky middle-aged man in corduroy trousers and checked shirt liberally spattered with brown matter, who farmed the fields around our home. Walford Arnold Griffiths – the Celtic syllables of his name gave away his Welsh border roots – was a man obsessed by sheep.

My parents were not farmers, and we had never lived on a farm before, but I soon fell in love with living there. The farm was an escape from the house, from money worries and unvoiced guilt and disappointment. As soon as we arrived, I began volunteering to ‘help’ on the farm as much as I could, a handy retreat from the times when my parents let their anger bloom into shouting.

Sheep were simple in their needs. They wanted food, water, the occasional helping hand with lambing. In the farmyard uniform of wellies, grubby trousers and an old jacket, I trudged out to the fields early on dark spring mornings to stick my small hands inside lambing ewes, reaching for heads and slimy ankles to guide new life into the world. I blew warm breath into ovine lungs, got covered in ticks during shearing, and lugged around cracked buckets of mineral lick. My younger brothers and I rode on the hay wagon in high summer and scrambled up the sides of slippery straw bales. Sheep nibbled at the edges of our garden and sometimes strayed inside it, panicking back into the fields when we ran towards them. Lamby, an orphan whom no ewe would mother, came to live on a pile of newspapers in our kitchen. Penned in by cardboard boxes and my baby brother’s stairgate, Lamby was fed from a bottle, sucking the long orange teat with lusty vigour. His urine stained the kitchen lino yellow but I loved Lamby with a child’s unchecked passion. I am not sure my parents felt the same.

Farming was the stuff of life for Mr Griffiths, as we always called him, a passion surpassing even his love of church and song. His attachment to sheep was lifelong, his knowledge and skill connected through the generations to an ancient culture of sheep farming in Britain.

Since the Bronze Age, much of Britain’s wealth has come from sheep’s fleece. The Roman historian St Dionysius Alexandrinus remarked that spun British wool could only be matched in fineness by a spider’s silken thread.1 There had been sheep in the British Isles for at least two millennia when the Romans arrived, but these Continental colonists brought their own sheep with them, some of which seem to have been a short-fleeced, self-shedding Cretan type suited to the Mediterranean climate, perhaps precursors of today’s Wiltshire Horn breed.2 They had been bred to have fleece with fibres shorter and paler than those of Britain’s native sheep. Selective animal husbandry tends to breed out natural pigments, and pure white wool will take a coloured dye, whereas naturally pigmented fibres are far harder to colour reliably. Wherever the Romans colonized, their sheep came too. And they were well-protected: sources speak of Roman sheep wearing jackets made of skin to keep their fleece free of burrs and twigs.

The Romans found that the fleece of British flocks was thick and waterproof, with a long staple (the natural length of a lock of fleece), which could turn the rain. They bred their Continental sheep with native stock to create the forebears of many of the breeds we know today, and as the Roman world stretched across Europe, so too did the trade in British wool. Diocletian’s Edict on Maximum Prices, issued in 301 CE, notes that ‘British woollen rugs are priced above all others.’

In the Middle Ages, British wool spun on looms in northern Europe still fetched the highest prices in the Western world. During the fourteenth century, intricate and skilful ways of weaving wool were introduced to Britain by Flemish weavers; what followed was a boom in weaving cloth, bringing wealth to wool-producing counties from the Cotswolds to East Anglia, Devon to Yorkshire. The economic importance of wool was such that it was placed at the very heart of government: Edward III (1327–77) proclaimed that the Lord Chancellor should sit on a bale of wool in Parliament. This Woolsack is still in use in the House of Lords, albeit in a newer form – it is now filled with wool from across the Commonwealth. In front of it is the Judges’ Woolsack, the huge cushion occupied during the State Opening of Parliament by the most senior members of the judiciary.

Successive monarchs and parliaments were keen to maintain the buoyancy of the wool trade and its associated industries. In 1571, Elizabeth I had Parliament decree that everyone older than six (‘except Maydens, Ladyes and Gentlewomen [and] al Noble Personages’) should ‘use and weare upon the Saboth and Holy Daye, onles in the tyme of their travel […] upon their head one Cappe of Woll Knytt, thicked [felted] and dressed in England […] and onely dressed and finished by some of the Trade or Science of Cappers’.3 Failure to do so incurred a fine of 3s. 4d. per day, which represented five days’ wages for a skilled tradesman.4 A sumptuary law not for the wealthy but the ordinary, the Cappers’ Act had been introduced to protect the livelihood of members of the Guild of Cappers and their dependants; unpopular and difficult to regulate, it was repealed in 1597.

Regulations on wearing wool were not just for the living. Responding to a depression in the wool trade in the following century, Charles II’s Parliament passed an Act in 1666 making it illegal to bury ‘any corpse in any shirt, shift, sheet or shroud […] in any thing other than what is made of sheep’s wool only’;5 framed as a statute in 1667, it was only repealed in 1814.6 Upholding the regulation required the swearing of affidavits by ‘two credible persons’ in front of a Justice of the Peace or a priest within eight days of the burial. As with the earlier Cappers’ Act, however, it was often ignored: by 1735, Pope’s satirical Moral Essays indicates that the practice of burying in wool had become if not obsolete, at least unfashionable. Narcissa, believed to be a representation of either the Duchess of Hamilton or the popular actress Anne Oldfield, ends her life with the words, ‘Odious! in woollen! ‘twould a Saint provoke!’, instead requesting,

‘No, let a charming chintz and Brussels lace

Wrap my cold limbs and shade my lifeless face:

One would not, sure, be frightful when one’s dead.’7

North of the border, sheep reshaped Scotland’s landscape and history; money from the wool trade built the monasteries in the twelfth century and, six hundred years later, was responsible for tearing down the Highland townships8 as landowners replaced the human population with an ovine one. In Yorkshire, wool built the great mill towns of Halifax, Bradford and Leeds in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where British fleece was combined with imported fibres from across the world – silk, alpaca, cotton – to produce textiles such as grosgrain, princetta and parramatta.9 The increase in labour costs and the ready supply of cotton from Britain’s colonies finally caused the decline of these industries by the beginning of the twentieth century.

Turning raw wool to spun yarn has a magic charm. As a free-range child on the farm, I pulled tufts of wool from wire fences, stuffing them into my pocket. My mum had a wooden spinning wheel and from time to time would spin her own yarn. Using a huge pair of carders – broad brushes with hard, sharp spines – she untangled the clots of dirty wool I brought in from the fields. The carders tugged at each other like burrs, separating the wool into smooth strands. By pushing the spiny paddles towards each other, a smooth rolag of wool would magically appear between their spikes. Then Mum set the spinning wheel whirring with her foot to coax this fat cigar of carded wool into yarn.

If this sounds like a fairy tale, it’s no coincidence. Images of transformation at the spinning wheel pepper the world’s folk stories. Think of Rumpelstiltskin, spinning gold from straw. Or Sleeping Beauty, pricking her finger on a spinning wheel and falling into a slumber so deep naught but one can wake her. From Greek mythology comes Jason and the Argonauts’ quest for the Golden Fleece. Jason, eager to reclaim his father Aeson’s stolen throne, was tasked to bring back a golden fleece from Colchis, part of present-day Georgia. There Phrixus, after escaping death on the back of a winged ram, had sacrificed his unusual steed and gave its golden fleece in thanks to Colchis’s ruler, Aeëtes. Hanging the fleece in a tree, Aeëtes instructed that it should be guarded by a never-sleeping dragon, lest a prophecy should come true that his kingdom would fall if it left. With his crew aboard the Argo, Jason set off to claim the fleece, enduring numerous tribulations before passing through the Bosphorus, the straits at the edge of the Greek world. In Colchis, Aeëtes, loath to lose the fleece, set Jason further trials: he must yoke fire-breathing bulls to a plough and sow dragon’s teeth into its tilled furrows. From these sprang soldiers, to be slain by Jason. Assisted by Aeëtes’s daughter Medea, Jason won back the fleece, aureate symbol of wealth and power.

Women who spin, knit and weave are legend, from Homer’s Penelope, unravelling and reweaving a shroud as she waits for Odysseus’s return, to mythic Ariadne, saving Theseus in the Cretan labyrinth with her ball of yarn. In Greek mythology, the three Fates, the Moirai, hold the mother thread of life – Clotho spins it, her sister Lachesis measures it, and Atropos clips it short. In Norse mythology, the Norns, goddesses wielding shears and spindles, do likewise. Women with their spinning wheels have long been agents for change and enchantment.

It’s not only the tales we tell, but how we tell them. Wool has left its mark on our speech. When we want to recount a story, we spin a yarn. If we deceive, we pull the wool over people’s eyes. For centuries, female spinsters (the masculine form is ‘spinner’) spun wool to earn their livelihood, and the word gradually became synonymous with ‘unmarried woman’, one not dependent on a husband for her keep. We weave narratives as we weave cloth, and our words for them are bound together: ‘text’ and ‘textile’ share the same Latin root, texere, to weave. Our terms for working wool and words intertwine.

In Cumbria, amid the debris of Christmas, I plan this year’s adventure. Shetland yarn beside me, I think through the months ahead, plotting a knitter’s course around the British Isles and planning visits to places shaped or built by wool. In Scotland, there are the islands of Shetland and the Hebrides, the settlements of Brora, Gairloch, Hawick. Down through the dales and mill towns of Cumbria, Northumberland and Yorkshire and past the knitting-machine clatter of the Midlands, I could then head east to the wool towns of Suffolk, thence west to Wales to unpick the Welsh love of sheep. Where should I start, and what shall I knit first?

A confession. Mea culpa, I am a messy and disobedient knitter. I can’t stick to patterns, baulking at their prescription for specific needle sizes and yarn types, and instead experiment by changing colours, adding stripes and meddling with stitch counts. Recipients of this knitwear have been known to hide my handiwork discreetly in drawers whilst their babies outgrow it. Three times I have made hats so misshapen as to be unwearable, sometimes needing hot-washing to shrink them down to a suitable size. Once this resulted in a dense Rastafarian-style cap with a crown so tight I had to cut it open to fit my head inside, my face then framed by two unintentional earflaps.

I’ve had better luck with hands than heads, working from the Victoria and Albert Museum’s archive of historic patterns to knit several pairs of 1940s Fair Isle mitts. With stiff and sturdy DK-knit fingers, these are gloves thick enough to keep you warm in a North ...