Kendal Green (Background: Kendal)

Kendal was famous for a coarse cloth called ‘cottons’ – which was actually made out of wool.  It was generally known as Kendal Green, from its distinctive colour, and it rivalled the more famous Lincoln Green. 

The motto of the town of Kendal, in use since the 17th century and incorporated into its coat of arms, is ‘Pannus mihi panis’ – cloth is my bread’.  This refers to the source of the town’s wealth, which was the manufacture of a coarse, hard-wearing woollen cloth usually known as Kendal Green, used primarily for clothing for the working man – the denim of its day. 

References to a fulling mill in Kendal in 1274 and a dyeworks 1310 suggest the woollen textile industry was already well established by 1300: and by 1500 the town was selling cloth all over England. Indeed there was also a thriving export trade, with Richard Gough writing in his 1789 Additions to Camden’s Britannia, of the town’s “coarse woollen cloth call[e]d Cottons sent to Glasgow and thence to Virginia for the use of the negroes”. 

 The cloth itself was woven in peoples’ homes throughout Westmorland, then brought to Kendal for finishing. The ‘tenter frames’ shown in Speed’s map of the town (1611) (above) show one important stage of the finishing of the cloth. In his long poem ‘Polyolbion’ (1622), Michael Drayton wrote, of Kendal that it was ‘for making of our Cloth scarce match’d in all the land’. Thomas Denton, writing of Kendal in 1688, said: ‘The people are generally all tradesmen, very industrious & provident, which by the help of their cloathing & cotten trade (which they disperse all over England) makes them much richer then their neighbours’.  This strange use of the word ‘cotton’ for the cloth seems to have been common, it is not clear why.

The name Kendal Green came from the characteristic green colour that the cloth was generally dyed.  The same colour was used for its rival, ‘Lincoln Green’.  Indeed there are those who claim Robin Hood and his Merry Men actually dressed in Kendal Green rather than Lincoln Green.  The dye was made originally from two locally grown plants, weld (Reseda luteola) which gave a yellow colour, and woad (Isatis tinctoria) which gave blue.  From the 16th century, indigo dye was imported to give the blue colour. The cloth would first have been washed and ‘fulled’ (a process which made the cloth more compact and water-resistant). It would then have been dyed yellow, then dyed again, with the blue dye turning the cloth green. Then it was off to the tenter frames for the final stage of drying and stretching the cloth to its final dimensions. 

Text by Bill Shannon

Extract of John Speed’s plan on Kendal, showing tenter frames, from his 1611 map of Westmorland. Lakes Guides https://www.lakesguides.co.uk/html/speed/sp14fram.htm

For background to the Cumbrian woollen industry, see 

https://www.cumbria-industries.org.uk/wool/

To find out more about the history of Kendal, click here 

https://www.cumbriacountyhistory.org.uk/township/kendal-formerly-kirkby-kendal

For a full list of all interesting facts, click here

 https://www.cumbriacountyhistory.org.uk/full-list-interesting-facts