Bishop Berkeley, in A Word to the Wise, writes of the English labourers in the South of England on a summer's evening "sitting along the streets of the town or village, each at his own door, with a cushion before him, making bone lace, and earning more in an evening's pastime than an Irish family would in a whole day."
"Wells, bone lace and knitting stockings."—Anderson.
"Launceston, where are two schools for forty-eight children of both sexes. The girls are taught to read, sew, and make bone lace, and they are to have their earnings for encouragement."—Magna Britannia. 1720.
Welsh lace was made at Swansea, Pont-Ardawe, Llanwrtyd, Dufynock, and Brecon, but never of any beauty, some not unlike a coarse Valenciennes. "It was much made and worn," said an aged Wesleyan lady, "by our 'connexion,' and as a child I had all my frocks and pinafores trimmed with it. It was made in the cottages; each lace-maker had her own pattern, and carried it out for sale in the country."
At what period, and by whom the lace manufactory of Ripon was founded, we have been unable to ascertain. It was probably a relic of conventual days, which, after having followed the fashion of each time, has now gradually died out. In 1842 broad Trolly laces of French design and fair workmanship were fabricated in the old cathedral city; where, in the poorer localities near the Bond and Blossomgate, young women might be seen working their intricate patterns, with pillows, bobbins, and pins. In 1862 one old woman alone, says our informant, sustains the memory of the craft, her produce a lace of a small lozenge-shaped pattern (Fig. 132), that earliest of all designs, and a narrow edging known in local parlance by the name of "fourpenny spot."
Till its annexation to the Crown, the Isle of Man was the great smuggling depôt for French laces. The traders then removed en masse to the Channel Isles, there to carry on their traffic. An idiot called "Peg the Ply" in Castletown (in 1842) was seen working at her pillow on a summer's evening, the last lace-maker of the island. Isle of Man lace was a simple Valenciennes edging.