Medieval Sheep and Wool

I 'N THE PAPER I wrote twenty years ago on the origins of British breeds of sheep, I .attempted to integrate new evidence from archaeology with older documentary evidence.' Medieval archaeology was in its infancy, and the bone remains from sheep gave little information. Illustrations in illuminated manuscripts and later paintings gave better evidence than records. But the most striking new and incontrovertible evidence came from within the parchments on which records had been written, viz in the form of remains of wool fibres from the animal whose skin had been used to make the parchment. In the intervening period I have found many more illustrations, but the major advance has been the measurement of the wool in the numerous textile remains from medieval excavations, so that for the first time we know exactly how fine in modern terms woo! was in the Middle Ages. The approach I propose to make in this paper is first to look at modern breeds, and their distribution in the recent past, to see how far their ancestry can be pushed back towards the Middle Ages. Then a brief consideration will be given of the meagre pre-medieval evidence, including the origin of British sheep, and finally the Middle Ages will be covered in greater detail, taking each source of evidence in turn. Although I have used new evidence from wool in textile remains, it has not been possible to relate the findings to medieval cloth descriptions used by economic historians.