All's wool that ends wool

From warm cloaks for the Roman army to many handsome churches, much of England’s might and wealth once rested on the back of the Cotswold sheep’s ‘golden fleece’, says Charles Harris

- Charles Harris

IN AD47, Roman cavalry sent west by Aulus Plautius found a land of gentle limestone hills between the Thames and the Severn, grazed by the primitive small sheep of the Dobunni tribe. A fort was built at Corinium, now Cirencester, soon a strategic junction on the Fosse Way and Ermine Street. By the second century, it was a provincial capital, complete with basilica and amphitheatre, second only to London in size and significance. Nearby country villas were centres of farming estates, which grew grain and kept sheep.

The Roman Empire reared sheep extensively and it is generally understood that the famous Cotswold animal—large, sturdy, with a friendly, amused expression, a hardy constitution, good maternal instinct, long, thick, lustrous wool and curly ringlets on a broad hornless forehead—descends, with improvement, from Roman introduction. Despite little explicit evidence, it seems clear that longwool sheep were imported, for the indigenous Neolithic ones had poor fleece. Cotswold wool clad Roman soldiers. Tacitus recorded extensive clothing trade with Corinium in the 1st century AD and Diocletian’s ‘edict’ of AD301, listing desirable imperial products, included the birrus Britannicus—an expensive, hooded, woollen cloak.

Rome declined and fell, and, in about 410, its legions withdrew. The sheep remained here, undisturbed. Although pagan Saxons defeated the Romano-British near Bath in 577, by 800 they were church-building, sheep-loving Christian farmers. The Abbess of Gloucester owned extensive Cotswold sheepwalks and sheep were kept at the many places called Shipton (sheep farm). In 796, Charlemagne himself sought Cotswold cloaks.