Roger Pinney

In the middle of the House of Lords, in front of the throne, is a large red cushion with no back and no arms. It has been the most important seat in the chamber for 650 years, and it is a sack of wool. Edward III put it there in the 1300s. He ordered that his Lord Chancellor, when he sat in council, should sit on a bale of wool, so that nobody in the room could forget what the country was built on. By then wool paid for the Crown. The tax on every sack leaving the ports funded Edward's wars in France. The Battle of Crécy in 1346 was fought, in large part, to keep the wool route to Flanders open. It is still there. The Lord Speaker sits on it every day the House meets, with the mace laid behind. A peer who wants to join a debate has to get off it first and speak from the floor. In 1938 somebody finally looked inside. Over the centuries the wool had quietly gone, and the Woolsack was full of horsehair. It was rebuilt and restuffed with fleeces sent from every sheep country in the Empire, so that the thing the Lords sat on was British wool again. That is the symbol the nation chose for itself. Not a crown, a sword or a Bible. A sack of what came off a sheep's back. For 400 years English wool was the finest in Europe, and the merchants who sold it built the churches of the Cotswolds and Suffolk that tourists photograph today. The Lord Speaker will sit on a fleece this afternoon. The hill farmer who grew it is being paid less for it than it cost to shear.