admin – By the Poor For the Rich: Lace in Context
Eliza Westbury was born in 1808 and died in 1828. She lived for all of her short life in the village of Hackleton, Northamptonshire, where she made a living as a lacemaker.

We know this from the introduction to Hymns by a Northamptonshire Village Female, to which is added a Short Account of Her Life. (Note that ‘Female’; obviously Eliza could not aspire to the title ‘Lady’!) This book, containing 70 or so of Westbury’s hymns and poems, was published shortly after her death, probably by the local Baptist minister William Knowles. It seems likely that Knowles encouraged Eliza’s writing after her conversion and acceptance into the Baptist congregation in 1826.

This is what Knowles, if he was editor, had to say about Eliza: this is the promised short account of her life.

Eliza Westbury was the daughter of William and Elizabeth Westbury of Hackleton, Northamptonshire. She was born in the year 1808. Her father died in the faith of the gospel, in the year 1811. At an early age she was sent to a Sabbath School, and made pleasing progress in learning. She, at times, felt conviction of sin; but remained a stranger to religion until the beginning of the year 1825, when it pleased God to seal upon her heart a few words which were spoken to her after she had been hearing a Sermon to young people. In May, 1826, she joined the Baptist Church at Hackleton, of which she was an honourable member till her death. During the last two years of her life she composed about one hundred and fifty Hymns, besides other poetry from which the following are selected and published, under the impression that they will be acceptable to her Christian friends. Most of them where [sic] composed while she was earning her living at lace-making, and which she used to write at her leisure. Her own experience will be seen in the piece of poetry at the end of the hymns, which was found after her death. She was frequently deeply impressed with the evil of sin, and was fearful lest she should deceive herself: but her death was attended with peace and with the hope of a blessed immortality.

The providences with which the family to which she belonged was visited were very affecting; within sixteen weeks out of five persons who resided in the same house, four were removed by death. On the fourth of January, 1828, her mother died; on the 20th, one of her mother’s sisters; on the 11th of April, death visited her, and on the 18th of the same month another of her mother’s sisters; and unto them all there is ground for hope that death was gain, and that though they are absent from the body, they are present with the Lord.

Reader! Prepare to meet thy God!

We came across Eliza Westbury through the writings of Sibyl Phillips whose thesis, ‘Women and Evangelical Religion in Kent and Northamptonshire, 1800-1850’ (2001) is available online. (Nancy Jiwon Cho has also written a little about Westbury in her thesis, ‘The Ministry of Song: Unmarried British Women’s Hymn Writing, 1760-1936’ (Durham, 2006).) We were intrigued by the fact that Westbury “composed while she was earning a living at lace making”. As discussed in previous posts, many observers of Midland life in the nineteenth century commented on lacemakers’ habit of singing at work. Eliza’s compositions might strengthen the case for a connection between this occupation and song.

We were hoping that Westbury’s hymns would reference, either in words or tune, the other songs associated with lacemakers – either the long ballads discussed in our post on Long Lankin and Little Sir Hugh, or the “tellings” which were the particular musical property of lacemakers. Unfortunately, Eliza’s book, which contains no indication of melodies, is extremely rare (in the UK the only copy seems to be in Northampton itself) and, partly because David is currently in Caen researching Normandy lacemakers, we have not been able to access it. However, to judge by the numerous verses reproduced by Phillips and Cho, the answer appears to be no. Perhaps unsurprisingly Westbury modelled her compositions more on other Evangelical hymnsters and poets, first and foremost Cowper’s and Newton’s Olney Hymns. Olney is only a few miles from Hackleton.

We offer, as an example, Hymn 27, ‘Discontent’, which given the poverty and hard-work associated with lacemaking, may have spoken to one of their habits:

Christians, beware of discontent,

‘Tis a besetting sin;

It will all happiness prevent

When once it is let in.

We murmur at our Maker’s will

Complain of our hard lot;

Calamities remember still,

But mercies are forgot.

Pardon, O Lord, our discontent;

Forgiveness now display;

And may thy spirit now be sent

To guide us lest we stray.

It does not appear that Westbury mentioned lacemaking by name in any of her surviving works, though some of the texts do refer to the events of her life such as ‘On the Death of the Author’s Mother’, which, as we know, preceded her own by only a few weeks. Here are three of the eight verses:

Who lov’d to see me walk the way

That leads to everlasting day,

And check’d me when about to stray?

My Mother!

It has pleas’d God her soul to take

To heaven, where no alarms can shake;

There may I meet, for Jesu’s sake,

My Mother!

Then with my Saviour I shall be,

And I shall from all sin be free,

And there in glory I shall see

My Mother!

As Phillips and Cho have shown, this is modelled quite closely on Ann Taylor’s (at the time) very famous poem ‘My Mother’, which itself borrowed its distinctive metre from Cowper’s ‘To Mary’.

The final piece in the collection contains 54 stanzas and is titled ‘Verses, Containing an Account of the Writer’s Experience’. These tell us relatively little about Westbury’s working life, it is her spiritual life that matters: her youthful waywardness, the depression brought on by her sense of sin, her conversion, and her ongoing doubts. But in the absence of any other autobiography of a lacemaker from the period, we quote them here… or as many verses as were quoted by Phillips.

I at an early age was taught

That God should be in every thought,

My Mother brought me up with care.

And led me to the house of prayer.

Unto a Sabbath School I went,

To gain instruction I was sent;

And there it was my constant aim

To strive to gain the greatest name.

‘Twas my desire (the truth I’ll tell)

That I in reading might excel;

My chief concern and labour then,

Was how to gain the praise of men.

…

I many strong convictions had,

But I to stifle them was glad:

I knew my ways did God offend,

But I to this would not attend.

I for my chief companions chose

Those who religion did oppose,

Who disobey’d each warning voice

They were the objects of my choice.

Thus with the thoughtless, gay, and vain,

God’s holy day I did profane;

For oft we in the fields did walk,

To join in vain and trifling talk.

But conscience told me all along

That I was surely acting wrong:

This fill’d my soul with sore dismay

And oft I did attempt to pray.

…

All sacred things I did deride,

But my companions would me chide,

And oft they unto me would say,

That I indeed was worse than they.

…

Who hath ascended up, thought I,

And seen a God above the sky?

Who of the dead came back to tell,

That there was either heaven or hell?

…

A minister of God above,

Bid me from Christ no longer rove,

But now to seek in days of youth,

The God of mercy, love, and truth.

He bid me also not to be

A servant of God’s enemy.

…

My sins as mountains did appear

Which filled my soul with grief and fear.

No hope of mercy could I see,

For bold transgressors such as me.

I thought I oft heard something say,

That t’was in vain for me to pray;

I at religion used to scoff,

And now the Lord would cast me off.

At length God’s holy word I took,

But fear’d to open that blest Book,

Lest in its pages I should see

A curse denounc’d on such as me.

My mind was devoid of peace

And fast my misery did increase.

At length, I fully did intend

To my own life to put an end.

… (but is prevented by remembering a chapter from the Bible on suicide)

No murderer shall enter heaven,

His crimes shall never be forgiven;

And should I be my murderer now,

To endless torment I must go.

… (Instead she joins the Baptist congregation)

With the saints I lov’d to meet

To worship at the Saviour’s feet.

…

But soon my mind was fill’d with care,

For Satan tempted to despair;

He told me ‘I did not believe,

‘But only did my self deceive,

‘That mercy I need not expect,

‘For I was not of God’s elect;’

Could I forgiveness hope to find,

A sinner of the vilest kind?

… (These doubts keep her from Church for a while, but in the end she is accepted and baptised)

Now those who read these lines may see

The goodness of my God to me.

He could have stop’d my feeble breath,

And sent me to eternal death:

But he has spar’d me still to tell

How he has sav’d my soul from hell.

…

God’s grace to sinners doth abound,

I sought the Lord and mercy found;

The vilest sinner need not fear,

For God will his petitions hear.

Lord, may thy spirit guide me now,

While I am in this world below:

And then when I am call’d to die,

Receive my soul above the sky.

One ‘keeps cattern’ but one ’goes tandering’. We are not sure whether this semantic difference is meaningful. Nor are we certain why Saint Andrew became the patron of Midland lacemakers, who celebrated his feast either on ‘new’ (30th November) or ‘old’ (11 December) Saint Andrew’s Day. We know no legend or song that would account for this role similar to those told about Saint or Queen Catherine, and to our knowledge Saint Andrew was not held in particular reverence by any European lacemakers. One Catholic website suggests that it was because the Saint Andrew’s cross resembles intersecting threads… But we suspect that its origins are more ecclesiastical, because Saint Andrew is the patron of many of the churches in the diocese of Peterborough. It seems likely that Tanders was once a widely held village feast and that the association with lacemaking arose as other groups forgot, or were discouraged from, celebrating the saint.

In some parts of Northamptonshire Tanders was not associated with lacemakers. In Broughton 54 people were bound over to keep the peace in 1930 after a night ‘tandering’, and a further 14 Broughton residents received summons to appear before Kettering magistrates in 1931 for celebrating Tanders too loudly. The crowd, estimated by the police at 1000 strong, had wandered the streets after midnight, banging tin cans and saucepan lids. The background to this mass demonstration was that the Parish Council had banned ‘tandering’, despite an overwhelming local referendum in favour of its maintenance: Saint Andrew being the patron of village church. None of those arrested were lacemakers; in fact there was only one woman among them, a fourteen-year-old ‘tailoress’ who was discharged as too young to be put through the trauma of a magistrates’ court hearing. The local magistrates obviously did not understand the custom, and in 1930 they assumed that this was a form of ‘rough music’ (a type of popular justice used to shame those who had broken the unspoken rules of community life, akin to the ‘Skimmington Ride’ which features in Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge). In 1931 the defendants hired a Northampton lawyer, Mr Burton, who argued, successfully, that Tanders was a traditional custom, always celebrated on the Sunday closest to ‘Old Saint Andrew’s’. The defendants were discharged on the basis that, as the magistrates instructed, ‘nothing of the same kind occurs next year’. However, the revival of Tanders at Broughton continues still with a tin can band and other night-time revels (the website In search of traditional customs and ceremonies has some pictures of the band in action from 2014).

Although widespread across central and southern Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire (some indication of Tanders celebrations, mostly held by lacemakers, have been recorded from Blisworth, Carlton, Cranfield, Elstow, Hanslope, Harrold, Kimbolton (Huntingdonshire), Leighton Buzzard, Milton Malsor, North Crawley, Olney, Pavenham, Stevington, Spratton, Stoke Goldington, Turvey, Wilstead, and Yardley Hastings) the custom passed largely unnoticed until the mid-nineteenth century. The first detailed account we have found so far was provided by Thomas Sternberg in 1851:

Of all the numerous red-letter days which diversified the lives of our ancestors, this is the only one which has survived to our own times in anything like its pristine character. St Andrew appears to be looked upon by the lace-makers as their patron saint; which may perhaps account for the estimation in which his festival is held. In many places, where progress has not yet shown her face, the day is one of unbridled licence – a kind of miniature carnival. Village ‘scholards’ bar out their master; the lace-schools are deserted, and drinking and feasting prevail to a riotous extent. Towards evening the sober villagers appear to have become suddenly smitten with a violent taste for masquerading. Women may be seen walking about in male attire, while men and boys have donned the female dress, and visit each other’s cottages, drinking hot ‘eldern wine,’ the staple beverage of the season. Then commences the Mumming, too often described to need mention here, save to note that in the rude drama performed in the Northamptonshire villages, St George has given place to George III, and the dragon, formerly the greatest attraction of the piece, been supplanted by Napoleon, who is annually killed on this night in personal encounter with the aforesaid monarch, to the intense delight and edification of the loyal audience.

Sternberg’s describes something more boisterous than the ‘cattern teas’ described in our last post, but in many villages the two events passed off in a comparable manner, with ‘washing the candle-block’ the central element. This next description of ‘Tanders’ in Bedfordshire sounds quite like ‘keeping catterns’. It was written by Mrs Kate Leila Edmonds from Summerfield, Carlton… not quite as grand as the Orlebars of Hinwick House who promoted Cattern in Podington over three generations, but still a local mover and shaker, president of the Carlton W.I. after the war, and a promoter of the lace industry. She wrote two extensive accounts of ‘Tanders’ for the Bedfordshire Times and Independent, one in 1900, the second in 1905. We have transcribed the first of these from The British Newspaper Archive. In neither does she give her source, but the memories are not her own; they describe events in the 1850s, whereas Mrs Edmonds was born in 1866. Both descriptions are strongly marked by nostalgia for simpler times of industrious peasants, a sentiment that often characterised attempts to revive the lace-trade:

Fifty years ago, in a little village of Bedfordshire there was great excitement amongst the pupils of the ‘lace school’ one cold November morning. The school dame had no need to scold that day for idleness, or for tardiness in arriving; all had come punctually, and worked with a will. For this was ‘St. Andrews Day,’ or as the lace-makers termed it ‘Tanders’ which brought a half holiday for them all. So the heads were bent over the lace pillows, and the quick fingers picked out the pins and stuck them in again rapidly that a novice would think it looked like play. Ah! but each pupil knew how much she can do in an hour; and she also knew that if she loitered or idled in the least, she could never make up for the lost time. For this lace making cannot be hurried; every stitch must receive the orthodox number of twists and crosses of the bobbins, to make good saleable lace. It was no uncommon thing for the ‘lace buyer’ to take off one half-penny in the yard if a lace was ill-made or not a pure white colour, and this was a consideration of much moment in days when halfpennies were so scarce. Holidays were almost as scarce as half-pennies; hence the unwonted attention of ‘Tanders’ morning fifty years ago. At last the welcome hour of twelve arrived, and one by one the pupils prepare to go home. Bobbins are carefully parted and pushed back each side of the pillow to prevent tangles. The ‘drawer,’ or narrow strip of patchwork is drawn over the lace to keep it spotless; a ‘cover,’ also made of print pieces, is pinned over the lace pillow, and work is over for the day. What a merry time they have! Let us look into one house and see how the lacemakers keep ‘Tanders day.’ The table, chairs, etc., are removed, and the ‘house-place’ cleared; for this is to be no stiff ceremonial party as we shall see. Someone has brought the ‘blades’ of a bobbin wheel, used in non-holiday times to stretch the skein of thread while winding. The ‘blades’ consist of two pieces of wood crossing each other in form like the letter X. The four points of the ‘blades’ being sharpened, a quarter of an apple is stuck on three points, and a piece of tallow candle on the fourth. Now the fun begins; the blades are suspended by a string from the ceiling. one of the party being blind-folded, the hands are tied behind, and as the blades are spun round the blind-folded one has to try to catch in the mouth a piece of apple from one of the points. Great is the fun and delight when, instead of a bite of apple, a bite of candle is taken. But much good temper prevails, and all are willing to take their turn at the ‘snap-apple,’ and so passes the amusement round. But now, the supply of apples being exhausted, and everybody tired of romping, the ‘snap-apple’ is abandoned, and the making of ‘Tanders’ sweets’ begins. These were days when dentists were almost unknown to country folk. Was this due to the fact that sugar was 5d a lb., and sweets regarded as a great luxury for the children? Whether this was so or not, the ‘Tanders’ sweets’ were good and wholesome, and coming only once a year they were in the eyes of the youngsters delicious. Brown sugar, and a very small lump of butter were the ingredients used in making the sweets, and until the boiling process was over everyone was in a state of great excitement and fear, lest the sweets should ‘turn to sugar’ and burn. The boiled sugar being poured on to a floured dish, each one had a hand in rolling or cutting sweets, and putting them by to cool.

The next morning was a trying time to the School Dame. Every lace-maker brought specimen’s of ‘Tander’s sweets’; some burnt black, some sugary, some clear as candy, and all exceedingly sticky. In vain does the School Dame threaten to ‘keep in’ and ‘tell your mother.’ The delinquents still eat sweets and muse on the joys of ‘Tander’s Day,’ thinking dismally what a pity it is that they have to wait a whole year before it comes again. Is it a pity? I think not.

Mrs Edmonds’ second article ended with an impassioned plea: ‘Wake up, English lace-makers? Teach your children all you know yourselves, and save the English lace trade from going out of the villages where it has been made for generations.’ Although probably not a lacemaker herself, her description of ‘snap apple’ and ‘Tanders sweets’ tally with other accounts. The reference to a school holiday may account for why lacemakers were among the last celebrators of Saint Andrew’s Day, as they were of St Catherine’s. The lace-school institutionalised memory of these holidays, and gave young lacemakers an incentive to maintain them. Hence the well-known account of ‘barring out’ at Spratton lace school, written in the 1890s but referring to events in the 1850s:

On S. Andrew’s Day they had a curious custom to seize the opportunity of the mistress leaving the room and then lock her out, and on her return they sang,

Pardon Mistress, Pardon Master, Pardon for a pin;

If you won’t give a holiday, We will not let you in.

After a brief display of counterfeited anger the mistress would give way, and the pupils had their half-holiday. The mistress was pretty severe, carrying a cane, and often giving them a cut if they behaved badly, and it is more than likely, says my informant, that they from time to time deserved it.

(The author of this account, which first appeared in Northamptonshire Notes and Queries in 1892, was Margaret Emily Roberts, the daughter of the vicar of Saint Andrew’s, Spratton, a lace teacher and active in the Midland Lace Association.)

Several accounts of Tanders mention a special cake consumed on that day. Pavenham W.I. contributed a recipe for a ‘Tandra cake’ to the 1948 Cookery Book of Traditional Dishes. We have still not tracked this down, but in the meantime here is Julia Jones’ and Barbara Deer’s recipe for a St Andrew’s Cake from Cattern Cakes and Lace. A Calendar of Feasts:

Ingredients

1lb/450g plain flour

1 teaspoon salt

½ oz/15 g fresh or ½ tablespoon dried yeast

1 teaspoon caster sugar

½ pint/300 ml warm water

1 egg beaten

4oz/100g lard, melted

4oz/100g currants

4oz/100 g sugar

1 oz diced crystallized lemon peel

Instructions

Oven 180 degrees C.

Sift the flour and salt into a bowl.

Cream the yeast with the teaspoon of sugar and blend in the water.

Leave the yeast to froth and bubble, then mix with the beaten egg and add to the flour.

Pour in the cooled, melted lard, and mix until smooth.

Knead well, cover and leave to double in size.

Knock back the dough and knead in the currants, sugar, and peel.

Transfer to a greased 2lb/1kg loaf tin.

Leave to rise until the dough reaches the top of the tin. 20-30 mins.

Then back to oven for 60-70 mins until well risen and golden.

Cool on a wire rack.

Slice and serve with butter.

Sources

Anne Elizabeth Baker, Glossary of Northamptonshire Words and Phrases, With Examples of their Colloquial Use, And Illustrations from Various Authors: To Which are Added, the Customs of the County (London: John Russell Smith, 1854).

Kate Leila Edmonds, ‘The Lace Makers’ Patron Saint. Fifty Years Ago’, Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 16 February 1900.

Kate Leila Edmonds, ‘St. Andrew’s Day or “Tanders”,’ Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 24 November, 1905.

Rev. E.R. Grant (Unitarian minister of Northampton), text of talk given on ‘The Legends and Folk-Lore of Northamptonshire’ at Northampton Town Hall, reported in the Northampton Mercury, 13 March 1880.

Dorothy Grimes, Like Dew Before the Sun. Life and Language in Northamptonshire (Northampton: Dorothy Grimes, 1991).

Julia Jones and Barbara Deer, Cattern Cakes and Lace: A Calendar of Feasts (London: Dorling Kindersley, 1987).

‘M.E.R’ [Margaret Emily Roberts], ‘Spratton Lace School’, Northamptonshire Notes and Queries, 4, 1892.

‘Tin Can Band in Court: Broughton Mummers who Celebrated “Tander”,’ Northampton Mercury, 2 January 1931.

Thomas Sternberg, The Dialect and Folk-Lore of Northamptonshire (London & Northampton: John Russell Smith, 1851).

Thomas Wright, The Romance of the Lace Pillow (Olney: H.H. Armstrong, 1919).

25 November is the Feast of Saint Catherine, and historically a holiday for the Midlands lacemakers, particularly those in Buckinghamshire and some northern parts of Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire. (Lacemakers in the southern and central parts of the latter counties tended to celebrate Saint Andrew’s Day instead; we deal with this holiday on his feast, 30 November.)

According to the ‘official’ legend — and we’ll see that lacemakers, and in fact almost everybody else who celebrated her feast, told a rather different story — Saint Catherine was a virgin martyr from early fourth century Alexandria in Egypt. Her father was the Roman governor of the province, but Catherine was a philosopher and Christian convert. She refused to submit first to the persecutions of Emperor Maxentius, then to his lascivious attentions, declaring that she was the bride of Christ. Infuriated, Maxentius ordered that she be broken on a wheel, but the device fell apart at her touch. Finally he had her beheaded.

Although there is little historical evidence for Catherine, she was one of the most popular saints in both the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and her cult clearly survived the Protestant Reformation in England. Because her attribute is the wheel, she became the patron of wheelwrights, and by extension carpenters, as well as ropemakers and spinners. She was the patron of both young women and old maids (spinsters in another sense), and as these groups formed the labour force for the needle trades, her patronage extended to all involved in textile production. The ‘bal de Sainte Catherine’ is still an important event in the calendar of the Paris fashion houses.[1]

In England, ‘keeping Cattern’ —that is celebrating Saint Catherine’s Day — was by no means confined to lacemakers. Even after the Reformation, women in the workhouse would receive a dole in order to ‘keep Cattern’.[2] In some towns, such as Ware and Peterborough, women — in the latter town principally the female inmates of the workhouse — paraded behind their own ‘queen’, singing:

Here comes Queen Catherine, as fine as any queen,

With a coach and six horses, a-coming to be seen,

And a-spinning we will go, will go,

And a-spinning we will go.

No doubt this was an opportunity to raise money for a feast later in the day.[3] In other parts of the country, particularly Worcestershire (though the custom has been recorded elsewhere), it was young children who used this day as an opportunity to tramp from house to house collecting apples and ale, aided by a rhyme such as this one:

Catherine and Clement be here, be here,

Some of your apples and some of your beer;

Some for Peter, and some for Paul,

And some for Him that made us all.

Clement was good old man,

For his sake give us some,

None of the worst but some of the best,

And God will send your soul to rest![4]

Saint Clement’s feast falls on 23 November and was another important holiday, though usually observed in different regions to Saint Catherine’s. A Sussex version of this rhyme names ‘Cattern’ as the mother of ‘Clemen’, an unlikely relationship for a virgin saint![5] Other indications of her widespread popularity are a recipe for a Cattern pie from Somerset,[6] and Cattern Fair held outside Guildford, where Cattern cakes were sold well into the nineteenth century.[7]

However, by the late nineteenth century, lacemakers were almost the only group to still hold her in honour. Occasionally in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire the mummers who put on the traditional drama of Saint George and the Turkish Knight in the run-up to Christmas were called ‘Katterners’, though any specific memory of Saint Catherine seems to have been forgotten.[8] Newspaper accounts suggest that ‘Cattern’ was still kept by carpenters in Chatteris (Cambridgeshire) in the 1860s,[9] and the farmer Mr Lot Arnsby of Raunds (Northamptonshire), though a Baptist, still treated his labourers to cakes and ale on Saint Catherine’s Day in the 1870s.[10] In both cases, the feast was held on 6 December, ‘Old Saint Catherine’s’, that is date of her feast before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in Britain in 1752 had entailed the loss of eleven days. These examples are very isolated compared with the numerous newspaper mentions of lacemakers ‘keeping Cattern’, sometimes on Old and sometimes on New Saint Catherine’s Day. In fact the feast seems to have undergone periodic revivals among lacemakers, often sponsored by local landowners and patrons of the lace industry.

Although there are references to women ‘Catherning’ or ‘keeping Catterns’ from the seventeenth and eighteenth century,[11] the earliest reference we have so far found to this day as a special feast among lacemakers is in a short article in Notes and Queries for May 1862 by ‘A.A.’ (we have not identified the initials) reporting that:

In Buckinghamshire, on Cattern Day (St. Catherine’s, 25th of November,) these hard-working people hold merry-makings, and eat a sort of cakes they call ‘wigs,’ and drink ale. The tradition says it is in remembrance of a Queen Catharine; who, when the trade was dull, burnt all her lace, and ordered new to be made.[12]

Although A.A. asked readers who this Queen might have been, the topic went quiet in that journal until in 1868. Interest was revived then by a review in The Quarterly Review of Mrs Bury Palliser’s 1865 A History of Lace, in which the author claimed (and in this the reviewer was following Mrs Palliser’s lead) that:

Catherine of Aragon, according to tradition, introduced the art of making lace into Bedfordshire during her sojourn at Ampthill in 1531-33. She was a great adept in the arts of the needle. Until quite lately the lace-makers kept ‘Cattern’s-day’ as the holiday of their craft, in memory of the good Queen Catherine.[13]

On what authority did Mrs Bury Palliser make this statement, asked J.M. Cowper in Notes and Queries?[14] The several responses did not resolve that issue, but they did provide plenty of evidence for lacemakers ‘keeping Catterns’. For example, John Plummer, who originally came from Kettering, reported that the feast

is known to be kept, for several generations, throughout the whole of Northamptonshire lace-making districts, as well as in those of Bedfordshire. By some it is called ‘candle-day,’ from its forming the commencement of the season for working at lacemaking by candle-light.[15]

He reiterated the tradition that ‘Queen Katherine was a great friend to the lacemakers’, but suggested that instead of Catherine of Aragon, Catherine Parr was meant, because the Parrs were a Northamptonshire family. However later in the same month A.A. returned to the topic and reiterated his story, this time definitely identifying the lace-burning queen as Catherine of Aragon.[16]

Readers will have noticed that, so far, there is no reference to a saint in any of these lacemakers’ celebrations, only queens. Two different stories were told. The oldest, though how old we are uncertain, concerns a queen burning her lace in order to create more work for lacemakers. A ballad, claimed as traditional (though we have our doubts) was apparently sung at a Kattern Day revival in Marsh Gibbon in 1905:

Queen Katherine loved to deck with lace

The royal robes she wore;

But though she loved to wear her lace,

She loved the lace-folk more.

So now for good Queen Katherine’s sake

Put bones and sticks away,

And keep the yearly festival

And sing on ‘Kattern Day.’[17]

As one recent historian has written, this story encapsulates a feminine, utopian economy which completely denies the laws of supply and demand, and in which the great existed to provide work for the small, and ‘harmoniously brings together the otherwise separate processes of production and consumption.”’18]

The second story, crediting Queen Catherine of Aragon as the original teacher of lace in England, is slightly later in origin but far more widespread, as it was regularly repeated in newspaper accounts in the late nineteenth century, became the focus of W.I. lectures and pageants in the twentieth, and is now regularly repeated on the web. This continuing tradition owes everything to Mrs Palliser’s reputation as a reliable historian of lace, it has no basis in any oral tradition linking that queen with the genesis of the lace industry. Mrs Palliser inferred from rather vague lacemakers’ traditions concerning a ‘good queen who protected their craft’, that the art of lace-working, as it then existed, was first imparted to the peasantry of Bedfordshire, as a means of subsistence, through the charity of Katherine of Aragon.’[19] To return to J.M. Cowper’s question in Notes and Queries — on what authority had this claim been advanced — the answer is on no greater authority than Mrs Palliser’s romantic inference. However, her invention has proved enormously popular, for it invoked a tradition of royal patronage of lace that was, at the time, still vital to the trade.

We doubt that Catterns had a connection to any English queen; rather it was the continuation of a Catholic saint’s day feast in Protestant England. We cannot say when and where the tradition turned the saint into queen: it may have been a post-Reformation defensive measure, for it was permitted to celebrate royalty when Catholic saints had fallen into disrepute. However, it is worth pointing out that in the popular culture of Catholic Europe, Catherine was always imagined as a queen, or at least a princess. The first line of a song popular throughout Spain, France and Italy, and indeed much further afield, tells us that Catalina/Catherine/Caterina was a ‘hija de un rey’ (in Spanish), ‘fille d’un roi’ (in French), ‘figlia di un re’ (in Italian).[20] Sometimes she is specifically identified as the daughter of the king of Hungary; in all cases it is her father, not a Roman emperor, who is responsible for her martyrdom. And while Saint Catherine was not usually the named patron of European lacemakers, nonetheless European lacemakers knew and sang her story. For example, in an audio recording made by Jean Dumas in 1959, you can hear Virginie Granouillet, a seventy-year-old lacemaker from Roche-en-Régnier (Haute-Loire), accompanying her bobbins with a version of the song.[21]

How did lacemakers ‘keep Catterns’? There are vague references to an earlier period when women dressed up in male attire and indulged in unfettered merry-making, including amorous (or violent) advances to passing men, a moment of female license, but we have no specific information.[22] The fullest description comes from Mrs Frederica Orlebar of Hinwick House, Podington (Bedfordshire) who wrote an account of an attempted revival in 1887 — which would form the template for further revivals in 1906 and 1937.[23] The Orlebars were landed gentry who had provided leadership to the county, as magistrates, M.P.s and masters of the hunt for several generations. Their patronage of the lace industry was part and parcel of this paternalistic concern for their tenants and electors. Catherine Channer used the manuscript ‘Orlebar Chronicles’ to write her 1900 account:

Cattern Tea.

In Podington and neighbouring villages the lacemakers have, within the memory of middle-aged people, ‘kept Cattern’, on December 6th – St. Catherine’s Day (Old Style).

I believe it was Catherine of Aragon who used to drink the waters of a mineral spring in Wellingborough, and who (as is supposed) introduced lace-making into Beds. The poor people know nothing of the Queen, only state that it was an old custom to keep ‘Cattern.’

The way was for the women to club together for a tea, paying 6d. apiece, which they could well afford when their lace brought them in 5s. or 6s. a week. The tea-drinking ceremony was called ‘washing the candle-block,’ but this was merely an expression. It really consisted in getting through a great deal of gossip, tea, and Cattern cakes – seed cakes of large size. Sugar balls went round as a matter of course. After tea they danced, just one old man whistling or fiddling for them, and ‘they enjoyed themselves like queens!

The entertainment ended with the cutting of a large apple pie, which they divided for supper. Their usual bedtime was about eight o’clock.[24]

This may be more staid than earlier celebrations, but some of the elements referred to here come up in other accounts too. The first is that it was a communal women’s festival: a man might provide the music but the lacemakers danced with each other. Money was pooled to provide food, drink and entertainment: rabbit or steak with onion sauce, followed by pies and cakes. Cattern pies — sometimes containing mincemeat, sometimes apples (as we have seen, Catterners collected apples) — might be arranged in the shape of a wheel, with partakers being offered a ‘spoke’.[25] Mrs Orlebar quoted a rhyme, apparently sung by the nightwatchman of Kettering, which made the pies the centrepiece of the celebration:

Rise, maids arise!

Bake your Cattern pies!

Bake enough, and bake no waste,

So that the old bell-man may have a taste!

Cattern cakes appear to be a different thing to a Cattern pie: the cakes come in various descriptions but the recipes almost always contain caraway seeds, which connects them to the ‘soul cakes’ consumed at Halloween in other parts of the country. The drink mentioned in connection with these festivities was methleglin, a honey mead termed ‘meytheagle’ in the Bedfordshire dialect.[26]

The term ‘washing’ or ‘wetting the candle-block’ explains why Plummer called this a ‘candle-day’. The holiday was not just the celebration of the patroness of lacemakers, it was the ritual marking of an important moment in the lacemakers’ year, for this was the day when candles, objects of enormous expense, could legitimately be used for evening work. These kind of candle feasts, opening and closing the period of neighbourly winter evening work gatherings, were quite common all over Europe. Among English lacemakers the closing day of the season appears to have been Candlemas (2 February), though it was not celebrated as much as Catterns.[27] This practice of working together to share light and heat also explains why Catterns was a communal feast. A candle-block provided light not for one lacemaker but many: a single candle would be mounted in the centre of several glass globes or flasks filled with snow-water, which would concentrate the light on the pillows of several lacemakers (the highest number of users of a single candle that we have so far encountered is eighteen!). But lacemakers did not only symbolically ‘wash’ the candleblock, they also leapt over it. According to John Aubrey, back in the 1680s, Oxfordshire girls (not specifically lacemakers) would ‘set a candle in the middle of the room in a candlestick, and then draw up their coats into the form of breaches [another hint at cross-dressing], and dance over the candle back and forth, with these words’:

The tailor of Biciter [Bicester] He has but one eye

He cannot cut a pair of green galagaskins

If he were to die.

Aubrey thought the custom was obsolete even in his time, but in fact the same game, and the same rhyme, have been recorded as late as 1910.[28]

Thomas Wright notes a different song being chanted by pupils jumping the candlestick in the lace schools at Wendover:

Wallflowers, Wallflowers, growing up so high,

All young maidens surely have to die;

Excepting Emma Caudrey, she’s the best of all.

She can dance and she can skip,

She can turn the candlestick.

Turn, turn, turn your face to the wall again[29]

Given the height of a lighted candle on a block players ran significant risks during this game. It is interesting to observe that even on holiday, lacemakers insist on the presence of death.

We can’t leave Catterns without giving a recipe for Cattern cakes. In 1948, Podington, Hinwick and Farndish Women’s Institute provided a recipe for the Cookery Book of Traditional Dishes which accompanied the ‘Home Produce Exhibition’.[30] We have not been able to track down a copy of this, so we have borrowed a recipe from the North Downs Lacemakers’ website[31]:

Ingredients

9oz /275g self raising flour

¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon

1 oz/25g currants

2oz/50g ground almonds

2 teaspoons caraway seeds

7oz/200g caster sugar

4oz/100g melted butter

1 medium egg, beaten

A little extra sugar and cinnamon for sprinkling

Instructions

Sift the flour and cinnamon into a bowl and stir in currants, almonds, caraway seeds and sugar.

Add the melted butter and beaten egg, mix well to give a soft dough (add a little milk if too dry).

Roll out on a floured board into a rectangle, about 12×10 inches/30x25cm.

Brush the dough with water and sprinkle with the extra sugar and cinnamon.

Roll up like a swiss roll and cut into ¾ inch/2cm slices.

Place on a greased baking tray spaced well apart and bake for 10 minutes. Oven set at 200 degrees C /400 degrees F/Gas 6.

Cool on a wire rack.

We’ve tried it, and the results were very tasty, though they didn’t look as much like Catherine Wheels as we had intended.

[1] See Ann Monjaret’s wonderful study, La Sainte Catherine: Culture festive dans l’entreprise (Paris, 1997).

[2] Robert Gibbs refers to an entry in the Aylesbury overseers’ accounts for 1672: A Historyof Aylesbury with the Borough and Hundreds, The Hamlet of Walton, and The Electoral Division. Aylesbury, Bucks Advertiser, 1885

[3] A. R. Wright, British Calendar Customs, ed. T. E. Lones, (Folk-Lore Society, 1936), iii. 108, 144. The tune, presumably, is ‘A begging we will go’. Pete Castle recorded a version of the song on the album ‘False Waters’. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABjMfqjl2pQ

[4] James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales of England (London, 1849) p. 238. For a map of ‘Catterning’ in the West Midlands See Charlotte S. Burne. ‘Souling, Clementing, and Catterning. Three November Customs of the Western Midlands’, Folk-Lore 25:3 (1914), p. 285.

[5] William Douglas Parish, A Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect and Collection of Provincialisms in Use in the County of Sussex (Lewes, 1875), p.25: ‘Catterning’.

[6] Margaret Baker. Folklore and Customs of Rural England (Newton Abbot, 1974), p. 132.

[7] A.J.M. ‘Catherine Hill in Surrey’, Notes and Queries 7th series II, 14 August 1886.

[8] Walter Rose, Good Neighbours. Some Recollections of an English Village and its People, Cambridge UP, 1943, pp. 131-5 (based on his experiences in Haddenham, Bucks). Fred Hamer recorded the same usage in Bedfordshire, though the ‘Folk Play Distribution Map: Actors’ Names’ on Peter Millington’s Master Mummers Website suggests it was quite rare even in this region: http://www.mastermummers.org/atlas/ActorsNames.php?maptype=outline&go=Go+%3E%3E

[9] Cambridge Independent Press, Saturday 8 December 1860.

[10] Peterborough Advertiser, 13 December 1879.

[11] Charles Lamotte, An Essay upon Poetry and Painting, with Relation to the Sacred and Profane History (London, 1730), p. 126.

[12] A.A., ‘Lace-Makers’ Custom: Wigs, A Sort of Cake’, Notes and Queries 3rd series I, 17 May, 1862, p. 387.

[13] ‘History of Lace, by Mrs Bury Palliser’, review in The Quarterly Review 125 (July-Oct., 1868): pp. 166-188, p. 168.

[14] J.M. Cowper, ‘Cattern’s Day’, Notes and Queries 4th series II, 29 August, 1868, p. 201.

[15] John Plummer, ‘Kattern’s Day’, Notes and Queries 4th series II. 3 October, 1868., p. 333.

[16] A.A. ‘Kattern’s Day’, Notes and Queries 4th series II, 17 October, 1868, p. 377.

[17] Buckingham Advertiser and Free Press, Saturday 2 December 1905.

[18] Elaine Freedgood, ‘“Fine Fingers”: Victorian Handmade Lace and Utopian Consumption’, Victorian Studies 45 (2003), p. 637.

[19] Fanny Bury Palliser, A History of Lace (2nd edition: London, 1869), p. 326.

[20] The Pan-Hispanic Ballad Project lists 42 versions of IGRH song-type 0126 ‘Santa Catalina’ https://depts.washington.edu/hisprom/optional/balladaction.php?igrh=0126 ; the Coirault catalogue of French folk songs likewise lists numerous versions of song-type 8906 ‘Le martyre de sainte Catherine’; there is no equivalent Italian catalogue of folk-songs, but it is quite a common children’s song: in our experience all Italians know of it.

[21] http://patrimoine-oral.org/dyn/portal/index.seam?aloId=15575&page=alo&fonds=3

[22] Christina Hole. A Dictionary of British Folk Customs. Hutchinson, 1976

[23] Northampton Mercury, Friday 14 December 1906; Northampton Mercury, Friday 26 February 1937.

[24] Catherine C. Channer and Margaret E. Roberts, Lace-making in the Midlands, Past and Present (London, 1900), pp. 70-71.

[25] A recipe is offered in Joanna Bogle, A Book of Feasts and Seasons (Leominster, 1992).

[26] ‘Wetting the Candleblock’, Bedfordshire Mercury, Friday 13 December 1912.

[27] Thomas Wright, The Romance of the Lace PillowOlney, Bucks: H.H. Armstrong, 1919, p. 202.

[28] James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales: A Sequel to the Nursery Rhymes of England (London, 1849), p.231, quoting from the manuscript of Aubrey’s Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme; Arthur R. Wright and T.E. Lones, British Calendar Customs: England (London, 1940), vol. 3, p. 178.

[29] Thomas Wright, The Romance of the Lace Pillow (Olney, 1919), p. 195. Obviously the name used depends on the player. A similar rhyme was recorded by Fred Hamer at Biddenham in Bedfordshire.

[30] ‘Women’s Institutes. Traditional Dishes for National Exhibition. Bedfordshire’s Contributions’, Bedfordshire Times and Independent, Friday 24 September 1948

[31] http://www.northdownslacemakers.org.uk/features/2007/catterns-day.php A very similar recipe is provided in Julia Jones and Barbara Deer, Cattern Cakes and Lace: A Calender of Feasts (London, 1987).

In the journal Notes and Queries for 22 August 1868 there appeared the following request from the Shakespearean scholar Sidney Beisly (author of Shakespere’s Garden, among other things):

“The song we had last night.

Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain:

The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,

And the free maids, that weave their thread with bones,

Do use to chant it.”

Twelfth Night, Act II, Sc. 4.

I should like to know if any of the songs which the lacemakers of times past sung are in existence, and where they are to be found. Am I right in believing that the free maids, noticed by Shakespeare in the above passage, were lacemakers? Any information on this subject will oblige

Over the next few months we intend to do our best to belatedly satisfy his interest, but we’ll start with the articles in Notes and Queries which prompted and responded to Beisly’s letter. In its nineteenth-century heyday, Notes and Queries was a meeting point for antiquarians, literacy scholars and budding folklorists. In fact the term folk-lore was coined in 1846 by the journal’s founding editor, William Thoms. In 1868, folksong collecting was not an established field of endeavour in England, unlike Scotland. The first English folk-song revival would have to wait for the turn of the century. But there were a few Victorian enthusiasts connected by journals like Notes & Queries, and of course the Shakespearean reference helped, for it provided folk-songs with their letter of literary nobility. Who could dismiss what the bard himself had deigned to notice?

There are two elements of Shakespeare’s depiction that are borne out by these nineteenth-century correspondents. Firstly, lacemakers had an established taste for old songs, even at the beginning of the seventeenth century when the trade was relatively new in England. Secondly, they had a penchant for the tragic and ghoulish, for the song the Feste sings in response to Duke Orsino’s injunction, starts:

Come away, come away, death,

And in sad cypress let me be laid….

We would hazard that the clown’s song may be part of a longer narrative ballad, but if so we have not been able to discover which one. However, it was just such ballads — narrative in structure, presumed old in date, heart-rending in content — that excited the interest of nineteenth-century song collectors.

Most of the information on lacemakers’ songs in Notes and Queries precedes Beisly’s intervention. In the edition of 4 July 1868 ‘J.L.C’ of Hanley Staffordshire inserted the following note (We have not been able to identify J.L.C., presumably he was not the genealogist Joseph Lemanuel Chester, a regular contributor under these initials, as he grew up in America):

A LACEMAKER’S SONG. — When I was a child, rising six years, my Northamptonshire nurse used to sing the following ditty to me as she rattled her bobbins over her lace-pillow:

“It rains, it rains in merry Scotland;

It rains both great and small,

And all the schoolboys in merry Scotland

Must needs to play at ball.

They tost their balls so high, so high,

They tost their balls so high,

The tost them over the Jews’ castel,

The Jews they lay so low.

The Jews came up to Storling Green:

‘Come hither, come hither, you young sireen,

And fetch your ball again.’

‘I will not come, and I dare not come

Without my schoolfellows all,

For fear I should meet my mother by the way,

And cause my blood to fall.’

She showed him an apple as green as grass,

She gave him a sugar-plum sweet;

She laid him on the dresser board,

And stuck him like a sheep.

‘A Bible at my head, my mother,

A Testament at my feet;

And every corner you get at

My spirit you shall meet.’”

This is a version of the Ballad of ‘Sir Hugh’, or ‘The Jew’s Daughter’ (Child 155, Roud 73, for the folk-song aficionados), an example of the anti-Semitic accusation of ritual murder which, it appears, originated in medieval England before spreading to Europe and beyond with horrific consequences, unfortunately not altogether relegated to the past. But for the moment we will concern ourselves only with the ballad, which tends to emphasise the murder rather than the ritual part of the story, at least as it was sung by lacemakers.

Lacemakers plural, because J.L.C.’s was not the first version of ‘The Ballad of Sir Hugh’ to appear in Notes and Queries. In the edition of 15 October 1853, C. Clifton Barry had asked “Why does not some one write a Minstrelsy of the Midland Counties”, before observing that the material was just as rich, and oddly akin to the ballads of Scotland (which were far better known even south of the border, thanks to the publishing endeavours of Walter Scott, James Hogg, William Motherwell, David Herd, Peter Buchan and many others). This Scottish tincture he had noticed in Gloucestershire and Warwickshire in versions of the drunken cuckold song ‘Our Goodman’ (Child 274, Roud 144) and the infanticide ballad ‘The Cruel Mother’ (Child 20, Roud 9). In response ‘B.H.C.’ (almost certainly Benjamin Harris Cowper, a biblical scholar, born in Wellingborough in 1822) wrote in on 24 December 1853 with the following:

THE BALLAD OF SIR HUGH, ETC.

The fact mentioned by your correspondent C. CLIFTON BARRY, at p. 357., as to the affinity of Midland songs and ballads to those of Scotland, I have often observed, and among the striking instances of it which could be adduced, the following may be named, as well known in Northamptonshire:

“It rains, it rains, in merry Scotland;

It rains both great and small;

And all the schoolfellows in merry Scotland

Must needs go and play at ball.

“They tossed the ball so high, so high,

And yet it came down so low;

They tossed it over the old Jew’s gates,

And broke the old Jew’s window.

“The old Jew’s daughter she came out;

Was clothed all in green;

‘Come hither, come hither, thou young Sir Hugh,

And fetch your ball again.’

“‘I dare not come, I dare not come,

Unless my schoolfellows come all;

And I shall be flogged when I get home,

For losing of my ball.’

“She ‘ticed him with an apple so red,

And likewise with a fig:

She laid him on the dresser board,

And sticked him like a pig.

“The thickest of blood did first come out,

The second came out so thin;

The third that came was his dear heart’s blood,

Where all his life lay in.”

I write this from memory: it is but a fragment of the whole, which I think is printed, with variations, in Percy’s Reliques. It is also worthy of remark, that there is a resemblance also between the words which occur in provincialisms in the same district, and some of those which are used in Scotland; e.g. whemble or whommel (sometimes not aspirated, and pronounced wemble), to turn upside down, as a dish. This word is Scotch, although they do not pronounce the b any more than in Campbell, which sounds very much like Camel.

Cowper does not say that the singer was a lacemaker, but we can probably infer this from his later contributions to Notes and Queries. For example, on 22 December 1855, he returned to this ballad:

THE BALLAD OF SIR HUGH.

In Vol. viii., p. 614., six verses of this ballad will be found contributed by myself. In replay to inquiries since made, I have received six verses and a half additional. I copy these from the original MS. of “an old lacemaker, who obliged me with these lines,” as my informant says. I have corrected errors of orthography and arrangement. For the sake of the variations I copy the whole.

“It rains, it rains, in merry Scotland,

Both little, great and small;

And all the schoolfellows in merry Scotland

Must needs go and play at ball.

“They tossed the ball so high, so high,

With that it came down so low;

They tossed it over the old Jew’s gates,

And broke the old Jew’s window.

“The old Jew’s daughter she came out;

Was clothed all in green.

‘Come hither, come hither, you young Sir Hugh,

And fetch your ball again.’

“‘I dare not come, nor will I come,

Without my schoolfellows come all;

And I shall be beaten when I go home,

For losing of my ball.’

“She ‘ticed him with an apple so red,

And likewise with a fig:

She threw him over the dresser board,

And sticked him like a pig.

“The first came out the thickest of blood,

The second came out so thin;

The third that came the child’s heart-blood,

Where’er his life lay in.

“‘O spare my life! O spare my life!

O spare my life!’ said he:

‘If ever I live to be a young man,

I’ll do as good chare for thee.

“‘I’ll do as good chare for thy true love

As ever I did for the King;

I will scour a basin as bright as silver,

To let your heart-blood run in.’

“When eleven o’clock was past and gone,

And all the schoolfellows came home,

Every mother had her own child,

But young Sir Hugh’s mother had none.

“She went up Lincoln and down Lincoln,

And all about Lincoln street,

With her small wand in her right hand,

Thinking of her child to meet.

“She went till she came to the old Jew’s gate,

She knocked with the ring;

Who should be so ready as th’ old Jew herself

To rise and let her in.

“‘What news, fair maid? what news, fair maid?

What news have you brought me?’

. . . . . . .

. . . . . . .

“‘Have you seen any of my child to-day,

Or any of the rest of my kin?’

‘No, I’ve seen none of your child to-day,

Nor none of the rest of your kin.’”

I am very anxious to complete this ballad from Northamptonshire; and I again renew my request that some of your correspondents will endeavour to supply what is deficient. The “old lacemaker” would have given more, but she could not. The pure Saxon of this ballad is beautiful.

Cowper got no answer to his request until J.L.C.’s entry in 1868 jogged the memory of Edward Peacock (1831-1915) of Bottesford Manor, near Lincoln. He supplied a full version of the ballad from a Mr W.C. Atkinson of Brigg, Lincolnshire (who had previously published it in The Athenaeum of 19 January 1867, though whether he heard it or discovered a manuscript or print version is not clear). This fills in some of the elements of the narrative: the mother calls her son and his body miraculously speaks, enabling her to find it hidden in a “deep draw-well.” In other versions bells ring and books read themselves as the body is transported. Peacock explained in his article that the ballad bears some relation to events that occurred in 1255 in Lincoln, when the Jews of that city were accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy, Hugh son of Beatrice, the future ‘Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln’. Nineteen members of the Jewish community would be executed in consequence. The story occurs in three contemporary chronicles, as well as in an Anglo-Norman ballad, and would be referred to in Chaucer’s ‘The Prioress’s Tale’. It is only one of several medieval child saint legends of a related kind (William of Norwich, Robert of Bury St Edmunds, Harold of Gloucester…). Yet while the story was old, there is no record of this particular ballad text until Thomas Percy printed a copy, supposedly from a Scottish manuscript, in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our Earlier Poets (1765). Thereafter, the ballad has been recorded frequently, in Scotland, England, Ireland and the United States; it has 295 entries in the Roud Folksong Index, the source of the Roud numbers given in this article (and available online at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library a mine of information on everything related to folk music). The modern ballad differs considerably from the medieval saints’ legends, not least in the primary role played by a woman as siren and murderer.

Lacemakers continued to sing this song while making lace well into the later nineteenth century, for Thomas Wright (1859-1936) of Olney, in The Romance of the Lace Pillow (1919) recorded versions from Weston-under-Wood and Haddenham, both in Buckinghamshire, which were used as lace tells in the lace schools. This is the text of one he gave in full.

THE JEWESS MAIDEN.

There was a Jewess maiden, or so my story states,

Who beckoned to a little boy who peeped between her gates.

An apple so red, a plum so sweet, she gave him from her tree;

She dazzled his eyes with a garry gold ring that was so fair to see.

And when she got him in the gates she laughed, he knew not why,

And uttered many wicked words and told him he must die.

She laid him on the dresser board, no mercy then she showed,

But stabbed him with a knife and stabbed until the life-blood flowed.

Wright emphasised that lacemakers’ songs and tells, particularly those from Buckinghamshire, “abound in allusions to coffins, shrouds, corpses, bones, lightning flashes, sardonic laughter, hyena-like cries, and other lurid, gruesome, clammy or grizzly terrors”. The next lacemakers’ song to appear in Notes and Queries makes his point very aptly.

J.L.C.’s reference to the ballad of ‘Sir Hugh’ prompted Cowper to return to the theme of lacemakers’ songs in Notes and Queries of 19 September 1868.

LACEMAKERS’ SONGS: “LONG LANKIN.”

Forty years ago, when in Northamptonshire, I used to hear the lacemakers sing the now well-known ballad of “Hugh of Lincoln” (“It rains, it rains,” etc.) Another, which I have never seen in print, but which I happen to have in MS., is “Long Lankin,” of which I send a copy. Like the damsels whom Shakespeare represents as “chanting” the song which the Clown proceeds to sing (in Twelfth Night, Act II., c. 4), the equally “free maids” of my childhood’s days often chanted, rather than sung, as they sat in rows “in the sun” or in the “lace-school,” an institution which is perhaps effete. But Shakespeare’s lacemakers made “bone lace,” and not “bobbin lace,” with which only I am acquainted. I could perhaps remember some few other ditties which the lacemakers used to sing, though my impression is that they were often mere childish nursery rhymes like “Sing a song of sixpence.” Such probably was one which began in this way:

“I had a little nutting-tree,

And nothing would it bear

But little silver nutmegs

For Galligolden fair”

of which I recollect no more, but that, as a little boy, I used to tell them to say “nutmeg-tree,” which they obstinately refused to do. By-the-way, there was a long piece about “Death and the Lady,” which the “free maids” used to chant. This exhausts my present reminiscences so I shall proceed to give you “Long Lankin”: —

“Said my lord to his lady as he got on his horse.

‘Take care of Long Lankin, who lives in the moss.’

Said my lord to his lady as he rode away,

‘Take care of Long Lankin who lives in the clay.

The doors are all bolted, and the windows are pinned,

There is not a hole where a mouse can creep in.’

Then he kissed his fair lady as he rode away;

For he must be in London before break of day.

The doors were all bolted, the windows all pinned,

But one little window where Lankin crept in.

‘Where’s the lord of this house?’ said Long Lankin.

‘He is gone to fair London,’ said the false nurse to him.

‘Where’s the lady of this house?’ said Long Lankin.

‘She’s in her high chamber,’ said the false nurse to him.

‘Where’s the young heir of this house?’ said Long Lankin.

‘He’s asleep in his cradle,’ said the false nurse to him.

‘We’ll prick him, we’ll prick him all over with a pin,

And that will make your lady come down to him.’

They pricked him, they pricked him all over with a pin,

And the false nurse held a basin for the blood to drop in.

‘O nurse! How you sleep, and O nurse how you snore!

You leave my son Johnson to cry and to roar!’

‘I’ve tried him with suck, and I’ve tried him with pap;

Come down, my fair lady, and nurse him in your lap:

I’ve tried him with apple, and I’ve tried him with pear;

Come down, my fair lady and nurse him in your chair.’

‘How can I come down, it’s so late in the night,

And there’s no fire burning, or lamp to give light?’

‘You have three silver mantles as bright as the sun;

Come down, my fair lady, all by the light of one.’

‘Oh! spare me, Long Lankin, spare me till twelve o’clock!

You shall have as much money as you can carry on your back.

Oh! spare me, Long Lankin, spare me one hour!

You shall have my daughter Nancy, she is a sweet flower.’

‘Where is your daughter Nancy? she may do some good;

She can hold the golden basin to catch your heart’s blood.’

Lady Nancy was sitting in her window so high,

And she saw her father as he was riding by:

‘O father! O father! don’t lay the blame on me;

It was the false nurse and Lankin who killed your lady.’

Then Lankin was hung on a gallows so high,

And the false nurse was burnt in a fire close by.”

To the best of my recollection this copy is not quite complete, and it was sung with occasional ad libitum variations, as “Sally” or “Betsy” for Nancy. It is probable that inquiry in the lace-making districts would produce copies of other old ballads.

Readers will probably be familiar with ‘I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear’ (Roud 3749). ‘Death and the Lady’ (Roud 1031) was a commonly encountered ballad — or rather ballads, for there are a number of different texts that share a very similar theme. It had often appeared on broadsides from the seventeenth century onwards, and was framed as a dialogue between a fine lady and Death, in which the certainty of the grave, and the judgement beyond, is gradually forced on the former. The final verse in the version supplied by Lucy Broadwood’s English Traditional Songs and Carols (1908) returns us to subtitle of this website:

The grave’s the market place where all must meet

Both rich and poor, as well as small and great;

If life were merchandise, that gold could buy,

The rich would live — only the poor would die.

‘Long Lankin’ (Child 93, Roud 6) had also previously appeared in Notes and Queries for 25 October 1856, when M.H.R. asked for information about the ballad ‘Long Lankyn’ “which is derived by tradition from the nurse of an ancestor of mine who heard it sung nearly a century ago in Northumberland”. Lankin (or Lamkin, or Lammikin, or Beaulampkins, or Lambert Linkin, or Bold Rankin… he goes by many names) is a particularly ghoulish ballad, frequently recorded in the English (and Scots) speaking world. In longer versions of the ballad the eponymous villain is a mason who builds a castle for a nobleman, who subsequently forgets to pay his bills. Perhaps because of its brutality, commentators have often speculated on a medieval origin, but in fact the earliest recorded version, ‘Long Longkin’ was noted from one of his female parishioners by the Reverend Parsons of Wye, near Ashford in Kent, and sent to Thomas Percy of Reliques fame in 1775. Another version appeared the following year in the second edition of David Herd’s Ancient Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads etc.

Neither ‘Sir Hugh’ nor ‘Long Lankin’ were only, or even primarily, sung by lacemakers. There were part of the common ballad culture of the English and Scots speaking world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if not before. It may be worth mentioning that Thomas Percy, who wrote Reliques of Ancient English Poetry while vicar of Easton Maudit in Northamptonshire, close to local centres of lace-making, nonetheless never mentions the penchant of lacemakers for old songs. However, there are some good reasons why the contributors to Notes and Queries should associate these type of songs specifically with lacemakers. The practice of singing while lacemaking was noted by several commentators after Shakespeare. For instance, Thomas Sternberg (probably Vincent Thomas, 1831-1880, who grew up in Northampton and was later librarian of Leeds Library), in his The Dialect and Folk-Lore of Northamptonshire (1851) wrote under the entry ‘Lace-Songs’ that “Lace making is almost always accompanied with singing”.

One might imagine that before machines drowned out the human voice and commercial recorded music became ubiquitous that practically all work, and many other human activities, were accompanied by song. However, from the evidence available, this was not the case. Some occupations in England were frequently associated with singing — they include carters and shoemakers, as well as Shakespeare’s trio of spinners, knitters and lacemakers — but no such association was made with carpenters, blacksmiths or dressmakers. This is not to say that there were not melodious blacksmiths or lyrical carpenters, but that singing was not commonly thought to be an inherent part of their work. A blacksmith’s repertoire would be individual, whereas lacemakers’ was an expression of their collective identity. Hence Sternberg use of the term of “lace-songs”: he associated a particular repertoire with this manufacture. Lacemaking was not so arduous that it prevented the simultaneous use of the lungs, and as pillows were portable it was often done in company, so that singers had both an audience and an accompaniment. And in lace schools, songs or “tells” were used as part of the training process, a topic we’ll return to in a later post. This occupational tradition explains why it was logical for Cowper to suggest that “inquiry in the lace-making districts would produce copies of other old ballads”.

But why these blood-soaked songs in particular? Both ‘Sir Hugh’ and ‘Long Lankin’ are about the murder of a child, specifically the long drawn out death by blood letting. And although the perpetrators might be punished, in lacemakers’ versions the emphasis is very much on the butchering of Hugh and Johnson rather than the retribution that might follow. It is particularly striking that in three cases the contributors to Notes and Queries cited children’s nurses as their original source, especially so in the case of ‘Long Lankin’ where a treacherous nurse is the murderer’s accomplice. Perhaps, like lullabies (think of ‘Rock-a-bye Baby’), these songs were a cathartic release of the repressed resentment felt by servants against the object of their attentions — weak but demanding, dependant but socially superior. Mothers too could feel that children were burdens, a topic we’ll return to in a future post about lacemakers and infanticide. Is it possible that resentment also underlay lacemakers’ performances of ‘Sir Hugh’? Lacemakers were frequently working ten-hour days, if not more, by the age of six: perhaps they were not that sympathetic towards schoolboys playing football. Again it is worth noting that it is a male child who is killed, while in the case of ‘Long Lankin’ the female child survives. We last see Nancy, or Sally, or Betsy, sitting at her window, exactly where, in contemporary descriptions, we find lacemakers working. Perhaps the substitute names allowed different girls to express their own frustrations against their mothers, the person who had set them to lacemaking, and their siblings, and especially brothers whose situation, even if not petted and spoiled, was probably less restricted than lacemakers.

Gerald Porter argues that in lace tells “the theme of child death is implicit, and this relates it [the tell] to a large group of songs in which labor and early death are linked.” Lacemakers sang about child death, while their own autonomy and even their health was being sapped by the very process in which they were engaged. Singing at work is very much part of “the romance of the lace pillow”: the “free maids” sitting in the sun outside a cottage door; but the actual content of lacemakers’ repertoire of songs undercuts this idyll. No doubt singing was a moment of freedom, of “fancy” (as some recent scholars of work-song express it), when imagination was allowed to wander in very different circumstances to those of lacemaker. But in a culture where even looking up from the pillow might be punished, songs might also express a rage that could find no other outlet.

Further Reading: from Notes and Queries.

Clifton Barry, ‘Notes on Midland County Minstrelsy’, Notes and Queries, 1st series VIII (October 1853), pp. 357-8.

B.H.C., ‘The Ballad of Sir Hugh, Etc.’, Notes and Queries, 1st series VIII (December 1853), p. 614.

B.H.C., ‘The Ballad of Sir Hugh.’, Notes and Queries, 1st series XII (December 1855), pp. 496-7.

J.L.C., ‘A Lacemakers’ Song’, Notes and Queries, 4th series II (July 1868), p. 8.

Edward Peacock, ‘A Lacemaker’s Song’, Notes and Queries, 4th series II (July, 1868), pp. 59-60.

Sidney Beisly, ‘Lacemakers’ Songs’, Notes and Queries, 4th series II (August 1868), p. 178

B.H. Cowper, ‘Lacemakers’ Songs: “Long Lankin”’, Notes and Queries, 4th series II (September 1868), p. 281.

Further Reading: other sources

Lucy Broadwood, English Traditional Songs and Carols (London, 1908).

Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols (Boston, 1882-1898).

Mary-Ann Constantine and Gerald Porter, Fragment and Meaning in Traditional Song: From the Blues to the Baltic, (Oxford, 2003), chap. II, ‘Singing the Unspeakable’.

Vic Gammon and Peter Sallybrass, ‘Structure and Ideology in the Ballad: An Analysis of “Long Lankin”’, Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 26:1 (1984), pp. 1-20.

Anne Gilchrist, ‘Lambkin: A Study in Evolution’, Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society 1:1 (1932), pp. 1-17.

David Gregory, Victorian Songhunters: The Recovery and Editing of English Vernacular Ballads and Folk Lyrics, 1820-1883 (Lanham, 2006).

Joseph Jacobs, ‘Little St. Hugh of Lincoln: Researches in History, Archaeology, and Legend’, reprinted in Alan Dundes (ed.) Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore (Wisconsin, 1991), pp. 41-71.

Marek Korczynski, Michael Pickering and Emma Robertson, Rhythms of Labour: Music at Work in Britain, (Cambridge, 2013).

Gavin Langmuir, ‘The Knight’s Tale of Young Hugh of Lincoln’, Speculum 47:3 (1972), pp. 459-482.

Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs and Other Pieces of our Earlier Poets (London, 1765).

Gerald Porter, ‘“Work the Old Lady out of the Ditch”: Singing at Work by English Lacemakers’, Journal of Folklore Research 31:1-3 (1994),pp. 35-55.

Emma Robertson, Michael Pickering and Marek Korczynski, ‘“And Spinning so with Voices Meet, Like Nightingales they Sung Full Sweet”: Unravelling Representations of Singing in Pre-Industrial Textile Production’, Cultural and Social History 5:1 (2008), pp. 11-31.

E.M. Rose, The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2015).

Thomas Sternberg, The Dialect and Folk-lore of Northamptonshire (London, 1851).

James R. Woodall, ‘“Sir Hugh”: A Study in Balladry’, Southern Folklore Quarterly 19 (1955), pp. 78-84.

Thomas Wright, The Romance of the Lace Pillow (Olney, 1919), Chap XIV: ‘The Lace Tells and the Lace-Makers’ Holidays’.

In a corner of the Ashmolean’s Textile exhibit hangs a rare portrait of a working lacemaker by the Danish painter Bernhard Keilhau (1624 – 1687). Dressed simply in a white shirt, plain open bodice, skirt and apron, she is depicted as working a large bolster pillow balanced on her lap, a scarf hastily tied around her head. Unusually for a portrait of a lacemaker, she is neither looking down at her work, nor at the viewer, but seems momentarily distracted by something or someone beyond the frame. A pupil of Rembrandt, Keilhau depicted the lacemaker as part of a larger composition of genre scenes which epitomised the five senses. Within this composition, the lacemaker is thought to be an allegory of sight[1].

Good eyesight is, of course, essential for any artisan. And yet, lace is profoundly connected to the visual in other way, too. First of all, it relies on the visual for its impact: what gives lace its particular material resonance is the manner in which it plays and manipulates the notion of surface, always begging the question whether it is the weave or the spaces in between which constitute the pattern. Lace is always partially concealing and partially revealing the surfaces it edges or covers. Secondly, because lace is such a delicate textile, visual sources are often the only way in which can study historical pieces. Along with pattern books, looking at paintings and portraits is our primary way to understand how fashions for lace changed over time, how lace was worn, and its visual impact as part of historical costume. Identifying and dating lace from visual sources, however, is never straightforward. Not only because painters often took some artistic license when portraying lace on garments, but because lace was often collected, inherited, and re-used on garments over time – even by the wealthy and the nobility. Seen through the subsequent fussiness of Victorian styles and 20th century machine-made laces, it is easy to forget that until well into the 18th century such fine laces were considered a form of transferable wealth on par with gold or gems.

As part of the Lace in Context project, David Hopkin and I became interested in understanding how lace is identified from visual materials, and what challenges this poses to scholars and collectors of lace. By bringing lace makers into the museum, we wanted to start a dialogue amongst practitioners, artists, and academics about how lace is portrayed in the visual arts, and how it might be ‘read’ back for purposes of identification. On the 7th of June, we invited Oxford’s Isis Lacemakers, as well as Gwynedd Roberts (Honorary Curator at the Lace Guild Museum) to view the Ashmolean’s collection of portraits. We were lucky enough to recruit the artist Teresa Whitfield to come and speak to us briefly about her work rendering lace in pen and ink, as well as to accompany us around the gallery. Tracing the way lace had been portrayed in portraiture across the European continent, we found not only varying approaches to depicting laces, but also a great difference in the importance artists from different countries and period gave lace in their portraits.

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The British tradition of wearing and making bobbin lace can be traced back as far as the mid-16th century and was well-established by the reign of Elizabeth the First (Yallop 1992). The technique, however, is even older: the earliest known pattern books Le Pompe (1557) and Nüw Modelbuch, allerly Gattungen Däntelschnür (1561) were printed in Venice and Zürich, respectively, and point to Italy as the origin of the technique (Sciama 1992). From there, both the fashion for lace and the knowledge of its manufacture spread along trade routes from modern-day Switzerland to France, Flanders, and then across the channel to Britain. The fashion for large ruffs – well known from contemporary portraits of Queen Elizabeth – and then for copious amounts of lace neckties, collars, and cuffs worn by both men and women until the early 19th century, led to a real expansion in the production of lace throughout Europe. A beautiful example of lace from this early period can be seen in the portraits of the Tradescant family housed in the ‘Ark to Ashmolean’ exhibit in the Museum’s new lower ground floor. Painted over a number of years between 1630-1650s, they depict Hester Tradescant, the second wife of John Tradescant the Younger, and her stepchildren. A family of gardeners and garden designers to the nobility, the Tradescants amassed the collection of rarities which would later form the basis of the Ashmolean. Housed in their residence at Lambeth, affectionately known as the ‘Ark’, their cabinet of curiosities was open to the public for a fee[2].

Equally impressive are the lace ruffs and cuffs are found on two Dutch portraits from the same period exhibited as part of the Museum’s Dutch Art collection on the second floor. In one portrait by Jan Cornelisz Verspronck (1606-1662), a young woman in rich, black brocade is depicted wearing lace cuffs, a lace-lined ‘bertha’ covering her square décolletage, and an enormous ‘millstone’ ruff. Her hair is covered by a delicate matron’s cap edged with more lace. Standing out against the stark, black background of her dress, the abundance of lace not only framed and highlighted the only visible parts of her body (the hands, the face, and her chest), but – along with her fine gloves and massive gold bracelet – also underscored her high social standing. Even more striking is the neighbouring portrait of a wealthy middle-class woman from Haarlem. The portraits of the Tradescant family and this portrait from the Dutch Golden Age belong to a period when fashions for heavy, dark textiles, as well as standing collars and ruffs, demanded bold, often geometric needle and bobbin laces. Indeed, until the 18th century, it was the richer forms of Italian laces such as Venetian needlepoint and Milanese bobbin lace which dominated fashions until lighter needle laces from Argentan and Alençon in France, and bobbin laces from Binche, Valenciennes, and Mechlin in Fanders gained popularity both in Britain and on the Continent.

Two portraits in the Ashmolean reflect this change in fashions. The first is a portrait of woman by the French painter Jean-Francois de Troy (1679-1752). One of the leading history painters of the day, Le Troy is new best known for the series tableaux de modes, in which he accurately depicted the fashions and pastimes of the aristocracy (Casely et. al. 2004). The second is a portrait of a gentleman by the French painter Etienne Aubry (1745-17881) made in about the year 1777. Dressed in a dark, slim-cut coat fashionable for its time, and a scarlet waistcoat, the gentleman wears a wig and a simple cravat augmented by a slim lace frill. Both portraits show not only how radically fashions for laces changed, but also a fundamentally different approach to the visual depiction of lace by portrait artists: while the painters of the Dutch Golden Age took produced meticulous depictions of fat lace collars, cuffs, and ruffs, French painters of the 17th and 18th century preferred a far more impressionistic approach, using a few, light brushstrokes. This probably reflected both the different material nature of 18th century styles of lace, as well as a move towards intimacy, narrative, and sentimentalism in French art.

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For the people portrayed in these pictures, however, the choice of what to lace to wear was not solely dictated by fashion. Bans on the import of foreign laces in England, France, Spain and other countries, show that even in the Early Modern period cloth, clothing, and fashion were seen as having the ‘power to materially articulate national identity’, leading anxieties about the economy to be ‘written over as a narrative of uncertainty and anxiety about national distinctions’ (Hentschell 2002:546). As a precious commodity, the trade and manufacture of lace was a subject of interest to parliament throughout the Early Modern period and the Restoration. Dealers of English lace competing with fine lace made in France, Belgium and Italy for customers appealed to consumers to buy with their patrimony in mind. Indeed, lace and lace manufacture became linked to civic patriotism precisely through appeals to the consumption habits of the nobility and the growing bourgeoisie. Thus, a Mrs. Dorothy Holt appealed to the ‘Ladies of Great Britain’ in a pamphlet of 1757 to ‘help circulate and distribute to the best Advantage, that Money which will arise from this their Native, English, Valuable and most Ornamental Manufacture; which will wear better than French point, Brussels lace, or Minonette’ (Holt 1757, emphasis in the original). Believing that the control of foreign trade was paramount to ensuring national prosperity, the Parliament imposed heavy import duties were imposed on foreign made lace in the 17th century and only lifted in 1860.

By the start of the 18th Century, lace making had become a major rural industry in England. The fortunes of artisans and lace traders were not only determined by changing fashions and the fluctuating trade policies of Parliament, but also larger questions of foreign policy and power-shifts on the Continent itself. Characteristically, lace makers in England saw their wages rise when the French went to war: Lace makers in the East Midlands, for example, enjoyed relative prosperity during and after the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). Even in such periods of commercial success, however, only a minute portion of the overall profits of the trade ever made it into the hands of the lace makers themselves. From 19th century sources, we know that the reality of a lace maker’s life was often harsh: Working from home, women were often forced to work for 8 to 10 hours daily, as well as running the household. It was during this time, that earlier calls for the patriotic consumption of English lace and civic philanthropy towards lace makers were joined by the socialism of William Morris and Ruskinian celebrations of craft, which advocated the preservation of handicrafts believed to be disappearing under the pressures of industrial manufacturing. Both Morris and Ruskin shared what Peter Mandler (1997) has called an anti-establishment, ‘rural nostalgic’ view of Englishness, and sought to protect rural crafts from the encroachment of urban, industrial.

This passion for the simple authenticity of craft was shared by another mid-19th century artistic movement, namely the Pre-Raphaelites. In the Ashmolean’s Pre-Raphaelites gallery hangs a portrait of Mrs Coventry Patmore from about 1856. A wide band of lace graces her low neckline, gracefully accenting her pale, sloping shoulders which would have been highly fashionable at the time. Mrs Patmore was the wife of essayist and poet Coventry Patmore, an influential friend of the Pre-Raphaelites. Their marriage was the subject of Patmore’s popular series of poems ‘The Angel in the House’; a phrase which has now come to encapsulate the cultural ideals of domestic femininity to which Victorian women were expected to aspire. Lace and lacemaking were often extolled as offering women a virtuous way out of poverty by members of the establishment. Yet, it is difficult to determine what kind of lace Mrs Patmore is wearing in the portrait. It is painted rather clumsily and does not seem have any discernible rhythmic pattern. What is certain, is that it does not resemble any kind of lace made in Britain at the time. In the 19th century, a widespread passion for antique lace meant copies of old laces were made, as well as much older pieces taken apart and re-fashioned to contemporary tastes (Leader 2010). This means it could very well have been a piece of antique lace. Or simply a phantasy put together by an artist not very familiar with the material itself. Regardless, it perhaps best illustrates the problems of trying to read and identify lace from visual sources.

Sources:

Caseley, Catherine. 2004. Ashmolean Museum: Complete Illustrated Catalogue of Paintings. Oxford: The Asmolean Museum.

Hentschell, R. 2002. Treasonous Textiles: Foreign Cloth and the Construction of Englishness. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32(2): 543-570.

Holt, D. 1757. An Address Humbly Offers to the Ladies of Great Britain Relating to the Most valuable Part of Ornamental Manufacture in their Dress. London: A.Millar, J.Whiston and B. White, and R. and J. Dodsley.

Leader, Jane. 2010. Identifying Lace. DATS in partnership with the Victoria and Albert Museum. Available at http://www.dressandtextilespecialists.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Identifying-Handmade-lace.pdf.

Sciama, L. 1992. Lacemaking in Venetian Culture, in Dress and Gender: Making and Meaning, R. Barnes and J.B. Eicher (eds). Oxford and New York: Berg.

Yallop, H.J. 1992. The History of the Honiton Lace Industry. Exeter: University of Exeter Press.

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[2] http://www.ashmolean.org/ash/amulets/tradescant/tradescant00.html

In her Victorian heyday Charlotte Mary Yonge (1823-1901) was as popular and as prolific a novelist as Dickens and Trollope. She has fallen out of fashion somewhat since, despite the efforts of the excellent Charlotte Mary Yonge Fellowship, whose website we recommend. Although a witty and lively writer, especially of dialogue, it was Yonge’s social and religious opinions which drove her plots, and explain why they feel so dated. This can be illustrated by the example of The Clever Woman of the Family, but our reason for including it in this series of blogs on lacemakers in fiction is because it also offers a picture of the Devon lace industry in the high Victorian period.

Yonge’s novel opens in the early 1860s on Rachel Curtis’s twenty-fifth birthday. She is the daughter of a gentry family in the fictional Devon fishing and resort village of Avonmouth and, in her own opinion at least, the clever woman of the family. But she can find no outlet for her intelligence and her energies because she is “tethered down to the merest mockery of usefulness by conventionalities. I am a young lady forsooth! — I must not be out late; I must not put forth my views; I must not choose my acquaintance; I must be a mere helpless, useless being, growing old in a ridiculous fiction of prolonged childhood”.

The primary objects of Rachel’s desire to be useful are the “hard worked, half-stifled little girls” in the local lace schools: “cramped in soul, destroyed in body, that fine ladies may wear lace trimmings”. It galls her that a charitable bequest by one of her ancestors in the seventeenth century actually pays for the girls’ apprenticeships. At the moment the only support she is able to provide is by purchasing their products, even though she describes lace as “cobwebs of vanity” (while her mother detests “that black lace thing, that looks fit for your grandmother” which she is obliged to wear as a consequence of her philanthropic consumption) and reading to the lacemakers in their schoolroom. This location is a “black-hole under the stairs” without windows where the local lace mistress keeps seven children in rigid silence for ten hours a day. Rachel reads them something religious, something improving, and a bit of a story, alongside mental arithmetic which, according to the author “was about as interesting as the humming of a blue-bottle fly” to its “well-broken” denizens. The idea that one must be “broken to lace” recurs throughout the book.

Rachel is particularly exercised by the fate of one intelligent girl, Lovedy Kelland, whose mother had refused to sacrifice her little girl “to the Moloch of lace” but instead sent her to school. There were even hopes she might become a trainee teacher. But when her mother dies, the girl is adopted by the lace-mistress “with the resolve to act the truly kind part by her, and break her in to lace-making.” But while Rachel is infuriated by Lovedy’s fate, her real ambition is to attack “the system… that chained girls to an unhealthy occupation in their early childhood, and made an overstocked market and underpaid workers”. “Lace and lacemakers are facts,” she explains to her distracted cousin Fanny, “but if the middle-men were exploded, and the excess of workers drafted off by some wholesome outlet, the price would rise, so that the remainder would be at leisure to fulfil the domestic offices of womanhood.” However, her wealthy neighbours have no desire push up the price of lace, and the lacemakers themselves are drawn to Primitive Methodism to escape the well-meaning interference of local do-gooders; they only tolerate Rachel because of her family’s historic position in the community.

Her opportunity to act comes through a chance encounter with Mr Mauleverer, a philanthropic lecturer and, it is implied but never quite established as fact, a clergyman unable to find a position because of his modern “opinions”. With his encouragement she launches the Female Union for Lacemaker’s Employment (the initials are not inconsequential, and the name is later changed to the Female Union for Englishwoman’s Employment or F.U.E.E.), gathering funds from near and far to support an Industrial School for the former lacemakers where, as Rachel explains “some fresh trades might be taught, so as to lessen the glut of the market, and to remove the workers that are forced to undersell one another, and thus oblige the buyers to give a fairly remunerative price.” A magazine is launched under the banner “Am I not a Sister?” (a reference to the famous slogan of the slave emancipation movement at the turn of the century, “Am I not a Man and a Brother?” For another novelist who drew connections between lacemaking and slavery, see our post on Johanna Courtmans-Berchmans). Premises are found nearby, a matron employed, and two lacemakers, including Lovedy Kelland, are taken in with the promise of becoming wood-engravers.

Sadly, Mauleverer turns out to be a con-man who pockets the monies raised by Rachel, while the matron is a vicious tyrant who starves the girls while forcing them to make sprigs day and night, beating them with a stick if they failed to fulfil their quota. The deception comes to light when Mauleverer presents two woodcuts, which he claims were engraved by the F.U.E.E’s trainees, jointly entitled “The free maids that weave their thread with bones” (the Shakespearean description of lacemakers). One woodcut, depicting a pretty maiden outside a cottage door with roses, honeysuckles and other “conventional rural delights” is labelled “Ideal”; the other, showing “a den of thin, wizened, half-starved girls, cramped over their cushions in a lace-school” is labelled “Real”. Rachel’s friends prove to her that in fact both images had been snipped out of an old copy of the London Illustrated News. However, this revelation comes too late for the beaten, emaciated Lovedy who dies of diphtheria soon after her release. Her last words to Rachel as watches over her deathbed are “Please tell me of my Saviour”, but Rachel finds she cannot, so far has she drifted from the verities of the established Church. (On the whole the poor in Yonge’s novels do not provide moral lessons to the rich, as they do in Charlotte Barnard’s work: this scene is an exception.) Lovedy’s death is only one of several shocks to Rachel’s image of herself as “the clever woman of the family”, but it is the most brutal.

Before the end of the novel Rachel will learn that only by submitting herself to patriarchal authority can she fulfil her life’s purpose. Male superiority appears first in the shape of her husband, but he is but a stepping stone to the masculine font of all authority, the Church. She will discover that the social conventions against which she railed at the beginning were instituted for her well-being, and even her fashion sense must be submitted to her husband (who has as low an opinion of her charitable lace purchases as her mother). In the second half of the novel the sufferings of the poor are largely forgotten and in as much as Rachel still feels that “every alley and lane of town or country reeks with vice and corruption”, the implicit argument of the novel is that not much could or should be done about it, or at least not by women alone uninstructed by pious men. After all, as Rachel explains at the end, one never knows whether one is doing more harm than good. “I had a few intellectual tastes, and liked to think and read, which was supposed to be cleverness; and my wilfulness made me fancy myself superior in force of character in a way I could never have imagined if I had lived more in the world. Contact with really clever people has shown me that I am slow and unready.”

Yonge sincerely believed in male superiority, and for many years opposed developments in women’s education. This is surely one reason that her works have fallen out of fashion. She was a tireless proselytizer for the Church of England in its most High Church, Oxford Movement garb. Although her characters are more rounded than Barnard’s and More’s ciphers, the moral message of her work is hammered home in chapter titles and epigrams. But perhaps even more off-putting is her absolute acceptance not just of social inequality — even for the exemplar of modern intellectual trends Rachel Curtis, class hierarchy is a given — but also social conventions. This is a novel in which the characters can spend the best part of the chapter discussing whether it is appropriate for a young widow to play croquet. Although in the text the partisans for the game carry the day, the author reveals her own allegiances when later the initiator of the craze in Avonmouth, a fashionable but wilful and selfish young woman, is killed in a freak croquet accident.

Lace-making is a background theme of the novel – the motor of Rachel’s enlightenment rather than a topic in itself, and it fades out completely in the second half of the book. Nonetheless it is clear that Yonge knew something of the trade. Her family came from Devon and she often holidayed there. She was certainly familiar with the vocabulary of the Honiton lace industry, such as “sprigs” for the patterns made by the lacemakers, and “gapsies” for the illicit breaks observed in the lace school. But if some knowledge came from direct observation, it is likely that she had also read the report of Commissioner John Edmund White on the lace industry (1864) as part of the Royal Commission on the Employment of Children and Young Persons in Trades and Manufactures not already Regulated by Law. White confirms, for example, the importance of the apprenticeships to lace mistresses in Devon (compared with the Midlands). Apprentices would be trained for a year and half or so before they could start making money on their own account. Yonge’s description of a lace school is also similar to those visited by White. For instance, Mrs Besley’s lace school at Seaton was an annexe to her cottage, “nearly square, a little over seven feet each way, and six feet six inches high, and containing, in fact, a little over 330 cubic feet, and there is no fireplace or means of warming”. This tiny space was shared by seven pupils, the mistress and her three daughters, working from early morning till at least 10:00pm, and often much later or even all through the night. As another lace mistress, Mrs Croydon, put it, “If you promise the work, you must do it” regardless of what strain it caused the young girls. Yonge’s Mrs Kelland would doubtless have agreed.

Girls started in these lace schools as young as four or five, though they were normally not expected to do a full day’s (and night’s) work until aged seven. Work would start at six or seven in the morning, and those mistresses like Mrs Copp of Beer who closed at ten in the evening, summer and winter, obviously considered themselves philanthropic for not keeping the girls later. The term school is something of a misnomer as most appear to have provided no education beyond lace skills. Hence the effort that Rachel Curtis puts into night schools and Sunday schools, where lacemakers might learn their letters, even though she felt that such efforts were only “scratching the surface”. Commissioner White was shocked by the levels of ignorance he encountered: for example, thirteen-year-old Emily Westlake, whom he interviewed at Mrs Besley’s school, “Knows the letters (and no more), but no figures (when shown) except ‘1’.” Yonge highlights this mental cramping in the character of Susan Kelland, daughter of the lace-mistress, “who was supposed to be a sort of spider, with no capacities beyond her web.” White highlighted the deleterious health effects of such children “crumped up” (to use the local term) over pillows in such ill-ventilated, stuffy rooms, alternatively too cold or too hot, for hours on end. The girls suffered from headaches, they damaged their eyes, and in some cases even died of brain fever from over-taxation. All this to earn between a shilling and, at most, even for the most adept, three shillings six pence a week (by way of comparison, in this region of very depressed wages, a male agricultural labourer might earn eight shillings a week on average).

The description of the lacemakers’ sufferings at the hands of the F.U.E.E.’s matron Mrs Rawlins –beaten, forced to work through the night, and in effect starved to death – also recalls accounts of the Barratt case of 1856, which Yonge may have read; it was certainly covered in her local newspaper. Like the Barratt’s sister and parents, Mrs Rawlins would be tried for manslaughter at the assizes, and in her case sentenced to one year’s hard labour.

Yonge is sniffy about Rachel Curtis’s desire to reform the system (“everything was a system with Rachel”) rather than, at most, relieve the symptoms of poverty (a much more proper activity for upper-class women). However, The Royal Commission’s report made it obvious that manufacturing’s reliance on child labour could not be ameliorated by private charity alone, it could only be addressed through legislation. Its first fruit was the Workshop Act of 1867, which stated that no child under eight could be employed, that children between eight and thirteen could work no more than six hours a day, and all employed children should get ten hours of formal schooling a week. Further regulation of workshops, together with new educational requirements, would effectively kill off the lace schools over the next two decades.

Further Reading

British Parliamentary Papers, House of Commons, First Report of the Commissioners on the Employment of Children and Young Persons in Trades and Manufactures not already Regulated by Law. 1863. As far as lace manufacturing is concerned, the findings of the Commission are usefully summarized in a more accessible pamphlet: Alan Brown, Take the Children: How Victorian Lace Girls Lived and Worked in the Honiton and East Midlands Districts — This is their Story, as Told to the 1862 Royal Commission (Sawbridgeworth, c. 2000).

Janice Fiamengo, “Forms of Suffering in Charlotte Yonge’s The Clever Woman of the Family”, Victorian Review 25:2 (2000); 85-105.

H.J. Yallop, The History of the Honiton Lace Industry (University of Exeter Press, 1992).

Rosamond Lehmann was born in 1901 at Bourne End in Buckinghamshire, on the southern fringe of the lacemaking districts. Her father, Rudolph Lehmann, had been editor of Punch and, briefly, liberal MP for Harborough. The Lehmanns, originally from Germany, were an artistic dynasty: two of Rosamond’s great-uncles were painters, an aunt was a composer, one sister became an actress and her brother was editor of the influential periodical New Writing. The Curtis family, protagonists of her third novel Invitation to the Waltz (1932), are of a rather different background, a settled rural manufacturing dynasty whose fortune derives from paper mills. Nonetheless, Lehmann modelled this fictional household on her own. The lead character, Olivia Curtis, is a portrait of the novelist as a young woman, indicated by her frequent flights of imagination. The novel is set in 1920, and opens on Olivia’s seventeenth birthday; it relates her anticipation of, and then participation in, the dance held by the local gentry family, the Spencers.

The Curtises know the Spencers but are not intimate with them. They are separated by fine but significant class distinctions: for instance Olivia and her older sister Kate do not ride, they cannot be ‘county’. Attracted and intimidated by