Fig. 270.—Velvet Brocade; Italian; Sixteenth Century.
In France the silk weaving industry was first established at Lyons about the middle of the sixteenth century. The designs of the first efforts of the French weavers were very similar if not copies of the prevailing Italian school, but soon after became more floral in character, and more and more realistic renderings of flowers and foliage, until about the eighteenth century, when they partook of the same character as the pottery and furniture decoration, which has been already described. During the Mediæval and Renaissance periods France, like England, imported silks and velvets from Italy and the East, and their linen and drapery from Flanders and Germany.
Bruges in Flanders was especially famous during the sixteenth century for its silks and velvets, and Ypres was even more so for its fine linens and damasks.
Very little silk was manufactured in England prior to 1629, when about this date a company of silkmen was formed in London. The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 had the effect of firmly establishing the manufacture of silk in England by the colony of French refugees who settled at Spitalfields, St. Giles’s, and Soho in London, and at Canterbury, Norwich, and Coventry. The trade soon afterwards spread to Manchester, Macclesfield, and Paisley in Scotland, and the first silk mill for spinning and throwing was erected at Derby by John Lombe in the year 1717, which was worked by water power.
The designs for the patterns of English silks have always been more or less imitations of the prevalent French styles, and, in fact, England depended largely until late years on the efforts of French designers for nearly all of its textile patterns. This is not the case, however, to-day, for very few foreigners are now employed as designers by English manufacturers.
The chief seat of the velvet manufacture in Germany at the present day is Crefeld; Switzerland produces great quantities of silk, which is made chiefly at Zurich and the villages on the banks of the Lake of Zurich, at Bâsle, and other places.
China, the birthplace of silk, and younger Japan are still famed for their delicate fabrics in this material, from whence the raw products are imported extensively into Europe. In America the silk industry has made great headway of late years, the principal seat of the manufacture is the town of Paterson in New Jersey.
England has always held its own in the manufacture of woollen goods of good material, mostly of plain cloth, but sometimes inwrought or woven with designs of figures, animals, and foliage patterns. At Bath, Norwich, Worcester, and in the abbeys and great religious houses during the Middle Ages the monks employed a good deal of their time at the loom, and considerable quantities of their work were exported to the Continent during the fourteenth century. The town of Worsted in Norfolk has given the name—worsted—to a cloth made there from a new preparation of the woollen yarn, which consisted of a special twisting of the threads so as to make the yarn of a harder texture. This cloth has been used for church vestments, hangings, and bed coverings.
Cotton, the woolly product of the cotton-tree, and the cloth made from it, has been known in India and the East from the earliest times.
Pliny mentions cotton under the name of a fabric called oxylina, made from the cotton that grew about the branches of the xylon or gossypium tree, or shrub, which grew in India, Upper Egypt, and Arabia.