Silkwoman

A silkwoman was a woman in medieval, Tudor, and Stuart England who traded in silks and other fine fabrics.[1][2] London silkwomen held some trading rights independently from their husbands and were exempted from some of the usual customs and laws of coverture.[3] The trade and craft of the silkwoman was encouraged by a statute of Henry VI of England as a countermeasure to imports of silk thread, and a suitable occupation for "young gentlewomen and other apprentices".[4]

Silkwomen in London
Alice Barnham Bradbridge and her sons (c.1557), Denver Art Museum

In 1421 Alice Corsmaker paid 6s-8d to the Mercer's Company of London to trade as a silkwoman.[5] Alice Bradbridge was recognised as a "sister" of the Worshipful Company of Drapers.[6]

Silkwomen in London manufactured silk thread from raw silk imported from Italy, wove and sold ribbons, braids, cord, girdles, and trimmings, called "narrow ware",[7] and made other silk goods.[8] In the Elizabeth period, silkwomen also provided linen goods including lawn sleeves and partlets.[9]

Silkwomen supplying the royal wardrobe

Anne Claver (died 1489) was a silkwoman to Edward IV.[10] She supplied silk thread for sewing or embroidery, ribbons, a mantle of blue silk lace, and wove silk thread into laces and tassels to be applied to bookbindings. She made a silk fringe in yellow, green, red, white, and blue. She may have supplied five counterpoints for covering beds, with imagery, scripture, and verdure, and four "costerings" or wallhangings chequered in red and blue with roses, suns, and crowns.[11] She made tufts of silk to decorate the coronation gloves of Richard III, and buttons for his and Anne Neville's robes.[12]

Cecily Walcot worked on furnishings and decorations for the coronation of Henry VII in October 1485. Walcot provided fringes of gold and silk thread for the royal canopy. Kateryn Champyon alias Claver made ribbons for the king's girdles, and Kateryn Walshe supplied fringes and ribbon, some in the green and white Tudor colours.[13] Agnes Dey or Sey and Alice Claver provided red ribbons.[14][15]

Elizabeth Langton, Elizabeth Lock, Jane Lock, Margaret Ashley, and Elizabeth Worssop supplied the royal wardrobe in the years 1498 to 1511.[16] Elizabeth Lock provided a black velvet hoods for Lady Catherine Gordon, the widow of Perkin Warbeck, in October 1498 and in March 1499, and a crimson velvet bonnet in 1502,[17] and in November 1498 and April 1499 black velvet bonnets with a gold border and partlets for Lady Anne Percy, one the gentlewomen attending Elizabeth of York.[18] Elizabeth Worssop made gold fringes for hose worn by Henry VII in 1510.[19] in November 1510 Margaret Ashley supplied coloured ribbons and sarcenet silk fabric in several colours for tippets worn by Mary Tudor, then known as the "Princess of Castile".[20]

Joan Wilkinson provided silks for Anne Boleyn. Margaret or Margery Guinet (died 1544), mother of Anne Lok, was a silkwoman to Anne Boleyn and Catherine Parr.[21] Marie Wilkinson was a silkwoman to Mary I of England,[22] Alice Smythe and Alice Montague served Elizabeth I and the royal wardrobe. Montague supplied "bone lace wrought with silver and spangles" in June 1572 and Mrs Swegoo, perhaps a "tirewoman", worked on head dresses for actors in The Masque of Discord and Peace.[23][24]

Dorothy Speckard was Elizabeth's silkwoman from 1601, and she continued to work for Anne of Denmark.[25] Another silkwoman serving Anne of Denmark in London was the French-born Esther or Hester Le Tellier née Granges, who is thought to have been the aunt of the miniature painter David des Granges.[26] She had an annual salary of £20 in 1606.[27]

Alice Montague and the clothes of Elizabeth I

Alice Montague was paid for hemming and edging Elizabeth's partlets, and starching the queen's sleeves and ruffs. She was paid for blackwork embroidery on the queen's smocks and collars.[28] In 1564, Alice Montague supplied plain Holland linen for the use of Elizabeth's laundry woman or laundress, "24 elles of holland for oure Laundresse to drie our Partelettes'.[29] Montague employed a woman "in altering and translating" the queen's partlets.[30]

According to the chronicle of Edmund Howes, in 1561 Montague gave Elizabeth her first pair of silk stockings as a New Year's Day gift.[31] In 1562, Montague provided a pewter metal doll for Aura Soltana, a Russian girl at Elizabeth's court. The doll was given to Kat Ashley suggesting that she looked after Aura Soltana.[32]

In the 1560s Montague was owed £702 by John Tamworth, a keeper of the Queen's privy purse. Tamworth reimbursed other suppliers and makers including the embroiderers David Smyth and William Middleton, Henry Herne the hosier, Garret Jonson the shoemaker, Raphael Hammond the capper, and paid for gold lace supplied to the tailor Walter Fyshe.[33][34]

Montague also made and provided lace and fringes for the linings and cushions of the coaches used by Elizabeth. The fabrics were embroidered by David Smyth.[35]

References
  1. Kate Ash, 'Silkwomen', Gale Owen-Crocker, Elizabeth Coatsworth, Maria Hayward, Encyclopedia of Medieval Dress and Textiles of the British Isles (Leiden: Brill, 2012, pp. 522-523.
  2. Marian K. Dale, 'The London Silkwomen of the Fiftenth Century', Econmomic History Review', 4 (1933), pp. 324-5.
  3. Amy Louise Erickson, 'Coverture and Capitalism', History Workshop Journal, 59:1 (2005), pp. 1-16: Tim Stretton, 'Women', Susan Doran & Norman Jones', The Elizabethan World (Routledge, 2011), pp. 337, 341, 347.
  4. Nicholas Harris Nicolas, Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York: Wardrobe Accounts of Edward the Fourth (London, 1830), p. 242.
  5. Lisa Jefferson, Medieval Account Books of the Mercers of London, vol. 1 (Ashgate, 2009), p. 329.
  6. Tim Stretton, 'Women', Susan Doran & Norman Jones', The Elizabethan World (Routledge, 2011), pp. 337, 341, 347.
  7. Kay Lacey, 'The Production of 'Narrow Ware by Silkwomen in Fourteenth and Fifteenth Century England', Textile History, 18:2 (1987), pp. 187-204: Maria Hayward, Great Wardrobe Accounts of Henry VII and Henry VIII (London Record Society, 2012), p. xxxi.
  8. Anne F. Sutton, 'Two dozen and more silkwomen of fifteenth-century London', The Ricardian, vol. 16 (2006), pp. 46-58.
  9. Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd (Maney, 1988), p. 229.
  10. Anne F. Sutton, 'Alice Claver, Silkwoman, (d. 1489)', Caroline Barron, Medieval London Widows, 1300-1500 (Hambeldon Press, 1994), p. 129.
  11. Nicholas Harris Nicolas, Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York: Wardrobe Accounts of Edward the Fourth (London, 1830), pp. 117-8, 125, 242.
  12. Anne F. Sutton, 'Alice Claver, Silkwoman of London and Maker of Mantle Laces for Richard III and Queen Anne', The Ricardian, 5 (1970), p. 24.
  13. Leopold George Wickham Legg, English Coronation Records (London, 1901), pp. 206-8
  14. William Campbell, Materials for a history of the reign of Henry VII, vol. 2 (London, 1887), p. 15
  15. Anne F. Sutton, 'Alice Claver, Silkwoman of London and Maker of Mantle Laces for Richard III and Queen Anne', The Ricardian, 5 (1970), p. 247, for Katherine Champyon alias Claver, and misreadings of 'Claver' by previous authors.
  16. Maria Hayward, Great Wardrobe Accounts of Henry VII and Henry VIII (London Record Society, 2012), p. xxxi.
  17. Joseph Bain, Calendar of Documents relating to Scotland, 1357-1509, vol. 4, (Edinburgh, 1888), p. 420 no. 36.
  18. Maria Hayward, Great Wardrobe Accounts of Henry VII and Henry VIII (London Record Society, 2012), pp. 10, 18, 38, 46.
  19. Maria Hayward, Great Wardrobe Accounts of Henry VII and Henry VIII (London Record Society, 2012), p. 85.
  20. Maria Hayward, Great Wardrobe Accounts of Henry VII and Henry VIII (London Record Society, 2012), p. 91.
  21. Susan M. Felch, 'Deir Sister: The Letters of John Knox to Anne Vaughan Lok', Renaissance and Reformation, 19:4 (Fall 1995), p. 47.
  22. Alison J. Carter, 'Mary Tudor's Wardrobe', Costume, 18 (1984), p. 25.
  23. Margaret Jourdain, 'Lace as worn in England until the accession of James I', The Burlington Magazine, 10 (December 1906), p. 168: Martin Wiggins & Catherine Richardson, British Drama, 1533-1642, vol. 2 (Oxford, 2012), p. 80 no. 521.
  24. Albert Feuillerat, Documents Relating to the Office of the Revels in the Time of Queen Elizabeth (Louvain, 1908), p. 156
  25. Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd (Maney, 1988), pp. 229-227.
  26. George Charles Williamson, The History of Portrait Miniatures, vol. 1 (London, 1904), p. 27.
  27. Mary Edmond, 'Limners and Picturemakers', Walpole Society, 47 (1978-1980), p. 123.
  28. Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd (Maney, 1988), p. 224.
  29. Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd (Maney, 1988), pp. 223.
  30. Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd (Maney, 1988), p. 223.
  31. Natasha Korda, 'How to do things with shoes', Patricia Lennox & Bella Mirabella, Shakespeare and Costume (Bloomsbury, 2015), p. 96.
  32. Janet Arnold, Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe Unlock'd (Leeds, 1988), p. 107: 'Copy of an Original Order of Queen Elizabeth', Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle, 24 (London, 1754), p. 163: Bernadette Andrea, 'Ippolyta the Tartarian', Carole Levin, Anna Riehl Bertolet, Jo Eldridge Carney, eds, A Biographical Encyclopedia of Early Modern Englishwomen (Routledge, 2017), pp. 512-3.
  33. John Nichols, Progresses of Elizabeth, vol. 1 (London, 1823), pp. 270-271
  34. Elizabeth Goldring and others, eds, John Nichols’s The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I: A New Edition of the Early Modern Sources, vol. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), Appendix 16, Account of the Queen’s Purse, 1559-1569, ed. by Jayne Elisabeth Archer and trans. by Sarah Knight, pp. 244-55.
  35. Julian Munby, 'Queen Elizabeth's Coaches: The Wardrobe on Wheels', Antiquaries Journal, 83 (September 2003), pp. 316, 319 doi:10.1017/S0003581500077726
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