Why Did Cloth Have to Be Beaten for Hours? Weaving Was Only Half the Job

Wool fibres carry microscopic overlapping scales along their surface, and agitating them in warm liquid makes those scales catch on each other irreversibly, so the fibres migrate, tangle and lock together. Cloth treated this way shrinks substantially, becomes far denser and thicker, gains considerable strength and becomes windproof and largely water resistant, and the weave can disappear entirely into a felted surface. Untreated woollen cloth is none of those things. The step is therefore not a finish but a necessary part of making the material, and it was historically done in urine, which supplies ammonia, and later with fuller's earth, a clay that absorbs the natural grease.

The work was hard and the mechanisation is straightforward:

• •By hand and foot, treading cloth in a trough for hours
• •A gruelling job, done by the lowest paid workers
• •The mill replaced feet with heavy wooden hammers
• •A waterwheel turned a shaft with projections lifting each hammer
• •The hammer fell under its own weight as the projection passed
• •Cloth circulated in the trough and was pounded for many hours

Mechanising this step had a geographical consequence that reshaped English textile production. The mill needs falling water, which towns in the lowlands did not have and which upland valleys did, so cloth finishing moved out of established towns and into the hills. Weavers followed the finishing. Town guilds, which controlled the trade and its standards, had no authority in the countryside, so the industry escaped their regulation as well as their costs. Historians have argued since the 1940s about whether this amounts to an industrial revolution of the thirteenth century, and while the strong version of that claim is disputed, the relocation itself is well documented in the records of the period.

The process was one stage in a sequence and the stages that followed are what gave the cloth its finish. Raising drew the surface fibres up into a nap, done by drawing teasel heads across the damp cloth, which required judgement since pulling too hard tore the surface. Shearing then cut that nap to an even length with enormous hand shears, repeated several times with the cloth stretched on a frame. Tentering stretched and dried the cloth on frames of hooks in open fields, which is where the phrase about being on tenterhooks comes from, and the fields where those frames stood are recorded in place names.

The buildings are common in the landscape of upland Britain and elsewhere and are frequently mistaken for something else. Many were converted to other uses as the industry mechanised further, becoming corn mills, saw mills and later small factories, and a substantial number are now houses, with the wheel pit and the leat still visible in the garden. Place names record them across England, France and Italy, and the surname derived from the occupation is among the commonest in English. The teasel heads used in the related raising process were grown as a crop, and no machine has ever quite matched them, so a few mills used them into the twentieth century.

Wool fibres carry overlapping scales that lock together when agitated in warm liquid, so cloth off the loom must be pounded for hours to shrink, thicken and become windproof. Water-powered hammers replaced treading, and because the mill needed falling water the industry moved from regulated lowland towns into upland valleys, taking the weavers and escaping the guilds with them.