Plate No. 139fabric
A pale linen warp crossed with a darker wool weft.
- First documented
- Middle Ages
- Origin
- England, United Kingdom
- Fiber
- linen, wool
- Weave
- linen warp, wool weft, plain woven
- Family
- plain
Plate No. 139 · fabric
Linsey-Woolsey
Linsey-woolsey is a coarse, strong cloth woven with a linen or cotton warp and a wool weft, combining the strength of the bast fiber with the warmth of wool. Cheap and hard-wearing but rough to the skin, it was the everyday cloth of poor and working people for centuries, and in colonial and early America it was spun and woven at home into the standard winter clothing of farm families and the enslaved. Its very name became a byword for something coarse, makeshift, or oddly mixed.
Named for
A rhyming compound of linsey, a linen cloth (perhaps from Lindsey in Suffolk), and wool, for its mixed fibers.
Sources & References
- 1.Linsey-woolsey, Wikipedia
- 2.Wool, Wikipedia