Leather Production in Roman Britain

For innumerable centuries, currying was one of the ancient and essential leather industries. It cleaned, scraped, stretched and finished the tanned hides by oiling, waxing or colouring them to the desired surface finish. There is even a reference to currying in The Iliad.

Although we are yet to identify the site of a single tannery in Roman Britain, we have recently found large pieces of ‘crust leather’, that is the hard, inflexible and untreated leather that is produced during the tanning process, at Drapers’ Gardens in London. These deposits can be dated to the third century AD, and they suggest that curriers were treating and finishing freshly-tanned leather there at that time.

There are, too, many leather items, like this shoe, which have been preserved in waterlogged conditions in London and elsewhere, which are of such good quality that they must have been made with curried leather.