NATURE COLUMN: Bill Cawley

THE warriors of Genghis Khan liked silk shirts.

It was not a fashion statement or an attempt to ape Saturday Night Fever’s Tony Manero in his dazzling liquid silk shirt – although “staying alive” was something that opponents of the Mongol Hoard frequently failed to do.

Their liking for silk shirts was entirely practical. The reason was that silk was so strong and unbreakable that arrowheads failed to penetrate the textile, making the extraction of the arrow much easier.

Little did they know, but the thread also has antibacterial qualities and assisted in healing.

Silk and the role of the silkworm, actually the larvae of a moth, played a role in Leek’s industrial prominence of the 19th Century – although its story goes back much further.

The Chinese have a legend that it was the Empress Leizu who, in the 27th Century BC, discovered the skill of silkworms when a cocoon fell into her tea from a mulberry tree on which the silkworm fed. It unravelled, revealing the thread.

China managed to maintain the monopoly of silk production for a thousand years and through the development of trade routes to the west this luxury item became known about through the ancient world.

In the Roman world, silk imported from China was so highly prized that children were employed to unpick the thread to provide material for looms.

When the secret of the life cycle of the silk moth was revealed by monks to the emperors of Byzantium, smuggling out the larvae in hollow walking sticks, silk production became an industry based around Constantinople, carefully created as a state monopoly with strict controls governing its production.

Mulberry trees were planted by the Emperor Justinian (527565) and the industry became a mainstay of the economy for the next 800 years.

The Mongols were not the first to recognise the ability of silk to leave less debris around a wound, unlike wool or cotton, thereby improving healing.

The personal bodyguard of the Byzantine Emperor – the Varangian Guard – wore silk.

There is a description of an impressive honour guard of Englishmen and Danes equipped with battleaxes and adorned in brilliantly coloured silk lining a main though fare in Constantinople in the 13th century.

I often wonder if any local Anglo Saxon after Hastings took the long trek eastwards to serve Emperors.

In 1904, the excavation of the Viking longboat at Oseberg in Norway found skeletons wearing Byzantine silk.

As far as the development of silk in Leek is concerned it was an 18th century development with the production of buttons being a staple part of the industry.

The industry grew from an essentially domestic small scale base in the 19th century with seven mills in operation in 1835 producing a range of silk goods, the raw silk being imported from Asia.