English Industries of the Middle Ages / Being an Introduction to the Industrial History of Medieval England

by L. F. Salzman

Than there be stairs to the top of Paul's.'

The first process, then, was the sorting of the wool. The better quality was used for the ordinary cloths, and the worst was made up into coarse cloth known as cogware and Kendal cloth, three-quarters of a yard broad, and worth from 40d. to 5s. the piece.[497] The term cogware seems to have sprung from its being sold to cogmen, the crews of the ships called cogs; but whether for their own use, or for export is not quite clear. The alternative name of Kendal cloths was derived from the district of Kendal in Westmoreland, a seat of the industry, at least as early as 1256.[498] The mixing of different qualities of wool in one cloth was prohibited; and as it was forbidden to mix English wool with Spanish,[499] so was the use of flocks, or refuse wool, in ordinary cloth,[500] except in the case of the cloth of Devonshire, in which, owing to the coarseness of the wool, an admixture of flock was necessary.[501]

In dyeing two mediums are required, the colouring matter and the mordant which fixes the dye in the wool. The mordant most in use in the Middle Ages was alum,[502] and at Bristol in 1346 we find that only 'Spyralym, Glasalym, and Bokkan' might be used and that any one using 'Bitterwos' or 'Alym de Wyght,' which must have derived its name from the Isle of Wight, or even found with any in his possession, was liable to be fined.[503] Far the commonest dye-stuff was the blue woad, of which enormous quantities were used. The plant (Isatis tinctoria) from which this was prepared is indigenous (the ancient Britons, indeed, wore the dye without the intervention of cloth), but practically all the woad used commercially in England was imported, Southampton being one of the great centres of the trade.[504] In 1286 the authorities at Norwich came to an agreement with the woad merchants of Amiens and Corby as to the size of the packages in which woad and weld, a yellow dye in much demand, might be sold,[505] and at Bristol some sixty years later elaborate regulations were drawn up for the preparation of the woad, of which two varieties are mentioned, that of Picardy and that of Toulouse.[506] The woad was imported in casks in the form of dry balls; these had to be broken up small, moistened with water, and then heaped up to ferment; after a few days the top layer became so hot that it could hardly be touched with the hand; the heap was then turned over to bring the bottom to the top, and left till this in turn had fermented; a third turn usually sufficed to complete the process.[507] In Bristol special 'porters' were appointed to undertake and supervise this seasoning and the subsequent storing of the woad, and a further regulation compelled the merchant to sell his woad within forty days after it had been stored and assayed.[508] The setting of the woad, that is to say its conversion into dye, was also an art in itself, and it would seem that in Bristol it was the custom for dyers to go to the houses of their customers and prepare the woad-vats. Through undertaking more jobs than they could properly attend to, much woad was spoilt, and in 1360 they were forbidden to take charge of more than one lot of dye at one time.[509] Further abuses arose through the ignorance and incapacity of many of the itinerant dyers, and in 1407 it was enacted that only those dyers who held a certificate of competency should ply their trade in the town.[510] At Coventry, another great centre of the trade, complaints were made in 1415 that the dyers had not only raised their prices, charging 6s. 8d. instead of 5s. for a cloth, 30s. instead of 20s. for 60 lbs. of wool, and 6s. instead of 4s. for 12 lbs. of the thread for which the town was famous, but were in the habit of taking the best part (la floure) of the woad and madder for their own cloths, and using only the weaker portion for their customers' cloths. A petition was therefore made that two drapers, a woader and a dyer, should be elected annually to supervise the trade.[511] Some fifty years later we have at Coventry a notice of what appears to have been a medieval instance of a quarrel between a 'trade union,' the Dyers Company, and 'blackleg' firms.[512] Thomas de Fenby and ten other dyers of Coventry complained against John Egynton and William Warde that they had assembled the members of their trade and had compelled them to swear to various things contrary to the law and their conscience, as that no one should buy any woad until it had been viewed and appraised by six men chosen for the purpose by the said Egynton and Warde, and that no dyer should make any scarlet dye (grene) at less than 6s. (the vat?), or put any cloth into woad for less than 4d. or 5d. Warde and Egynton had also adopted the medieval form of picketing, by hiring Welshmen and Irishmen to waylay and kill the complainants on their way to neighbouring markets.

A list of cloths made in York in 1395-6[513] gives some idea of the colours in general use. For the first three months, September-December, blue largely predominated, but for some unexplained reason this colour almost disappeared from January to May, its place being taken by russet. Red, sanguine, morrey (or orange), plunket,[514] green, and motleys, white, blue, and green occur; also 'paly,' which was presumably some striped material, and in a very few cases black. By the regulations drawn up in London in 1298,[515] no dyer who dyed burnets blue[516] or other colours might dye 'blecche' or tawny: the reason does not appear, but this uncertain tint, 'blecche,' occurs again as reserved specially for Spanish wool.[517] For blue, as we have seen, woad was used, and for yellow weld, a combination of the two yielding green; scarlet was derived from the grain (greyne),[518] and reds and russets from madder, which was imported in large quantities. Several varieties of lichen were probably included under the head of 'orchal,' and afforded shades of brown and red. Fancy shades were formed by double dyeing, and apparently were not always reliable, as a statute[519] passed in 1533 ordered that none should dye woollen cloth 'as browne blewes, pewkes, tawnyes, or vyolettes,' unless they were 'perfectly boyled, greyned, or madered upon the wode, and shotte with good and sufficient corke or orchall.' At this time brazil, or logwood, was being adopted as a dye, and its use was absolutely forbidden.

Carding, or combing, and spinning are processes which need not detain us long. They were both home industries, and spinning, in particular, was the staple employment of the women, and accordingly regulations were not infrequently made to ensure a good supply of wool for their use. At Bristol, in 1346, no oiled wool ready for carding and spinning might be sent out of the town until the carders and spinners had had a chance of applying for it; moreover, it might only be exposed for sale on a Friday, and no middleman might buy it.[520] Similarly at Norwich, in 1532, the butchers were ordered to bring their woolfells into the market and offer them for sale to the poor women who lived by spinning.[521] When the clothmaking trade got into the hands of the big capitalist clothiers, who gave out their wool to be carded and spun, it became necessary to pass laws[522] to ensure on the one hand that the workers should do their work faithfully, and not abstract any of the wool,[523] and on the other, that the masters should not defraud the carders and spinners by paying them in food or goods[524] instead of in money, or by the use of false weights, making women, for instance, comb 7½ lbs. of wool as a 'combing stone,' which should only contain 5 lbs.[525]

Weaving was, of course, the most important of all the processes in clothmaking. Reduced to its simplest form, the weaver's loom consists of a horizontal frame, to the ends of which the warp threads, which run longitudinally through the cloth, are fastened in such manner that they can be raised and depressed by heddles, or looped threads, in alternate series, leaving room between the two layers of warp for the passage of the shuttle, charged with the woof.[526] The shuttle, flying from side to side across the alternating warp threads, covers them with woof, which is packed close by a vertical frame of rods, the lay or batten, swinging between the warp threads. To weave tight and close required considerable strength, and at Norwich women were forbidden to weave worsteds because they were 'not of sufficient power' to work them properly.[527] The cloth as it was woven was wound on a roll, bringing a fresh portion of the warp within the weaver's reach, but while its length was thus limited merely by custom or convenience, its breadth was obviously controlled by the width of the loom, and when Henry IV., in 1406, ordered that cloth of ray should be made six-quarters of a yard broad instead of five-quarters, as had always been the custom, the order had to be revoked as it would have necessitated all the ray weavers obtaining new looms.[528] For the right to use looms payments had often to be made to authorities of the town. At Winchester in the thirteenth century, every burel loom paid 5s. yearly, the only exceptions being that the mayor, the hospital, and the town clerk might each work one loom free of charge.[529] Nottingham was another town where duties were paid on looms,[530] and at Bristol, as we have seen, prior to 1355, the erection of a 'webanlam' entailed payments of 8s. 5d. in all.

To guard against false working, it was the rule at Bristol that all looms must stand in shops and rooms adjoining the road, and in sight of the people, and the erection of a loom in a cellar or upstair room entailed a fine.[531] It was possibly for the same reason that weavers were forbidden to work at night,[532] though an exception was made at Winchester in favour of the period immediately preceding Christmas.[533] On the other hand, the London jurors in 1320 coupled this ordinance against working by candle light with the enforced holiday which the weavers' gild compelled its members to take between Christmas and the Purification (2nd February)[534] as measures prejudicial to the commonalty, and intended to restrict the supply and so maintain the price of cloth.[535] A further device for the same purpose was the rule that no cloth of Candlewick Street was to be worked in less than four days, though they might easily be made in two or three days.[536] Thanks to these methods, and to the way in which admission to the gild was limited, the looms in the city had been reduced in thirty years or so from 380 to 80, and the price of cloth had risen accordingly. The authorities throughout the country were constantly in the dilemma of having on the one hand to permit the restriction of the numbers of the weavers, with a consequent rise in the cost of their wares, or, on the other hand, running the risk of inferior workmanship 'to the grete infamie and disclaundre of their worshipfull towne.' Not only were the unauthorised weavers often ignorant of their art, not having served their apprenticeship, but they used flock and other bad material, and bought stolen wool and 'thrummes.'[537] The latter were the unwoven warp threads left over at the end of the cloth, and as there was no export duty on thrums, the weavers contrived to cut them off as long as possible, and in this way much woollen yarn was sent out of the country without paying customs, until the practice was made illegal by an Act of Parliament in 1430.[538]

The cloth on leaving the loom was in the condition known as 'raw,' and although not yet ready for use was marketable, and many of the smaller clothmakers preferred to dispose of their products at this stage rather than incur the expense of the further processes. This seems to have been the case on the Welsh border, as Shrewsbury claimed to have had a market for 'pannus crudus' from the time of King John.[539] Much raw cloth was also bought up by foreign merchants and sent out of the country to be finished; and at the beginning of the sixteenth century Parliament, with its usual terror of foreign trade, seeing only that the finishing processes would be carried out by foreign workmen instead of English, forbade the export of unfinished cloth. It had then to be pointed out that, as most of these cloths were bought to be dyed abroad, and as after dyeing all the finishing processes would have to be repeated, the cost of the cheaper varieties would be so raised that there would be no sale for them; cloths below the value of five marks were therefore exempted.[540]

Raw cloth had next to be fulled, that is to say, scoured, cleansed, and thickened by beating it in water. Originally this was always done by men trampling upon it in a trough, and the process was known as 'walking,' the fuller being called a 'walker' (whence the common surname), but during the thirteenth century an instrument came into general use called 'the stocks,' consisting of an upright, to which was hinged the 'perch' or wooden bar with which the cloth was beaten. The perch was often worked by water power and fulling, or walking, mills soon became common. By the regulations of the fullers' gild of Lincoln recorded in 1389,[541] no fuller was to 'work in the trough,' that is to say to walk the cloth, and a further rule forbade any man to work at the perch with a woman, unless she were the wife of a master or her handmaid. Probably the intention of this last rule was to put a stop to the employment of cheap female labour 'by the whiche many ... likkely men to do the Kyng servis in his warris and in the defence of this his lond, and sufficiently lorned in the seid crafte, gothe vagaraunt and unoccupied and may not have thar labour to ther levyng.'[542] About 1297 a number of London fullers took to sending cloths to be fulled at certain mills in Stratford, and as this was found to result in much loss to the owners of the cloths, orders were given to stop all cloths on their way to the mills, and only allow them to be sent on at the express desire of the owners.[543] This seems to point to mill fulling being inferior to manual labour, while possibly the fulling being conducted outside the control of the city may have tended to bad work. At Bristol in 1346, one of the rules for the fullers forbids any one to send 'rauclothe' to the mill, and afterwards receive it back to be finished,[544] and in 1406 the town fullers were forbidden to make good the defects in cloths fulled by country workmen.[545]