INDUSTRIES 



The mention of rye-straw in this passage is 

 interesting, as it is generally held that the use of 

 rye-straw in the British plait industry dates from 

 the nineteenth century and began in the manu- 

 facture of an imitation of the Leghorn plait. 

 The material of the Leghorn plait is not rye- 

 straw, but has often been called so. It is pos- 

 sible that in Shakespeare's time the Leghorn hats 

 were known in England and may have been sup- 

 posed to be made of rye-straw. But such hats 

 were necessarily costly, and would scarcely be 

 placed by Shakespeare on the heads of * sicklemcn ' 

 even when ' making holiday.' There is nothing, 

 however, improbable in supposing that the home- 

 made rustic hats of the time were sometimes 

 made of rye-straw ; and it is possible that such 

 were even then held to be superior, more fitting 

 the ' making holiday,' rye-straw being finer than 

 wheat-straw. Mr. Slater, already quoted, says 

 that it is not known when the making of hats 

 or bonnets of plaited straw first assumed com- 

 mercial importance in the south of Europe ; and 

 he quotes Coryat (who in 1608 travelled on 

 foot for five months in France, Italy, and Ger- 

 many) as saying that 'delicate strawen hats' 

 were worn at that time by both men and women 

 in many parts of Piedmont. Coryat evidently 

 looked upon these ' delicate strawen hats ' as 

 something diflFerent from anything he had seen 

 in England. That the use of home-made 

 plaited straw was independent of any introduced 

 art of plaiting may also be inferred from the fact 

 that in the middle of the eighteenth century a 

 certain kind of straw hat worn by ladies in Eng- 

 land was known as ' gipsy hat.' On the other 

 hand, Pepys's mention (1667) of straw hats 

 ' much worn in this part of the country ' (Hat- 

 field) may refer to hats derived from the intro- 

 duced industry. 



There is a widely-known tradition — the 

 origin of which we have been unable to dis- 

 cover — that connects the straw-plait industry of 

 Bedfordshire and two or three bordering counties 

 with Mary Queen of Scots and her son our James I. 

 Mr. Thomas G. Austin, formerly registrar of 

 the district of Luton, in a carefully compiled 

 work published in 1871, thus states this tradi- 

 tion : — ^ 



Mary Queen of Scots, when travelling in her 

 mother's country, Lorraine, found numbers of women 

 and children employed, some in plaiting straws, and 

 others in working the straw plait into hats. Notic- 

 ing that these poor people seemed better off than 

 their non-plaiting fellow-countryfolk she took some of 

 them with her and settled them in Scotland, in or 

 about the year 1552, under her immediate protection, 

 in order that the handicraft might be learnt by her 

 own subjects. Before, however, her laudable projects 

 could bear fruit, cruel destiny overtook her. The 

 Lorrainers, however, were not deserted, for her son, 

 James VI of Scotland and I of England, brought 



them to England, finding a suitable shelter for them 

 under the Napier family, who were personal friends of 

 the Anglo-Scottish king, and at that time (i6oo) 

 owners of Luton Hoo. 



The time of their arrival in England is else- 

 where given as 1605. This tradition was quoted 

 in 1878 in an address to Edward VII, who as 

 Prince of Wales visited a straw trade exhibition 

 at the Luton Plait Hall, but it does not explain 

 why the straw-plait industry first found its centre 

 at Dunstable rather than at Luton ; and Mr. 

 John Waller, a descendant of the pioneers of the 

 Luton trade, who made a careful examination of 

 local registers and other documents, has refused 

 to accept it as true. There appears to be no 

 extant record of the industry as located at Luton 

 until 1764. That the industry had taken root, 

 both in Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, before 

 that time is evident from Oldmixon's Critical 

 History of England^ written towards the end of 

 the reign of George I, where we find it stated 

 that ' several thousand plaiters found profitable 

 employment ' in those counties. Arthur Young, 

 who visited Dunstable in 1768, says that there 

 was 



at that place a manufacture of basket-work, which they 

 have carried to a great perfection of neatness, and make 

 of hats, boxes, baskets, &c., a large quantity annually ; 

 but not a great number of hands are employed by it.* 



It would appear from this that straw was used at 

 Dunstable for other articles than hats ; the latter 

 use may have grown out of the former. This 

 supposition acquires still more probability from 

 the following description of Dunstable in the 

 Commercial Gazetteer, appended to Macpherson's 

 Annals of Commerce, 1805, as 



a town in the neighbourhood of which the women 

 and children are employed in making hats, baskets, 

 and many fancy articles of straw, which in their hands 

 assumes a vast variety of figures and colours, and pro- 

 duces considerable emolument, especially since the 

 straw hats have been in general request among the 

 ladies. 



The baskets and fancy articles were, many of 

 them at least, made of split straws dyed in dif- 

 ferent colours, flattened and pasted on wood or 

 cardboard, and shaped into baskets, work-boxes, 

 mats, &c. These articles obtained a ready sale 

 among the travellers passing through the town on 

 the coaches of that period. 



Until near the end of the eighteenth or the be- 

 ginning of the nineteenth century — the exact date 

 does not appear to be discoverable — the straws 

 used in the fancy articles were split by a knife ; and 

 most, if not all, of the plait was made of whole 

 straws. As the straw used for plaiting in Tuscany 



' The Straw Platting, &c., 15. 



' Quoted by Austin, op. cit. 15. 

 • Six Monty Tour, i, 1 6. 



119 



