Academic Reading — Test 83

Reading passage

During the Middle Ages, few commodities mattered more to the English economy than wool. The country exported vast quantities of it to the weaving cities of Flanders and Italy, where it was prized above the fleeces of almost any other region. Among the areas that supplied this trade, the Cotswolds, a band of limestone hills in the west of England, became especially celebrated. The thin, well-drained soils of these uplands were poorly suited to growing crops, but they offered excellent grazing for sheep. The local breed, often called the Cotswold Lion, produced a long, lustrous fleece that fetched high prices abroad. For roughly three centuries, the fortunes of the region rose and fell with the value of that fleece. The scale of medieval sheep farming in the Cotswolds was considerable. Great estates, many of them belonging to monasteries, kept flocks numbering in the thousands. Cistercian houses in particular organised their lands around large-scale wool production, and their granges became hubs of the rural economy. Italian merchant companies sometimes purchased an entire year's clip in advance, paying for wool that had not yet been shorn. This system gave landowners a reliable income but also exposed them to risk, for a poor season or a sudden fall in prices could leave debts unpaid. Wool, in other words, was not merely a product of the hills; it was an early form of international finance. The profits of the trade did not remain in the countryside alone. They flowed into a network of market towns, where wool was collected, graded, weighed and sold. Towns such as Northleach, Chipping Campden and Cirencester grew prosperous as centres of exchange, and their wealthiest inhabitants were the wool merchants known as woolmen. These men acted as intermediaries, buying fleeces from farmers across a wide district and selling them on to exporters or directly to foreign buyers. Some grew rich enough to lend money to the Crown, and a few were granted positions of considerable influence. Their success depended on trust, on accurate weighing, and on a detailed knowledge of the quality that distant weavers demanded. The most visible monuments to this prosperity were the churches. Across the Cotswolds, merchants poured money into rebuilding and enlarging their parish churches, raising tall towers, broad windows and richly carved interiors. These buildings, often far grander than a small town might seem to warrant, are still known today as wool churches. They were acts of piety, but also of display, allowing a successful woolman to advertise his standing and to secure prayers for his soul after death. Inside several of them, memorial brasses show merchants standing with their feet resting on a sheep or a woolpack, a frank acknowledgement of the source of their fortunes. Few communities anywhere in medieval England left such durable evidence of commercial wealth. The good times, however, did not last indefinitely. From the later fourteenth century onwards, England began to weave more of its own cloth rather than sending raw wool overseas. Heavy export taxes, imposed by kings eager to fund their wars, made unprocessed wool steadily less competitive on foreign markets. Cloth-making itself tended to move towards regions with fast-flowing rivers that could power fulling mills, and some of these lay outside the Cotswolds. As the raw-wool trade declined, the great fortunes that had built the wool churches gradually faded. Yet the towns themselves survived, and because later prosperity passed many of them by, their medieval and Tudor buildings were never swept away by redevelopment. This accident of history explains much of the region's appeal today. Streets of honey-coloured stone houses, built when wool was king, still stand largely as they did five centuries ago. The very churches that merchants funded continue to dominate the skylines of quiet towns whose populations are now a fraction of what they once were. For the modern visitor, the Cotswolds offer a rare chance to read a chapter of economic history written directly into the landscape. The sheep that once grazed these hills in their hundreds of thousands have largely gone, but the wealth they generated remains visible in stone, a lasting reminder of an age when a single commodity could shape the destiny of an entire region.