goat-sheep (caprinae skins) (Q344)

Skins from animals in the Caprinae subfamily to which goat and sheep both belong. The goat is an animal with a coat of coarse hair that leaves clearly defined hair follicles in the skin, grouped in three in waving lines across the skin, usually in combination with a rich, deep grain. The best quality skins have a dense network of fibres in the epidermis, which, in combination with stable organic tanning agents such a sumac, produced skins of great beauty with outstanding durability. The best skins were imported (hence the names they were given in Europe – maroquin, turkey leather and today niger – named after the countries they came from. The sheep is a closely related animal which, depending on the proportion of coarse hairs and fine wool hairs in the skin will look more or less like goatskin, and if there is a very high proportion of coarse hair (hairsheep), the skin is, to the eye, more or less indistinguishable from goatskin. This confusion was compounded in the early eighteenth century when Edward Harley, Earl of Oxford, unable to obtain sufficient quantities of high-quality turkey leather (tanned goatskin) for his enormous library, began to import a bright red skin directly from Morocco made from the skins of hairsheep. Because of where it came from, it was called ‘morocco leather’, which means that English and French morocco leather came from different animals – with vastly different levels of durability, to which the deterioriated condition of many of Lord H