INDUSTRIES 



It was very early a custom among village maidens 

 to keep St. Katherine's Day as a feast ; and the 

 reference to the ' old bell-man ' in the above lines 

 supports the assumption that ' Cattern ' was in 

 reality a survival of the old religious feast. On 

 the other hand, the fact that only lace-makers 

 preserved the custom down to quite recent times 

 justifies the inference that Queen Katherine's 

 patronage induced the lace-makers to appropriate 

 the feast to their particular industry, and to make 

 it their holiday. 



Though there is a large amount of literature 

 upon the subject of lace, most of it is occupied 

 with descriptions of the different makes and 

 styles, and no careful inquiry into the date of its 

 origin has been made. The references to the 

 actual history of the industry as such are vague 

 and lacking in arrangement. All that can be 

 said about the early history of lace in England, 

 beyond what has been said above, is that the 

 making of pillow-lace was carried on in Eng- 

 land to a considerable extent in the sixteenth 

 century, and that the Midland lace bore traces 

 of French influence. Shakespeare's Twelfth 

 Night, which may be dated about the year 1600, 

 contains the lines : — 



The spinsters and the knitters in the sun. 

 And the free maids that weave their thread with 

 bones. 



This allusion to bobbins, which were at first 

 generally made of bone, is doubtless a bit of local 

 English colour ; and if so it would suggest that 

 lace bobbins were then familiar objects. In the 

 next century, references to ' bone-lace,' i.e. pillow- 

 lace made with bone bobbins, become numerous. 

 The New English Dictionary quotes from ' Sim- 

 ple Reasons' in Harl. Misc. the mention of 

 ' Davison a bonelace maker.' Thomas Fuller, 

 in his Worthies, published in 1662, the year after 

 his death, says ' Bone-lace it is named, because 

 first made with bone (since wooden) bobbins.' 

 This passage implies that the industry had already 

 become an old one. The London Gazette, 1666, 

 refers to ' Our manufactures of Points and Bone- 

 laces.' Here both needle-point and pillow-lace 

 are recognized as 'our' manufactures. In fact 

 our home manufacture of lace was considered of 

 sufficient importance to deserve legislative protec- 

 tion against foreign competition ; for in 1662 an 

 Act was passed prohibiting the importation of 

 foreign bone and other laces. This Act was 

 repealed by 6 George IV, cap. 105. In the 

 same year (1662) Flemish lace-makers were 

 brought to England to teach their kind of work ; 

 and though it is said that, for lack of the fine 

 thread necessary for their work, the foreigners 

 returned home, the result of their visit was the 

 establishment of the Honiton lace industry in 

 Devonshire. 



Beyond the tradition that has gathered round 

 the residence of Queen Katherine at Ampthill 



we have not been able to discover any historical 

 explanation of the fact that Bedfordshire, Buck- 

 inghamshire, and Northamptonshire became the 

 principal seats of the pillow-lace industry. The 

 industry extended to a small extent to the 

 adjacent counties, but not sufficiently to form a 

 distinguishing feature of those districts, as it did 

 in the counties above named. Already in 

 Defoe's time Bedfordshire could thus be described 

 by him : — * 



Through the whole of the south in this cbunty, the 

 people are taken up with the manufacture of bone 

 lace, in which they have wonderfully exercised and 

 improved within the last few years. 



There is no reason to think that he needed to 

 have limited this description to any part of the 

 county. When we can have the aid of trust- 

 worthy statistics, we find the industry in 

 Bedfordshire to hold about the same relation to 

 the total population of the county as in the two 

 larger counties. Taking the year 1851, when 

 the pillow-lace industry had been subjected to 

 the competition of machine-made lace for more 

 than half a century, we find that Buckingham- 

 shire had 7,112 lace-makers over the age of 

 twenty, out of a total population of 76,570; 

 Northamptonshire 5,800, out of a population of 

 115,735; and Bedfordshire 3,779, out of a 

 population of 67,027. The numbers of lace- 

 makers under the age of twenty are not given in 

 these census returns for the separate counties ; 

 but they would bear a similar proportion to the 

 total in each county. The only other counties 

 in which pillow-lace is made that show any 

 considerable number of makers for this year are 

 Devonshire, the seat of the Honiton lace industry,, 

 with 3,336 lace-makers over the age of twenty ; 

 Oxfordshire 1,197 5 ^^^ Huntingdonshire 442. 

 The rate of decay of the pillow-lace industry 

 may be estimated by comparing with the above 

 figures those of 1861, 1881, and 1901. In 

 the county census returns for 1861, persons 

 under twenty years of age are included, and 

 will thus partially obscure the decrease. In 

 that year there were in Buckinghamshire 

 8,501 lace- makers, in Northamptonshire 8,22i> 

 and in Bedfordshire 6,728. The lace-makers 

 under twenty in Bedfordshire numbered 2,087,. 

 only five of them being males, 959 of them 

 being between ten and fifteen, while as many 

 as 747 were between five and ten. By deducting 

 those under twenty, we get the number of lace- 

 makers over twenty 4,641, an increase over the 

 3,779 of 1851 almost exactly proportionate to 

 the total increase in the population of the county. 

 An analysis of the figures of the other two 

 counties would show similar results. When we 

 come to 1 88 1 we find that the decrease in 

 Bedfordshire is relatively less than that in either 

 of the two other counties. The figures in 



' Defoe's Tour Through Great Britain. 



123 



