The type of sheep

The initial conundrum is what type of sheep did the Templars keep on their estates in Lincolnshire? The use of the word breed would imply a far greater degree of differentiation than had in fact occurred by the beginning of the fourteenth century, a fact which underlies Trow-Smith's preference for the term ‘regional types’. Pelham refers to short-woolled and long-woolled sheep, the former being Ryedale type, and the latter, the Lincoln and Leicester types. In her influential study of the medieval wool trade Power states that ‘It seems fairly safe to assert that there were two of these [different breeds of sheep] distinguished by the length of staple of their wool’. The two breeds cited were ‘the small sheep producing short wool’ and the ‘large sheep [which] produced long wool’. She further subdivides the long wools into two breeds, the Cotswold and the Lincolns, which were responsible for the ‘great bulk of fine wool exported in the Middle Ages’.

The first dissenting voice was that of Bowden, who states unequivocally that ‘the production of long-staple wool in England in the Middle Ages was at the most negligible, there being no true, long-woolled breed of sheep in England at this time’, adding that ‘a clear-cut division between long- and short-staple wool […] previous to the eighteenth century did not in fact exist’. Stephenson supports Bowden in there being no longwools in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and associates short staple with fine, high-quality fleeces whereas the later long-staple wool was coarser. Bischoff suggests that the earliest longwool breeds appeared in the seventeenth century, but adds the caveat that ‘it seems possible’ that the ‘genetic predecessors of the later longwool breeds’ may have existed in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries as a result of selective breeding.

In 1343, Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, of the Italian merchant house of Bardi, ranked Lindsey wool among the best in Europe. This implies that, just as medieval wool merchants differentiated between wools of different quality, so too was there some difference between the types of sheep which produced it.