Tents, to be linen or not to be linen.

[M. Demetrius]

Fabric is VERY labor-intensive to produce -why waste this on keeping soldiers dry, when the goatskin is a by-product of meat production?

The process of tanning hides is not as easy as some might think. But don't lose sight of the plain fact that labor was not as pricey then as it is today. I suppose some kind of time/labor analysis could be made to determine if tanning hides and harvesting/processing/spinning/weaving cloth were roughly equal in difficulty of production, but I wouldn't know how to set it up.

Anyone who has sewn both will likely agree that cloth is much easier to sew a tight seam than leather, for many reasons. The weight of leather is certainly higher than cloth, in the general sense of what we're discussing here. A papilio in modern canvas weighs something like 20 lbs (9 kg), while a leather one could easily weigh three times that much.