Melton Is a Town in Leicestershire
Melton Is a Town in Leicestershire
The warmest cloth in your closet is named after an English market town.
Melton Mowbray sits in Leicestershire, in the English midlands. It became the center of English fox hunting, and the coats worn in that country had to survive weather, thorns and long days in the saddle. The cloth made for them took the name of the town and never gave it back. That was the early 1800s. We still call it melton.
Fulling is where melton becomes melton
Melton starts as a twill, which is to say it starts looking like ordinary woven wool. Then it is fulled. Fulling has two parts. First scouring, which washes the oils and dirt out. Then milling, where the cloth gets heat, moisture and friction all at once until the fibers interlock and mat together. The cloth shrinks hard in the process, often by a third or more, and it comes out thicker, denser and heavier than the wool that went in. The twill you started with is gone. You cannot see the weave anymore.
For centuries this was done by hand and by foot. People beat the wet cloth with clubs or walked on it for hours. Machines do it now, and the principle has not changed at all.
Napping and shearing
After fulling, the surface is brushed to raise a nap, then sheared close, sometimes several times over. That is what gives melton the flat, smooth, faintly velvet face and the clean edge that barely frays when you cut it. It is why a melton coat looks quiet and holds a shape instead of draping like a blanket.
Why it beats the wind
Wind gets through cloth by finding the gaps between yarns. Fulling closes the gaps. That is the entire trick, and it is why navies, hunting fields and outerwear all landed on the same cloth from completely different directions.
Where we use it
Our BLACK Melton Western Jacket is 23.5oz woven in the USA for us. The Heavy Stone Grey Melton Western Over-Shirt is 28oz of pure melton wool, also woven in the USA, and both are made in Seattle. The new peacoat color coming is my forest green melton, made in Japan. Same family of cloth, three very different pieces, and all of them get better the colder it is outside.
A Way Of Life.
Shop the Story
Black Bear Brand BLACK Melton Western Jacket
Black Bear Brand Heavy Stone Grey MELTON Wool Western Over-Shirt
Related Reading
Harris Tweed: The Only Cloth Protected by an Act of Parliament