John Battle’s historical article on Kirkstall Abbey and the Italian Banks, in full here on Kirkstall Online:

Having moved down from their monastic community in Barnoldswick where “their fruits and grain were repeatedly destroyed by great rains and the badness of the soil”, Abbot Seleth settled  the new Kirkstall Abbey on the hermits’ site in Kirkstall in June 1153, reporting that “Kirkstall though pleasant abounded only in wood, water, and stone; the soil was barren, rude and cultivated and the River Aire parted the lands of William de Poitou from those of William de Ramaville”.  But the monks soon extended their territory and “by their great industry in clearing and tilling their grounds, rendered them fruitful”. As the estates expanded so the number of monks increased and the Abbey build up a number of benefactors and powerful protectors , including King Henry I , King Henry II and King Edward I. A great list of benefactors endowed Kirkstall with large donations of land, properties, rents and tithes as it developed into one of  England’s most wealthy estates, providing  maintenance work on the granges for the surrounding population.

“The Cistercian monks were great sheep breeders and wool became the foundation of the medieval economy and the importance of wool was acknowledged by the fact that the Crown would accept payment of taxes in sacks of wool instead of in money. The legacy of the wool economy remains in the “woolsack seat” in the House of Lords to this day. Each monastery was expected to be self supporting and wool provided cloth for habits for the monks and cloths for the farm workers. But as the monks built up their sheep farm they developed a surplus they could trade and sell.  In 1224 the Abbot of Kirkstall was granted  special permission by the King to send one shipload of wool yearly wherever he pleased. Pack horses took the wool sacks to the coast to be shipped from Hull and Scarborough to the Low Countries and to Italy. A woolsack consisted of 364lb of wool which was the weight of a reasonable load for a packhorse. As Jervault Abbey in North Yorkshire became known for its horse breeding and Fountains Abbey for its herds of dairy cattle, Kirkstall  then became internationally known for its sheep. But according to the records in the “Fundacio Abbathie de Kyrkestall”,  the sheep flocks depended on the weather and there were years when they faired badly. In 1280 there were 11,000 sheep on the Kirkstall granges but in 1284 there were none at all as a result of exceptionally bad weather and Kirkstall Abbey was deep in debt. The flocks were ravaged by scabies despite treatment by tar and were wiped them out. Too much rain  or a season of drought hitting the hay crop for winter feed could do a lot of damage and drastically affect the income to the Abbey. When Abbott Grimstone was elected in 1284 he inherited debts amounting to £5,248. 15s .7d and 59 sacks of wool (an immense sum in those days) though some 9 marks ( a week’s wages) were also owed to Bernard Tardi for washing the wool!  In 1286 the flock was back to 1,320 sheep and by 1301 Kirkstall Abbey is recorded as possessing a large herd of cattle, 216 draught oxen, 160 cows, 152 yearlings and bullocks, 90 calves and 4000 sheep.  By 1310 the flock  was up to 5000 strong.

But 16 years after Kirkstall Abbey had managed to reduce the debts and re-establish the sheep flocks, the trade with Italy started to go wrong. Wool was a great exportable commodity and documents in the library of Florence bear testimony to the quality of Kirkstall wool. The best quality was worth 20 marks, the medium quality 10.5 marks and the worst 9.5 marks. In 1315 the “clip” consisted of  a good 25 sacks of wool. A first quality sack would raise 9p per lb which would pay a labourers wages for a week. The wealthy merchants from Italy and France and the Low Countries were all prepared to buy up English wool and pay cash for it. What’s more they were often prepared to pay cash in advance and put money down on  the next year’s clip. The merchant’s would travel over to Kirkstall to sample the clip and buy in bulk in advance.  And though this “forward selling” ( a kind of wool futures or PFI scheme) was actually forbidden in the General Chapter rules an Abbott needing cash to get on with a substantial building project often ignored the rule to get cash in hand. Indeed a document in the “Coucher Book of Kirkstall” illustrates that this forward selling had being going on for some time. Nor was it only to cover short term weather problems when the flocks were ravaged. In 1292, for example, the record states that Kirkstall sold its wool ahead for ten years! When the wool sacks failed to materialise the strain of debts hit the Florentine banks and indeed took  some of them under. The failure of the Kirkstall monks to deliver their promised wool sacks caused a crisis in the Florentine banking system early in the fourteenth century and the Florentine bankers turned the money tap off. The wool trade was causing a global financial crisis and King Edward III’s response was to ban the export of wool altogether and promote a domestic weaving industry and market. But though the global  trade with Florence was lost Kirkstall Abbey was large enough to keep going economically right through to the dissolution under King Henry VIII.