Following the Norman Conquest of 1066, the burgeoning British wool industry advanced, wool production and trade now driving the economy. Initially much commerce concerned the raw fleece, the largest flocks of sheep belonging to the great landowning abbeys and monasteries. Several, including Rievaulx and Fountains in Yorkshire, Furness in Lancashire and Tintern in Wales sold thousands of fleeces to Italy, France, Germany and the Low Countries, using the income to finance the construction of their magnificent buildings.

Fine British woollen cloths were also exported throughout the 1100s and 1200s and weavers’ guilds became established in London and elsewhere. However, despite impressive profits from fleeces and textiles, it was felt that England should produce more goods, and during the 1330s Edward III invited highly skilled Flemish woollen cloth weavers, fullers and dyers to settle in England. Their arrival revitalised manufacturing to the extent that annual exports of about 5,000 pieces of cloth in the mid-1300s had multiplied twentyfold by the mid-1500s.

Medieval and Tudor cloth production involved sorting and blending fleeces into varying qualities for different purposes, for example ‘long staple’ producing functional, rather itchy cloth and ‘short staple’ producing more costly materials for the wealthy. Fleeces were then cleaned using the process called ‘willeying’, removing dust and loosening fibres before scouring or washing dirt and natural grease from the wool. The dried wool was then straightened by carding or combing using hand implements with metal spikes or hooks, until it became a soft, rope-like yarn or ‘sliver’. Women spun the yarn, operating spinning wheels as a cottage industry and men mainly wove the cloth on handlooms. Woven cloth had to be ‘finished’, so the fulling mill was as common as the corn mill, and local fields were full of tenter frames on which cloth was stretched and dried. The nap of the cloth was then raised, originally using small bats stuck with spiky teasel heads, then huge iron clippers (‘croppers’) sheared the cloth to a fine finish, before final dyeing.

Wool production largely replaced corn growing countrywide during the later middle ages, when many communities and entire families engaged in wool production or trade. Major centres included Cumbria, Leeds and York in the north; Lincoln, Norwich and Suffolk; parts of Kent; Devon; Oxfordshire and adjacent counties. Some port towns grew rich on the export of woollen cloth, while merchants and drapers earned great wealth. Some built the ‘wool’ churches of the Cotswolds, East Anglia and the West Country, which, along with guildhalls, other public buildings and private houses testify to the former significance of English wool.