The Winter Work of Jacob Wool
This essay, originally shared in our December Field Notes, explores the history of Jacob sheep, traditional wool preparation methods, and the seasonal rhythms that shaped; and still shape; how this distinctive fleece has been worked in Scotland and beyond. It draws on agricultural writing, estate records, and ethnographic accounts to examine winter as a practical working season rather than a symbolic one. Full historical citations and sources are provided below for readers who wish to follow the material more deeply.
Seasonal labour, traditional preparation, and the rhythms that shaped wool work in Scotland
Jacob sheep are often described as ancient, but what matters more is that their history is incomplete by design. Geneticists and historians continue to debate their precise origins, not because evidence is lacking, but because the breed predates the systems of record-keeping that produce tidy explanations. Before sheep were formalised into breeds, they were shaped by land, use, and restraint. Jacob sheep belong to that older order, and it is this absence of enforced standardisation that defines both the animal and its wool.¹
By the early nineteenth century, they were already recognised as survivals. William Youatt observed in 1837 that piebald, many-horned sheep were being “preserved in certain parks, rather as an object of curiosity than of profit.”² The remark is revealing. These sheep endured not because they outperformed others, but because someone chose to keep them at a moment when agricultural thinking was shifting decisively toward efficiency and yield.
David Low, writing from Edinburgh a few years later, provides the most useful framework for understanding this persistence. In On the Domesticated Animals of the British Islands, he noted that certain ancient sheep types retained their defining characteristics “where change has not been enforced by cultivation.”³ This observation explains both the survival of Jacob sheep and the uncertainty surrounding their origins. They were not shaped by improvement programmes, nor were they widely exported or standardised. Their continuity lies in landscapes where restraint, not intervention, governed practice.
That restraint is written clearly into the fleece. Historically, a Jacob fleece was never treated as a single, uniform material. Wool was skirted and classed by hand, with fibres separated according to body area and quality. Longer, more elastic wool from the shoulder and sides was reserved for spinning; shorter or coarser fibres from the britch were used for flocking, stuffing, or hard-wearing cloth. Variation was not eliminated; it was organised.
Scouring followed the same practical logic. In Scotland, wool was traditionally washed in soft water, often drawn from burns or rivers, with care taken not to waste fuel or damage fibre. Over-scouring weakened wool; under-scouring shortened the life of the cloth. Ethnographic accounts collected by Alexander Carmichael record winter households shaped by limits of light, fuel, and strength, where work was fitted carefully to what could be spared rather than expanded to meet an abstract ideal.⁴
Once dried, the wool was carded by hand into rolags for woollen spinning. This technical distinction matters. Woollen preparation preserves air within the yarn, creating insulation through structure rather than smoothness. Jacob wool, with its mixed staple lengths and natural elasticity, suits this preparation particularly well. Warmth here is not decorative; it is physical. Trapped air is insulation.
The timing of this work is consistently documented. Thomas Tusser wrote plainly in 1557, “When winter draws on, then spin at the door.”⁵ Spinning belonged to winter because it required little space, modest light, and steady effort rather than strength. Daniel Defoe observed the same pattern in the 1720s, noting that in winter evenings the wheel went constantly once field labour had ended.⁶ Across centuries, the reasoning does not change.
In Scotland, parish accounts from the 1790s repeatedly record spinning and knitting filling the long winter nights after outdoor work ceased. These were not idle hours filled for comfort; they were the hours that remained. In Gaelic-speaking homes, this work took place around the hearth, the teine, and was described in plain, functional language; winter work, obair a’ gheamhraidh; labour shaped by season rather than sentiment.⁷
Knitting required little equipment and travelled easily between tasks. Weaving, which demanded space, shelter, and uninterrupted time, appears most often in winter-quarter estate and household accounts, when looms could stand undisturbed and labour was available indoors. Winter was not an absence of work, but a reallocation of it; effort drawn inward and set to tasks that required patience rather than daylight.⁸
Jacob wool’s natural colouring further shortened the chain between animal and object. Browns, greys, creams, and blacks were blended during carding to create natural marls, reducing the need for dye and saving labour, fuel, and materials. This was efficiency rather than aesthetic preference. Using the wool as it grew made sense when resources were limited and nothing was done without reason.
Working with Jacob wool in this way today is not reenactment. The same constraints still apply. Short days alter how energy is spent. Hands slow. Tasks narrow. Spinning and knitting return not as nostalgia, but as work that fits the season. The material asks for steadiness rather than speed, attention rather than force.
The uncertainty surrounding Jacob sheep’s origins does not weaken their story. It confirms it. They have always belonged to systems that function quietly and persistently, shaped more by land and limits than by design. When winter draws work indoors and the world contracts to hearth and hand, that way of working becomes visible again; not as memory, but as something that still holds.
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Footnotes
Ryder, M. L., Sheep and Man. Duckworth, 1983; Alderson, Lawrence, The Chance to Survive. Pilkington Press, 1989; revised ed. 2001. Both discuss primitive sheep types and the survival of rare breeds shaped by continuity rather than improvement. See also Kijas et al., “Genome-wide analysis of the world’s sheep breeds reveals high levels of historic mixture and strong recent selection,” PLoS Biology, 2012.
Youatt, William, Sheep: Their Breeds, Management, and Diseases. Baldwin & Cradock, London, 1837.
Low, David, On the Domesticated Animals of the British Islands. Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, London, 1845.
Carmichael, Alexander, Carmina Gadelica. Collected 1860s–1890s; published 1900. Ethnographic accounts of domestic labour and seasonal rhythms in Gaelic-speaking Scotland.
Tusser, Thomas, Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry. 1557.
Defoe, Daniel, A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain. 1724–1726.
The Statistical Accounts of Scotland. Sir John Sinclair (ed.), 1791–1799. For linguistic structure of the Gaelic phrase, see Dwelly, Edward, The Illustrated Gaelic–English Dictionary, 1901.
National Records of Scotland, GD (Gift and Deposit) estate papers, 18th century, including Argyll and Atholl estate household accounts. See also Weatherill, Lorna, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760. Routledge, 1988, for analysis of seasonal household production cycles.
From our farm, these historical practices continue to inform how we work with our own Jacob flock throughout the year; how wool is collected, prepared, and returned to use in its proper season. Our monthly subscription membership journal follows that work as it unfolds, through farm diaries, seasonal photography, and ongoing chapters from our historical novel set on this land, connecting past practice with present experience.