[904] Hollingshed’s Chronicle, 1577, p. 213.
[905] In his satyre called The Steel of Glass:—“In silk knitt hose, and Spanish leather shoes.”
[906] In Hollingshed, third part, p. 1290:—“Upon the stage there stood at the one end eight small women children, spinning worsted yarne, and at the other as manie knitting of worsted yarn hose.”
[907] Buch des Alten Pommerlandes, 1639, 4to, p. 388:—“Duke Bogislaus VIII. suffered himself at length to be overcome by love, and married Sophia, daughter of Procopius margrave of Moravia, who was a very prudent and moderate lady. In her old age, when her sight became bad, so that she was incapable of sewing or embroidering, she never put the knitting-needle out of her hands, as is written in our chronicles. The rhymes which she always had in her mouth are remarkable:—
Nicht beten, gern spatzieren gehn,
Oft im Fenster und vorm Spiegel stehn,
Viel geredet, und wenig gethan,
Mein Kind, da ist nichts Fettes an.
‘Never to pray; to be fond of walking; to stand often at the window and before the looking-glass; to talk much and do little; is not, my child, the way to be rich.’”
[908] Mezeray, where he speaks of the silk manufactories under Henry IV.
[909] The first description of the stocking-loom illustrated by figures, with which I am acquainted, is in Deering’s Nottingham, 1751, 4to, but it is very imperfect. A much better is to be found in the second volume of the Encyclopédie, printed at Paris, 1751, fol. p. 94–113. The figures are in the first volume of the second part of the Planches, and make eleven plates, eight of which are full sheets. [The reader will also find a very good description of the stocking-loom illustrated with woodcuts in Ure’s Dictionary, art. Hosiery.]
[910] The following passage occurs in the petition, p. 302: “Which trade is properly stiled framework-knitting, because it is direct and absolute knit-work in the stitches thereof, nothing different therein from the common way of knitting (not much more antiently for publick use practised in this nation than this), but only in the numbers of needles, at an instant working in this, more than in the other by an hundred for one, set in an engine or frame composed of above 2000 pieces of smith, joiners, and turners work, after so artificial and exact a manner, that, by the judgement of all beholders, it far excels in the ingenuity, curiosity, and subtility of the invention and contexture, all other frames or instruments of manufacture in use in any known part of the world.”
[911] This account is given by Aaron Hill in his Rise and Progress of the Beech-oil Invention, 1715, 8vo.