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Lace making was usually done in women’s own homes. If the family was poor sometimes men and boys also took up lace making. When young girls were made to go to school from 1880 and much lace was being made on machines instead, this industry mostly died out.
Please add profiles of lacemakers (and associated occupations) to this project.
Image right - Public Domain File:Johannes Vermeer - The lacemaker (c.1669-1671).jpg
Associated Occupations
- Honiton Sprig maker lace
- Lace bobbin makers.
- Lace collar makers;
- Lace dealers;
- Lace drawer - usual a child assisting in lace making
- Lace makers;
- Lace Master/Mistress
- Lace pattern makers;
- Lace pillow makers;
- Lace runner
- Lace seller
- Lacer
- Laceman
There are two main methods of making traditional lace: with a needle and single thread (needle lace) or with multiple threads (bobbin lace). Bobbin lace is a lace textile made by braiding and twisting lengths of thread, which are wound on bobbins to manage them. As the work progresses, the weaving is held in place with pins set in a lace pillow, the placement of the pins usually determined by a pattern or pricking pinned on the pillow.
Bobbin lace is also known as pillow lace, because it was worked on a pillow, and bone lace, because early bobbins were made of bone or ivory.
Lace can also be made with a crochet hook, knitting needles or tatting or netting shuttle.
It is believed that lace originated in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century, and rapidly developed from the 1550s onwards. By 1600 high quality lace was being made in many centres across Europe including Flanders, Italy, Spain, France and England. The demand for lace continued to grow in the seventeenth through to the nineteenth centuries, with the styles changing to meet the varying demands of fashion.
Image above - The Lace Maker, The Charles Deering Collection Reference Number: 1927.2143 (United states)
History in Britain
Lace was probably made in the Eastern Counties (Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire) prior to 1563, flax growing areas.
Lacemakers from the continent (Europe) came 1563 to 1568. They were Flemish Protestants who left the area around Mechelen (Mechlin / Malines) when Philip II introduced the Inquisition to the Low Countries.French Huguenots settled in the Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Northamptonshire area in the 1500s, teaching the people how to make lace.
Whether lace making was introduced to Britain by the Huguenots or not is a bone of contention - Huguenots and England’s lace making industry is a very comprehensive aticle on the subject.
1563: Twenty-five recent widows, makers of bone lace, settled in Dover, Kent; 400 settled in Sandwich, Kent;
1567: It is estimated that 100,000 left Flanders when the Duke of Alva became head of the Spanish Catholic Army. Most of that number came to England.
Lacemakers, many from Lille, left in 1572 after The Massacre of the Feast of Saint Bartholomew. Exactly how many is not known but many hundreds came to Buckinghamshire and Northampton.
In 1609 John Brinkhurst established alms houses on Oxford Road in Marlow to provide accommodation for the poor. On April 8th 1623 a petition was sent to the High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire concerning the plight of the lace makers: ‘much distressed, as bone lace making was much decayed’. In 1624, in memory of his son Henry, Sir William Borlase founded a school in West Street “to teach twenty-four boys ‘to read and cast accounts’ and twenty-four girls to ‘knit, spin and make bone lace’”.
Huguenot emigration continued until the Edict of Nantes in I598. However, when the Edict was rescinded in 1685 by Louis XIV, there was another wave of religious refugees. About 10,000 left Burgundy and Normandy. The lace makers found their way to the by now well-established lace villages in the counties of Buckingham, Bedford and Northampton.
Flemish and Huguenot names still common in the area are listed below; most have been Anglicised over time.
- Bitchiner Le Fevre
- Cattell
- De Ath
- Dudeny (Dieu donner)
- Glass Conant
- Hillyard
- Lathall Francy
- Milliner
- Minard (Mynard)
- Mole (Mohl)
- Nurseaw
- Perrin Waples
- Raban
- Rennels
- Rubythorn
- Sawell Le Fevier
- Simons Cayles
- Vaux
Families of agricultural workers and the more lowly artisans supplemented their income by working at the lace; men and boys as well as women and girls.
The 1803 Militia Lists for three local villages include:
Hanslope George Hancock lacemaker
North Crawley James Cobb lacemaker
Emberton Chas. Cooper lacemaker
Northamptonshire - Northampton Militia lists of 1777 states that there were between nine and ten thousand young women and boys employed in lacemaking in and around Wellingborough and about nine thousand involved in the trade around Kettering.
The 1824 directory for Winslow (Buckinghamshire), includes Samuel Yates (lace merchant, Sheep Street) and George Jones (lace dealer, Great Horn Street). The lace-makers were usually the poorer women. In the 1851 Census, about 150 women in Winslow gave their occupation as lace-maker. They would have been taught at a lace school, and Rebecca Lee, living in the Market Square, gave her occupation as Lace School Mistress. There were another 12 "pauper lace-makers" in the Workhouse.
Lace Schools - by the mid-19th century most village (Turvey) girls attended a Lace School, from as young as five or six, supervised by a Lace Mistress who was paid by the parents,
The competition from machine lace and from imported lace put the industry into decline by the late 19th century.
Image above - Wenceslas Hollar - The lace-maker; Public domain photograph of portrait art print, 18th century, free to use, no copyright restrictions image - Picryl description
The Industrial Revolution between 1760 – 1840, brought changes for lacemaking, bringing about the mechanisation of the craft. The first machine lace was made in the late-eighteenth century, and was followed in 1809 by a machine which could produce a stable net fabric that could be used as the foundation for new, hand-worked laces
Two Acts of Parliament influenced the decline of the bobbin lace industry:
- Education Act (1870 in England & Wales, 1872 in Scotland and elsewhere) providing free, compulsory, elementary education for all children up to the age of 13;
- Workshops Act setting out minimum requirements for hours worked and conditions of employment.
See attached documents of 1851 Census Lacemakers in Sidmouth, Devon and Towcestor, Northamptonshire
In the 1881 census there were nine professional lacemakers in Cosgrove, Northamptonshire, and many more women and girls making lace at home.
Harry Armstrong, born in Stoke Goldington in 1886, set up the Bucks Cottage Workers’ Agency in 1906.
References, Further Reading
- https://www.laceguild.org/a-brief-history-of-lace
- https://laceincontext.com/tag/lacemakers/
- https://cowperandnewtonmuseum.org.uk/lacemaking/ - Lace Making at the Cowper & Newton Museum
- https://www.lacemakersofcalais.com.au/workers-and-work - Lacemakers of Calais
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobbin_lace
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/legacies/work/england/nottingham/article_2.shtml
- http://www.winslow-history.org.uk/twentiethc-lace.shtm
- https://omeka.library.american.edu/s/netscherlacemaker/page/maidser...
- https://churchmousec.wordpress.com/2015/08/25/huguenots-and-england...
- https://www.turveyhistory.org.uk/topics/occupations/an-overview-of-...
- http://www.mkheritage.co.uk/cnm/html/EXHIBITS/lace/lacehtml/01_hugu...
- https://web.archive.org/web/20060313162023/http://www.greensnortonv...
1851 Sidmouth, Devon Document attached - lace related people listed in the 1851 England Census for Sidmouth, Devon.
1851 Towcester, Northamptonshire Document attached - lace related people listed in the 1851 England Census for Towcestor, Northamptonshire.
1841/51 Winslow, Buckinghamshire Document attached.