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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Textile Fabrics," Daniel Rock delves into the intricate world of textile design, interweaving historical context with contemporary analysis. The book is structured as a comprehensive exploration of fabric manufacturing techniques, aesthetic principles, and the socio-economic implications of textile production. Rock'Äôs prose balances scholarly rigor with accessibility, making complex concepts relatable through vivid imagery and practical examples. Key themes address sustainability in textile production and cultural significance, positioning the work within the broader discourse of art and industry in modern society. Daniel Rock, a seasoned textile expert and educator, draws upon years of experience in both the academic and practical realms of fabric arts. His previous work as a curator in textile exhibitions has enriched his perspective, allowing him to identify the often-overlooked narratives behind the fabrics that surround us. Rock'Äôs passion for preserving artisanal craftsmanship and promoting sustainable practices informs the core message of this book, making it a timely contribution to both academic and popular discussions. I highly recommend "Textile Fabrics" to scholars, students, and enthusiasts alike. This work is not merely an examination of textiles but a call to appreciate the artistry and heritage embedded in everyday materials. Readers will emerge with a deeper understanding of the fabrics that shape our lives and the stories they tell.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Textile Fabrics
Table of Contents
CHAPTER I.
Under its widest acceptation the word “textile” means every kind of stuff, no matter its material, wrought in the loom. Whether, therefore, the threads are spun from the produce of the animal, vegetable, or mineral kingdom; whether of sheep’s wool, goats’ hair, camels’ wool, or camels’ hair; whether of flax, hemp, mallow, or the filaments drawn out of the leaves of plants of the lily and asphodel tribes of flowers, or the fibrous coating about pods, or cotton; whether of gold, silver, or of any other metal; the webs from all such materials are textiles. Unlike these are other appliances for garment-making in many countries; and of such materials not the least curious, if not odd to our ideas, is paper, which is so much employed for the purpose by the Japanese. A careful reference to a map of the world will show us the materials which from the earliest ages the inhabitants of the world had at hand, in every clime, for making articles of dress.
In all the colder regions the well-furred skins of several families of beasts could, by the ready help of a thorn for a needle and of the animal’s own sinews for thread, be fashioned after a manner into various kinds of clothing.
Sheep, in a primitive period, were bred for raiment perhaps as much as for food. At first, the locks of wool torn away from the animal’s back by brambles were gathered: afterwards shearing was thought of and followed in some countries, while in others the wool was not cut off but plucked by the hand away from the living creature. Obtained by either method the fleeces were spun generally by women from the distaff. This very ancient daily work was followed by women among our Anglo-saxon ancestors of all ranks of life, from the king’s daughter downwards. Spinning from a distaff is even now common in many countries on the continent, particularly so all through Italy. Long ago the name of spindle-tree was given in England to the Euonymus plant, on account of the good spindles which its wood affords: and the term “spinster” as meaning every unmarried woman even of the gentlest blood is derived from the same occupation. Every now and then from the graves in which women of the British and succeeding epochs were buried, are picked up the elaborately ornamented leaden whorls which were fastened at the lower end of their spindles to give them a due weight and steadiness.
A curious instance of the use of woollen stuff not woven but plaited, among the older stock of the Britons, was very lately brought to light while cutting through an early Celtic grave-hill or barrow in Yorkshire: the dead body had been wrapped, as was shown by the few unrotted shreds still cleaving to its bones, in a woollen shroud of coarse and loose fabric wrought by the plaiting process without a loom.
As time passed by it brought the loom, fashioned after its simplest form, to the far west, and its use became general throughout the British islands. The art of dyeing soon followed; and so beautiful were the tints which our Britons knew how to give to their wools that strangers wondered at and were jealous of their splendour. A strict rule limited the colour of the official dress assigned to each of the three ranks into which the bardic order was distinguished to one simple unbroken shade: spotless white, symbolic of sunlight and holiness, for the druid or priest; sky-blue, emblem of peace, for the bard or poet; and green, the livery of the wood and field, for the teacher of the supposed qualities of herbs and leech-craft. Postulants, again, asking leave to be admitted into either rank were recognized by the robe barred with stripes of white, blue, and green, which they had to wear during the term of their initiation. With regard to the bulk of the people, we learn from Dion Cassius (born A.D. 155) that the garments worn by them were of a texture wrought in a square pattern of several colours; and, speaking of Boadicea, the same writer tells us that she usually had on, under her cloak, a motley tunic chequered all over with many colours. This garment we are fairly warranted in deeming to have been a native stuff, woven of worsted after a pattern in tints and design like one or other of the present Scotch plaids. Pliny, who seems to have gathered a great deal of his natural history from scraps of hearsay, most likely included these ancient sorts of British textiles with those from Gaul, when he tells us that to weave with a good number of threads, so as to work the cloths called polymita, was first taught in Alexandria; to divide by checks, in Gaul.
The native botanical home of cotton is in the east. India almost everywhere throughout her wide-spread countries arrayed, as she still arrays, herself in cotton, gathered from a plant of the mallow family which has its wild growth there; and in the same vegetable produce the lower orders of people dwelling still further to the east also clothed themselves.
Hemp, a plant of the nettle tribe and called by botanists “cannabis sativa,” was of old well known in the far north of Germany and throughout the ancient Scandinavia. More than two thousand years ago we find it thus spoken of by Herodotus: “Hemp grows in the country of the Scythians, which, except in the thickness and height of the stalk, very much resembles flax; in the qualities mentioned, however, the hemp is much superior. It grows in a wild state, and is also cultivated. The Thracians make clothing of it very like linen cloth; nor could any person, without being very well acquainted with the substance, say whether this clothing is made of hemp or flax.” From “cannabis,” its name in Latin, we have taken our word “canvas,” to mean any texture woven of hempen thread.
Although flax is to be found growing wild in many parts of Great Britain, it is very doubtful whether for many ages our British forefathers were aware of the use of this plant for clothing purposes: they would otherwise have left behind them some shred of linen in one or other of their many graves. Following, as they did, the usage of being buried in the best of the garments they were accustomed to, or most loved when alive, their bodies would have been found dressed in some small article of linen texture, had they ever worn it.
We must go to the valley of the Nile if we wish to learn the earliest history of the finest flaxen textiles. Time out of mind the Egyptians were famous as well for the growth of flax as for the beautiful linen which they wove out of it, and which became to them a most profitable, because so widely sought for, article of commerce. Their own word “byssus” for the plant itself became among the Greeks, and afterwards among the Latin nations, the term for linens wrought in Egyptian looms. Long before the oldest book in the world was written, the tillers of the ground all over Egypt had been heedful in sowing flax, and anxious about its harvest. It was one of their staple crops, and hence was it that, in punishment of Pharaoh, the hail plague which at the bidding of Moses fell from heaven destroyed throughout the land the flax just as it was getting ripe. Flax grew also upon the banks of the Jordan, and in Judæa generally; and the women of the country, like Rahab, carefully dried it when pulled, and stacked it for future hackling upon the roofs of their houses. Nevertheless, it was from Egypt, as Solomon hints, that the Jews had to draw their fine linen. At a later period, among the woes foretold to Egypt, the prophet Isaiah warns her that “they shall be confounded who wrought in combing and weaving fine linen.”
How far the reputation of Egyptian workmanship in the craft of the loom had spread abroad is shown us by the way in which, besides sacred, heathenish antiquity has spoken of it. Herodotus says, “Amasis king of Egypt gave to the Minerva of Lindus a linen corslet well worthy of inspection:” and further on, speaking of another corslet which Amasis had sent the Lacedæmonians, he observes that it was of linen and had a vast number of figures of animals inwoven into its fabric, and was likewise embroidered with gold and tree-wool. This last was especially to be admired because each of the twists, although of fine texture, contained within it 360 threads, all of them clearly visible.
But we have material as well as written proofs at hand to show the excellence of old Egyptian work in linen. During late years many mummies have been brought to this country from Egypt, and the narrow bandages with which they were found to have been so admirably and, according even to our modern requirements of chirurgical fitness, so artistically swathed have been unwrapped. These bandages are often so fine in their texture as fully to verify the praises of old bestowed upon the beauty of the Egyptian loom-work. We learn from Sir Gardiner Wilkinson that “the finest piece of mummy-cloth, sent to England by Mr. Salt, and now in the British museum, of linen, appears to be made of yarns of nearly 100 hanks in the pound, with 140 threads in an inch in the warp and about 64 in the woof.” Another piece of linen, which the same distinguished traveller obtained at Thebes, has 152 threads in the warp and 71 in the woof.
Although from all antiquity upwards, till within some few years back, the unbroken belief had been that such mummy-clothing was undoubtedly made of linen woven out of pure unmixed flax, some writers led, or rather misled, by a few stray words in Herodotus (speaking of the corslet of Amasis, quoted just now) took that historian to mean wool, and argued that Egyptian textiles wrought a thousand years before were mixed with cotton. While the question was agitated, specimens of mummy-cloth were submitted to the judgment of several persons in the weaving trade deemed most competent to speak upon the matter. Helped only by the fingers’ feel and the naked eye, some among them agreed that such textures were really woven of cotton. This opinion was but shortlived. Other individuals, more philosophical, went to work on a better path. In the first place they clearly learned, through the microscope, the exact and never-varying physical structure of both these vegetable substances. They found cotton to be in its fibre a transparent tube without joints, flattened so that its inward surfaces are in contact along its axis and also twisted spirally round its axis; flax on the contrary is a transparent tube, jointed like a cane and not flattened or twisted spirally. Examined in the same way, old samples of byssus or mummy-bandages from Egypt in every instance were ascertained to be of fine unmixed flaxen linen.
CHAPTER II.
For many reasons the history of silk is not only curious but highly interesting. In the earliest ages even its existence was unknown, and when discovered the knowledge of it stole forth from the far east, and straggled westward very slowly. For all that lengthened period during which their remarkable civilization lasted, the older Egyptians probably never saw silk: neither they, nor the Israelites, nor any other of the most ancient kingdoms of the earth, knew of it in any shape, either as a simple twist or as a woven stuff. Not the smallest shred of silk has hitherto been found in the tombs or amid the ruins of the Pharaonic period.
No where does Holy Writ, old or new, tell anything of silk but in one single place, the Apocalypse xviii. 12. It is true that in the English authorized version we read of “silk” as if spoken of by Ezekiel xvi. 10, 13; and again, in Proverbs xxxi. 22; yet there can be no doubt that in both these passages, the word silk is wrong through the translators misunderstanding the original Hebrew. The Hebrew word is not so rendered in any ancient version: and the best Hebraists have decided that silk was not known by the old Israelites. When St. John speaks of it he includes it with the gold, and silver, and precious stones, and pearls, and fine linen and purple which, with many other costly freights, merchants were wont to bring to Rome.
It was long after the days of Ezekiel that silk in its raw form only, made up into hanks, first found its way to Egypt, western Asia, and eastern Europe.
We owe to Aristotle the earliest notice of the silkworm, and although his account be incorrect it has much value, because he gives us information about the original importation of raw silk into the western world. Brought from China through India the silk came by water across the Arabian ocean, up the Red Sea, and thence over the isthmus of Suez (or perhaps rather by the overland route, through Persia) to the small but commercial island of Cos, lying off the coast of Asia minor. Pamphile, the daughter of Plates, is reported to have first woven silk in Cos. Here, by female hands, were wrought those light thin gauzes which became so fashionable; these were stigmatized by some of the Latin poets, as well as by heathen moralists, as anything but seemly for women’s wear. Tibullus speaks of them; and Seneca condemns them: “I behold” he says “silken garments, if garments they can be called, which are a protection neither for the body nor for shame.” Later still, and in the Christian era, we have an echo to the remarks of Seneca in the words of Solinus: “This is silk, in which at first women but now even men have been led, by their cravings after luxury, to show rather than to clothe their bodies.”
Looking over very ancient manuscripts we often find between richly gilt illuminations, to keep them from harm or being hurt through the rubbings of the next leaf, a covering of the thinnest gauze, just as we now put sheets of silver paper for that purpose over engravings. It is not impossible that some at least of these may be shreds from the translucent textiles which found favour in the world for so long a time during the classic period. The curious example of such gauzy interleafings in the manuscript of Theodulph, now at Puy en Velay, will occur perhaps to more than one of our readers.
It may be easily imagined that silken garments were brought, at an early period, to imperial Rome. Not only, however, were the prices asked for them so high that few could afford to buy such robes for their wives and daughters, but, at first, they were looked upon as quite unbecoming for men’s wear; hence, by a law of the Roman senate under Tiberius, it was enacted: “Ne vestis serica vicos fœdaret.” While noticing how womanish Caligula became in his dress Suetonius remarks his silken attire: “Aliquando sericatus et cycladatus.” An exception was made by some emperors for very great occasions, and both Titus and Vespasian wore dresses of silk when they celebrated at Rome their triumph over Judæa. Heliogabalus was the first emperor who wore whole silk for clothing. Aurelian, on the other hand, neither had himself in his wardrobe a garment wholly silk nor gave one to be worn by another. When his own wife begged him to allow her to have a single mantle of purple silk he replied, “Far be it from us to allow thread to be reckoned worth its weight in gold.” For then a pound of gold was the price of a pound of silk.
Clothing made wholly or in part out of silk, nevertheless, became every year more and more sought for. So remunerative was the trade of weaving the raw material into its various forms, that, by the revised code of laws for the Roman empire published A.D. 533, a monopoly in it was given to the court, and looms worked by women were set up in the imperial palace. Thus Byzantium became and long continued famous for the beauty of its silken stuffs. Still, the raw silk itself had to be brought thither from abroad; until two Greek monks, who had lived many years among the Chinese, learnt the whole process of rearing the worm. Returning, they brought with them a number of eggs hidden in their walking-staves; and, carrying them to Constantinople, they presented these eggs to the emperor who gladly received them. When hatched the worms were distributed over Greece and Asia minor, and very soon the western world reared its own silk. In some places, at least in Greece, the weaving not only of the finer kinds of cloth but of silk fell into the hands of the Jews. Benjamin of Tudela, writing in 1161, tells us that the city of Thebes contained about two thousand Jewish inhabitants. “These are the most eminent manufacturers of silk and purple cloth in all Greece.”
South Italy wrought rich silken stuffs by the end of the eleventh century; for we are told by our countryman Ordericus Vitalis, who died in the first half of the twelfth century, that Mainerius, the abbot of St. Evroul at Uzey in Normandy, on coming home brought with him from Apulia several large pieces of silk, and gave to his church four of the finest ones, with which four copes were made for the chanters.
From a feeling alive in the middle ages throughout the length and breadth of Christendom, that the best of all things ought to be given for the service of the Church, the garments of its celebrating priesthood were, if not always, at least very often wholly of silk; holosericus. Owing to this fact, we are now able to learn from the few but tattered shreds before us what elegantly designed and gorgeous stuffs the foreign mediæval loom could weave, and what beautiful embroidery our own countrywomen knew so well how to work. These specimens help us also to rightly understand the description of the splendid vestments enumerated with such exactness in the old inventories of our cathedrals and parish churches, as well as in the early wardrobe accompts of our kings, and in the wills and bequests of dignified ecclesiastics and nobility.
Coming westward among us, these much coveted stuffs brought with them the several names by which they were commonly known throughout the east, whether Greece, Asia minor, or Persia. Hence when we read of samit, ciclatoun, cendal, baudekin, and other such terms unknown to trade now-a-days, we should bear in mind that, notwithstanding the wide variety of spelling which each of these appellations has run through, we arrive at their true derivations, and discover in what country and by whose hands they were wrought.
As commerce grew these fine silken textiles were brought to our markets, and articles of dress were made of silk for men’s as well as women’s wear among the wealthy. At what period the raw material came to be imported here, not so much for embroidery as to be wrought in the loom, we do not exactly know; but from several sides we learn that our countrywomen of all degrees, in very early times, busied themselves in weaving. Among the home occupations of maidens St. Aldhelm, at the end of the seventh century, includes weaving. In the council at Cloveshoo, in 747, nuns are exhorted to spend their time in reading or singing psalms rather than weaving and knitting vainglorious garments of many colours. By that curious old English book the ‘Ancren Riwle,’ written towards the end of the twelfth century, ankresses are forbidden to make purses or blodbendes (which were narrow strips to bind round the arm after bleeding), to gain friends therewith. Were it not that the weaving especially of silk was so generally followed in the cloister by English women, it had been useless to have so strongly discountenanced the practice.
But on silk weaving by our women in small hand-looms a very important witness, especially about several curious specimens in the great collection at South Kensington, is John Garland, born at the beginning of the thirteenth century in London, where many of his namesakes were and are still known. First, a John Garland, in 1170, held a prebend’s stall in St. Paul’s cathedral. Another was sheriff at a later period. A third, a wealthy draper of London, gave freely towards the building of a church in Somersetshire. A fourth, who died in 1461, lies buried in St. Sythe’s; and, at the present day, no fewer than twenty-two tradesmen of that name, of whom six are merchants of high standing in the city, are mentioned in the London post office directory for the year 1868. We give these instances as some have tried to rob us of John Garland by saying he was not an Englishman, though he has himself told us he was “born in England and brought up in France.”
In a kind of short dictionary drawn up by that writer and printed at the end of ‘Paris sous Philippe le Bel,’ edited by M. Geraud, our countryman tells us that, besides the usual homely textiles, costly cloth-of-gold webs were wrought by women; and very likely, among their other productions, were those blodbendes “cingula” the weaving of which had been forbidden to ankresses and nuns. Perhaps, also, some of the narrow gold-wrought ribbons in the South Kensington collection, nos. 1233, 1256, 1270, 8569, etc., may have been so employed.
John Garland’s “cingula” may also mean the rich girdles or sashes worn by women round the waist, of which there is one example in the same collection, no. 8571. Of this sort is that fine border, amber coloured silk and diapered, round a vestment found in a grave at Durham; which is described by Mr. Raine in his book about St. Cuthbert as “a thick lace, one inch and a quarter broad—evidently owing its origin, not to the needle, but to the loom.” In an after period the same bands are shown on statuary, and in the illuminated manuscripts of the thirteenth century: as instances of the narrow girdle, the effigy of a lady in Romney church, Hants and of Ann of Bohemia in Westminster abbey may be referred to; both to be found in Hollis’s monumental effigies of Great Britain; for the band about the head, the examples in the wood-cuts in Planchè’s British costumes, p. 116.
