Dyed In the Wool, Tenterhooks, and Other Inspiration for The Spinster
This week, I released a new, free short story to my newsletter subscribers, The Spinster (read it here with your subscriber password).
I was inspired to write this story simply because I love that the term “spinster” came from women who were relatively economically independent: they worked spinning wheels from their homes. To write Millie Deere, I decided to delve into her business model, and boy, did I find drama!
The textile industry was a mainstay of the British economy for centuries. Natively, the British grew flax for linen and raised sheep for fleece. As the British Empire expanded, the British imported cotton from India and the United States to be spun by the same spinners, woven, and sold. (Here is an interesting write-up on the evolution of the wool industry from Historic UK.)
As described in A Perfect Red by Amy Butler Greenfield, the traditional wool process included several steps, each of which required different craftsmen. First, shepherds sheared fleece from sheep. Then washers and carders prepared it for processing by cleaning it and pulling the fibers apart. At that point, spinners spun the fleece fibers into yarn (either woolen or worsted, which I’ll let you read about here). Then came the weavers, who wove it into cloth. Next, “walkers” washed the cloth with fuller’s earth, a compound that promoted dye absorption. They dried it on a rack called tenters, and tenterhooks held the fabric in its appropriate position (have I got you on tenterhooks yet?!). Finally, it was given to dyers, who had the difficult and smelly process of giving it color. (Occasionally, dyers worked with unspun wool to make the colors longer-lasting, which is the origin of the phrase “dyed in the wool.”)
If all that has your head spinning like fiber on a bobbin, I recommend this YouTube video, showing the traditional processes from a farm in Maryland.
Since so many different people were involved, by the eighteenth century, the textile industry operated on a “putting-out” system. Sometimes, each craftsman sold fabric to the next person in the process, but more commonly, a manufacturer managed the process. After purchasing the fleece, they provided it to spinners throughout the countryside, who returned it as yarn in skeins or hanks for a piece rate. (Spinners commanded a better rate for worsted yarn than woolen.)
This is where the drama comes in. Since wool was a valuable commodity, spinners sometimes skimmed from the supply, either to use for themselves or to sell to a third party. There were two ways of doing this: short reeling or false reeling. Spinners wound yarn into skeins or hanks using a reel, whose measurements were standard within regions. For example, in Yorkshire, a reel was expected to have a circumference of one yard, and a hank would have 560 threads of yarn. A false reel cheated on the number of threads in the hank or skein. Short reeling cheated on the circumference of the reel.
As British wool manufacturing grew (due to more powerful looms that replaced master weavers), they got more serious about prosecuting false or short reelers. Beginning in 1749, the punishment for reel fraud was fourteen days of hard labor and a whipping. However, public opinion on the penal system was changing, particularly for women, so by the 1770s that had been reduced to a five shilling fine for a first offense. (Read John Styles’s excellent article on false and short reeling from Textile History here.)
Manufacturers set up inspectors or “searchers” to find evidence of short or false reeling, so that in the years following the new system, convictions of reel fraud increased exponentially.
By the time Millie is accused of short reeling, enforcement was on the decline, largely because the putting-out system was on the decline. With the advent of spinning jennies and power looms, the textile industry moved to factories, leaving women like Millie with little economic independence. (More of this impact is explored in The Duchess Wager, where you again get a glimpse into Millie and Josiah’s life.)
In any case, I was fascinated by the idea of a spinster, a weaver, and a little injustice. The result is the short love story, The Spinster.
PS If you want to get a sense for what spinning entailed, check out these videos: