After Nabuurs&VanDoorn tell their story to the Flemish Textile Heritage Institute, they are re-directed to the library at the textile museum in Tilburg. Their questions go in many directions but concentrate on refugees from the Southern Lowlands who migrated to Norwich in the United Kingdom from the 16th century onwards, and who become known as Elizabethan Strangers or Aliens.
Margaret of Parma (1522-1586) is governor of the Lowlands when Protestants want to hand her a pleading letter. In Brussels, her adviser tells her; ‘ce ne sont que des gueux, Madame’; translated “they are just beggars, madame”. Margaret refuses to accept the letter, which is the start of the iconoclasm and an increase of Protestant refugees to Norwich.
Fashionable amongst nobles are the curly collars decorated with lace, which are made of linen batiste. These collars are supported with metal wirework of silver or gold. In the lowlands, a special industry emerges for making and maintaining these collars made of fine linen fabrics. After each wash, the collars must again be bleached, stiffened and ironed into shape. Special stiffening techniques emerge for the fine translucent linen.
After their arrival in Norwich, the weavers worked with fabrics such as baize, bays, baies, bay, damask, worsted, crape, brode, broadcloth, friezes, housewife's cloth and perpetuana. They are known for their new draperies made of wool-based fabrics in vibrant colours with intricate patterns. An interesting change from luxurious fine fabrics to rougher cheaper fabrics with colorful patterns. Is it because they no longer could work for nobility, that they started to make fabrics for their own class?
Unfortunately, Nabuurs&VanDoorn only find information in this library from the 18th century onwards. There is no information from before the time that the Lowlands not yet had been colonized by Holland (the beggars). Weavers from the Lowlands were then put to work in Holland and their knowledge was appropriated. Women's labor in these early new times was moved from domestic to public sphere by the emerging patriarchal capitalism that took control by displacing labor out of women's hands.
Nabuurs&VanDoorn leave the library disappointed and will have to search further to rediscover the lost secrets of women's work, based on oral traditions and unwritten knowledge. The women worked in small groups and learnt while bleaching, stiffening and ironing by experimenting and doing together. A bottom-up approach in contrast with the hierarchical top down approach by early capitalist patriarchy.
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