A coarse, plain cloth has a greater claim to being the most important textile in history than any sumptuous silk brocade or royal robe. Sailcloth is the fabric that has made it possible for humanity to explore the world, trade across seas, build great empires, and wage wars for millennia, and yet history pays very little attention to it. Textile archaeology has begun to fill in some of the gaps, but there is still a huge amount that we don’t know about how sails were made and how sail-making changed the communities that undertook this work.

Without sailcloth the Greeks could not have fought the Trojans, there would have been no Viking empire, William the Conqueror would not have invaded England, the Polynesians could not have settled the Pacific, Columbus certainly would not have sailed the ocean blue, Magellan would not have circumnavigated the world and there would have been no transatlantic slave trade.

Sails made so much possible. But even though these form the structure of our history and cultural heritage, there has been very little focus on the sails that made them possible, and almost none on the communities that made the sails. This episode of Haptic & Hue looks at the most ancient sails we know about and takes us right up to the modern sails used for the sort of yachts in the recent America’s Cup Race in Barcelona. We talk to a modern craft sailmaker and hear how a small village in Somerset was once at the heart of the global industry of sail-making. We also hear from a Danish textile archaeologist about why Viking sails were unique.

For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/

There is a global flax revival underway. In the great linen belt of North Western Europe, the land under cultivation has more than doubled in a decade and linen production is steadily increasing worldwide. After years of being spurned for ‘easier’ man-made fibres, or cotton, once again linen is being valued. It may only be around half-a-percent of the world’s textile fibres at present, but this time it is being grown not just for fine fabrics, but also because it's gentler on the land. It needs less water, fewer pesticides and fertilizers, and new uses are being found for it too, from creating surfboards to skis, from acoustic insulation to car doors.

Flax looks back as well as forward. Like no other yarn, it is the ancient fibre of civilisation. Linen has walked the long centuries alongside mankind. In Europe and Western Asia, its cultivation reaches back thousands of years to the beginning of human settlement and farming. It clothed the pharaohs of Egypt in life and death, it powered the ships of ancient Greece and Troy, it is mentioned more than 80 times in the Old Testament. This is the fabric that wrapped the Dead Sea Scrolls to keep them safe down the centuries.

Join us this month as Haptic and Hue travels to Ireland, once the undisputed centre of the world’s linen processing industry to see what it is making of the great flax revival and how Irish linen is faring.

For more information about this episode and pictures of the people and places mentioned in this episode please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/

Exactly thirty years ago a book came out that changed the way we think about textiles and fibre and the role they’ve played in the human story. Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber became a best seller. What she said was revolutionary. Until then people thought that textiles were a by-product of civilisations and that processes like weaving were around five or six thousand years old. Wayland Barber was the first person to understand that they are central to the development of human society, and she said, spinning and weaving were far older than we realised and went back to the beginnings of human social development. She coined the phrase The String Revolution and suggested the Stone Age would have been better called the Age of String.

Elizabeth Wayland Barber’s book: Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years with its radical ideas, put textiles at the heart of the human story. It played a major role in creating a new generation of expert textile archaeologists and in getting the subject taken seriously. She helped make it possible for them to search for ancient fibre and textiles and, crucially, to understand that what they were seeing wasn’t detritus or trash but something precious that has a great deal to tell us about human beings and what they are capable of. She was also one of the first people to give us a way to value the work of women in pre-historic societies.

To celebrate the book’s 30th anniversary a new edition has been published with an updated afterword by Wayland Barber. This episode of Haptic & Hue is devoted to a rare interview with Elizabeth Wayland Barber in which she tells us how she came to write the book in the first place and the ideas that lay behind it.

For more information about this episode and details of the discount on the book please go to https://hapticandhue.com/tales-of-textiles-series-6/