ABOUT
The Stroud: A Journey to Recover a Lost Woollen Blanket.
In the faded pages of travelogues and the ledgers of distant trading posts, there lingers the mention of a cloth once coveted across oceans — a Strouding. Early explorers, fur traders, settlers, and Indigenous peoples alike wrapped themselves in its warmth, stitched it into garments, carried it through forests and plains. Nowadays, the Stroud is strangely a ghost of industry, scarcely mentioned, its story lost in time.
Here in the valleys that gave it birth, little survives to guide us back. The old mills stand hollow, their wheels stilled, their craft forgotten. To imagine a Stroud anew, from gathered fragments — a trader’s note, a scarlet coat, recollections of wool shorn from the golden fleece of a Cotswold Lion — and weave them anew imagined whole.
Once, these valleys echoed to the sound of clattering looms: two hundred mills spun and wove, fed by the quick-running waters that dyed cloth with a scarlet so brilliant it was the envy of the world. Above them, the Cotswold hills rolled out their limestone pastures, where a million sheep once grazed, their fleeces praised across Europe; a 12th Century proverb goes ‘In Europe the best wool is English, In England the best wool is the Cotswold’.
Now, with no unbroken thread of tradition to follow, the task is both an act of memory and of imagination: to conjure a contemporary Stroud that honours its ancestry, while breathing new life into a forgotten lineage. Using only the fleece of the Cotswold Lion — gathered from local pedigree flocks, our own among them — and woven as close to the old ways as the present allows. The Stroud returns, not as a relic, but as a living heirloom, carrying forward the heritage of cloth, the spirit of the valley, and the legend of the golden fleece.
COTSWOLD LION
The thrust of oolite that runs the length of the Cotswolds is natural pastoral country, with free-draining limestone that grows bone and fleece and there is no better breed of sheep than the Cotswold Lion to utilise the natural characteristics of the Cotswold terrain. It is little wonder, then, that this area has carried sheep since the time of the Romans.
Cotswold sheep adapted and thrived on such country, and the Cotswolds became a major centre for the wool trade. Such was the reputation of its superior-quality wool that King Duarte of Portugal requested Cotswold wool to make a cloth interwoven with gold in Florence, illustrating the prestige and high demand for English wool, which Parliament declared the "sovereign merchandise and jewel of (Edward III’s) realm of England" due to its immense economic importance.
English wool had its glory days in 1480, when wool prices reached their highest and great private fortunes were amassed by the time of the Tudors. Pious benefactors, like the Grevilles and Hicks of Chipping Campden, the Celys and Forteys of Northleach, and the Tames of Fairford, built the great monuments of the age: the wool churches of Fairford, Cirencester, Northleach, and Chipping Campden.
It is astonishing, then, to believe that from these lofty heights in the Middle Ages, the Cotswold Lion would come close to extinction by the 20th century. Its numbers plummeted from an estimated 400,000 in 1891 to a mere single flock kept by William Garne at Aldsworth. In 1938, Massingham wrote that "Farmer Garne kept a flock of 200 ewes, 200 lambs, and 100 tegs at Arlington, and was the only one left over the whole of the Cotswolds from the Warwickshire to the Somerset border, and so the only one left in the world." He added, "Farmer Garne of Aldsworth, to whom England owes a great deal more than she gives with both hands to many a newspaper hero." By the time of William Garne’s dispersal sale in 1968, the number of Cotswold sheep had reached an all-time low of 200.
Today, dedicated enthusiasts are working to rebuild the population. While no longer on the brink of extinction, the breed remains on the 'at risk' register with a registered breeding population of only 1,200 ewes.
MAKE
The Stroud Blanket is made with wool with provenance and regional heritage. Working only with the Cotswold Lion to ensure the breed’s long-term survival and realise once again the true value of its superior-quality lustrous golden fleece; preserving a vital part of English history and protecting future biodiversity.
Across the world, modern regenerative farming methods are returning to ancient practices such as the ‘golden hoof’ to improve soil texture, fertility, and support the water cycle. Sheep have naturally fertilised soil for thousands of years in a system of arable rotation, grazing, and tramping organic matter back into the land, and the soil’s ability to sequester carbon from the atmosphere also helps in our fight to reverse the effects of global warming.
There are many existing benefits to native and rare breed sheep wool, and others yet to be discovered, and the danger of narrowing the genetic pool in the pursuit of a homogenised monoculture of wool poses a serious problem for the security of future biodiversity. A good example being the use of the Cotswold breed historically, in selective breeding to improve the length of the fleece in Spanish Merino sheep, from Cotswold rams presented to Henry IV of Castile by Edward IV and which were later exported to Australia. Wool is a sustainable fibre to champion for the future as we look for greener solutions in British manufacturing.
The Stroud blanket is made with wool sourced here in the Cotswolds directly from shepherds with registered pedigree Cotswold Lions and from our own pedigree flock. Governed by an ethos of traceability connecting farm to factory, we can trace back blanket collections back to individual flocks. The process of producing a Stroud blanket is rooted in locality and expertise in native manufacturing, collaborating with craftspeople specialising in their trades over generations and produced in regions around Britain that are of world renown for their speciality; from the scourer, the spinner, the dyer, the weaver, to the finisher.
Given the fragility of the breed and with only twelve hundred odd Cotswold breeding ewes remaining in Britain, the very nature of the rare supply of Cotswold Lion wool limits the quantity of blankets that The Stroud can produce in any one year’s wool clip. This reflects in the collections being numbered editions to the clip year.
HISTORY
The great medieval wool trade of the Cotswolds has left its memorials in countless villages and here in the Stroud valleys lying at the foot of the Cotswold scarp, where mills lay strung out along the valley bottoms and weaver's cottages climbed the hill slopes above them, swift-flowing streams rose from beds of lias clay beneath the oolite limestone, giving water power to the mills. There was once made a woollen cloth known as a Stroud.
Long before the coming of the Industrial Revolution, the making of cloth flowed to the rhythm of a cottage industry: the clothier and his family prepared the wool and ‘put out’ it to the neighbouring cottagers; there, spun by the women and children and woven by the men on handlooms. The cloth returning to the clothier to begin a journey of finishing — first to the fulling mill, where it was plunged in pits of water and beaten by great wooden hammers worked by water power, thickened and firmed the cloth. Cleaned with fuller’s earth and dressed with teasels to raise a long, soft nap. Then to the shearshop to be trimmed smooth with heavy hand shears — a skill so demanding it commanded the highest pay.
At last to the dyehouses, whose art and alchemy had won Stroud Valley cloth a reputation the world over — not only for its Stroudwater scarlet and Uley blue that clothed armies, but also for its bright cloth that could be seen in the fields around, laid out to dry on tenter racks. From an eighteenth-century dyeing book we see: Bright Rich Claret, Dark Raven, Red Ratt, Light Batt Wing, Paris Dirt, and flamboyant stripes of: Sage and Pink, Corbeau and Orange, Dark Olive and Madder, Red Mouse and Eye White.
Daniel Defoe in the eighteenth century records ‘It was no extraordinary thing to have clothiers in that county worth from £10,000 to £40,000 a man, and many of the great families, who now passed the gentry in these counties, have been originally raised from and built-up by this truly noble manufacture’.