🐑 A Sack Full of Wool

Hi!  👋

In the House of Lords there's a seat that isn't really a seat, it's more like a giant cushion.

It's square, made of decadent red cloth, large enough to lie down on, and is located at the very front of the chamber with no back and no arms. It is where the Lord Speaker sits today, in the middle of debates, on something that looks like a sofa.

It's called the Woolsack, and it's been there since the fourteenth century. Edward III ordered for it to be made as he wanted his Lord Chancellor to sit on it while making decisions of state: on an actual bale of wool. At that time, wool was the wealth of England. It was the very thing the country sold that kept the economy and the king’s wars running. He wanted the source of that wealth to prop up the men who were making decisions about it, literally, so they couldn't forget where their wealth came from.

It's a good idea, let the weight of its presence come up through the cushion while you decide what to do.

In 1938, they opened the Woolsack up, for repair or for cleaning, we’re not entirely sure. But inside, instead of wool, they found horsehair.

Nobody knows when the wool went out and the horsehair went in. There's no record of the swap, it just happened, quietly, one day over however many years. Ever since, nobody in the room knew, because from the outside a stuffed cushion is a stuffed cushion.

It took someone to actually cut it open to find out what was really inside.

They then restuffed it properly, with wool from across the British Isles and from fifteen Commonwealth countries, supplied through the International Wool Secretariat. The Lord Speaker still sits on it. But it took six hundred years and an accident of maintenance for anyone to check.