THE FABRIC OF HISTORY
Esther Rutter explores the rich heritage of British wool
Britain is a country built on wool. From the spectacular churches of East Anglia to the wild moors of the Highlands, the trade has shaped the landscape for more than a thousand years. British fleece was once the best in the world and, in the Middle Ages, was quite literally worth a king’s ransom: in 1193, the sale of England’s wool crop was instrumental in raising the equivalent of £2 billion to pay the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV to release Richard the Lionheart.
In 2017, I embarked on a pilgrimage to learn more about Britain’s woollen heritage. My journey took me through fields and factories, archives and abbeys to uncover tales of fantastic wealth, ingenious creativity and dogged determination. I found that wool has left its mark, cropping up in nursery rhymes and fairy tales, and influenced our idiom, where spinsters keep us on tenterhooks as they spin a good yarn.
While the stereotypical knitter is an older woman, it was once a trade dominated by men. Working in a skilled occupation regulated by guilds, professionals were not bound by regular hours, but were paid according to the quality of their output. This sometimes meant they had free time in which to follow other interests, one of which was cricket. In fact, the small Nottinghamshire village of Ruddington, long famous for its framework knitting, was at one time supplying almost all the players for the county’s First XI cricket team – and many rivals besides.
Royal patronage played an important role in showcasing British knitwear, and in Shetland I found intricate lace mourning shawls popularised by Queen Victoria, alongside highly patterned Fair Isle golfing jumpers modelled by Edward VIII as Prince of Wales in the 1920s. Elsewhere, by contrast, I discovered stories of crafty resistance fighters smuggling tales of military secrets within their knitting. In 1914, MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service, worked with members of the Belgian Resistance to gather information about the movements of the Imperial German military. Those who lived in houses overlooking railway yards would encode information into their knitting, apparently slipping a stitch for a troop train, or perhaps purling one for an artillery carriage. During World War II, the US Office of Censorship banned the sending of knitting patterns abroad, in case the instructions contained encoded military information.
Yet wool is not only the stuff of history and fable. Warm, hard-wearing, natural and biodegradable, it can be made into almost anything, from chairs and tables to clothes and cloths. In a world looking to use less plastic and synthetic fabric, it may well be the fibre of our future. ‘This Golden Fleece: A Journey Through Britain’s Knitted History’ by Esther Rutter (£16.99, Granta) is published on 5 September.