ABSTRACT
English broadcloth, that prince of materials, was regulated in its length and breadth dimensions from the Middle Ages and in its weight from the time of Edward VI. The elaborate processes in the manufacture of broadcloth include sorting, scouring, picking, willowing, and carding the wool, spinning yarn, warping or measuring the yarn, sizing the yarn with glue, threading the loom with warp, weaving, fulling, scouring two or three more times, raising the nap, burling, shearing the nap, and packing the cloth in bales. Because of the British propensity for keeping records and writing local history, some notions of the commercial manufacture of woolen textiles can be gleaned dating from the early seventeenth century. English woolen manufacturers always had the ear of Parliament. Perhaps no movement in American history was so pervasive and long-lived as that for economic independence. That in reality there can be no such thing, then or now, has never taken away its ideological and chauvinistic appeal.
