From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Broadcloth is a dense woolen cloth.

It was made in several parts of England at the end of the medieval period. The raw material was short staple [wool], carded and spun into yarn and then woven on a broad loom to produce cloth 1.75 yards wide it was then fulled, usually in a fulling mill.

Around 1500, broadcoth was made in a number of districts of England, including Essex and Suffolk in southern East Anglia, the West Country Clothing District (Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, east Somerset - sometimes with adjacent areas), at Worcester, Coventry, Cranbrook in Kent and some other places.

This was the best English cloth, and large quantities were exported by the merchants of the Company of Merchant Adventurers of London, principally to Antwerp as white (i.e. undyed) cloth. It was finished and dyed in Flanders, and then marketted throughout northern Europe. The cloths might be short (24 yards long) or long (30 yards long).

The raw material for broadcloth from Worcester was wool from the Welsh border counties of Herefordshire and Shropshire, known as Lemster (i.e. Leominster) wool. That for the West Country came from the Cotswolds. In both cases, the high quality was the result of the comparatively poor pasture, which (probably aided by selective breeding) led the sheep to grow wool with the desired qualities.

English exports of broadcloth reached their highest level in the mid 16th century, after which some regions began producing other kinds of cloth, particualrly various new draperies. Difficulties were encountered in export markets in the mid 1610s, partly due to currency difficulties in eastern Europe, and partly to the ill-conceived Cockayne Project. Broadcloth production thus declined in the 17th century.

Worcester remained a centre for the production of white broadcloth. Other areas, such as Ludlow and parts of the Cotswolds started to produce similar cloth, known as 'Worcesters'. The market suffered major setback in the 18th century, when the trade of the Levant Company with Turkey was obstructed by French competition. From this time, the production of broadcloth finally lost its importance.^[1]

Modern broadcloth can be comprised of cotton, silk, or polyester. The dense weave lends sturdiness to the material.

1. ^ K. G. Ponting, The Woollen Industry of South-west England (Bath 1971), 3-34; B. Supple, Commercial crisis and change in England 1602-1642: a study in the instability of a mercantile economy (1959); J. de L. Mann, The cloth industry in the West of England (Oxford 1971).