The Grantville Gazette - Volume 4 Part 39

always having two people involved in a.s.sembling the weapon and using the checklist.

The gun is not invulnerable to knocks and b.u.mps or even wear. Common problems demonstrated in service were things ranging from something as simple as the c.o.c.king handle being rammed into a tree or stone and bent or broken, to the receiver tube that holds the barrel and gas system in place cracking from the strain of bi-pod use. Feed trays become worn and allow misfeeds and feed tray covers become bent

and restrict the movement of parts. Barrels and gas systems become overheated and can erode or warp from exposure to high heat and pressure. The feed system can be damaged by an inexperienced user attempting to forcefully close the feed tray cover while the bolt is forward. There is no support depot repair facility for the Grantville M-60 and for that matter, no mail order parts houses or internet web sites to provide replacement parts directly to the users.

Army technical manuals call for special lubricants, but in reality anything oily beats nothing and guns have been operated on used motor oil or sewing machine oil or WD-40 (TM) more than once. For extended firing, the synthetics do seem to work best as they do not evaporate as easily.

The gun depends on steel links to feed ammunition. Each link is stamped from steel, hardened, and given a protective finish. A link firmly holds one cartridge in position for feeding by friction around the body of the cartridge and what is essentially a flat spring that snaps into the extractor groove of the cartridge. The link also has a piece that snaps over the next cartridge in between the front and rear of its link. Once links become damaged by being flattened or bent or lose their metal temper or are heavily corroded, they are of no use. Fortunately links that are recovered undamaged can be reused many times. Links are normally deposited just below the link ejection port to the right of the gun, as they are not forcefully ejected. When the gun is tilted to the left, links may be struck by the forcefully ejected fired cartridge cases and scattered. For the purposes of Grantville, it may be best to make some sort of bag to catch both the used links and ejected cartridge cases so they may be more easily recovered for re-use.

Ammunition is the most important factor for keeping Grantville's M-60 working and the gun's biggest weak link. The best ammunition for the M-60 is 7.62 NATO ammunition having the "NATO cross" on the case head. How much of this is in Grantville? The ammunition for the gun should drive a 147 to 152 grain bullet at 2800 +/- 40 feet per second from its barrel. As the weapon is gas operated, it is critical that the correct amount of gas pressure be available at the gas port in the barrel to cycle the action for the next round. Any factory loaded military round of 7.62 NATO ball or tracer ammunition that bears the cross in a circle stamp should function the M-60 or any NATO standard weapon in that caliber.

Obviously it is possible to reload some ammunition. U.S. military 7.62 NATO ammunition can be reloaded by sport shooters who reload .308 Winchester. This has led some to call for the seizure of all .308 ammunition and components to feed the M-60. Besides the political problems this may cause, there is a technical problem. Commercial .308 Winchester or hunting ammunition typically do not have cartridge cases constructed to the same hardness as NATO standard. Firing some hunter's .308 ammunition in the M-60 can cause stoppages and likely ruin the cartridge case for further reloading. The commercial bra.s.s tends to be far softer than the NATO standard, resulting in bent and creased cartridges on loading and more importantly, bent, torn, or broken rims upon extraction. Should the bend, tear, or break be large enough, the cartridge will fail to extract and require a cleaning rod be run down the barrel to extract the case.

Owners of military style semiautomatic rifles will also often note this problem. Some, like the FN FAL type rifles that have a gas regulator, can be adjusted to slow their action speed and not damage bra.s.s as much. But they are best served with ammunition intended for such rifles.

A problem for reloading the 7.62 NATO military ammunition that may be in private hands is that much of it may be of foreign manufacture and have a Berdan primer rather than the U.S. standard Boxer large rifle primer. Berdan primers are much harder to remove than Boxer designs and few Americans reload them or have tools to do so. There are a number of ways to remove the Berdan primers, each much more time and material consuming than the removal of Boxer primers. Another problem facing reloading for the M-60 is the availability of usable primers. It may be several years before new primers of any type can be reproduced. For the immediate future only the primers in the hands of reloaders or already loaded in cartridges are available. A factor that comes into play when loading for military weapons is the hardness of various primers. The firing pin strike of the M-60 is substantial and because the round is being fired from a hot, and possibly as a result, tight chamber, pressures can be higher than normal. These factors can result in ruptured primers that allow hot gas and molten metal from the primer to be sprayed into the bolt and feed areas of the gun. Military primers are harder than most commercial primers. Many who reload for such weapons will not use some of the major and most common brands of primers for this reason.

Next there is the issue of bullets. The NATO standard is for a full metal jacket bullet with a pointed nose. There may well be feed problems if bullets of a different shape are used. Also bullets must be loaded to the same overall length as the 7.62 NATO standard. This means considerable load development may be necessary to use longer and heavier bullets that might be available from hunters and target shooters who reload. Also part of the M-60 feed system pushes down on the front of the bullet, possibly damaging sporting bullets such as soft points with their exposed lead and hollow points with their unsupported cavities. Reloaders tend to purchase and have on hand sporting type bullets suitable for hunting and target shooting. Most states do not allow the use of full metal jacket ammunition for taking game and the full metal jacket bullets tend to not be as accurate as most available hunting or target bullets. Their only advantage for sport shooters is a slight savings in purchase cost. There is actually likely more loaded surplus 7.62 NATO ammunition with such bullets in Grantville than there are unloaded bullets suitable for reloading them.

Finally there is the issue of available powder. Grantville will not be able to produce smokeless powders of any sort for quite some time. All the smokeless powders that exist are in the hands of sport reloaders who recognize its value for their own use. Further, not all smokeless powders are suitable for reloading the 7.62 NATO cartridge. Even among the powders that are suitable, different powders may need a good bit of load development work done to get a load that functions the M-60 and shoots reliably and accurately from it. Given the small amount of powders available, all this testing may be seen as a waste of what could be valuably used in a hunting rifle. Any load development also uses up primers and bullets that cannot be currently replaced. While there are many loads that will function fine in a manually operated rifle like a bolt action, getting a series of loads for different powders that produces that critical gas-port pressure for the M-60 will be an expensive ch.o.r.e.

One possible alternative for arming the M-60 may be to convert any military loadings of the older US M2 Ball loadings of the .30-06 caliber. These cases will be of or near the same hardness as the NATO bra.s.s. The bullet falls within the proper weight range and the powders will be suitable for loading to 7.62 NATO pressures and velocities. The bullets would be pulled and saved for use, the powder saved, the cartridge cases run through a .308 sizing die and the excess removed and the necks turned to the correct size. Loads may then be developed using the original powder. Each lot of ammunition must be processed separately for this type of conversion. This might work well if 1000 rounds of a specific lot of .30-06 ammunition were available, but it would not be suitable for a few mixed rounds. One certainly would not wish to mix powders of two different types or even lots when doing these conversions.

It may be possible to obtain usable primers and bra.s.s by converting other old military ammunition. If large lots of 7.92 mm, 7.65 mm or 7 mm Mauser cartridges can be found, they can be converted to 7.62 NATO cartridge cases and their original primer used. Again the original powder might be used to develop loads if proper bullets are available. The bullets for these rifles cannot generally be used in .308 caliber guns, though it might be worthwhile if a large quant.i.ty of 7.65 Mauser ammo were found to attempt to swag the bullets down a few thousandths of an inch to proper diameter. Finding enough of that round with a spitzer shaped bullet to make it worth while is unlikely, though.

At best the Grantville M-60 machine gun is a stopgap weapon of limited use. It may be a guide for future machine gun development, if not for a copy of itself, in ten or fifteen years as a starting point or for taking ideas from. It may actually be little more than a good luck talisman having a short useful life on the battlefield from lack of suitable ammunition and repair parts.

Something that performs the same functions as the M-60, that can be produced and operated with 1633 materials and technology with as little help from Grantville as possible, needs to be developed as soon as possible.

Even disregarding all of the above arguments, copying the M-60 requires machine time and tools that are not available. Also the quality of the steels needed for the barrel, gas system and the all important springs that will be necessary for an "automatic" machine gun, whose action is cycled by the firing of its ammunition, are not available.

Many have suggested that a "manual" machine gun driven by an external power supply, such as a gunner turning a crank, would solve the spring problem. It does not, however, deal with the problem of primers and cartridges.

The best known of the manual machine guns is the Gatling gun. It is interesting to note that it was perfectly legal to own an untaxed or federally registered manually operated machine gun in the USA and West Virginia in the year 2000 when the Ring of Fire occurred. There are likely to be not only ill.u.s.trations in books available in Grantville, but it is not impossible for there to be a set of detailed blueprints for building a late model, cartridge-type Gatling gun somewhere in town in private hands. Unfortunately, such designs call for modern ammunition exactly like the automatic machine guns demand.

The original Gatling guns (as were in use during the first half of the 1860s) used a special firing chamber rather than a fixed cartridge. Each of these was a steel tube with one end open to accept powder and bullet and the other end closed by a plug having a nipple for a percussion cap to be affixed. These chamber pieces were treated like and performed like cartridges, though they were simply pushed up against the end of each barrel rather than sliding into the barrel as cartridges do in later designs. Still, there is the need for percussion caps and a great deal of machine time and tools just to produce the guns and enough firing chambers to make production worthwhile.

In perhaps five or six years, Grantville can have cartridges loaded with black powder equal to anything available in the 1870s. When that happens, Gatling guns will certainly be doable and perhaps, if steel production and manufacturing techniques are advanced enough, the Gatlings may be skipped in favor of a Maxim or Browning 1895-type automatic machine gun.

But does Grantville have five years to wait for a machine gun? A machine gun is what military planners refer to as a "force multiplier"; that is, if you only have a few men, something that gives them greater ability on the battlefield than their raw number suggests. To be worthwhile, a machine gun in 1632 would have to be able to deliver more effective shots on an enemy force than the same number of men armed with the SRG, a muzzle loading Flintlock that fires minie ball ammunition. For five men with SRGs, we might expect that to be between 15 and 20 shots per minute, with the ability to actually hit a predicted area at ranges up to 300 yards.

Was there a weapon that could do that, which did not need modern cartridges, heavy and expensive chamber pieces, percussion primers, and perfect springs? A design likely to be known or recorded in Grantville?

Yes.

During the American Civil War (ACW) the most-purchased and used "machine gun" fits this description. Most schoolboys can tell you about the Gatling guns bought by General Butler of the Union Army and even a few are aware of the single barreled "Auger Coffee Mill" that outnumbered the Gatling in the field. Very few, however, seem to recall the less glamorous Requa battery gun or "the covered bridge gun" as it was frequently called. Almost as heavy as a light field howitzer and drawn much the

same way by a team of only two horses on a carriage, the Requa bears little physical resemblance to the one M-60 machine gun in town.

But it is capabilities, not looks, that count.

The original Requa battery (or volley) guns fired up to 175 rounds of rifle-power shots per minute when

served by a crew of three. It could fire these bullets with some accuracy and power to a range of over 900 meters. The guns fired their shots either at a concentrated spot or spread out horizontally and equally s.p.a.ced over a wider area. While not as effective as an M-60 GPMG, the Requa could outshoot 40 SRG armed men with a crew of only four, three to work the gun and one to hold the horses.

So what is the Requa battery gun, as it was originally built and as it might be produced for the use of

Grantville's allies?

The original Requa battery guns in U.S. service during the American Civil War (ACW) had 25 barrels laid out horizontally on a light artillery carriage. The barrels were often described as .50 caliber, but surviving bullets seem to be .52 caliber. The caliber of the original guns is not a concern for Grantville, and it may be that a larger or smaller bore size would work as well or better. Certainly there is no reason not to use the same .58 caliber barrels that are being produced for the SRG, a specially designed bullet that would take advantage of the breech loading ability of the battery gun, and the barrels rifled with an appropriate twist. A longer, heavier, solid bullet of boat-tail construction would provide far better performance than the regular .58 caliber minie ball in use with the rifles. The bullet would be made so that its diameter equals the bore size of the barrels, as measured to the bottom of the rifling lands. Such bullets would retain velocity much better than minie b.a.l.l.s and, owing to the fact that they can be made as hard as linotype if the materials are available, would have far greater ability to pierce body armor than the soft lead minie ball.

The barrels must be mounted in a frame that will hold the rear of the barrels in a fixed position, yet allow the muzzle end of individual barrels to be adjusted to fire at a common point or spread to make a fan-shaped swath of fire. This can be accomplished by a set of steel wedges between the mounts of each barrel that, when pulled to the rear, would splay the muzzles apart a known amount. Two potential methods of controlling this movement are available: a simple lever having locks at three or four range settings, or infinitely adjustable via a large screw and adjustment wheel having gradations for various ranges. It would work well to have marked adjustments for parallel firing ( all barrels pointed at the same place), and then perfect separation (bullets strike a foot apart horizontally at a given range) for the

ranges of 150, 300, 600, and 900 meters.

The metal frame holding the barrels and their adjustment system needs to be adjustable so both sides can be raised or lowered to take into account "cant"-that is to say, level the barrels for best effect. It also

needs to have an elevation adjustment like a common artillery piece. These can all be done with large threaded screws, as was done in the original.

The feed strips for the ammunition are strips of steel or iron with holes for the individual cartridges.

These consist of two strips joined in a piano-hinge fashion to make a single loading strip. The cartridges are shoved through one set of holes and the other portion of the strip is then swung up to prevent cartridges from falling back out.

The cartridges may be made of copper rather than cartridge bra.s.s, or turned from iron or steel. They need not have a complex primer pocket or hollow rim and will thus be easier to make with fewer culls.

Unlike the firing chambers for the Gatling or Ager Coffee Mill guns, these are true cartridges that are fired inside the gun rather than simply b.u.t.ted against the back of the barrel, though they have no primer.

Like the Maynard carbine cartridges used in the ACW, the Requa cartridge simply had a small hole in its base to allow the flame of the external priming system to flash through. Since this is a preloaded cartridge, it may have as many features to improve its accuracy as desired, such as waxed felt discs and paper cards between the bullet and powder or a paper-wrapped bullet. For extreme close range work, shot-cartridges may even be issued.

The rear of the gun consists of a breech that is little more than a hinged piece whose front end bears a curved lower edge that will force the cartridges and feed strips forward as it closes. This is attached through a simple lever to a series of "fingers" that will extract the clip a short distance when fully opened. Imagine a piano hinge running the length of the rear of the barrels mounted horizontally and this breech attached to the hinge. When the piano-hinged breech is fully forward and down, the cartridges are loaded into the chambers of each barrel and await firing. Along the top edge of the breech piece is a groove and in the bottom of that groove are 25 holes that align with the hole in the bottom of each loaded cartridge. This groove is simply filled with loose gunpowder from a powder measure or horn and is ignited to fire. The original gun used a percussion cap for this ignition, but a flintlock or even a bit of glowing slow match from an artillerist's linstock would work as well. Ignition is from the center-most barrel outward and all barrels typically fire in a ripple in about one second.

Since the battery gun is an artillery piece with its own mount, lock time-the time between initiating firing and the bullet leaving the barrel-is not as critical as it would be on a shoulder-fired weapon.

While such a system may not be practical for producing a cartridge-firing flintlock rifle, it works fine in this usage.

The sighting system for the guns may take two forms. One is a single sight and a spirit leveling bubble to ensure that the barrels are level. The other would be a set of two or more sights that could each be set for range and then checked to ensure the gun was aimed to cover the area intended. A sight on each of the outer two barrels might do this and would allow the gun to be intentionally canted to shoot over ground sloping to one side.

Horizontal adjustments may be made either by moving the gun carriage trail, or the gun mount may be made more complex to allow it to function as a turn table. Such a system as the latter was familiar to Swedish King Gustav's gunners, who had such on some of his light guns, but it adds complexity to the design.

During the ACW, the battery gun was made at a cost of about $500 U.S. of that time. By comparison, some iron 2.12 inch rifled cannon were made for about $275 U.S. that same year. Grantville must determine which use of its resources would give it the greatest return, building 20 battery guns or building 36 little cannon. Certainly one battery gun can out-perform 50 average riflemen in the field at volley firing. A cannon might get off three shots of canister in a minute, the typical load for a two pounder being only 46 round musket b.a.l.l.s or 138 total for 3 shots. A battery gun gets off seven volleys totaling 175 shots of a better-shaped, more easily aimed bullet and can control dispersion over range. With a fan-shaped beaten zone, rather than the cone of fire of an artillery piece, half those shots are not wasted going high or low, as would be the artillery's cloud of shot.

Forty loaded strips would provide a gun with 1000 rounds of ammunition and would be easily carried on the gun carriage in ammunition boxes. And the gunner and his number one could each carry sufficient powder to prime that many strips. Additional loaded cartridges and a few spare strips could be carried on pack animals or in a battery wagon. A battery of two guns firing in sequence could fire 14 volleys in one minute, or a volley of 25 shots about every four and half seconds.

While Grantville and her allies begin to adopt the open-order skirmish formations that disperse riflemen and make volley fire less effective, a few battery guns in a battle can keep the benefit of volley fire at a low expense of man and horse power. This technology can be ignored only at great risk, for surely the French and Austrians have obtained history books that mention such a gun and are hard at work on their own versions. Grantville has the choice of experiencing this primitive machine gun from the point of view of the shooter or the target.

Which would you choose?

A Looming Challenge

by Pam Poggiani.

Grantville needs people to work in the munitions factories. And the steel mill. And the brick factories. Where will they come from? Why, all those poor women who have to spin and weave all the time can be emanc.i.p.ated right away-just build a spinning jenny and power up those looms!

Grantville needs more cloth, to make uniforms and to provide everyone with a change of clothing. What can be done? Why, build a spinning jenny and power up those looms!

Now, wait just a doggone minute-it is not that easy! Among the up-timers there are no textile mill workers, no hobby spinners, no hobby weavers. Some up-timers will be sure that great-grandmother's spinning wheel and loom in the attic must be better than anything down-time and want to show them off-those wheels and looms that have not, over the years, been fed to the stove (Foxfire 10, 362). But the down-timers may be hard put to keep straight faces. The spinning wheels used in American homes were great wheels, a design that down-time spinsters on the Continent abandoned over a hundred years before the Ring of Fire. American home looms were simple two- or four-harness looms; seventeenth-century weavers use multiple-harness or draw looms.

The spinning jenny pictured in encyclopedias is not the original of 1764, nor even the patented jenny of 1770, but an improved version from 1815. Except in the Encyclopedia Americana, the parts are not labeled. Even there, the description of how it works is incomplete, and the drawing does not show how the drive wheel at the side turns the spindles. Constructing a spinning jenny from the up-time knowledge known to be in Grantville will be a long, frustrating engineering exercise involving much experimentation.

The seventeenth-century loom is not suited to power. Several inventions and adjustments must be made before weaving, just of wool, can be mechanized.

First Steps Spinning Wheel.

The simplest improvement that up-timers can suggest is that the down-timers convert their spinning wheels from hand power to foot power: crank the hub of the drive wheel of a low spinning wheel, set a treadle below, and put a connecting rod (known in OTL as the footman) between.

Later historians a.s.sumed that the low wheel, with the flyer/bobbin spinning mechanism and the treadle to power it, appeared complete in 1530, replacing the thirteenth-century great wheel. Perhaps, in the absence of written evidence-women's work was seldom doc.u.mented-these writers a.s.sumed that spinsters enjoyed walking a prescribed course while spinning, manipulating the supply of fiber, the thread being spun, and the drive wheel, and that only the treadle could have convinced them to sit. The crank-and-connecting-rod system has been known since about 1500 (HOTb 653-4), for turning wood lathes. But would a wood-turner watch his wife spinning and thereby realize how useful a treadle would be? Not to mention that these later writers attribute the invention of the treadle and/or flyer/bobbin to a mason of Brunswick, one Johann Jurgen. A drawing of the low wheel with flyer/bobbin appears in a household journal of about 1480 (HOTa 204); there is no treadle.

Spinning wheels were hand-powered until late in the seventeenth century (Feldman-Wood). "A Woman Spinning," painted in 1655 by Nicolaes Maes, of Amsterdam, shows the earlier, treadle-less design, as do several earlier paintings, while "Interior with a Woman at a Spinning Wheel," by Esaias Boursse, also of Amsterdam, from 1661, shows a primitive treadle. "The Spinner," painted a generation later by Willem van Mieris, of Leiden, shows a wheel with a fully developed treadle. This indicates that the treadle was first applied about 1660, and modified later.

A few minor tweaks may be necessary: The crank and the far end of the treadle must be in line, and making the table three-legged instead of four-legged is advisable. The treadle must be able to drive the wheel in either direction, according to need, so footman and treadle are tied together with a bit of leather lacing through a hole bored in each. The bearings, probably of leather, between crank and footman and between treadle bar (replacing a stretcher) and the table legs, should be firm enough to hold the wheel in position when the spinster stops it, so that she can stop it exactly when she wants to, and restart it going in the same direction easily.

Photographs of a treadled spinning wheel in operation can be found in the newer encyclopedias (not in the 1911 Britannica), and in Foxfire 10 (356; not in the article on spinning and weaving found in Foxfire 2). Grantville's museum contains a low wheel with treadle, but no up-timer knows anything about spinning wheels and may not even notice the differences between it and the wheels used by down-timers.

Loom.

The first improvement to the loom is the flying shuttle, which will provide some ease for the weaver. The two looms in Grantville's museum do not have flying shuttles; although of late twentieth-century manufacture, they are simple versions of the looms used in the home by women of the seventeenth century. However, the text and drawings available in several encyclopedias should be sufficient once the desire for the invention occurs.

A loom holds the warp, the lengthwise threads of a textile, taut, and provides a mechanism to lift certain of these threads-in the simplest case, every other-while pulling the rest down, creating a shed for the pa.s.sage of the shuttle. The shuttle carries the weft, the crosswise thread, over and under the warp threads. The usual shuttle of the seventeenth century is a shape known and used at least since the thirteenth century-a boat shuttle. This is a rectangular block with pointed ends; in the top is a trough wherein a bobbin full of yarn can spin, letting the weft pay out through a small hole in the side of the shuttle as it travels across the warp. The weaver opens the shed by pressing treadles with his feet. While holding the treadles down, he stretches forward and to one side to throw the shuttle through the shed with a snap of his wrist, then quickly reaches to the other side of the loom to catch it. A man of average height, or less, can weave on a warp two ells in width, an ell on most of the Continent being 26 or 27 inches. Before opening the countershed and throwing the shuttle back, the weaver swings the beater (or batten) to snug the shot (British: pick) of weft against the growing edge, the fell, of the cloth. The beater is made of two heavy lengths of wood hung vertically from above, holding the reed between the lower ends. The reed, extending across the loom, is strips of reed, set vertically and edge-forward, between two laths. The warp threads pa.s.s through the dents between the individual reeds. As well as beating up the weft, the beater and reed help keep the warp threads from clinging to each other.

The flying shuttle, invented by John Kay in 1738, will permit one weaver (instead of two or more) to produce wider cloth, and will improve the ergonomics of weaving. But it will increase the speed of weaving very little. Although Aspin uses the term "doubled" for the increase in speed (p. 14), the actual numbers recorded at the time, and reported by Aspin, show that after the invention, a weaver needed yarn from five or six spinsters instead of only four.

Invention of the flying shuttle begins with modification of the beater. The bottom lath is widened so that it extends forward of the reed to make a shuttle race on which the shuttle can slide. At each end of the beater, beyond the edges of the warp, a box big enough to hold the shuttle is added, with the end toward the beater open for the shuttle to leave by and enter through. The shuttle is thrown from one box to the other across the warp by the impact of a pick block, a small wooden block deep in the box that is jerked or knocked so that it hits the end of the shuttle and then encounters a stopper. There are several ways to move the pick block: the original invention had the ends of a loose cord fastened to the pick blocks through a slot in the front of the box, and the weaver jerked a handle fastened to the center of the cord to left or right.

The shuttle used in the twentieth century with the flying shuttle mechanism is the boat shuttle, but having metal caps on each end with a spring inside instead of being a solid block of wood. These caps came fairly early in the development, as did tiny wheels set in the bottom of the shuttle.

The weaver will still need to check the length of weft left behind by the shuttle before beating it into place. It must be enough to keep the weft from pulling the edges in, but not so much that there are loops of it beyond the edges of the cloth. A neat selvage is the mark of a good weaver.

The treadle and the flying shuttle are minor improvements-they are evolutionary, not revolutionary-but they could incline down-timers to look favorably on more up-time innovations.

Changes: Down-time to Up-time The modern, up-time, textile industry depends not only on machines-a mult.i.tude of them!-but also on

improved crop yield, good transport, and, yes, cheap labor even yet.

The down-time European fiber crops are wool, linen, hemp, and silk. The first three are grown almost everywhere; silk is produced in Italy, and in France in an area around Lyons. Cotton is grown elsewhere and imported. Ramie, jute, and other natural fibers are native to, and used in only, the Far East.

Raw Material Supply.

Wool (undercoat of Ovis aries) is from sheep that have been bred for the purpose for millennia. A major part of the wool supply comes from Britain, which, in the 1630s, does not tax its export. For more wool, there must be more sheep. What will they eat? Australia or America could feed them, but not Europe. Breeding for quant.i.ty as well as quality of wool has been underway for something over 6,000 years; formal Mendelian theory may be of interest to down-timers.Flax (Linum usitatissimum) and hemp (Cannabis sativa), bast fibers, can be grown anywhere in Europe; at this time, flax is a major crop in areas just south of Thuringia, and hemp is major in several areas of Germany. They will grow in almost any soil, as long as it is deep enough for the roots.