I am told that it is a commonplace of English history as taught at school that wool, in the shape of fibre, as sheep grow it, or made up into cloth, was one of the mainstays of England's greatness throughout the centuries that separated the first arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in this island and the beginning of the cotton industry.

We are also told, and we know it is true, that wool could be found behind almost every manifestation of English economic and commercial activity in the Middle Ages and in the sixteenth, seventeenth and perhaps the early eighteenth centuries. Yet I wonder how many of us realise how really important English wool was to England and to countries abroad throughout the Middle Ages. The barons of England, sitting in Parliament, asserted in 1297 that wool represented half of England's wealth or, as they put it, ‘half the value of the whole land’. Other medieval Englishmen, of course, were much more vague in their appraisal of the importance of wool. The merchants of the Staple might refer to it – it was the common way of referring to wool – as ‘the jewel of this realm’. That particular reference to the jewel of the realm dates from about the middle of the fourteenth century, but two centuries earlier the chronicler Henry of Huntingdon referred to wool as Britain's main national endowment.