Mike Redwood
Columnist
International Leather Maker
According to Sellar and Yeatman’s 1066 and All That, the only history book I kept after school, British history could be reduced—absurdly but memorably—to two dates: 55 BC and 1066. Both, in their telling, involved Britain being conquered.
Julius Caesar’s expedition of 55 BC was not the actual Roman conquest of Britain, which began with Claudius in AD 43, but he did arrive to check the UK out and he is the more memorable figure. More memorable still is the fact that the Romans, the “Top Nation” according to Sellar and Yeatman, brought proper semi-industrial vegetable tanning with them and the leather industry as we still know it now began.
But 1066 is undeniably one of the great turning points in English history. After victory at the Battle of Hastings, William of Normandy became king of England and transformed its ruling class, landholding, castles, administration, aristocratic culture and language, also greatly impacting Scotland and Wales, who joined the Union later.
The Bayeux Tapestry—more precisely, a vast eleventh-century embroidery—offers an extraordinary physical and documentary record of that world. When it opens at the British Museum on September 10, it will be displayed in Britain for the first time in nearly a millennium.
Without leather, Hastings might have been cancelled
Having recently written about the importance of leather in the film Homer, I have a simpler observation about Hastings: the battle could not have happened in the form we know it without leather.
At first sight, Hastings appears to be a story of iron and wood: weapons, shields, ships, castles, tactics and human endurance. But leather was an indispensable enabling material. Saddles and horse harness, footwear, belts, straps, scabbards, bags, grips and elements of protective equipment all depended on it.
This is not to say that every use of leather had no substitute. Rope, rawhide, textile, felt and woven fibres could perform some of the same tasks. Reins can be made from rope and saddles can incorporate cloth, felt, wood and rawhide. Yet leather combined durability, flexibility, familiarity and repairability in a way that made it especially suited to a military culture dependent upon movement, riding, fastening, carrying and repeated use.
Crossing the Channel with large numbers of horses and then fighting a battle required far more than brave men, sharp weapons and capable commanders. It required reliable, standardised and repairable equipment. Norman cavalry was not simply a collection of mounted men: it was a system of horses, saddles, girths, reins, straps, footwear, armour, weapons, ships, craftsmen, supplies and replacement parts.
Without leather, perhaps the contenders might have had to settle the English succession with a game of dominoes in a Sussex inn.
Slow-moving systems
But the more interesting point is not that a particular warrior wore leather, or that a saddle had leather components. The real question is how leather had become so ordinary, reliable and available that armies could treat it as part of the normal infrastructure of life.
This is where the Annales School and Fernand Braudel’s idea of material civilisation is useful. They direct attention away from dates, battles and famous individuals towards climate, agriculture, demography, commerce, technology, transport, social groups and everyday material life.
Leather came, and continues to come, from a slow-moving system of animals, land, craft knowledge, trade, labour, military organisation and habitual use. It depended on cattle, sheep and horses; on grazing and mixed farming; on woodland fuel and tannin-bearing bark; on water; on the tanner’s skills; and on connections with saddlers, cobblers, armourers, belt-makers, bag-makers and glovers.
The Norman Conquest emerged from cross-Channel networks of wealth, kinship, ambition and political opportunity. It also depended on the ability to assemble troops, horses, ships and supplies, together with large quantities of iron, wood, textiles and leather—and skilled people capable of turning those materials into usable military equipment. Still, the Battle of Hastings lasted a day. These systems that made its saddles, horse tack, boots, belts and equipment possible had been forming for centuries.
What the Bayeux embroidery shows
If you are fortunate enough to obtain a ticket for the British Museum exhibition, do not merely count visible leather objects in the Bayeux Tapestry. That exercise may be useful, but it is incomplete.
The embroidery presents a world of ships, horses, soldiers, swords, shields, helmets and mail. It vividly records military movement, preparation and violence. Yet it does not make leather conspicuous. Leather is everywhere in function, but rarely certain in appearance: as straps, grips, scabbards, shoes, possible shield components and harness. From the embroidery alone, such materials are seldom unambiguously identifiable.
That very invisibility is revealing. Leather was part of what every contemporary assumed would be there: a normal solution to a multitude of practical problems. It did not need a chronicler’s notice precisely because it was so deeply embedded in the routines of life.
The most fruitful questions are therefore not simply whether a warrior wore leather, but: Who were the tanners? Where did hides and bark come from? How were materials traded? Which saddlers, cobblers, armourers and other makers supplied an army? Who repaired damaged equipment or supplied replacements? How did the whole system reach the right place at the right time?
Such questions remind us of leather’s origins from a herd of cattle or sheep to the tanner’s workshop, the fair, a ship’s sails and cordage, a battlefield and a royal court.
Leather after cavalry
Leather was a strategic material in medieval warfare because it supported mobility, protection, transport and repair. Its role changed with mechanisation, new military technologies and the declining relevance of horse cavalry. In modern armed forces, it remains important in footwear, gloves and selected accoutrements, but it is no longer the pervasive military infrastructure it once was.
More broadly, leather remained deeply embedded in everyday life until the age of petrochemicals, mass manufacture and plastics. Plastics offered inexpensive and sometimes technically effective alternatives. They also fitted a retail desire for shorter product lives and rapid disposal.
The price of that system was not properly counted. Fossil-fuel origins, waste, pollution and end-of-life consequences were too often treated as externalities, while climate, biodiversity and human health now bear the cost.
Leather should not be romanticised; its production has always depended on land, animals, water, labour, energy and skilled processing. But it belongs to a different historical logic: one in which durability, repair, re-use and the value of material knowledge mattered more visibly.
Leather must not remain invisible
Sellar and Yeatman ended history in the 1920s, when America became “Top Nation.” Whether that position proves as durable as its predecessors is another question.
Leather’s own future will depend partly on whether tanners and leather users can explain its place in the world more convincingly. Leather is not merely luxury, fashion, guild history or technological innovation—important though all of those are. It is the product of a profound historical system linking climate, agriculture, husbandry, household labour, technology, trade, industry, hierarchy and environmental adaptation over centuries.
A history of leather should therefore ask what ecological and material foundations lie beneath apparently separate stories of warfare, trade, craft, fashion and consumption.
In 1066, leather was not the cause of Norman victory. It did not replace William, Harold, cavalry tactics, political ambition or the contingencies of battle. But it reminds us of the mistake of imagining that battles occur in an abstract space of personalities and strategy.
Leather helps recover the complex, low-status, repetitive and materially constrained world beneath the drama: the world that allowed an army to walk, carry, ride, fasten, protect, feed, land and fight.
That is why, in the Bayeux Tapestry, leather is both everywhere and almost invisible.
mike@internationalleathermaker.com
You can find Dr Mike Redwood across social media at @michaelredwood.
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