Hair by Kurt Stenn

Author:Kurt Stenn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus
Published: 2015-02-06T16:00:00+00:00

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WOOL BANKROLLS AN EMPIRE

Wool made the fortunes of many who handled it, including Cosimo de’ Medici, the famous Renaissance banker, and Christopher Columbus.

Perhaps the most famous weaver of wool was Penelope, queen of Ithaca. As Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey opens, Penelope is weeping over the absence of her husband, Odysseus, the storied warrior and king who left her twenty years earlier to join the Greek states in their campaign against Troy. Although she heard he had survived the war and started homeward, she knew nothing more. Was he returning? Imprisoned? Dead? The uncertainty of Odysseus’s fate presented an irreconcilable dilemma to Penelope. In the society of her day, as long as a woman’s husband lived, she had the obligation to preserve his home; on the other hand, if her husband was dead, she was equally obliged to remarry. What should she do? Penelope conceded that as soon as she finished weaving a shroud for Odysseus’s aged father, Laertes, she would choose a husband from among her multiple suitors. So, from sunrise to sundown, she wove cloth, and then every night, she furtively unraveled it. After three years, when the suitors finally discovered her ruse, they were furious and swore to murder Telemachus, Penelope’s son and Odysseus’s heir. As the story ends, Odysseus returns home and defeats the seditious suitors to reclaim his kingdom and reunite his family at last.

When faced with crushing social pressure, Penelope took refuge in the work she had known all her life: the spinning and weaving of wool. This is hardly surprising, since wool was women’s work, and its product—cloth—was critical to the household. Wool work filled the free hours of every Greek woman—commoner or queen—and Homer writes of women who spun fleece every day from before sunrise until well after dusk. And so it’s no surprise that Penelope turned to this familiar activity in her time of need.

The story of wool encompasses nothing less than the history of civilization. Up until about three hundred years ago, few children grew up without some knowledge of spinning yarn, warping a loom, or passing a shuttle through a shed. The ways of wool were embedded in nearly every aspect of human existence back then, and our language bears witness to that exposure. Consider how many wool-based metaphors we use, most likely without any thought of their origins, among them “fabric of life,” “unraveling a mystery,” “on tenterhooks,” “homespun ideas,” “my spinster aunt,” “heirloom,” “to spin a yarn,” “weavers of long tales,” “thread of an argument,” and “space shuttle.” But as wool has been important to many cultures over many times, the subject is so huge that no single chapter—let alone a single book—could render a balanced description of its rich history. But one important aspect of that larger story can be seen by examining the wool trade in medieval England.

During the Middle Ages, wool became the foundation and driver of the social, political, economic, and industrial development of the British Empire. The earliest British inhabitants herded sheep and processed wool; in fact, when the Romans invaded England in 43 C.

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