Cloth leads found in Bruges: evidence of medieval cloth industry

The construction of a new underground car park on Koning Albert I-plein revealed an extra secret: 241 cloth leads were found during the works. Such a lead was a hallmark of cloth from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. In that period, Bruges was the third largest producer of cloth after Ghent and Ypres. One in four Bruges residents was involved in the cloth industry at the time.

Gigantic production

During the excavations, remnants of wooden frameworks were also found, on which they stretched the sheet at the time.

According to Raakvlak, the intermunicipal service for immovable heritage in Bruges and the surrounding area, the find proves the size of a gigantic cloth production in Bruges at that time: they produced an estimated 25,000 sheets per year.