Mediterranean markets. The upper price ranges comprised more finely textured, heavier,
pure linens and woolens; and the most luxurious woolens were densely woven from the
finest English wools. The most expensive French textile was the woolen escarlate
(écarlat, scarlet; first documented ca. 1030–50), whose distinctive red color was
produced by kermes (or grain), a dyestuff composed of rare Mediterranean oak-infesting
insects (Coccus ilicis). Rivaling the finer Italian silks, a late-medieval French escarlate
(about 80 by 5 ft.) could cost as much as three years’ pay for a master mason or carpenter
in Paris or Rouen.
Of all these textiles, the most important were woolbased. From the first evidence for
commercial production in the later Carolingian era until perhaps the 12th century,
worsted-type fabrics seem to have predominated. They were distinguishable by their
lozenge or diamond-twill weaves, composed of strong, long-fibered wool yarns, woven
on the vertical warp-weighted loom of great antiquity. A fashion and industrial revolution
took place with the emergence and subsequent victory of the long, heavy, felted woolen
broadcloth, composed of short-stapled, finer wools whose yarns were woven on the new
horizontal foot-operated treadle loom. First so described by Rashi of Troyes (ca. 1040–
1105), it was subsequently much enlarged and improved by the 13th century as the
famous broadloom. If that loom was the most crucial innovation for the new long
broadcloths, their cohesion and durability also depended upon extensive fulling (unlike
worsteds), with water, chemicals, pressure, and heat: to force the fine, curly, but weak
wool fibers to interlock and be felted into a highly compressed and thus heavy fabric,
whose fiber-ends were then repeatedly raised or “napped” with teasels (a thistle plant)
and shorn with razor-sharp, foot-long shears, until all visible trace of weave was
obliterated and the texture had become as smooth as silk.
Three other labor-saving innovations of the late 12th and 13th centuries were also
particularly well suited to producing woolens: carding the wool fibers with two wired
brushes, which also facilitated subsequent felting; spinning carded wools or cotton with a
hand- or foot-operated wheel that rotated the spindle; and mechanical fulling, with water-
powered wooden hammers to pound, scour, and felt the woven cloth. While the rival and
younger Italian and English cloth-making establishments, called “draperies,” soon
adopted these innovations, the more prominent Franco-Flemish draperies long resisted
them, for fear of impairing the quality of their woolens. Many required the traditional
techniques of hand-combing the wool fibers and then spinning them with the drop-
spindle and distaff to produce both the warps (the strong yarns stretched on the loom) and
the wefts (the weaker yarns passed
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1710