In nineteen thirty-six, peat cutters in Sweden found a man in Bocksten bog. He had been killed in the twelfth century and staked into the moss. His hood was still on his head, with a tail almost three feet long. His cloak, tunic and hose came out of the peat whole enough to copy.
Every thread on him came off a sheep. There was not one ounce of down or plastic in the outfit, and he walked through Scandinavian winters in it. A three-hundred-dollar shell jacket can leave you shivering at a bus stop.
The difference was never the sheep. It was what happened to the cloth after the loom, and what people did with it on the body.
Tonight we go through forty pieces, from a Swedish bog, a fuller's trough, a cold cathedral, a frozen Greenland churchyard and a king's fur ledgers. Forty is not a number we chose. The reason comes at the end.
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