Linen diaper weaving in 18thcentury Scotland
Vanessa Habib takes a look at a once thriving trade and the many patterns and varieties that could be skilfully woven by highly-trained craftspeople in centres such as Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen
‘The loom was there, and the weaving, and the growing pattern in the cloth .…’
These lines from the story of Silas Marner, the linen weaver of Raveloe at a moment when he had been robbed of his life savings, remind us of an essential trade of which there is now little trace, that of the customary weaver and the weaving of linen for the domestic household by hand.
Discussions with housewife or housekeeper of fanciful or hardwearing patterns for the many linens used at home, for example sheeting and towels, and the commissioning of regular orders of figured napery or table linen for the household no longer take place. But a rare weaver’s pattern book presently in the collections of the National Library of Scotland illustrates, on close to 70 pages, the vocabulary of patterns a journeyman weaver might learn, or a master weaver create for his customers.They are samples of a huge variety of patterns, now forgotten, based on fancy twills or ‘tweels’ where floats of yarn are extended to form diagonal patterns, which the weaver could reverse to form diamond or lozenge shapes over the cloth with complex interlacings reminiscent of knotwork.
Twills or tweeled weaves were often used to make a thicker cloth, the yarns being set more closely to withstand frequent laundering and wear in the home.With longer floats or by ‘breaking the tweel’ the strict diagonals of twills could be disguised to create a smoother surface where larger and more intricate designs showed off the natural gloss of linen. On the tea table and the breakfast table these bleached white cloths emphasised cleanliness and decorum. In candlelight, which threw up the patterns, they emphasised the taste and social standing of the host.
Although the owner of the book is anonymous, each pattern is named with details showing the most efficient way to weave it.What is perhaps the name of the person who placed regular orders for a particular design is also added, for example, ‘Mrs Lambie’s Snow Drop’, which needed 25 healds (the mechanism which lifted the warp threads in the loom in sequence) to complete the pattern, or ‘Mrs Thomas Buchanan No.4’. Many named patterns are known from Scottish inventories of domestic linen, for example, ‘hundred rose knot’, ‘twenty loaf knot’, ‘heart knot’, ‘star knot’ and ‘Cortre knot’, perhaps originally an imported design from Kortrijk or Courtrai in Flanders.
Some may have had satin bases, such as the ‘fir tree knot’ and ‘king’s knot’ and the more elaborate ‘Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream’ noted in this pattern book and ‘30 Leaves Dornick’, a term connected with the town of Doornik or Tournai, used to describe figured diaper table linen in Scotland.These patterns were ubiquitous and infinitely varied. Less well known is the skill involved in managing so many healds (or ‘leaves’ as weavers called them) in the loom to produce a fault free cloth.The many lifts needed to weave a large pattern placed stress on the warp threads, and because linen was not an elastic fibre, yarn often snapped. Larger diaper patterns could be woven with a ‘back harness’, a second set of healds operated by knotted cords passing over the loom above the weaver’s head and pulled down as the pattern required. The ‘mounting’ of a loom, with so
much cordage and many moving parts, took many months to learn.
Increased regulations
The linen trade in Scotland became the subject of national scrutiny and regulation after the union of 1707. The establishment of the Board of Trustees for Fisheries, Manufactures and Improvements signalled a national policy to foster and expand the linen trade beyond customary or private work. Early encouragements to merchants and manufacturers to test the market included annual prizes for the best webs of different kinds of linen then made in various areas of the country, for example diaper in Fife or fine plain linen in Edinburgh. In Glasgow and Paisley, where some of the finest yarn was spun, there was a thriving market for linen neckerchiefs ‘which is your Staple’.
The rules for competition in 1734, for example, were laid out in the board’s minutes and letter books and advertised in the press. In that year four prizes were offered, including £2 10s for the finest web containing not less than six dozen napkins in the piece in a width of roughly 30 inches. Glasgow inventories reveal the scale of this business. James Newall, a merchant who died in 1737, held in stock 760 dozen and two odd Glasgow and Paisley chequered handkerchiefs or napkins in his warehouse – valued at over £255 sterling
– and 151 dozen and seven odd white napkins with different borders lying in his warehouse and cellars valued at £69 12s 4d.
Napkins were often decorated with silk and with cotton, which was legally permitted after 1736, and many were dyed or printed after weaving. Newall had an eighth share in a ship named The Glasgow of Liverpool and many trading connections from Bristol to Manchester. He was a partner in the Shuttlefield weaving factory which by the early 1740s employed over 70 looms and additional private weavers. Many of these neckerchiefs found their way to the American colonies and the West Indies. All webs of linen offered for sale, whether for home or export, had to carry a national stamp as a guarantee of quality.
Dunfermline links
In 1736, twelve suits of table linen were presented to the speaker of the House of Commons, Arthur Onslow, as a demonstration of the progress of the linen manufacture in Scotland. Perhaps more a gesture of commitment to the project, it did, however, result in the donation of £100 for prizes for the best-made Scottish damask and diaper for the following three years. Diaper weaving was an important trade in Dunfermline and surrounding areas, historically associated with the court and church and it could be made with many fanciful patterns and as competition rules specified, different qualities.
A rare and very early damask tablecloth survives in the collections of Dunfermline Museum which proclaims ‘LET THE INCORPORATIONE
OF THE LINNEN
MANUFACTORY IN SCOTLAND PROSPER’, showing a coat of arms, a man with a shuttle and a woman holding a distaff and spindle at each side.There was a taste for armorial designs amongst the nobility, who could purchase suits of napery bearing their family crest. In the past these were imported from the Low Countries but attempts were made in Edinburgh and Dunfermline to copy these exquisite cloths in the early 18th century. A recently-discovered and complete tablecloth in the collections of the Highland Folk Museum (pictured overleaf) shows the royal coat
of arms of the first three Hanoverian kings and emblems of union between Scotland and England. Napkins were described by a contemporary writer in 1720 as essential in polite society however a tablecloth could be optional:
If a Friend come to your House betwixt Meals… and you design only to give some little Refreshment, and not a formal Meal, then you are only to cause throw down a Napkin half-folded on the Table, and not a Table-cloath, and another folded on his Plate, with a Fork and Knife:And if it be only Bread and Cheese, there is no need of a Fork or another Napkin than what is under the Bread and Cheese.
William Cheap was one of several linen merchants and weavers working in Edinburgh who manufactured a wide range of domestic linens for an increasingly wealthy urban population. He advertised, in the mid 18th century, tea towels, breakfast covers and suits of diaper and damask table linen with ‘great Choice of the prettiest Patterns’, many entirely new and some three yards broad and four yards long, an indication of more convivial dining.
He owned drawlooms for weaving damask, at his factory house on St John’s Hill at the Pleasance. John Bruce at the Diaper Factory Hall in Glasgow was able to supply the earl of March’s household with over £117 worth of napery in the summer of 1749, which included over 20 diaper and damask tablecloths, one flowered, eleven dozen diaper ‘servits’ and three dozen damask, as well as yardages of Holland, towelling, ‘haggabag’ (huckaback), and 360 yards of sheeting.
A broad width tablecloth, say of eight or nine feet, required three men to weave it: two to pass the shuttle from one side of the warp to the other and one to control the pattern threads.The trustees’ minute books record experiments in the 1740s with what was claimed to be a kind of fly shuttle invented by a table linen weaver named John Johnston from Arbroath. Johnston was able to weave cloth 2.5 yards broad without the help of another man. Although John Kay had patented a fly shuttle in 1733, Johnston was awarded a grant in return for training apprentices in his method of weaving. All did not end well for him, however, either from professional envy from other weavers or from the erratic performance of the shuttle itself during trials in Edinburgh.
From 1751 linen handloom weavers in Scotland were freed from guild restrictions and their long training as journeymen. As markets grew, some were tempted to set up too quickly, their orders not fulfilled and thus ‘the country Housewives wisely chuse to give their work to the old fashioned weavers.’ Inventories of the time show how large and varied the stock of domestic linen could be. The Virginia merchant William Crawfurd, who died in 1755, left quantities of napery (and he was not unusual), including over 60 tablecloths and 290 or more napkins, of dornick, damboard and damask on which to display his silver and delftware, numerous towels, some tea ‘servets’, and impressive numbers of pairs of sheets, all hand-woven.
The continuing growth of interest in the study of Scottish material culture has led to a reassessment of the national heritage and is an incentive to search for more examples of the linen weaver’s work, which after all was nationally supported and encouraged for more than a century.Treasured pieces of linen survive in family collections and in long-forgotten bequests in local museums.We read of the romance and the drudgery of the linen weaver’s life, and the onslaught of technology which affected it, but have overlooked the immense skill and craftsmanship in making a fine piece of linen in what has been called the ‘industrious revolution’.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author is indebted to the Pasold Research Fund for a grant to photograph the tablecloth in illustration 7. High Resolution photography was undertaken by Philip Dickson at PSD Photography in Edinburgh.The author thanks Rachel Chisholm at the Highland Folk Museum.An article on the tablecloth is in preparation.