Final Report Summary - SESW (Spinning in the Era of the Spinning Wheel 1400-1800)
From the introduction of the spinning wheel to England during the later Middle Ages to its eclipse by powered spinning machines early in the nineteenth century, hand-spun yarn was vital to the success of the textile industries that dominated English manufacturing. Indeed, hand spinning – of wool, flax and ultimately cotton – became the principal income-generating activity pursued by English women. For many of those women, it was also an essential means of furnishing their own families with textiles. Spinning was, at one and the same time, the foundation of England’s domination of international trade in textiles and a crucial means by which rural families supplied themselves with cloth.
Yet hand spinning before the Industrial Revolution is typically dismissed as a crude, low-skill, low-productivity bottleneck. It is presented as an obstacle to economic and technological progress, an obstacle to be overcome by heroic inventors such as James Hargreaves and Richard Arkwright, who developed machines like the famous spinning jenny of 1764. Hand spinning has rarely been studied in its own right. ‘Spinning in the Era of the Spinning Wheel’, funded by the European Research Council, remedied this deficiency. It was a five-year research project, beginning in 2010, undertaken by a team led by Professor John Styles of the University of Hertfordshire, UK. Its objective was a comprehensive history of hand spinning in England between 1400 and 1800.
The project discovered unexpected sources of information and developed exciting new techniques for researching them. An important breakthrough in research methods was the use of hand-held USB microscopes linked to portable computers. This is a new technology that enables researchers to establish the composition of large numbers of surviving textiles and establish statistical comparisons. One way the project used this technique was to examine the textiles in patchwork quilts. Each quilt can contain up to 2,000 individual pieces of fabric – a textile archive in its own right.
The project’s principal findings can be summarised under three headings. First, the impact of fashion. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England witnessed a tide of novelty in fabrics made from a range of materials, including wool, linen, cotton and silk, and employing a range of techniques, including weaving, knitting, lacemaking and embroidery. The principal trend was a shift towards lighter, more colourful and more highly patterned fabrics. Often these new fabrics required yarns spun to new specifications, or in new combinations mixing different finenesses and different materials. One consequence was technical innovation, which long pre-dated the famous spinning machines of the Industrial Revolution, although at this earlier period the new machinery was largely hand-driven. The early-modern period saw the spread of new spinning wheels, twisting engines, throwing mills, and other spindle technologies for the preparation of yarn.
When we turn to the second area of the project’s findings – spinning as women’s work – another consequence of this tide of novelty can be observed. Throughout the period, spinning in England was undertaken overwhelmingly by women. Yet far from being a low-skill backwater, the new demand for a wider range of finer yarns required greater skill. Foreign commentators remarked on the superiority of English spinning as spinners became more specialist, using different spinning wheels for different fibres. There were specialist spinning wheels for long or short woollen fibres, long or short flax fibres, as well as for cotton. There were wheels with flyers and without flyers, hand-turned and foot-turned, Dutch wheels and Saxony wheels. Differentiation in spinning skills increased, with marked contrasts between localities.
The third and final area of the project findings concerns the Industrial Revolution. Microscopic analysis revealed that most surviving ‘cotton’ fabrics woven in England before the Industrial Revolution consisted half of linen threads (the warps) and only half of cotton threads (the wefts). Hand spinners in England found it almost impossible to spin cotton warps suitable for use by hand-loom weavers at a realistic price. Yet in India, hand spinners could spin cotton warps. Many Indian fabrics of the period consist entirely of cotton. It is Richard Arkwright’s water frame of 1769 that emerges from this project as the key invention of the Industrial Revolution. Unlike the spinning jenny, Arkwright’s water frame spun warp yarns. Historians normally explain mechanization in terms of increases in quantity rather than quality, but the most important immediate consequence of Arkwright’s machine was a transformation in quality. Mixed linen-cotton fabrics were replaced by the more desirable, but still expensive all-cotton fabrics. Arkwright’s machine was the textile equivalent of the European discovery of the secret of porcelain – a way of making something special that Europeans craved, but could previously obtain only as an import from Asia.
For further information, see the project website at: www.spinning-wheel.org
Yet hand spinning before the Industrial Revolution is typically dismissed as a crude, low-skill, low-productivity bottleneck. It is presented as an obstacle to economic and technological progress, an obstacle to be overcome by heroic inventors such as James Hargreaves and Richard Arkwright, who developed machines like the famous spinning jenny of 1764. Hand spinning has rarely been studied in its own right. ‘Spinning in the Era of the Spinning Wheel’, funded by the European Research Council, remedied this deficiency. It was a five-year research project, beginning in 2010, undertaken by a team led by Professor John Styles of the University of Hertfordshire, UK. Its objective was a comprehensive history of hand spinning in England between 1400 and 1800.
The project discovered unexpected sources of information and developed exciting new techniques for researching them. An important breakthrough in research methods was the use of hand-held USB microscopes linked to portable computers. This is a new technology that enables researchers to establish the composition of large numbers of surviving textiles and establish statistical comparisons. One way the project used this technique was to examine the textiles in patchwork quilts. Each quilt can contain up to 2,000 individual pieces of fabric – a textile archive in its own right.
The project’s principal findings can be summarised under three headings. First, the impact of fashion. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England witnessed a tide of novelty in fabrics made from a range of materials, including wool, linen, cotton and silk, and employing a range of techniques, including weaving, knitting, lacemaking and embroidery. The principal trend was a shift towards lighter, more colourful and more highly patterned fabrics. Often these new fabrics required yarns spun to new specifications, or in new combinations mixing different finenesses and different materials. One consequence was technical innovation, which long pre-dated the famous spinning machines of the Industrial Revolution, although at this earlier period the new machinery was largely hand-driven. The early-modern period saw the spread of new spinning wheels, twisting engines, throwing mills, and other spindle technologies for the preparation of yarn.
When we turn to the second area of the project’s findings – spinning as women’s work – another consequence of this tide of novelty can be observed. Throughout the period, spinning in England was undertaken overwhelmingly by women. Yet far from being a low-skill backwater, the new demand for a wider range of finer yarns required greater skill. Foreign commentators remarked on the superiority of English spinning as spinners became more specialist, using different spinning wheels for different fibres. There were specialist spinning wheels for long or short woollen fibres, long or short flax fibres, as well as for cotton. There were wheels with flyers and without flyers, hand-turned and foot-turned, Dutch wheels and Saxony wheels. Differentiation in spinning skills increased, with marked contrasts between localities.
The third and final area of the project findings concerns the Industrial Revolution. Microscopic analysis revealed that most surviving ‘cotton’ fabrics woven in England before the Industrial Revolution consisted half of linen threads (the warps) and only half of cotton threads (the wefts). Hand spinners in England found it almost impossible to spin cotton warps suitable for use by hand-loom weavers at a realistic price. Yet in India, hand spinners could spin cotton warps. Many Indian fabrics of the period consist entirely of cotton. It is Richard Arkwright’s water frame of 1769 that emerges from this project as the key invention of the Industrial Revolution. Unlike the spinning jenny, Arkwright’s water frame spun warp yarns. Historians normally explain mechanization in terms of increases in quantity rather than quality, but the most important immediate consequence of Arkwright’s machine was a transformation in quality. Mixed linen-cotton fabrics were replaced by the more desirable, but still expensive all-cotton fabrics. Arkwright’s machine was the textile equivalent of the European discovery of the secret of porcelain – a way of making something special that Europeans craved, but could previously obtain only as an import from Asia.
For further information, see the project website at: www.spinning-wheel.org