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English Oak Wool Winder
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English Oak Wool Winder
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Hand-wrought in English oak, its removable twin drums running as smoothly as they ever did, this piece is an interesting and unusual relic of Britain's past eminence as a great wool-producing country.
From the 14th through the 18th centuries the production of wool brought great prosperity to the traders and cloth merchants of Wales, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire and elsewhere in England, a level of prosperity still evident in the great churches and other imposing buildings of the villages and market towns. The people who used this piece would have lived in much humbler surroundings, with whole families working in their cottages carding, spinning and winding the wool, and this is a winder that has survived intact from those times. We cannot say how old it might be, although we believe it to be well over 200 years old, nor can we identify its place of origin because, although spinning-wheels showed local variations, it is unadorned by any carving. It is a completely functional piece incorporating only the essentials for its purpose, and once such a piece of machinery was developed there was no compelling need to tinker with it, so traditional designs sometimes remained unchanged over centuries. The winder is constructed entirely of seasoned oak, that hard-wearing timber from which Drake and Nelson's warships were made, and the lighter surfaces on the rods in each drum show that this interesting piece had considerable use before being superseded by mill machinery in the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. We are left with a desirable antique to remind us of the days when there were no factories, nothing could move on land at a pace faster than that of a running horse, and everything 'manufactured' was, literally, something made by hand. 
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