Introduction

Previous generations of historians often assumed that, before the Industrial Revolution, the families of small farmers, craftspeople and labourers across rural England were clothed in a narrow range of coarse textiles, often homespun and largely unchanging.¹ It is a view that has increasingly been challenged by their successors, or, at the very least, been heavily qualified.² Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, western Europe witnessed a tide of novelty in textiles. A wave of innovations, embracing both fabrics and equipment, swept the continent. The impact of these innovations and how they extended to non-elite consumers are the subject of this chapter. It falls into three parts. First, it examines the character of the innovations in terms of materials and techniques. Second, it assesses the ways these innovations have been understood, using English evidence to question how effectively historians have integrated changes in production and changes in consumption. Third and finally, it considers the impact of these changes on the production of textiles by households for their own use: in other words, their impact on what has been termed ‘auto-consumption’, ‘household self-provisioning’ or, in an older historical literature, ‘homespun’.³

Innovation

Early modern textile innovation in western Europe was underpinned by two linked developments during the later Middle Ages. The first was the shift from a two-fibre textile culture, with production and consumption monopolised by wool and flax, to a four-fibre textile culture, with woollens and linens supplemented by fabrics made in Europe from silk and from cotton. Introduced initially from the eastern Mediterranean, the production of silks and cottons had become established in parts of western Europe by the end of the Middle Ages. In the course of the next three centuries, their manufacture and consumption expanded, both geographically and socially, driven by a change in elite taste described by Patrick Chorley as a Europe-wide ‘shift away from woollen broad cloth to silk that characterized this whole period up to the seventeenth century’.⁴

Following the dissemination across western and northern Europe of the horizontal treadle loom during the twelfth century, heavily napped woollen broadcloths and silk velvets dominated the European high-prestige textile market. From the fifteenth century, however, they were challenged by lighter, smoother, colour-patterned fabrics, often with a distinct sheen. Silks led the trend. Indeed, lighter silk fabrics were to lead European high fashion for the next three centuries, but they were quickly followed by textiles made to mimic patterned silks in wool, in mixed materials and eventually in cotton and linen. Interaction between the fibres stimulated dramatic expansion in the range of textiles available to consumers of modest means, with substitutions of one fibre for another, technology transfers between fibres and a proliferation of new, mixed-fibre fabrics. The cheapness of these lighter fabrics, including new lighter silks, as well as their fashionability, secured them far wider markets than their heavy medieval predecessors, extending deep into the middle and eventually lower ranks of western European society.

These wider markets were shaped by the second development which underpinned textile innovation in early modern Europe – the reinvigoration of European trade at the end of the Middle Ages. As John Munro argues, the changing pattern of trade in Europe saw the re-emergence of trans-European trade in medium- and low-quality coarse textiles, eclipsed during the contraction of European trade in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as well as a reinvigorated trade in textile raw materials.⁵ Munro, when discussing the fourteenth century contraction of trade in cheaper says and serges, suggests they went on being made, but for household use or for purely local consumption. He says little more about them. The implication is that there was a later medieval falling back to reliance on local textile resources, with a corresponding contraction in the diversity of textiles in everyday use. Chris Wickham goes further, arguing that, even at its zenith, around 1300, long-distance trade in woollen textiles from the urban cloth-making centres of Italy and Flanders served predominantly ‘lords and their entourages’. Peasants in the surrounding areas could always ‘make most of their necessary goods themselves’.⁶

With the expansion of European trade in lighter, cheaper textiles from the later fifteenth century, a relatively small number of major manufacturing centres emerged. They were to dominate production of these textiles for national and international markets during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These centres were located in western Europe’s most economically advanced regions: initially, in the sixteenth century, in Flanders, Italy and Picardy, and subsequently in Holland, England and other parts of France. They supplied markets across Europe, drawing on what Stuart Jenks has identified as a distribution revolution in the fifteenth century, and subsequently beyond Europe with the opening of intercontinental maritime trade in the sixteenth century.⁷ For textiles, the consequences of European maritime expansion were to be profound, including new or previously unfamiliar dyestuffs (indigo, cochineal, logwood); new techniques, especially for decorating fabric with colour (colourfast painting and printing); new sources of textile raw materials (American long-staple varieties of cotton, Chinese and Indian raw silks); and new overseas markets in West Africa, Asia and the Americas, with distinctive tastes and unfamiliar competitors.

Two main trends in product innovation characterised Europe’s new, four-fibre textile culture from the end of the fifteenth century. First, the shift already identified towards lighter, more colourful and more highly patterned fabrics, used both for clothing and for furnishings. Second, the dissemination of textiles employing new or relatively unfamiliar techniques, such as knitting, lace-making and colourfast printing. The impact of these innovations can be observed across the whole range of textile fibres, including wool, linen, silk and cotton. Their effects were felt at every level of the market, from the finest patterned silks worn by monarchs and their courtiers to the cheap ribbons worn by housemaids on their caps. These forms of product innovation were intimately linked to innovation in technology, fashion and marketing. They were associated with the invention, dissemination and refinement of new machines. They went hand-in-hand with an intensification and systematisation of fashion, culminating in the emergence of an annual fashion cycle for silks, at least, during the later seventeenth century.⁸

Pre-existing types of woven fabrics became lighter as well. Loom-patterned silks, produced principally in Italy, but widely exported, were the most costly and high-status textiles in sixteenth-century Europe. Between the mid-fifteenth century and the early seventeenth century, their weave density fell by a third, reflecting a shift to lighter, thinner cloths.⁹ The new, light silks – grosgrains, sarcenets, satins and damasks – cost only half to three-quarters of the price of the traditional heavy brocaded velvets they superseded.¹⁰ An equivalent change can be observed in fine woollen broadcloths, which could be almost as expensive as silks. Between the 1630s and the 1680s, the weight of a typical coloured broadcloth made in Wiltshire, in the west of England, also fell by a third.¹¹

The reduction in the weight of established silk and woollen fabrics was accompanied by the dramatic commercial success of a variety of light woven fabrics. Most prominent were those made with combed, long-staple wool. By the eighteenth century, it had become common in English to refer to these fabrics collectively as worsteds, which remains the modern usage, but previously they went by a variety of names.¹² Lighter fabrics incorporating coarse, long-staple wools, such as says and serges, had long been produced in Europe. Nevertheless, the expansion of European commerce during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw huge increases in the production of new, attractive varieties in key centres, initially in Flanders, but extending over the course of the next two centuries to Holland, England, France, Italy and beyond.¹³ By the later seventeenth century they too were facing competition in key markets from another category of lightweight woven textiles that was new to Europe – all-cotton fabrics, such as calico, imported from India, initially by the Portuguese in the sixteenth century and, after 1600, on an ever-larger scale by the English and Dutch East India Companies.

Many of the new, lightweight woven fabrics were made from mixed materials, especially combinations of long-staple wool with silk or other fibres. They included union fabrics, in which the fibre of the warp yarn differed from the fibre of the weft yarn, as well as blended or union yarns, in which the yarns themselves combined different fibres. Mixed-fibre fabrics were not, of course, new. Yet despite medieval precursors, the proliferation of new kinds of mixed-fibre textiles which accompanied the European shift to lighter textiles from the sixteenth century was unparalleled. Like medieval half-silks, the new mixed fabrics often mimicked more expensive textiles made from a single type of fibre, but at a lower price. So as the new, cheaper, lightweight Italian silks swept western Europe in the later sixteenth century, their patterning, colours and sheen were evoked for less affluent consumers by cheaper textiles combining expensive silk yarns with cheaper yarns made from combed wool, mohair, cotton or linen. They mimicked a wide range of costly silk piece goods – satins, damasks, velvets and taffetas – but at a much lower price.¹⁴ Similarly, the expensive new lighter broadcloths made with Spanish wool were imitated by fabrics like serges and says, which combined warp yarns made from combed wool with weft yarns made from carded wool, as well as by heavily napped fustians combining linen warps with cotton wefts.

Lighter-weight fabrics tended to be less durable. The Venetian ambassador to the French court complained in 1546 that the satins and damasks made by the Tuscans and the Genoese were ‘cloths that cost little and last even less’.¹⁵ Norwich was the principal English manufacturing centre for the new, light fabrics made with combed, long-staple wool, known as Norwich stuffs. In 1606 it was claimed, perhaps with some exaggeration, that Norwich’s traditional ‘ancient worsteds’ of the mid-sixteenth century would have lasted six times longer than the new Norwich stuffs, yet both were fabrics made with combed, long-staple wool.¹⁶ More than a century later, Daniel Defoe famously dismissed Indian cotton calicoes as ‘ordinary, mean, low-priz’d, and soon in rags’.¹⁷ Indeed, cotton was not to replace linen for everyday shirting and sheeting until after the mechanisation of its spinning and weaving in the nineteenth century, when it became cheap enough to compensate for its inferior durability.¹⁸ Qualms about the durability of the new lightweight fabrics made with long-staple wool account for some of the names given them by English manufacturers, such as ‘perpetuana’, ‘durance’ and ‘everlasting’.¹⁹

Cheaper, less durable fabrics facilitated more frequent purchases of a wider array of items, which aligned with a heightened sensitivity among consumers to variety, novelty and fashion. An emphasis on design innovation was a corollary of this acceleration in turnover. Almost all the new fabrics were distinguished by the speed with which their patterns and colours were changed.²⁰ Unlike woollen fabrics made entirely or partly from carded, short-staple wool, many of the new fabrics were not fulled or napped. Consequently, their yarns were visible, enabling a huge array of woven patterns (Figure 1.1). In 1611, Norwich stuffs were already being described as being ‘of infinite variety of sorts, figures, colours and prices’. The need for new patterns was constantly stressed. ‘Our trade is most benefitted by our new inventions and the varying of our stuffes which is contynually profitable.’²¹

The shift to lightweight fabrics for outer garments was complemented, from the fifteenth century onwards, by a mass diffusion of linen undergarments. It was associated with expanding output of fine linens such as cambric and lawn, as well as coarser flax and hemp fabrics, produced in the countryside for both international trade and local consumption.²² The proliferation of linen undergarments reflected the spread of new conceptions of cleanliness, semiotically privileging white bleached linen over cheaper unbleached brown linen.²³ At the same time, it contributed to the multi-layering of dress associated with wearing outer garments which were individually thinner and lighter, and consequently provided less thermal insulation.

These innovations in textile piece goods were accompanied by an equivalent transformation in the variety and quantity of textile trimmings and clothing accessories. Ribbons and tapes had ancient origins; knitted goods were familiar in medieval Europe; and both needle and bobbin-lace had medieval precursors – nevertheless, all of these saw a remarkable elaboration and proliferation after 1500. Ribbons, often made from inferior or even waste silks, became key decorative elements in European dress, even among the poor (see Chapter 2). The same was true of lace trimmings, especially those made from the cheaper bobbin-lace (Figure 1.2, see also Experiment in focus IX). In England, stockings, knitted with multi-ply yarns made from silk, worsted or wool – and also subsequently from linen or cotton – almost entirely replaced medieval hose made from woven woollen cloth (see Experiment in focus II).²⁴ By the seventeenth century, moreover, decorative kerchiefs were widely worn by both men and women (Figure 1.3). Small in size compared to the textile lengths used for main garments, they were relatively affordable. The most expensive were made from silk, cambric or Indian muslin, but even the cheaper versions employed premium materials such as bleached linen and (by the end of the century) multi-coloured loom-patterned or printed fabrics.²⁵

Figure 1.1 Samples of calamancoes and striped and plain worsted stuffs, Norwich or Spitalfields, London, 1720. The National Archives, MFQ 1/134: samples of textiles submitted to the Commissioners for Trade and Plantations by the London Weavers Company, 1720, fol. 150.

The shift towards lighter fabrics and mixed materials saw corresponding changes in the supply of key inputs, particularly fibres and yarns. Traded textile fibres were subject to ever more precise sorting and differentiation by quality and price, some according to specific attributes of the fibre, some according to their place of origin. Each grade of fibre had a particular use and price. Precise grading of materials facilitated an expansion of product ranges, each range differentiated by its quality and targeted at different price points in different markets.²⁶

Grading also extended to the waste products generated as materials were processed. The distinction between legitimate materials and waste was especially stark for silk, the most expensive textile raw material. Most silk yarns were not spun. They were made by winding the long silk filaments off the cocoon and combining and twisting them into various grades of thread. However, at each stage in the process, short-fibre silk waste was created, which could be transformed into an inferior-quality yarn only by spinning it. In mid-sixteenth-century Venice, it was estimated that about a quarter of the material derived from silk cocoons ended up as waste silk that could only be spun.²⁷ Spun silks were used as weft in cheaper silk fabrics, or in mixed fabrics like the burates made with spun silk warps and woollen wefts at Nîmes in France in the eighteenth century.²⁸ Different grades of spun silk were also employed extensively in haberdashery and trimmings. Similarly, different grades of waste wool arising from wool-combing and cloth-shearing were used to make coarse yarns for hand-knitted stockings, as well as low-priced cloths, such as plains, duffels and blankets.²⁹

Figure 1.2 Charles Beale, Susan Gill, c. 1680. A servant wearing a cap with a lace trim. British Museum, London, 1981,0516.15.1–94: Charles Beale Sketchbook, fol. 34.

The new, lighter-weight fabrics required finer yarns than their heavier predecessors. In spinning yarn for superfine Wiltshire broadcloth warps in the 1720s, only half the length of yarn was spun from a pound weight of wool as compared with yarn spun for worsted stuffs in East Anglia during the following decade.³⁰ Yarns also became more uniform, because in the new fabrics the yarn was often visible, which was not the case in the silk velvets and heavily napped broadcloths that preceded them. Most yarns continued to be spun by hand, but finer, more uniform yarns took longer to spin. Consequently, the shift towards lighter fabrics required ever-increasing numbers of hand spinners. It also encouraged innovations in the equipment employed for spinning, although the pace at which they were adopted was uneven.

Figure 1.3 John Riley, Bridget Holmes, 1686 (detail). An aged servant in the royal household wearing a white linen kerchief, cap and apron. The Royal Collection, London.

The spindle spinning wheel had been introduced into Europe from Asia during the Middle Ages, providing a typical gain in productivity over the hand spindle of at least double for short-staple fibres. Nevertheless, it replaced the hand spindle only slowly and unevenly, especially outside the orbit of the core textile-manufacturing areas which dominated inter-regional trade. The hand spindle was cheap, it could be used while walking, and in the spinning of coarser linen yarns its productivity appears not to have been markedly inferior to spinning with a spindle wheel.³¹ In many parts of continental Europe, as well as in the Highlands of Scotland, it remained in use for spinning flax and coarse woollen yarns long into the eighteenth century.³² In England, too, it continued to be employed for similar purposes throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In 1675, the Hampshire agricultural writer John Worlidge defined the hand spindle or rock as ‘an instrument generally used in some parts for the spinning of flax or hemp’.³³ In 1687, a chapman at Forton in Lancashire, who dealt in turned wooden objects, stocked hundreds of cheap wooden hand spindles, with accompanying wooden distaffs and wooden spindle whorls. Stoneware whorls for hand spindles were imported into sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England from Germany, alongside Rhenish stoneware jugs and tankards.³⁴ In the eighteenth century, however, the hand spindle largely disappeared from England. It went on being used commercially only in parts of Norfolk for producing some of the finest worsted yarns for Norwich stuffs, because it excelled at spinning certain very fine, high-twist yarns, albeit slowly. Similarly, in the eighteenth-century Swiss Alps, ultra-fine cotton yarn for muslins – known as Löthli yarn – was spun on a hand spindle for a higher rate of pay than wheel-spun yarn.³⁵

Meanwhile, spinning wheels themselves underwent significant refinement and elaboration. The major innovation was the substitution of a flyer mechanism for the simple spindle, first undertaken sometime in the late fifteenth century. It increased the spinner’s productivity because it removed the need for winding on the yarn, making spinning a continuous and potentially faster process. It could also be adapted so that the wheel was turned by means of a foot pedal, thereby allowing the spinner to use two hands to draft the fibre continuously. However, the flyer wheel was two or three times the price of a simple spindle wheel, it was not well suited to short fibres, such as short-staple wool and cotton, and it was used predominantly for spinning flax. At the same time, the spindle wheel itself underwent a process of adaptation for different fibres, involving different sizes of wheel, and different spindles and drives. The Dutch wool wheel, used to spin yarn from short-staple Spanish Merino wool for the new, light lakens woven at Leiden in the seventeenth century, was distinguished by its sloping platform and wooden spindle, which produced a softer and less twisted yarn.³⁶ It was copied all over Europe. In England by the eighteenth century it was possible to distinguish between wool wheels, worsted wheels, jersey wheels, cotton wheels, fustian wheels, flax wheels, linen wheels and tow wheels, as well as great wheels, long wheels and small wheels, Dutch wheels and Saxony wheels, double wheels and single wheels.

The trend towards textiles made from thinner, more visible yarns also encouraged the use of devices for measuring the fineness and uniformity of yarn. After yarn was spun, it was customarily reeled into skeins or hanks. Simple reel staffs – wooden rods equipped with crossbars at each end to hold the yarn – had been widely used for this purpose in the Middle Ages. In the early modern period, circular reels, mounted on an axle, became increasingly common, speeding up the process. Where yarn was measured and sold simply by weight, reeling was a way of arranging it into convenient bundles. However, when establishing the precise fineness of yarn was a priority, reels could also be used as instruments for measuring quality. If the circular reels used in a particular branch of textile manufacture were of a standard circumference, and skeins or hanks were a standard number of revolutions of that reel, then the number of skeins or hanks per unit of weight provided a measure of the yarn’s fineness or count. Reels were adapted to enhance this process. Snap reels made a sound after a certain number of revolutions, while clock reels had a clock-like face with a pointer indicating the number of revolutions.

The use of reels to measure quality in this way was widely adopted in the manufacture of the new light fabrics made from long-staple combed wool. Differentiation between yarns was important here, because much of the fabrics’ decorative effect derived from the interplay of different yarns. In the production of yarn for short-staple woollens and coarser linens and linen-cotton mixes, use of the reel as a measuring device was less common, although it became more so. For instance, in the mid-eighteenth century it was a key element in the drive to apply English techniques to the manufacture of French cotton-linens.³⁷ But it was in the production and distribution of silk yarns that the use of the reel for measuring fineness was at its most sophisticated, extending in eighteenth-century Italy to the use of a specialised yarn-testing reel by silk dealers as well as silk manufacturers.³⁸

Producers and consumers

The first section of this chapter approached transformations in early modern European textiles in terms of the materiality of fabrics and the tools employed to make them. In economic history, however, innovations in textiles have more often been approached through study of the organisation of production and the incentives which shaped it. For an older, ‘stages’ theory of European industrial development, first formalised by German historians in the later nineteenth century, the early modern period was the era of rural domestic handicraft production, a distinct stage in the development of manufacturing between the urban guild system of medieval Europe and the urban factory system of the nineteenth century.³⁹ Control of the means of production was a key defining factor here, as well as location. The materiality of products and their consumption did not figure prominently. Many of the assumptions that underpinned this interpretation of early modern European manufacturing have since been discarded.⁴⁰ Yet the idea of a sequence of developmental stages culminating in the Industrial Revolution has continued to shape histories of early modern European manufacturing, notably with the concept of ‘proto-industrialisation’, defined by its author Franklin Mendels as ‘the first phase of the industrialization process’.⁴¹

The notion of proto-industrialisation grew out of Mendels’s work on early modern linen production in Flanders. His aim was to understand the internal economic and social dynamics of the rural domestic system, its emergence having often been treated simply as the response of guild-constrained merchant-manufacturers to high urban wages. Mendels insisted that the technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution were preceded not by stagnation but by a process of economic growth through regional specialisation. He presented a picture of early modern western Europe increasingly divided between rural regions specialising in commercial agriculture and rural regions specialising in commercial manufacturing. Some regions, which previously combined agricultural production with part-time industry, now gave up their industries and began to purchase industrial products from other regions. At the same time, other regions began to specialise in rural handicrafts, not simply to supply local markets but for ‘regional, national, or international trade’.⁴² Building on this model of regional specialisation, Mendels offered an explanation of, first, why rural farmers and labourers were drawn into industrial production, couched essentially in terms of population pressure on resources, and, second, how that development led to factory industrialisation, via, in particular, capital accumulation and further demographic expansion.

The proto-industrialisation thesis has been much criticised. For many if not most of the early modern rural regions that specialised in commercial handicrafts, proto-industrialisation was not the first phase of the industrialisation process. The destiny of their manufacturing industries was attenuation and disappearance. Other regions experienced mechanised industrialisation without ever passing through a proto-industrial stage.⁴³ Mendels, moreover, largely ignored the relationship between changes in production and changes in consumption. He paid little attention to the products of the industries he studied, denied the importance of technical innovation, ignored product innovation and offered no account of the shape of demand for proto-industrial goods beyond general references to local, regional, national and international markets.

In more recent economic history, the relationship between changes in production and changes in consumption during the early modern period has been analysed most effectively using the concept of an ‘industrious revolution’, proposed by Jan de Vries. According to de Vries, an early modern ‘industrious revolution’, driven by new kinds of consumer goods, was a precursor to the Industrial Revolution, providing the context in which it could unfold.⁴⁴ Confronted with evidence for real-wage stagnation in north-west Europe between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries, de Vries asks how this can be reconciled with equally compelling evidence for ownership of growing numbers of material things, including, conspicuously, textiles and clothing. De Vries insists that consumer demand was transformed in parts of north-west Europe between 1650 and 1800. New kinds of commodities emerged, with the capacity to entice ordinary people out of self-sufficiency and idleness into working harder and buying more. They included new manufactured goods which were cheaper, less durable and more fashion-sensitive, such as lightweight, printed cotton clothing, and containers for food and drink made from decorated earthenwares. They also included new kinds of stimulants, both exotic (such as tea, tobacco and sugar) and domestic (such as gin and brandy).

De Vries resolves the paradox in two ways. First, he points out that if macroeconomic growth before 1830 was slower than previously believed, as recent studies of the English Industrial Revolution have suggested, then ‘it leaves “pre-industrial” England as a rather richer economy than had earlier been assumed, for the simple reason that less growth in the 1760–1830 period means the pre-1760 economy must have possessed a per capita income closer to that found in the post-1830 period’.⁴⁵ Like Mendels’s proto-industrialisation thesis, this represents a powerful challenge to the old belief that the European economy between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries was premodern and therefore growthless and poor.

Second, de Vries argues that the key dynamic during this era of economic expansion before the Industrial Revolution was the behaviour of the household as an economic unit, in particular the way time was allocated among members of the household to different activities. In order to buy more, ordinary households devoted increasing time and effort to paid work, especially the wives and daughters of those households. Wage rates might have stagnated, or even fallen, but more household members participated in paid work, and they worked for more hours and more days. Consumption was key. ‘Consumer demand developed through an interaction of market and household productive systems.’⁴⁶ People were drawn into paid work by the lure of new commodities superior to those they could produce for themselves. They reallocated time and consumption from the household to the market. Like Mendels, de Vries assumes that the paid work available would vary according to developing regional patterns of comparative advantage but work in new forms of textile manufacturing was especially prominent, particularly those labour-intensive processes that employed predominantly women and children, such as spinning and knitting.⁴⁷

De Vries’s industrious revolution thesis has been enormously influential. Yet in the light of the transformations in textiles outlined in the first section of this chapter, it looks chronologically timid. De Vries traces the start of his industrious revolution only as far back as the mid-seventeenth century, when the new commodities he identifies as the spur goading women and children into paid work first began to be available. His central focus is what he terms the ‘long eighteenth century’, from 1650 to 1850.⁴⁸ His principal sources are taxation records, especially import duties, and post-mortem probate inventories of possessions. Whether probate inventories provide reliable evidence of the consumption choices of the families of small farmers, craftspeople and labourers has been much disputed, as de Vries acknowledges.⁴⁹ His list of the new commodities that played a key transformative role in consumer culture is dominated by the imported groceries (tobacco, sugar, tea, coffee), Asian-influenced ceramics and Indian and Indian-influenced cotton textiles familiar from historians’ debates about an eighteenth-century consumer revolution in England. Yet before the mid-eighteenth century, none of these goods (apart from tobacco) achieved anything approaching a degree of market penetration among English families of small farmers, craftspeople and labourers which could realistically have encouraged them to greater industry.⁵⁰ Rather than preceding the Industrial Revolution of the second half of the eighteenth century, their dissemination appears to have accompanied it.

These exotic consumer goods hold a prominent place in historians’ debates for the same reasons de Vries focuses on them: they occasioned copious hostile commentary in print, and, conveniently, their rapidly growing consumption can be traced through taxation records. Although de Vries acknowledges ‘the centrality of clothing to the power of consumer demand’, both probate and taxation records are notoriously poor guides to changes in English domestic consumption of textiles and dress.⁵¹ In so far as de Vries discusses changes in their consumption, he concentrates on the proliferation during ‘the long eighteenth century’ of Indian calicoes and the European-made cotton textiles that copied them, which in Britain were subject to customs and excise duties.⁵² The transformations in textiles of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are touched on, but not explored, with passing references to ‘the changing composition of wardrobes toward lighter woollens, linen, cotton, and mixed fibers’, and to Joan Thirsk’s pioneering studies of the burgeoning commercial production of bobbin-lace and knitted textiles, especially stockings, in poor English rural households.⁵³

Perhaps de Vries is led astray by his insistence on a stark boundary between an old consumption regime at the beginning of the seventeenth century and a new consumption regime in the eighteenth, between old luxury and new luxury, between intrinsic value and fashion, between what he portrays as an inherited material world and a leap to a novel, transient world of goods.⁵⁴ This chronology of rupture, combined with a lack of equivalent sources for the earlier periods, diverts attention from the material, technological and commercial transformations in textiles that, by the mid-seventeenth century, were already reshaping the lives of plebeian consumers in England. After all, textiles comprised an especially large proportion of regular household consumption of manufactured goods, particularly among working people.

De Vries’s industrious revolution thesis does offer a compelling framework for understanding the link between changes in early modern consumption and production. Yet as far as textiles and dress are concerned, the thesis would be chronologically more coherent if it placed less emphasis on the printed calicoes and cotton-linens of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and more on the earlier shift to lighter, brighter, cheaper, fashion-sensitive and less durable textiles, which were equally alluring to humble consumers. Two in particular stand out. First, the worsted and worsted-mix textiles which began to be produced in the Low Countries from the end of the fifteenth century, and in many other parts of Europe during the sixteenth century. Second, the new, fashionable clothing accessories highlighted by Joan Thirsk, which also rapidly captured wide markets during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly ribbons, knitted hosiery and bobbin-lace.⁵⁵ These textiles possessed the key characteristics that de Vries associates with accessible innovations capable of luring purchasers into a new industriousness. They were semi-durable, visually attractive in ways that aligned both with an accelerating fashion cycle and with the sartorial rhythms of everyday life, relatively inexpensive and getting cheaper.⁵⁶ Yet they are poorly represented in the sources de Vries cites, especially probate inventories, where it is durable, inheritable household goods that feature most prominently. Moreover, as Thirsk demonstrated, the new clothing textiles and accessories provided novel opportunities for women’s and children’s paid work. They needed frequent replacement and, especially in the case of worsteds, required a higher ratio of female spinners to male weavers than older, heavier woollen fabrics, because their finer, lighter threads took longer to spin. Accurate statistics for early modern women’s employment in England are almost entirely lacking, but there is general agreement that the numbers employed in commercial spinning grew dramatically between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries.⁵⁷

De Vries lays particular emphasis on printed calicoes and cotton-linens because they held a special fashionable appeal for women, whose increased participation in commercial manufacturing is crucial to the industriousness thesis. Here he draws on the literature on the so-called ‘calico craze’ associated with the surge in imports of Indian cotton textiles that took place in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century western Europe. Yet in England before 1700 Indian cotton textiles were not extensively worn as women’s main garments: gowns or petticoats. Indeed, gowns and petticoats made from cotton textiles, whether cotton-linens, calicoes or muslins, did not come to dominate women’s dress until the second half of the eighteenth century.⁵⁸ Nevertheless, the textiles used for these most visible and fashion-sensitive of women’s main garments did change radically during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The evidence of criminal trials for theft in counties in south-east England and the English Midlands (Table 1.1) indicates a dramatic shift between the later sixteenth and the later seventeenth centuries away from the use of heavy, short-staple woollen cloth for gowns, petticoats and the earlier kirtle, towards silks and especially towards worsteds – stuffs, serges, tammies, mohair.⁵⁹ Indeed, russet, a cheap woollen cloth woven in the natural colour of the sheep’s fleece, which had epitomised simple rural life in sixteenth century plays and ballads, disappeared entirely by 1660.⁶⁰

It is difficult to measure the overall performance of the English woollen textile industries across the seventeenth century, but a transformation in the mix of products is clear enough. Indeed, the seventeenth-century shift in women’s outer garments from heavy woollen fabrics to lighter, colourful, and often patterned worsteds and worsted-silk mixes was no less dramatic than the shift to printed fabrics after 1740. By the start of the eighteenth century, according to a later pamphlet, ‘our women among the Gentry, were then clothed with fine English Brocades [silks], and Venetians [a worsted-silk mix]; our common Traders’ Wives with slight Silk Damasks [silk or a worsted-silk mix]; our Country Farmers Wives, and other good Country Dames with woorsted Damasks, flower’d Russels and flower’d Calimancoes [all worsteds], and the meanest of them with plain woorsted Stuffs, etc.’.⁶¹

Gowns and petticoats employed significant lengths of fabric. During the first half of the eighteenth century, an English working woman’s gown might require 9 to 11.5 yd of fabric, her petticoat 4 yd. In the 1740s, a yard of worsted camlet bought by a Lancashire small farmer’s family for a gown cost 14.5d, a yard of blue flowered worsted damask for another gown 20.5d, while 13.5d per yard was paid for tammy for a petticoat.⁶² When made up, the petticoat cost 54d for the outer fabric alone, roughly a week’s wages for a full-time, adult cotton spinner in mid-eighteenth-century Lancashire, the gowns from 130d to 236d.⁶³ Evidently, these lightweight, often decorative worsted fabrics were accessible to plebeian consumers for wear as main garments (Figure 1.4). However, they represented major items of expenditure when acquired in the fabric lengths necessary for petticoats or gowns. Such purchases were intermittent and could be postponed.

Figure 1.4 Paul Sandby, Black Heart Cherries, c. 1759. A London street-seller wearing a blue and white striped petticoat under a red worsted stuff gown. A pink silk ribbon is tied round her cap and around her neck she wears a blue and white check kerchief. Yale Centre for British Art, New Haven, B1975.3.206.

When Jan de Vries turns to what he calls ‘the luxuries of the poor’ – the new consumer items most likely to encourage the poorest manual workers to greater industriousness – textiles for gowns and petticoats are not his principal focus. For manual workers, he insists, the key ‘incentive goods’ were colonial groceries and new alcoholic drinks, which were bought much more frequently, in small quantities and at a fraction of the price.⁶⁴ Yet many of the novel clothing accessories of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – ribbons, knitted stockings, kerchiefs – fell into a price range that resembled working people’s purchases of extra-European groceries. By the mid-eighteenth century, when both categories of goods were being bought regularly by plebeian consumers, the pattern of purchases was not dissimilar in terms of expenditure and frequency.

During the 1750s, Stephen Hudson kept a shop at Thruscross, high in the Yorkshire Pennine hills between Skipton and Knaresborough. It served a humble clientele consisting overwhelmingly of small farmers and tradespeople. They made frequent, small purchases of colonial groceries – tobacco, sugar, tea – and bought clothing accessories – stockings, ribbons, kerchiefs, mitts – in just the same way (Table 1.2). Hudson’s typical sale of colourful silk ribbon to decorate a hat or a cap was worth 8d, the cost of a yard or two of ribbon, depending on width and quality (Figure 1.5). This was cheaper than his average sale of small parcels of sugar or tea, although the typical tobacco sale was smaller still. Stockings and mitts, in woollen or worsted yarn, the latter frame-knitted, were sold by Hudson largely in single pairs, at prices similar to his regular sales of tea. Most of his kerchief sales were also of single items. His cheap linen kerchiefs were close in price to his stockings. His printed and loom-patterned kerchiefs, often with cotton or silk threads, could cost twice as much, yet they too were popular. Sales of kerchiefs, mitts and ribbons, like those of tea, were heavily skewed towards unmarried women, who made hardly any purchases of tobacco.⁶⁵

Figure 1.5 ‘A bunch of 4 ribbons narrow – Yellow, Blue, Green, & Pink’, pinned to the billet for Foundling 170, a girl named Pamela Townley, 1743. These are plain, narrow, affordable silk ribbons, which would have sold for a few pence per yard. © Coram. London Metropolitan Archives, A/FH/A/9/1/3: Billet Book, 1742–46, London Foundling Hospital, which continues as the children’s charity Coram (https://www.coram.org.uk/).

Tobacco apart, it was only in the course of the eighteenth century that the extra-European groceries highlighted by de Vries became sufficiently affordable for regular purchase by the sort of people who patronised Stephen Hudson’s remote Pennine shop.⁶⁶ Ribbons, stockings and kerchiefs became accessible much earlier. Knitted stockings had almost entirely replaced woven hose early in the seventeenth century.⁶⁷ Linen kerchiefs became everyday wear. As Margaret Spufford pointed out in her study of seventeenth-century pedlars, kerchiefs were ‘the staple items of ready-made clothing amongst the chapmens’ inventories … Even when a chapman carried no other finished goods, he was likely to carry these.’⁶⁸ Silk ribbons already appear in the probate inventories of English provincial shopkeepers in the sixteenth century, though not in large numbers. In the course of the seventeenth century, their numbers and variety increased markedly as manufacture in England grew and spread from London to the provinces, especially the area around Coventry.⁶⁹ In her extensive survey of haberdashery in retailers’ probate inventories, Polly Hamilton notes that ‘the quantities of ribbons … took an upturn in the 1670s, rising from roughly fourteen varieties noted per decade to thirty-two varieties per decade around the turn of the century’.⁷⁰ By 1701, in the small market town of Ambleside, deep in the mountains of the Lake District, a blacksmith could buy cheap silk ribbons for his servant maid at 2d or 4d a yard.⁷¹ The wide appeal of the fashion for top-knot ribbons at this period was the subject of popular broadside ballads:

The seventeenth century saw these cheap petty clothing luxuries emerge as essential components of everyday fashion. They became fixtures in the stock of the small shopkeepers and pedlars who served plebeian customers decades before most extra-European groceries. Coveted, inexpensive and universally available, they were equally potent incentives to industriousness.

The fate of homespun

Jan de Vries argues that his industrious revolution saw rural women and children drawn into various forms of home-based, income-generating manufacturing, especially spinning, by the lure of attractive new consumer goods, from textiles to tea. This move into market-orientated work was unprecedented, ‘making effective market use of labor [previously] trapped in idleness and underemployment by the seasonal constraints of agriculture’.⁷³ Yet de Vries never explores this pre-existing world of female rural ‘idleness and underemployment’. It serves merely as a counterpoint to a subsequent surge of industriousness.

So what were early modern women and children doing with their time before income-generating work in commercial manufacturing became widely available? English commentators towards the end of the eighteenth century were almost unanimous in insisting that one of the things they were doing was domestic self-provisioning with textiles, even in regions not typically associated with rural textile production. They repeatedly bemoaned its decline over the course of the century. In Staffordshire, for instance, it was reported in 1794 that ‘there is no considerable public manufacture of linen, but a good deal of hurden [harden], hempen, and flaxen cloth, got up in private families’, while ‘a good deal of woollen cloth is got up in the country by private families, though in less quantity than formerly’.⁷⁴ Similarly, in the East Riding of Yorkshire:

Of course, household self-sufficiency in textiles could never have been complete in any era, because the different stages of production involved radically different time commitments. A single weaver working full-time required the output of several spinners, their precise number depending on the fibre, the preparatory processes, the fineness or count to which the yarn was being spun and the intensity at which they worked. So, when we speak of household self-provisioning in textiles, we are speaking principally about spinning by the women of the household. Weaving the yarn spun into cloth for the household’s own use was generally undertaken by skilled specialists – men who identified themselves occupationally as weavers and owned looms and an appropriate range of loom gear. Such weavers worked on a jobbing basis for a variety of customers, weaving up the yarn spun by local women into cloth for a fee.⁷⁶

In the mid-eighteenth century, when commentators suggested that textile self-provisioning was already declining in England, evidence for the presence of jobbing weavers in the population is provided by the lists of men balloted for the militia in three English counties, and in subdivisions of three others, between 1759 and 1777 (Table 1.3). These militia lists provide a reasonably comprehensive census of adult male occupations.⁷⁷ Together, they enable us to trace the presence of weavers in several widely separated parts of England, characterised by a variety of rural economies. Northamptonshire was a county with a significant but contracting worsted industry producing for distant markets. Hence it is not surprising that 9.5 per cent of the men listed there were weavers.⁷⁸ By contrast, none of the five other counties or subdivisions was noted for large-scale textile production. Nevertheless, the militia lists reveal the presence in all of them of weavers, most of whom must have worked on a jobbing basis. At one extreme was Hertfordshire, agriculturally prosperous with ready access to London and its many suppliers of textiles and clothing. Only 0.3 per cent of its men listed for the ballot were identified as weavers. At the other extreme was Northumberland in the far north of England, with remote upland areas characterised by poor pastoral agriculture. There the proportion of weavers was considerably higher at 4.3 per cent, but still less than half the percentage in worsted-manufacturing Northamptonshire.⁷⁹ The proportion of weavers in the three subdivisions, scattered across the south and east of England, varied from 0.6 per cent in south Dorset to 1.6 per cent in the Soke of Peterborough.

The proportion of weavers may appear small outside Northamptonshire with its worsted industry, but in Kent in the extreme south-east of England, in Northumberland in the far north and in the Soke of Peterborough in the east it did not differ dramatically from the proportion of other rural craft occupations in the listed population, particularly tailors and shoemakers.⁸⁰ In those areas, between a fifth and a half of parishes or townships hosted a resident weaver. The evidence of the militia lists suggests, therefore, that jobbing weavers were readily accessible to households self-provisioning with textiles across many parts of mid-eighteenth-century rural England, but not all. In Hertfordshire and south and west Dorset, access was possible, but more restricted. The Finnish botanist Pehr Kalm noted in 1748 that in Hertfordshire ‘the women do not get sore fingers by much spinning, or arm-ache or back-ache from weaving. It is the part of the Manufacturers to make up for this, and the men’s purses are punished in this matter.’⁸¹

What were these jobbing weavers actually weaving? In the case of Northumberland, we know, because in 1792 jobbing weavers around the town of Hexham circulated handbills listing the charges for their services weaving household-spun linen yarn of various finenesses for ‘housewives’.⁸² All the textiles they wove were linens – yard-wide plain linen cloth, sheeting, ticking and huckaback – and mostly coarse. The pattern book of a jobbing weaver, Thomas Jackson, who lived in the vicinity of Kirkleatham in the north-east of Yorkshire, shows how these weavers adjusted standard designs to the requirements of local customers.⁸³ Alongside a draft for a simple linen damask diaper (Figure 1.6), Jackson notes that it was woven for one customer in 1756 with a yarn of 38 cuts or leas per pound (NeL 38), for another in 1761 with a coarser yarn of 28 cuts or leas per pound (NeL 28), and for another again in 1769 with a yarn of 40 cuts or leas per pound (NeL 40).⁸⁴ Jackson evidently adjusted to accommodate the fineness of yarn supplied by his customers, and yarns could vary considerably in fineness between different spinners. Nevertheless, these were all relatively coarse yarns. In the internationally competitive Irish linen industry, what was termed two-hank yarn (NeL 24) was not even exported, but used for local consumption, while three-hank yarn (NeL 36) was deemed just about adequate for linen for labourers’ shirts. It is notable that the 1792 Hexham weavers’ price list included yarns even coarser than these, which in Ireland were used for sacking or coarse sheeting for the poor.⁸⁵

Figure 1.6 Weaver’s draft for a linen damask diaper with details of the yarn supplied by customers, from the pattern book of Thomas Jackson, jobbing weaver, Kirkleatham area, Yorkshire, c. 1756. Weaver’s thesis book, England, seventeenth–eighteenth century, Cooper Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York, textiles department,1958–30–1.

We can observe this kind of auto-consumption from the household’s perspective in the accounts kept by the Latham family in west Lancashire between 1724 and 1767. The Lathams farmed a smallholding of approximately nineteen statute acres in the rural township of Scarisbrick.⁸⁶ They are the most humble eighteenth-century English family for which a long run of household accounts survives. During the early years of married life, between 1726 and 1741, Richard and Ann (Nany) Latham produced eight children, seven of whom lived to adulthood; six of their surviving children were daughters.

From the very beginning of the accounts in 1724, there are payments for spinning wheels and their accoutrements, so it seems that spinning was performed both by Nany Latham and by her daughters as they grew beyond infancy. In 1724, shortly after her marriage, Nany Latham acquired a new flyer wheel for spinning flax, suggesting this was a priority for the couple. Payments appear in the accounts almost every year thereafter for raw flax. Raw hemp, raw cotton and sheep’s wool were also bought from time to time, but far less frequently and in much smaller quantities. Between 1724 and 1767 the family bought more than 1,000 lb weight of flax, but only 34 lb of hemp, 36 lb of raw cotton and 113 lb of wool. In two years – 1745 and 1761 – the Lathams also bought seed to grow flax, which they then processed, but there is no mention of flax-growing in other years. The family also had a few sheep on their farm and owned sheep-shears.

The spinning the Latham family undertook on their own account was, therefore, overwhelmingly of flax. However, the women of the family undertook spinning not just to provision the household but also for wages as outwork. Scarisbrick was in the spinning zone for both the Lancashire cotton industry and the Lancashire-Yorkshire worsted industry. At the end of the 1730s, as the older daughters entered their teens, the family bought three wheels for spinning cotton, as well as cotton cards to prepare the fibre. Yet subsequently they bought only very small quantities of raw cotton. The presence of the specialised cotton wheels and a subsequent jump in the level of family expenditure suggests that cotton was being spun for wages under the putting-out system. Later, two more ‘cotten wheels’ were bought for the younger daughters as they grew up.

It is difficult to establish precisely how the textile fibre bought or grown by the Lathams was used, but much of it must have been spun into yarn and woven into linen cloth for the family’s own use.⁸⁷ The first eighteen years of the accounts, up to 1741, cover the early, penurious period of the Lathams’ marriage, when they were burdened with small children. They bought less than 29 yards of plain linen cloth ready woven, much of it described as ‘fine’. Some ready-woven linen was also bought in the form of kerchiefs and occasionally aprons. It is inconceivable that a family which numbered nine by 1741 could have made do with such a small amount of plain linen, amounting to 1.5 yd per year, for clothing as well as for household and farm requirements (sheeting, sacking, etc.). Three yards of cloth was sufficient to make only one shirt for an adult man. Evidently the majority of their linen was self-provisioned – plain, relatively coarse, much of it probably unbleached, and used for shirts, shifts, sheets and sacking.

If the Lathams largely supplied themselves with linens during the early, challenging years of marriage when resources were limited, the same was not true of woollens. The family bought only relatively small quantities of wool to spin. Much of the yarn spun from that wool was probably knitted into stockings. They certainly owned knitting needles, at the modest cost of a halfpenny a pair. Some was also woven with their linen yarn to make linsey woolsey. However, the overwhelming majority of the woollen and worsted cloth they wore appears to have been purchased ready woven. During the years 1724 to 1741 the accounts record an average annual purchase of approximately 5.25 yd of woollen and worsted cloth per year, which was almost entirely used for making outer garments.

After 1742, when the family’s income increased dramatically as the older daughters began to earn by spinning cotton yarn for the Lancashire cotton industry, the situation was transformed. Purchases of ready-woven woollen and worsted cloth for garments quadrupled. Annual spending on (often decorative) linen clothing accessories, such as kerchiefs, caps and aprons, jumped fivefold. The amount of plain linen bought ready woven also grew, albeit much more modestly, from 1.5 yd to 2.5 yd per year. Nevertheless, the Lathams continued to rely on self-provisioning for much of their plain linen, especially the coarser varieties. Their small annual purchases of coarse linens, valued at under 12d per yard, hardly changed and the same was probably true of the quantity of coarse linens they had woven from their own yarn. Between 1742 and 1754 the amount of flax and hemp fibre the family purchased declined by 20 per cent, but it was supplemented in the mid-1740s by some flax grown on the farm.

The transformation in the fortunes of the Latham family illustrates some of the principal elements in Jan de Vries’s industriousness thesis. The booming Lancashire cotton industry of the 1740s and 1750s offered a family with six daughters ample opportunity to take on outwork spinning for wages, although they do not appear to have worked full-time at cotton spinning, combining it with dairying, work on the farm and domestic labour.⁸⁸ The family’s spending choices suggest that fashion in clothing was a crucial incentive to industriousness, both for the daughters of the family and for their mother. A good part of their additional earnings was spent on what was, by the standards of Lancashire village life, expensive and fashionable female clothing, especially gowns and accessories. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasise that the increase in family spending required to make these additional clothing purchases between 1742 and 1754 was small, no more than an extra 20d a week, considerably less than the estimated weekly earnings of just one regularly employed outwork cotton spinner at the period.⁸⁹ Relatively small shifts in family income could produce dramatic transformations in material culture.

Although the Latham daughters worked at cotton spinning, their fashion choices were not dominated by cotton textiles. For gowns, they bought light, colourful worsteds and silk-worsted mixes – flowered damask and silk camlet – as well as the printed cotton-linen fabrics woven in Lancashire. Accessories included silk kerchiefs, aprons in fine white linens such as cambric and lawn, and lace borders for caps and aprons. In contrast to the regular purchases of sugar and treacle recorded in the family accounts, the entries for these clothing purchases were personal and individualistic, naming the recipient.⁹⁰ If the language of the accounts is any sort of guide, the Lathams invested their individual identities in clothes to the almost complete exclusion of the other goods the family bought, whether perishables or durables, cheap or expensive.⁹¹

Nevertheless, if the individualistic pleasures of fashionable consumption lured the Lathams into waged labour in the 1740s, in the manner de Vries suggests, it can hardly be said that the Latham family were previously trapped in rural idleness, when so much time and labour had gone into provisioning the young family with textiles. It was only during the early, impecunious years of married life, between 1726 and 1741, that the family paid others to spin for them, suggesting Nany Latham could barely fulfil her young family’s own requirements for spun yarn, let alone undertake outwork or market spinning for money.

Five key attributes of textile self-provisioning emerge from the Latham accounts. First, fabrics made from yarn spun within the household made a major contribution to the quantity of textiles consumed by the Latham family, yet in no sense was the family self-sufficient in textiles. In other words, self-provisioning was important, but not paramount.

Second, spinning yarn for household use did not depend on access to land to grow flax or raise sheep. The Lathams purchased most of their flax and hemp, drawing on international supply chains that extended into the Baltic region. They grew flax on their small farm only briefly in the mid-1740s at a time when flax prices were rising, and subsequently repeated the experiment only once. In other words, we cannot assume that families – even landless labouring families – were excluded from spinning for household use simply because they did not have land to grow the raw material.

Third, the boundary between self-provisioning and market supply, between textiles made or processed within the household for use by its members and textiles sourced from outside the household, was drawn in terms of type of fibre and the quality of the cloth, as defined by yarn fineness and colour. The Lathams supplied themselves with textiles through a combination of self-provisioning and market transactions. The textiles they had woven from their homespun yarn were mainly coarser linens, some of them bleached, though probably not very intensely.⁹² The family’s production of poor-quality but quickly spun coarse yarn to make into brown or off-white cloth suggests a concern to save time, rather than a lack of skill. Fine spinning and thorough bleaching would have been much more time-consuming. As the family’s income rose in the 1740s, when the daughters started to undertake outwork spinning for wages, these homespun coarse linens continued to be made and used, but the balance of the family’s textile consumption shifted towards shop-bought, fine, light, visually attractive and often fashionable fabrics. In other words, fabric type, quality and fashionability were critical issues in the allocation of time between household production and production for the market.

Fourth, spinning for a wage and spinning for household use were not mutually exclusive within a family, although whether individual women of the Latham family specialised in one type of spinning or the other is not clear. Differing techniques depending on the fibre being spun may have been significant for divisions of labour within the household. In the accounts, Nany Latham’s name tends to be associated with flax spinning wheels, her daughters’ names with wheels for spinning cotton. Nevertheless, self-provisioning continued. We cannot assume that family self-provisioning with textiles necessarily declined because waged spinning increased.

Fifth, the experience of the Latham family confirms the view of eighteenth-century commentators that linen had come to predominate in textile self-provisioning, as production of homespun woollens declined, perhaps encouraged by a reallocation of homespun woollen yarn to self-provisioning with coarse hand-knitted stockings. A pattern of household self-provisioning dominated by purchases of flax or hemp to be spun into yarn for coarse linens, similar to the Lathams, can be observed in the domestic accounts of several better-off, middling-sort families at the same period, such as the curate Miles Tarn at Cheddington in Buckinghamshire, the Morley farming family at Breadsall, Derbyshire, and Hester Soame, the widow of a worsted manufacturer, who shared a house with her sister at Pytchley in Northamptonshire.⁹³ Even the household of the Lancashire farmer Clement Taylor, of Finsthwaite in Furness, who owned a flock of some two hundred sheep, generated as much homespun linen as homespun woollens.⁹⁴

Earlier, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, homespun woollens may have been more prominent. They certainly received as much attention as homespun linens in the many editions of Gervase Markham’s much-plagiarised English Huswife, first published in 1615, although Markham suggests that the woollen yarn spun by ‘ordinary English House-wives’ was undifferentiated and often coarse.⁹⁵ Homespun woollens appear regularly in the domestic accounts of gentry families at this period.⁹⁶ Yet in the 1640s, Sir Robert Filmer was recommending that the virtuous wife ‘must seeke out such thinges as are profitable for her country, for in some places it is more available to buy cloath readymade then to make it’.⁹⁷ Indeed, John Oldland has argued that homespun woollen textiles were already declining in importance in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, with the rise in the English countryside of commercial manufacture of an increasingly diverse range of cheaper, colourful, woollen fabrics, at a time when the dress of the rural population was changing and demand for commercially produced woollen cloth was expanding.⁹⁸ Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, the market for commercially supplied linen also expanded, but England, as Europe’s foremost producer of sheep’s wool, was not noted for flax and hemp cultivation, or for commercial linen manufacture. Much of the increase in demand for linens, especially for finer, bleached linens, was supplied by imports from continental Europe. Indeed, for most of the early modern period, linen cloth was England’s leading manufactured import. As Daniel Defoe commented early in the eighteenth century, ‘England does as it were ravage the whole spinning world for linen and linen yarn and lace’.⁹⁹

The period from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries witnessed diversification across the whole range of commercial textiles available to consumers of modest means. A concern with fashion and appearance, combined with falling prices and widening availability of waged work for women and children, encouraged purchase of the new, lighter, colourful varieties of English-manufactured fabrics and clothing accessories that swept the market in successive waves. The same imperatives drove purchases of the many varieties of French, Dutch and German fine bleached linens for the shirts and shifts, kerchiefs and caps that became typical contents of pedlars’ packs.¹⁰⁰ Yet coarser linens did not simply disappear as imported finer varieties of linen became more widely available. Many English households continued to self-provision with coarser linens. They were assisted by access to raw material supply chains and technical innovations fostered by commercial textile manufacturing, in particular cheap Baltic flax and hemp, and the new, foot-pedalled flyer spinning wheel, which cut the time needed to spin flax and hemp.¹⁰¹ Hardwearing, coarse, brown sheets, made from homespun harden or tow cloth, could satisfy the growing desire for domestic comfort and cleanliness which drove even the working poor to acquire increasing numbers of linen sheets.¹⁰² After all, domestic linens such as bedsheets were not public sartorial signifiers of fashionability in the manner of the fine, white linens worn as caps and kerchiefs. The same was true of workaday shirts and shifts. In a household economy like that of the Latham family, the relationship between commercially sourced and domestically sourced textiles was more complementary than competitive, although there was always the potential for the kind of substitutions Jan de Vries describes, arising from shifts in employment opportunities, family incomes and textile prices.

Conclusion

The transformations in textiles outlined in this chapter extended across much of Europe, but their impact was uneven. Between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries, manufacturing the new, lighter textiles for national and especially international markets came to be associated with a limited number of major manufacturing cities and their rural hinterlands. Thus, international trade in ribbons was dominated by production centres such as Padua in Italy, Saint-Etienne in France, Coventry in England, Augsburg in Germany and Basel in Switzerland. Prominent centres for worsted stuffs were Amiens in France, Leiden in the Dutch Republic and Norwich in England.

Tracking consumption of the new, lighter textiles across Europe is more difficult. For early modern England, the pace and depth of innovations in dress are striking. England, however, was unusual in several respects. It was a large country with a highly integrated textile market, centred on London.¹⁰³ It lacked internal customs barriers, sumptuary laws were abandoned after 1604, and guild controls on product and process innovation were relatively weak. There is little evidence for anything that could be described as regional, folk or peasant costume.¹⁰⁴ More broadly, it was one of early modern Europe’s most successful economies, internationally highly competitive in industry and commerce, with expanding opportunities for waged manufacturing work, especially for women and children, at a time of falling textile prices.

Elsewhere in Europe, as Sheilagh Ogilvie has pointed out, conditions could be much more hostile to innovation in textile consumption. Small territorial units could restrict the size of markets by enforcing controls or taxes on trade. Guilds or regulations could limit innovation, products, access to work and wages. Sumptuary laws could restrict what was worn by different kinds of people.¹⁰⁵ In many parts of continental Europe, moreover, the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were economically challenging, with falling living standards, contracting industries and reduced opportunities for waged work. Incentives to greater industriousness were more likely to derive from impoverishment than from the lure of attractive consumer goods. Where textile manufacturing for international markets became uncompetitive, as in parts of northern Italy, there could be a retreat into commercial production of low-quality cloth for local markets, with reliance on local raw materials.¹⁰⁶

The notion of an ‘industrious revolution’, as proposed by Jan de Vries, offers a compelling framework for understanding the link between production and consumption of early modern textiles. Yet as de Vries acknowledges, it was mainly England and the Dutch Republic that initially, at least, experienced its full impact.¹⁰⁷ Both states were, of course, leaders in the trade in extra-European commodities – tea, coffee, tobacco, sugar, calicoes – so it is perhaps not surprising that de Vries places so much emphasis on their consumption as an incentive to industriousness. Yet England and the Dutch Republic were also two of the most successful and innovative textile-manufacturing territories in Europe, at a time when textiles were traded in larger quantities than any other manufactured goods. Well before most extra-European commodities achieved anything close to a mass consumer market, new, light, fashionable textiles and textile accessories were transforming what ordinary women in England wore, while at the same time providing them with new opportunities for waged work. De Vries insists on the dynamism of the consumer economy of early modern Europe. Yet the evidence he provides suggests it was propelled chiefly by engagement with goods imported from the world beyond Europe. The history of textiles and fashion between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries indicates that, on the contrary, the dynamism of the continent’s early modern consumer economy was driven – initially at least – by textiles made in Europe.