what is Mungo Shoddy?

So, what precisely is mungo and shoddy? 

and what's the difference between the two? 

and who is our eponymous hero mungo shoddy?

Wikipedia says :

Mungo

Fibrous woollen material generated from waste fabric, particularly tightly woven cloths and rags. See also: shoddy.

Shoddy

Recycled or remanufactured wool. Historically generated from loosely woven materials. Benjamin Law invented shoddy and mungo, as such, in England in 1813. He was the first to organise, on a larger scale, the activity of taking old clothes and grinding them down into a fibrous state that could be re-spun into yarn. The shoddy industry was centred on the towns of Batley, Morley, Dewsbury and Ossett in West Yorkshire, and concentrated on the recovery of wool from rags. Shoddy is inferior to the original wool; "shoddy" has come to mean "of poor quality" in general (not related to clothing), and the original meaning is largely obsolete.

History House declares shoddy to be :

A good example of early recycling.

If someone says that something is shoddy they normally mean that it is badly made or of poor quality, or may be referring to bad workmanship. But where did this word come from?
Its origin goes back at least to 1813 and surprisingly refers to a process which would be seen nowadays as a good example of recycling. The recycling of wool.
Shoddy is the name given to an inferior woollen yarn made by shredding scraps of woollen rags into fibres, grinding them and then mixing them with small amounts of new wool. The object was to manufacture a cheap cloth which could be made into products and clothes. It was also known as Rag-Wool. An even finer shredding process produced what was called Mungo.
Shoddy was first made in Batley, Yorkshire, by, it is believed, Benjamin Law, and its production quickly spread to surrounding textile towns in the area.
The collection of the rags for this process started in streets all over Britain by rag dealers or rag and bone men as they became more commonly known. The rags were sorted, and any seams, or parts of the rag not suitable, were left to rot and then sold onto to farmers to manure crops. Or they were used for bedding or stuffing.
The remaining wool rags were then sent to the shoddy mills for processing. For several decades shipments of rags even arrived from continental Europe.

Maggie Blanck clarifies :
 
Benjamin Law developed a process of turning recycled old rags mixed with some virgin wool into shoddy around 1813 which had a revolutionary effect on the textile industry. He was unable at the time to figure out a way of incorperating taylors clippings into the process. This was figured out by his nephews several years later and was called "mungo". By 1855, 35,000,000 pounds of rag were being sorted and processed into yarn to make "mungo" and "shoddy". The making of shoddy and mungo is a similar process to the making of woolen and worsted, once the rags had been ground up and processed into yarn.
Batley and Dewsbury were the major centers for the rag collecting and sorting business, as well as the manufacturer of shoddy and mungo. Rags were collected from two sources.

1. Old rags from old clothes were collected by ragmen for a price. The ragmen would then sell them to the rag merchant.
2. New rags were bought by the rag merchant as scrap from clothing manufacturers and tailors.

Old rags were not as valuable, as they were dirty and needed more processing to turn into yarn. New rag was used for mungo, which was a finer cloth than shoddy

Sir George Head wrote:

"The trade or occupation of the late owner, his life and habits, or the filthiness and antiquity of the garment itself, oppose no bar to this wonderful regeneration; whether from the scarecrow or the gibbet, it makes no difference; so that, according to the change of human affairs, it no doubt frequently does happen, without figure of speech or metaphor, that the identical garment to-day exposed to the sun and rain of a Kentish cherry orchard or saturated with tobacco smoke on the back of a beggar in a pothouse, is doomed in its turn to grace the swelling collar, or add dignified proportion to the chest of the dandy". Yorkshire Scenes Lore and Legends, M Tait, 1888

And again from Mr Taits book:

"Hither are brought tatters from pediculous Poland, from the Gipsies of Hungary, from the beggars and scarecrows of Germany, from the frowsy peasants of Muscovy; to say nothing of snips and sherds from monks' gowns and lawyers' robes, from postillions' jackets and soldiers' uniforms, from maidens' bodices and noblemens' cloaks" A heterogenous collection truly, to be shredded by "devils" into mungo fibre, re-spun and re-woven, and thus resurrectioned into new material for the backs of people who little dream of the various vicissitudes through which their garments have previously gone." Yorkshire Scenes Lore and Legends, M Tait, 1888

...So, a revolutionary example of early recycling, fit for noblemen and dandies, or an inferior cloth of poor quatily? ...and what of our protagonist, mungo shoddy, where does he fit in? in his own words : much as the moniker suggests, mungo lives in a cut and paste collage of a psychodelic daydream, weaving locally produced musical nuggets within a tapestry of found footage and fx...

In other words, mungo's modus operandi can be summed up in Ossett's unofficial town motto - INUTILE UTILE EX ARTE - Useless things made useful by skill.