Fleece Washing

Customs of washing Fleece vary from place to place.

In France, they seem to have always washed wool before spinning.

Throughout the Middle Ages, as far as we can tell from illustrations, wool washing was practiced much the same way at home and in industry (there was a large and lucrative wool industry in France at that time, the reading list below shows more information).

By the late 18th century when King Louis XIV commissioned a work documenting all aspects of French artisanry and industry, wool washing was performed on a larger scale, but still mainly by hand -- and still using primarily cool water. The main wash for lifting mud and "suint" from the wool happens in the large vat; then the wool is placed in the pen in the river for a rinse. After washing, the sections of fleece are draped over rods to dry.

Meanwhile in Spain, wool was a valuable commercial commodity, and the techniques for washing the valuable merino fleeces were carried out on a grand scale. Those practices and their facilities were documented by a French wool trader who was deeply impressed by what he'd seen in his travels. The Spanish system involved enormous cauldrons housed in their own buildings and heated by fire. The heat would have been necessary to remove the rich oils present in merino fleeces.

In Holland, the climate is different, and so are the sheep; and the tradition has been to spin in the grease, then wash and dye the yarn afterwards. ...By the way, some modern Dutch wool-spinning equipment is still often geared for working with greasy fleece and will work better with that than with washed wool.

In Scotland, land of tartan and tweed, spinners would rinse the mud out of a fleece, but usually not take the extra step of scouring it. However, they also normally dyed "in the wool" before spinning, and the simmering dyepot would effectively clean a fleece as a side-effect of putting colour onto the fibre. Aged urine was often an ingredient in the dye bath, altering the solution's pH and contributing urea -- an excellent scouring assistant.

In England, the old professional guild system makes it hard to figure out what went on at the household level; but the professional guilds almost always worked with clean fleece. Professional wool-combers added oil to the fleece to aid combing partly because the natural oils had all been washed out before the wool arrived at their workshops.

Peter Teal, our present-day guru of woolcombing techniques, sums up his own reasons for washing wool prior to combing in his classic work, Hand Woolcombing and Spinning:

"I am strongly in favour of scouring the fleece, because not only is it more pleasant to handle, but the spinner has greater flexibility in the use of the basic raw material. Because the spinner has a constant supply of clean, dry fleece, to which is added the required amount of oil immediately prior to spinning, the raw material used has characteristics which are absolutely constant, month in, month out. Because the quality of the raw material never varies, touch need never vary and the chances of the yarn's being similarly uniform are considerably increased. ... There is one other fact that clinched the matter for me. In all the descriptions of wool combing that have survived, observers are unanimous in stating that the fibre was scoured first."

Mr Teal's preferences are based on personal experience, but also on a keen awareness of the way the work was performed in centuries past.