At this time of year many of us will be getting out the woolly jumpers and carthenni to beat the chill. Wales is well known for its woollen industry and once upon a time most towns would have had their own mill and even their own patterns unique to each area or county.
In 2022 the Library’s archives became the recipient of a unique volume exploring the history of Welsh woollen mills. ‘The Welsh Woollen Industry’ written in 1969 by Elsie Price charts the history of the wool industry in Wales including photographs and case histories and also includes samples showing the different weaves and styles produced by different mills across Wales.
It is thought that one of the earliest references to wool and weaving occurs in the Laws of Hywel Dda, the set of native Welsh laws codified by Hywel Dda, the 10th-century king of Deheubarth. Wales’ upland environment and harsh weather leant itself far more to pastoral sheep farming than it did to growing arable crops, and the skill of spinning and weaving wool became one of its foremost cottage industries.
In the medieval period the expansion of the Cistercian monasteries facilitated the production and transportation of wool over longer distances, as tracks cut by the monks were used to take wool to market by packhorse as well as to link up Cistercian networks. One such path, the ‘Monk’s Trod’, a medieval trackway linking the twelfth-century abbeys of Cwm-Hir (near Llandrindod Wells, Powys) and Strata Florida (near Pontrhydfendigaid, Ceredigion), remains a popular public right of way to this day.
![Penrice and Margam 315, a quit-claim including a fulling mill near Oxwich, [1323]](/fileadmin/images_gwefan/new_structure/blog/2024/202411/Penrice___Margam_315.jpg)
Over the centuries, wool production became more mechanised, with the introduction of the horizontal loom and water-powered fulling mills able to handle larger quantities of wool, moving production away from its cottage industry origins and easing the labour-intensive process of cleaning, carding, and spinning. Many Welsh estates in the early modern period list mills among their assets.
In the 18th and 19th centuries the Industrial Revolution saw a huge increase in the building of Welsh factories, with Elsie noting that some of the first woollen factories were built at Bridgend in 1780, Machynlleth in 1794, and Dolgellau in 1806. The introduction of the carding engine in the early 19th century was also responsible for the more rapid processing of wool. Many factories continued to produce woollen goods well into the 20th century, but the modern development of other types of textiles, particularly synthetic materials, saw the mass popularity of wool decline as the closure of factories pushed up production costs.
But as Elsie wrote, woollen goods are ‘another facet of the unique character of Wales’, and today Welsh wool of course continues to be spun, knitted, felted, and worn as a versatile material, with its long history preserved in the archives.
Lucie Hobson
NLW Archives and Manuscripts
Category: Article