By historian Roger Bingham of Ackenthwaite:

GREEN is Kendal’s colour.

But it alludes not to the emerald hues of Kentdale but to the woollen cloth, spun and woven in the town from the Middle Ages to modern times.

The material also known as ‘Kendal cottons’ had, however, a low rating compared to other textiles.

It was described in the 19th century as ‘coarse woollen cloth made from the worst wool and used for the very poor of London’.

Otherwise it was fit only for ‘horse clothing, dusters and mops’.

Around 1380 a statute of King Richard II referred to its ‘being sold to poor and mean people’.

In 1424 a commentator called Lydgate referred to a beggar having on his head ‘a thread bare Kendal hood’.

Barclay, a hundred years later, referred sarcastically to a character ‘whose costly clothing was of threadbare Kendal Green’.

Yet in 1545 Hall’s chronicles relate how Henry VIII’s servants visited Katherine Parr ( ‘the Queen from Kendal’) ‘in short coats of Kentish Kendal like outlaws of Robin Hood’.

But, Kentish probably did not refer to the Queen Katharine’s native river but to the county of Kent where more regal raiment was created.