Shopping for lace in seventeenth century London

This engraving by Abraham Bosse shows the interior of a Parisian gallery in the 1650s where lace, embroidery and other haberdashery items were sold. Examples of the pieces for sale are pinned on the wall behind the counter and saleswomen and their assistants are shown dealing with the customers. A similar establishment, called the New Exchange, opened in London, on the south side of the Strand, in 1609 and was described as having two long double galleries one above the other, which housed ‘great numbers of very rich shops of drapers and mercers filled with goods of every kind’ according to Count Lorenzo Magalotti who visited it in 1669. High quality fabrics and dress accessories were also sold in shops crowded together along the old London Bridge, which at that time was the only crossing over the River Thames in London. In 1633 the bridge was nearly destroyed in a fire that started in a needle makers shop. Luckily the bridge survived but 41 shops selling fabrics, hats, gloves and haberdashery were destroyed – imagine the value of all the beautiful things lost in that fire. These galleries were a place to shop but also a place to promenade and show off ones clothes. However, according to a satirical pamphlet of the time, the best place to show off was the middle aisle of St Paul’s Cathedral, where fashionable young men would congregate every morning to parade up and down, showing off their latest fashions, lace and accessories. The pamphlet advises them that ‘four turns’ of this catwalk were enough as any more than that would be boring for their audience!

A close up of the engraving shows the type of lace items being sold readymade to customers. There seem to be several styles of collar, some with lace edgings round a linen collar and others made entirely of lace. The latest fashion in lace at the time would have been Flemish bobbin lace, which was a flat style with detailed designs (the lower piece in the photo below), however Italian bobbin lace was also popular, and you can see an example of that in the upper piece below.

Needle lace and various styles of cutwork were also fashionable, so there was a varied choice for customers. Styles of neckwear were changing at this time from the ruffs  of the sixteenth century to the falling bands and soft collars of the seventeenth century, which most of the customers are wearing, and this shop seems to have both in stock. As well as collars the image shows lace cuffs and fans for sale. There are also some rosette shapes which are probably decorations for shoes. This shop would also have sold lace trimmings and lengths of lace for customers to buy and apply to their own clothes. Larger and more important items would have been commissioned and the design and type of lace discussed with the lace merchant. It is interesting to see that saleswomen seem to be advising the customers while their male assistants are collecting items off the shelf or boxing them up and wrapping them once the purchase has been made. Most shopping at this time would have been done locally because the cost of transporting goods was high. However many people took advantage of any of their friends and family visiting London, giving them requests to buy items of lace for them. It’s always difficult buying things for other people though and frustrating for them if the item isn’t exactly what they wanted, so it was not an easy task. However, it must have been very exciting for Londoners and visitors alike when these new galleries opened and people could wander past a series of shops selling so many luxury items and browse a variety of beautiful things. 

Contemporary needle lace sampler

 

Needle lace is made with a needle and thread and most of the stitches are variations on blanket or buttonhole stitch. You need an outline from which to anchor the stitches and this can be made by cutting areas out of an existing piece of cloth or by making a framework by couching down threads. In both cases you then fill in the spaces you have made with lace stitches. The little sampler in the image was made by attaching  thin ribbons in a grid pattern to a background that I had painted and collaged and then filling in the open spaces with a variety of needle lace stitches.

I started by filling  some of the rectangular spaces with solid areas of stitching. At the top you can see an area of cloth stitch which starts with a line of thread being sewn straight across the space. You then work back along the thread with simple loops at regular intervals. For the row below that you start again with the thread across the space but your loops this time go round the thread and link into the loops of the previous row of stitches. Once I’d finished the block I then threaded a fine gold thread through the stitches but I could also have done that as I’d worked or used a different colour as my base thread.

 

In one of the lower spaces I worked my row of looped stitches over small lengths of thicker gold thread. With these wider strips of gold I didn’t need to secure them at each side of the space because the looped stitches are sufficient to keep them in place. In the rectangle on the right I have worked a more open stitch called double net stitch and again threaded fine gold through part of the work. To give some texture to the piece I also made some thicker interconnecting bars by sewing several threads across the space forming a rough T shape then worked close blanket stitch over them to form a more solid structure. By interlinking the shapes as I worked they form an intertwined grid. I also embellished the piece with small circular couronnes, made by wrapping threads into a circle and then working blanket stitch tightly all round them. Once made, the finished circles can be sewn to the work with the same thread used to make them. I also added beads and other couched threads, so quite a lot of additions, but I’ve kept the same subdued colour palette throughout the work so hopefully it all works together.

Machine embroidered lace collars

 

This net fabric covered with embroidered lace collars shows how embellishments like this can be made in large numbers for the clothing industry. They are made with a multihead embroidery machine which acts like several sewing machines joined together. The net base is stretched on a frame and can be moved automatically from side to side or back and forth as the embroidery progresses

The machine includes a number of heads which contain the needles. Each needle has its own supply of thread so different colours or types of thread can be used in each one. In this case a thicker glossier thread has been used in one needle to outline and highlight parts of the design in the same way a gimp thread would be used in handmade lace.

These collars have been designed to use in pairs as the front edge is longer than the back so they would fit round the neck with the smaller edge at the back of the garment. Once the embroidered fabric is removed from the machine the excess net separating the individual collars is cut away carefully leaving the shaped collar. Any loose threads at the beginning and end of the embroidery also tend to be cut off as the backing net is removed. The lace can then be attached straight on to the neck of a garment. The thicker outlining thread will ensure that the collar retains its shape and doesn’t fray as well as providing a slightly scalloped edging to the design. The whole process is a fast and economic way of producing lace clothing for the mass market.

Lace songs and tells

 Researchers in Vienna have recently found that groups of people singing together can improve team work and interpersonal coordination. This would not have been news to Victorian lacemakers in the East Midlands area of England who encouraged the children in lace schools to sing as they worked at their pillows.

These songs, known as lace tells, improved concentration and were often linked to counting the number of pins worked in a lace pattern in a specific period of time. One Bedfordshire counting tell goes as follows:

Needle pin, needle pin, stitch upon stitch,

Work the old lady out of the ditch,

If she is not out as soon as I,

A rap on the knuckles shall come by and by,

A horse to carry my lady about –

Must not look off till 20 are out.

The children then worked 20 pins and if any of them spoke or looked away from their pillow before they had completed 20 pins the others would call out:

Hang her up for half an hour,

Cut her down like a flower.

The girl referred to would then place another pin and reply:

I won’t be hung for half an hour,

I won’t be cut down like a flower.

Other lace tells were related to local people and events. Many local lacemakers were unhappy with the treatment they received from the Buckingham lace buyer Mr E Godfroy who often paid them in tokens, which could only be used to buy food in certain shops, rather than money that could be spent anywhere. In revenge they sang this lace tell about him:

Nineteen miles to Charing Cross,

To see a Black Man ride on a white horse.

The rogue was so saucy he wouldn’t come down,

To show me the road to the nearest town.

I picked up a turmut and cracked his old crown

And made him cry ‘turmuts’ all over town.

Godfroy was known as the Black Man because he was the first lace buyer to get the lacemakers using black silk thread to make lace. Obviously many lacemakers would have liked to pick up a turnip (a solid root vegetable known locally as a turmut) and hit him over the head with it to ‘crack his old crown’. These are just two examples of lace tells collected by Thomas Wright in his history of lacemaking, based on his research at the beginning of the twentieth century. Others deal with a variety of subjects including romance, death, gruesome murders and each other’s appearance, which must have made for a lively school day.

A painted lace tablecloth

 

Over the Easter holiday I was lucky enough to visit Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum where I saw an exhibition of some beautiful portraits painted by John Singer Sargent. He was part of the Broadway colony of artists painting in Worcestershire at the end of the nineteenth and the early part of the twentieth centuries. The exhibition also featured some works by the other artist in the group including ‘Between two fires’ painted by Francis Davis Millet in 1892.

It wasn’t the subject of the painting that attracted me. In fact I felt a bit sorry for the puritan man in the picture who looks rather intimidated by the two maids on either side of him. It caught my eye because of the accurate depiction of the lacework round the tablecloth, which you can see in close up in the photo at the top of this post. It is in fact drawn work where threads are pulled, or drawn, out of the background cloth and the remaining threads are used as a background for embroidery stitches. The horizontal and vertical threads you can see were originally part of the cloth and the diagonal ones were added as embroidery stitches with a needle and thread. The raw edges of the rectangular shapes would have been secured with closely worked buttonhole stitches like the edges in the image below.

However this embroidery, although it looks like the lace in the painting, is not drawn work because the threads used to make the pattern across the open space are thicker than the cloth threads and have been added afterwards as free embroidery.

I was also interested in the caps on the maids’ heads especially as I had been looking at speldenmuts a few weeks before. The ones in the painting are much smaller than the caps from the Netherlands and beautifully painted so you can see the gathers and the spots on the muslin. However I wasn’t sure that embroidered muslin would have been use for servants headwear in the seventeenth century, which is the time that the painting is set. I’m also dubious about the net curtain at the window. I’ve seen several paintings and photographs of similar half curtains at the windows of cottages in the nineteenth century but not in the seventeenth. Who would have thought that a casual visit to an art exhibition would have thrown up so many textile questions!

Religious lace bobbins

 

I was trying to find some inscribed lace bobbins relevant to the Easter period to blog about this week, but I haven’t managed to find any. T S Huetson in his survey of bobbins in the early part of the twentieth century reports finding lace bobbins inscribed with the words ‘Easter’ as well as ‘Christ crucified’ and ‘Jesus died for me’. The closest I could find were the general religious inscriptions in the image above, reading from left to right ‘I love Jesus yes I do I do’, ‘Thou O God seest me’ and ‘Jesus’. Many lacemakers followed a nonconformist Christian faith, which meant they believed they had a personal relationship with God and their services involved hymn singing and personal reflection. They would have attended newly built chapels rather than the local village church and the children would have attended Sunday school where they learnt stories from the Bible and their significance to contemporary life. Sunday was the Lord’s day and therefore a day of rest when no work was done. Lace pillows were covered over on Saturday evening and not uncovered again until Monday morning when lacemaking recommenced. Religion would have played an important part in the lives of most lacemakers so it is surprising that so few religious bobbins survive. Perhaps it is more of a reflection on the types of lace bobbins subsequent generations have decided to keep and the cheeky ones like ‘Kiss me quick’ or those with names on have proved more popular with collectors and lacemakers.

Speldenmuts - pin caps from The Netherlands

 

I saw this pin cap at Luton Museum (Wardown House Gallery and Museum) and was fascinated by the row of tiny pins around the lace. I was interested to know whether they were just there for decoration or had a practical use. I’ve since been doing some research and found that these caps are part of the regional costume from the south west region of Brabant in the Netherlands.

                                

The caps have a large crown, gathered on to a strip of lace or fabric, attached to linen ties to secure the cap. These ties would have been pulled tight and tied in a bow at the nape of the neck to keep the crown in place so that it would have kept the wearer’s hair off her face and neatly covered. In most of the caps I have seen the crown area is finely embroidered although whether this was common or only the highly decorated ones have survived I don’t know.

                           

The front part of the cap is made up of a border with a wide scallop sewn from fine lawn edged with lace or entirely of lace. It is attached to the strip of fabric that holds the crown with fine pleats. In many examples the lace seems to be of the Lille type with a wide area of open net with occasional tallies and a floral border along the edge outlined with a thicker gimp thread.

The defining feature of all the caps is the row of pins fixed closely together to make a band of shining silver down the centre of the lappet. Some sources say the pins are copper others say they are stainless steel but so far I have only seen the silver-coloured steel ones. The examples I’ve found in museums all date from the nineteenth century, however some are from the early part and others from the end of the century, reinforcing the theory that these caps were items of regional dress that were kept and reused possibly by different generations, rather than fashion wear that changes over time. As for my original question about the pins, all the sources I’ve seen suggest the pins were decorative and were added to give sparkle to the caps and had no functional use at all.