Fulling and the tuckers

When he had woven a length of cloth the weaver would generally pass it on to a group of people known as fullers or tuckers to be fulled and finished. Straight from the loom, a piece of woollen cloth is a coarse, sacking-like material with little substance. After it has been fulled, dried, stretched and raised it is transformed into a softer, thicker and fluffier cloth. In the fulling process the cloth was repeatedly pounded in water with fuller's earth (or a similar substance) added to scour and shrink it. The fuller's earth removed the grease added to the wool before spinning, while the beating action matted together the woollen fibres until the cloth looked like felt and the weave pattern became less obvious. In Witney some fuller's earth was probably always used as there was a natural supply available in the Cotswold region; in the 18th century it was imported to the town from Woburn in Bedfordshire. Many Witney fullers also used a type of gritty yellow clay that could be dug up close by [1].

Fulling caused the cloth to shrink down in size; when the Witney Blanket Weavers' Company (the local trade guild) was set up in the 1711 strict regulations were laid down prescribing how far certain sizes and qualities of cloth could be shrunk and what they should weigh. This was a skilled job and fines were issued if cloth was found to be less than the required weight.

The earliest method of fulling was to trample the cloth by foot in vats; this way was certainly used by the Romans. By Medieval times (as early as the 12th century) the fulling mill had been invented. Sited on good fast flowing river stretches, water power was used to drive a wheel which alternately raised and dropped pairs of heavy wooden hammers called fulling stocks onto the cloth. Fulling thus became the first power-driven process in the wool industry, able to pound away at the cloth by day and night and replacing the work of several people.

The tuckers were independent of the master weavers but were employed or contracted by them to finish the blankets and were paid twice yearly. This arrangement may have arisen because fulling was the first process in the woollen industry to become mechanised and fulling mills required a lot of capital to build and maintain, so that specialisation was necessary. Another reason was that fulling and finishing were skilled procedures that were critical to the quality of the finished cloth and required several men to them carry out. Like weavers, tuckers were organised into masters and their journeymen employees. The master tucker was responsible for all losses and damage to the blankets while they were entrusted to him for finishing [2].

Clare Sumner