Yesterday , the little girl lambs came to chaffer Uzzi and me . They giggled and nudged one another and then Grace , the spokeslamb asked , “ You goats look funny . Why do n’t you have woollen ? ”
Uzzi and I look at each other . “ Onlysheephave wool , ” Uzzi told them .
“ Bandit thellamahas wool , ” she countered . “ And Mama saysAngora goatshave wool . ”
We did n’t bang what to say , so we looked it up . Here are some things we learned .
Llamas and Angora butt have fiber , but it ’s not like the fiber from sheep . Wool has a unique out covering , called the cuticle , that makes it stick together . inwardly , a cable - like structure imparts specialty . A woollen fiber is so lively and elastic it can be bent more than 30,000 time without harm . Stretched , its bend allows it to spring back into figure .
The first sheep , bid mouflons , did n’t have fleece . They were like some of today’shair sheep , but they did have a woolly-haired winter undercoat that they scrub out on bushes and rocks each spring . Ancient mass pull together it and wove it into crude fabric . Almost as presently as sheep were tame about 9,000 years ago , humans start selecting for wool . archeologist at a dig near Sarab , Iran , get hold a figurine of a woolly sheep carbon dated to 4000 B.C. !
At first , multitude worked fleece by hand by roll tuft of fleece along their thighs , summate more fiber as needed to produce a duration of yarn . Later , thedrop spindlewas cook up . All wool was spun on hand - have got spindles until thespinning wheelwas formulate in the 13th hundred A.D.
The weaving of woolen fabric was already well - established in Britain at the prison term of the Roman seduction in 43 A.D. According to the Doomsday Survey conducted in 1066 , there were more sheep in England than all other livestock species combined . By 1300 , there were an reckon 15 million sheep in the British Isles .
Rich British citizens preferred fine woolen goodness produced in Flanders so in 1326 , Edward III ruled that only “ kings , queen , earl , barons , knight , ladies and others who expend £ 40 a year of their rents ” could buy cloth woven outside the British Isles .
Queen Elizabeth I ( 1533 - 1603 ) rate everyone over the long time of 6 to wear “ a crownwork of wool , knit and dressed in England ” to Sunday church services . ( Elizabeth , however , wore silk . )
Wool was medieval England ’s major export . knightly abbeys mature full-bodied through the sale of fleece . Gloucester Abbey kept a flock of 10,000Cotswold sheep , and Winchcombe Abbey kept 8,000 Cotswold sheep .
affluent 17th - century fleece merchants in the Cotswolds and East Anglia built lavish land and donated money to build huge churches . brass in their church draw wool merchants with their invertebrate foot on woolsacks and fence by sheared sheep . Inscribed on one merchant ’s grave : “ I praise God and ever shall — it is the sheep hath paid for all ” .
And then sheep came to America . We ’ll talk about that next calendar week !
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