Between 1450 and 1800, textile production was second only to agriculture in economic importance. It employed more people and produced more profit than any other manufactured product. Production and trade existed at two levels. Everywhere peasants and villagers turned locally grown wool and flax into fabric and clothing for themselves and their neighbors. The cloth they produced was of poor quality and not designed for export to distant markets. On top of this local market sat a large and lucrative luxury trade in silk, wool, linen, and (eventually) cotton fabric, the most important of which were heavy woolens. The customers for these fabrics were wealthy landowners, government and church officials, merchants, financiers, aristocrats, and master craftsmen in Europe, Asia and the Levant.
Ireland and the Baltic region supplied much of Europe's flax, although it was widely grown and available. In the sixteenth century, Venice and other Italian cities acquired silkworms and mulberry trees, and began silk manufacturing. From there, the silk industry made its way north to Holland, Zurich, Lyon, Cologne, and Spitalfields (East London), England. At the same time, cotton thread and fabric began to arrive from India and became wildly popular.
Most important of all the textile industries was the trade in raw wool and wool fabric. Sheep raising abounded everywhere. In the fifteenth century, the best fleeces came from England. In the sixteenth century, Spanish merino sheep knocked English sheep into second place. French sheep were considered to produce the third best wool. Two types of wool fabric were produced in Europe—woolens and worsteds. Of the two, the market for woolens was by far the larger. Woolens were made from short-staple wool fibers that were swirled together before spinning. The cloth had a soft-textured appearance and feel. Worsteds were made from long-staple wool and had a harder, smoother finish. Soft woolens were considered far more desirable than the harsher worsteds and dominated the wool trade.
Turning raw wool into fabric was a long, complicated process. The sheep's fleece was sheared in one continuous piece, rolled, sacked, and sold to merchants (drapers) or clothiers or their agents. The fleeces were dirty and greasy, not uniform, and far from ready for spinning and weaving. Fleece breakers opened up the fleece and removed the large pieces of debris that were caught in it. The fleece was then pulled apart, and the wool was sorted into three or four grades. Next, the sorted wool was cleaned. Any remaining debris was removed from the fleece by beating it with sticks, and then it was washed in alternating hot and cold, soapy and clean water. Some fleeces were dyed at this point, but dyeing raw wool produced dull colors, and it was common to dye fabric after it was completed rather than when the wool was raw. Whether it was dyed or not, the fleece was now lubricated with butter or oil to make it easier to work.
After breaking, cleaning, and oiling, the wool passed into the hands of combers and carders. Their task was to convert a mass of tangled, curling wool into long, straight, smooth fibers for worsteds by combing, or into a smooth ball of short wool fibers for woolens by carding. Spinners converted the combed or carded wool into continuous lengths of yarn by pulling, twisting, and turning it into a thin, continuous thread. This was the most labor-intensive part of the process. Estimates vary, but six spinners (or more) seem to have been required for every loom that was in operation. Yarn that was spun with a drop spindle was stronger than wheel-spun yarn and was used for the looms' warps. Wheel-spun yarn was wound onto bobbins and used for the weft.
Weavers usually wound their own warps and prepared their own bobbins for the loom. The best woolens were woven on broadlooms that produced fabric that was 1¼ meters wide and 22 to 23 meters long. It commonly took two men and one child (most often, probably, a boy in training) to operate a loom and weave the cloth. Once the woolen cloth was woven, it passed into the hands of fullers who cleaned and softened it by dunking it in water that contained various kinds of detergents and soaps that dissolved or absorbed the fat that had been added to the wool before it was carded or combed. Lye, stale human urine, ashes, and fuller's earth were commonly used. Fullers placed the folded cloth in a vat and trod on it with their feet, periodically removing and refolding the cloth so it would be evenly fulled.
After fulling, the cloth was dried, stretched, bleached, and perhaps dyed. Teaselers raised the nap by brushing the cloth with the burr of the teasel plant to impart a soft finish. It was clipped smooth by shearmen, pressed, and returned to the merchant for sale. The entire process involved twenty people (not including dyers) for each piece of cloth produced and took at least six weeks. Women worked as carders, combers, and spinners, while men performed most of the other tasks. The finer the cloth, the larger the labor force and the longer the time it took to produce it. (More finely spun yarn required more spinners, for instance). The finishing of worsteds was much simpler (they did not require fulling, teaseling or shearing, for instance), but the market for them was much smaller.
In the fifteenth century, textile manufacturing was an urban industry, controlled by wealthy merchants (drapers) who purchased raw wool, had it turned into cloth, and then sold it, often to other craftsmen who performed the final finishing steps, including dyeing and teaseling. These were capital-intensive crafts, and cloth merchants often preferred not to be involved in them. Before the seventeenth century, most English cloth was dyed and finished in Holland. In England, in addition to merchants who only bought and sold, clothiers, themselves often master weavers, controlled a great deal of the woolen trade.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, textile workers dominated the population of towns like Venice and Leiden. By the sixteenth century, however, merchants had discovered that they could avoid the high wages, labor shortages, and quality controls imposed by urban guilds and governments by hiring peasants to do manufacturing work in their homes. Urban merchants continued to control production, but much of the work force was spread out through the countryside. Alternately referred to as the putting-out system, cottage manufacturing, and the Verlag system, merchants (Verlagers) found they could save money (rural workers could work for less because they produced much of their own food) and increase production at the same time. Trained cottage workers could be as skilled as urban workers, but many alternated farming and manufacturing and produced goods of lesser quality. The high-end woolen trade remained important, but many merchants began to reorient their businesses away from the luxury market and toward lower-quality, lower-priced, and more rapidly produced goods.
The building of fulling mills (first mentioned in accounts c. 1000) that beat the woven cloth with hammers raised by water wheels to replace the labor-intensive hand (or foot) fulling provided another incentive for merchants to put work out into the countryside and was a major determinant of the location of woolen production. In the eighteenth century, when merchants expanded employment to increase production, many rural villages became as much, or even more, dependent on the textile industry as they were on farming. Following the lead of Franklin Mendels, historians now call this intensification of cottage industry proto-industrialization to distinguish it from its earlier, perhaps more benign, manifestation, when cottage workers toiled fewer hours and produced goods for local markets.
New Markets and New Fabrics
Success in the textile industry was never permanent in the early modern world, and even the seemingly most secure industrial cities could watch their predominance and control of trade decline precipitously. Survival and growth depended on a host of factors: access to raw materials, including raw wool and chemicals for dyeing; labor supply; access to trade routes and transportation systems, including ships and overland carriages; changing political allegiances; warfare; access to water for washing and fulling; demographic growth or stagnation; consumer demand; government laws and guild regulations; entrepreneurship; and fluctuating international markets.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, combinations of these factors inaugurated a series of important changes in the textile industry. Flanders, northern Italy, and southern Germany lost their dominance of woolen production to England, the Netherlands, and the Walloon region between the Meuse and Rhine Rivers. The woolen industries of Lille and Hondschoote disappeared rapidly. Venice, the largest producer of luxury broadcloths in the sixteenth century, saw its woolen industry wither away. One region's loss was often another's gain. England's woolen and worsted industries grew markedly with the government's decision to stop exporting wool fleeces in 1660. Leiden, adapting to a growing demand for lighter-weight fabrics, grew from a town of 12,000 in 1600 to a city of 80,000 in 1640, and then was outstripped by the nearby cities of Liège and Verviers, where labor costs were lower.
Often, the key to success was adaptability, especially in the eighteenth century. The economic downturn of the seventeenth century and changing consumer tastes had dampened demand for luxury woolens. Regions that had access to a variety of wool thread and flax or cotton began to produce "the new draperies," hybrid cloths made of both long and short staple wool (serges and says), wool and flax, wool and cotton, and cotton and flax (fustians and siamoises—that is, cotton and linen fabric produced in Normandy). Worsted production also profited from the demand for lighter-weight cloth.
Cotton fabrics from India and the Levant arrived in Europe in the sixteenth century or earlier. By the eighteenth century, the Dutch and English East India Companies began to import substantial amounts of pure cotton cloth (calicoes) from India and the Levant to Europe. To protect the woolen industry, England forbade the importation of pure cotton cloth in 1700. Other countries followed suit. Raw cotton and cotton thread continued to arrive, however, imported not only from the Middle East and India, but also, beginning in the early eighteenth century, from the West Indies. The woolen industry remained the largest of the textile industries throughout the eighteenth century, but the market for cotton and linen fabric grew as fast as or faster than the supply of raw cotton. (Europeans were unable to spin cotton thread that was strong enough for warp threads until the introduction of the spinning frame in the 1770s.) The markets for these hybrid cloths of relatively modest quality were substantially different from those for woolen broadcloths. Many cloths were sent to Africa; others were purchased by European peasants, farmers, and urban workers. In both cases, the more brightly colored the cloth, the more it resembled the illegal calicoes and the more popular it was.
In English and Continental cities, woolen and worsted production continued to increase in the eighteenth century, despite the competition of the new draperies. In England this growth was fostered by the creation of urban cloth halls where the clothiers who oversaw the manufacturing of cloth sold their wares to merchants who, in turn, oversaw the finishing, transportation, and marketing of them. The most dynamic sector of the textile industry, however, was in cotton. The supply of raw cotton was far more elastic than the supply of wool and hence less expensive to purchase even though it had to be imported from Asia or the Western Hemisphere. The bulk of the heretofore untapped markets for European textiles lay in warm or temperate zones with hot summers—North America, Africa, south and east Asia, and the West Indies, where lightweight cloths were clearly more desired than heavy woolens.
New Technologies
As the eighteenth century progressed, the invention of machines designed primarily to increase both the quantity and quality of cotton yarn made the manufacture of pure cotton fabric possible. Textile machines were not new in the eighteenth century. In 1598 William Lee invented a stocking frame for knitting. By the end of the seventeenth century, it had all but eliminated hand knitting. In 1604 William Dircxz van Sonnevelt invented a ribbon frame that allowed one person to weave twelve ribbons at a time, and in the 1600s, Italians invented a machine for throwing silk that revolutionized silk manufacturing. At considerable risk, the plans for these machines were smuggled into England in 1717. Not all machines were immediately successful. John Kay's flying shuttle (1733) was slow to catch on because it speeded up weaving, which already consumed yarn faster than women could spin it. John Wyatt's and Lewis Paul's spinning frame (1738) was equally unsuccessful, but by mid-century the cultural climate was ready for innovation. The carding machines invented by Paul and others in the 1750s, James Hargreave's jenny (1765), Richard Arkwright's spinning frame (1769) (also known as the water frame), and Samuel Crompton's mule (1779) made it possible to produce stronger and finer cotton thread than ever before. With machinery came factories and the growth of cotton cities. Between 1760 and 1830, for instance, the population of Manchester, England, increased from 17,000 to 180,000. Edmund Cartwright devised a power loom in the 1780s, but its advantages over hand weaving were slight, and adoption of mechanical weaving came much more slowly than the adoption of mechanical carding and spinning. Finishing processes were also transformed. Chemicals replaced the sun as bleaching agents (sulfuric acid in 1756; chlorine in the 1790s) and cylinder printing replaced the old block press (1783).
Almost all of these machines were invented for the cotton trade, but they could be and were adapted for use in the production of wool fabric. Worsteds adapted more easily to the new technology than woolens did. The spinning frame was used to spin long-staple wool for worsteds. Short-staple wool used in woolens was more fragile and much more difficult to spin by machine, although it, too, was being spun by jennies by the 1780s. The same was true of mechanical weaving when it spread in the nineteenth century. Stronger threads made it easier to weave worsteds than woolens.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the textile industries of Europe were moving rapidly into the industrial era. The era of cotton had begun; worsteds were outpacing woolens; factory production was returning manufacturing to the cities; and markets had expanded well beyond the luxury trade of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.
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—GAY L. GULLICKSON
