ROOING 🐏

Were Anglo-Saxon sheep SHORN?

I am working on book 2 in Wrath and Weeping (Oath of the Wolf) and there is mention of a character being killed with a pair of sheep shears. (He had it coming, don’t worry.)

But as I have been editing these past months, it occurred to me…were Anglo-Saxon sheep SHORN? 

By extension, would the Anglo-Saxons have had SHEARS?

This may sound like a very silly question to anyone familiar with Anglo-Saxon textiles. EVERYONE wore wool in this time period. 

If you were wealthy enough, you might be able to afford a linen undershirt or shift to go under the wool, but everyone was wearing wool on the outside, sometimes in multiple layers.

So the Anglo-Saxons were definitely using wool and we know they were collecting it around midsummer, but were they shearing or were they rooing?

To explain rooing sheep, we need to explain some things about sheep...

If you’ve ever heard that sheep will die if they aren’t shorn, that is true for many modern breeds, BUT that is because humans have selectively bred them to be that way. 

The wild sheep that domesticated sheep are descended from did not need to be shorn.

They ROOED.

Rooing is where the fleece comes off naturally. (If you’ve ever seen an Angora Rabbit shed, it’s a lot like that.)

So on a rooing sheep at the right time of year, you could just walk up to them and gently pluck the whole fleece off by hand. There are modern sheep breeds that still roo—Shetland Sheep, Soay Sheep, and Icelandic Sheep, for example.

I was able to find a video from an Ontario-based farm with Icelandic sheep and they found that you can roo an entire fleece from an adult ram in about 20 minutes. This is roughly the same amount of time it takes to manually shear a sheep with traditional shears, but did not answer my question about Early Medieval British sheep.

So I emailed Dr. Debby Banham of Cambridge University, possibly THE top academic on Anglo-Saxon agriculture. I asked her about evidence for rooing in Pre-Conquest Britain and she said we don’t have anything in written sources, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

She then recommended her book, Anglo-Saxon Farms and Farming. (I am about a third of the way through and it is amazing!)

I also emailed Butser Ancient Farm, a living history farm in Britain, and they referred me to Alan West, an exceptionally knowledgeable gentleman who told me all kinds of information about the many varieties of sheep that would have been present in Britain in the Early Medieval era.

Basically, you would have had mix of sheep tracing their ancestry to the pre-Roman sheep just a few steps from domestication, sheep imported by the Romans from Mediterranean stock, sheep imported by the Saxons of Germanic stock, sheep imported by the Scandinavians, and a considerable diversity even within these four types.

Shearing goes back to at least 3500 BC in the Mediterranean, so we can pretty safely say that the Roman Mediterranean stock would have been of the finer wool, shearing-needed type. 

All the others would have likely been "primitive" rooing types. (The Pre-Roman and Scandinavian sheep types would have rooed for sure.)

Dr. Banham’s book also heavily emphasizes that there would have been A LOT of variety in sheep of Britain and Ireland in the Early Middle Ages, even within the same regions and individual flocks in some cases. 

From what I understand, Mr. West believes most Early Medieval British sheep would have rooed and I think this is a reasonable assumption based on what we have been able to piece together.

• Rooing is convenient, requires no specialized tools, and no specialized skills. 
• Metal was very precious in Early Medieval Britain, so metal tools were at a premium.
• Even now in the age of electric clippers, sheep shearing requires significant skill.

From this perspective, rooing sheep would have been very practical, very economical.

However, the wool of rooing sheep is coarser and you have less control over when the fleece is collected. 

Larger, wealthier farms that could acquire finer wool types and had the manpower for specialized processes might have had some non-rooing sheep, but they were likely the exception, not the norm.

But again, there was a lot of genetic diversity among sheep and all domesticated animals in this time period. 

I keep saying “types” because livestock “breeds” are a fairly modern invention. There were no sheep “breeds” 1,000+ years ago. (This is where a lot of people get into trouble.)

There is no modern sheep breed to today that looks or performs exactly like an Early Medieval sheep.

As I have mentioned, there are several breeds, often called “heritage” or "primitive" breeds, that share traits and features, but there are none that are exactly the same. (1,000+ years of human intervention will do that.)

Early medieval Britain would have had a mix of rooing and non-rooing sheep, probably more rooing than not.

But again, this is the sort of thing that nobody seems to have written down just because while the vast majority of people in this time period were subsistence farmers, this information was not seen as important enough to record.

After all this research, I really want to write about rooing in book #3. I also want to emphasize the scarcity and value of metal within this world.

The "death by a thousand snips" was part of Edric's backstory on Valdar.

I swapped the shears for an eating knife (still a very slow and painful way to behead a person) because Valdar is based largely on Iceland and...well...Icelandic sheep love a good roo.

Tears of the Wolf, book 1, is out now.

Oath of the Wolf, book 2 starts audiobook recording in August and we are on track for an October release date.

For Bookhalla!