Sack (Wool)

Three hundred and sixty-four pounds of wool, being twenty-six stone or two weys.

The sack was the trading unit of the English wool trade, fixed at twenty-six stone of fourteen pounds. It sits neatly in the middle of a chain: two weys make a sack, and twelve sacks make a last of wool.

That chain mattered because wool was the English economy. The export duty levied on it, the subsidy granted to kings by Parliament, and the fortunes of the great wool churches of the Cotswolds and East Anglia were all reckoned in sacks.

It is also the reason the Lord Speaker of the House of Lords sits on a woolsack. The seat was introduced in the fourteenth century as a reminder of where the kingdom’s wealth came from, and when it was reconstructed in the nineteenth century it was found to have been stuffed with horsehair. It was restuffed with wool from across the Commonwealth, and the symbol was allowed to stand.