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COPYRIGHT 2002 Adam Mickiewicz University Press
ABSTRACT
The silkwomen of medieval London have become a celebrated case in the history of women's work, but the surviving evidence about the status of their work and their social situation is ambiguous at best. This essay examines their famous petition to Parliament in 1455 in which they describe silkwork as the virtuous labour of "gentlewomen", and reads it against a number of other representations of women and silk work from romance, sumptuary legislation, estates literature and political poetry. My focus is on both the possibilities and the limitations offered by interdisciplinary research into medieval women's lives.
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One of the most celebrated cases in medieval women's history is that of the London silkwomen in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. (1) They have featured prominently in recent debates about the economic and social autonomy of late medieval women, relative to later periods. This is a complex issue whose resolution is well beyond the scope of this paper, and whose implications are much broader and deeper than the case of the silkwomen. However, their prominence in the debate over whether medieval women enjoyed a "golden age" of prosperity and independence raises some important second-order issues. I hope to address some of these issues in this essay, which is conceived in part as a methodological inquiry. I will also introduce a further dimension to discussion by considering some different kinds of evidence about women, work and luxurious textiles, especially the anxious texts of romance, estates literature and sumptuary legislation, to explore some of the broader contexts in which we might find representa tions of medieval women's work. I will also suggest that some aspects of the complexity we expect of such texts might also be found in some of the seemingly more straightforward "historical" documents. My intention throughout is to reflect on the disciplinary traditions and influences that still tend to shape the directions of our research, as historians and literary critics, even in this "interdisciplinary" era in medieval studies.
1. The London silkwomen and their petition
The English silk industry is of particular interest, as it seems to have been predominantly in the hands of women. There was no sericulture in England at this time, and no large scale silk weaving either, in contrast to a number of European countries. But English ecclesiastical embroidery, known as opus anglicanum, had been famous since at least the thirteenth century, when Pope Innocent IV was so impressed by English ecclesiastical vestments that he commissioned a number of embroiderers to make more such garments for Rome. At court, too, the fashion for elaborate silk and gold embroideries required their constant renewal and remaking. Robes and other garments associated with Edward III's Order of the Garter in the late 1340s and 1350s constituted a large proportion of this elaborate work. The work of court embroidery seems to have been shared equally by men and women: of its nature, it was closely linked to the heraldic work of the armourers. We know the names of a number of male embroiderers, for example, a nd we know that male workers at court earned twice as much as women (Staniland 1989: 277; Staniland 1991: 22; Christie 1938: 31-37).
But the production of thrown silk and small items, the "narrow ware" produced on very small looms, or by other methods of knotting or tying, was almost exclusively the domain of women, most of whom were based in the city of London. Women silkworkers specialised in converting, or "throwing" raw silk into yarn, weaving small items such as fringes, tassels, ribbon, laces, and girdles, and making up small items such as purses. As traders, they also undertook large and sometimes lucrative contracts with other European traders. These women were the wives or widows of wealthy merchants and Aldermen (Thrupp 1948: 170); and were often registered asfemme soles, meaning they could trade, borrow and incur debt in their own right, and conduct risky overseas trade. We know of a number of silkwomen, such as Margaret Cliderowe (who left a collection of silver valued at over [pounds sterling][16.sup.2]), Alice Claver, Beatrice Fyler, and Elizabeth Nevyle, who traded in their own right, and took in other women as apprentices, though the apprentices were bound to both husband and wife, to learn the wife's trade. Girls came from counties such as Norfolk, Warwickshire and Yorkshire to be apprenticed to London silkwomen (Dale 1933: 325-327).
Famously, too, the silkwomen petitioned the king and parliament on a number of occasions, complaining against foreign traders importing inferior materials, or forestalling supplies of raw silk, forcing up the prices. These documents can tell us a great deal about how the silkwomen represented their own work and their socio-economic status. In 1368 a group of certain women called "silkwymmen" had brought a petition to the Mayor and Aldermen of London against the actions of Nicholas Sarduche, a merchant of Lombardy. They said they had no other means of livelihood than their craft, and accused Sarduche of forestalling and regrating "all the crude and coloured silk and other kinds of merchandise brought by aliens, thus grivously enhancing the price" (Calendar of plea: 99-106). The petition of 1455, howevet; is the more extensive and detailed. It opens:
... besechen the silke-wymmen and throwestres of the craftes and occupation of Silkework within the Citee of London, which be and have been craftes of wymmen within the same city of tyme that noo mynde renneth unto the contraries. That where it is pleasying to God that all his creatures be set in vertueux occupation and labour according to their degrees, and convenient for thoo places where their abode is, to the norishing of vertue, and eschewying of vices and ydelness. And where upon the same craftes, before this tyme, many a wurshipfull woman within the said citee have lyved full honourably, and therewith many good Housholds kept, and many Gentilwymmen and other in grete noumbre like as there now be moo than a M, have been drawen under theym in lemyng the same Craftes and occupation ful vertueusly... (Rotuli Parliamentorum 5, 34 H. VI (1455): 325)
They complain that while they have only ever imported raw, or "unwrought" silk, that various Lombards and other "aliens estraungers" now routinely import thrown silk, ribbons, laces, corses and other ready-made silk products.
The sufferance of this grievance ... hath...
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