“When we engage in fibre arts, we are creating something, but we’re also participating in historic traditions tens of thousands years old. You are not only making art for your soul, and for future generations, you are embodying the work of our ancestors.”
The Woven Road.
Knitting has been around for centuries. The art spread from the middle east to Europe along with spices, as early as the 12 Century. Each place that adopts a knitting technique adapts it for their own needs, style and resources available to them. The oldest knitted garments have been found, as fragments, dug up with the people wearing them. Fragments of a pair of socks from Egypt dating back to 400 - 600 AC suggest, by their complexity, that knitting, in this form, had been developed before this date. The two stranded colour work is worked in blocks using an intarsia technique. The feet the socks covered and the knitting both distorted by time, but it gives us a picture of the lives of the those that wore such garments when living. There are other forms of evidence that provide such information: artwork and laws.
On the right hand panel of the Buxtehude Altar held at the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Hamburg, Germany, the Visit from an Angel depicts a Madonna knitting a garment on four needles. The artist, Master Bertram (1345 - 1415) was well known for showing women doing everyday tasks in his works. His panel Apocalypse, held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London depicts the Book of Revelations, as well as plague, Armageddon and Last Judgement, women harvesting grapes can clearly be seen.
There are other examples of knitting in religious art. Madonna dell’ Umiltà by Vitale da Bologna circa 1353, shows the Madonna knitting in the round. This was not uncommon as knitting as flat pieces then stitched together is thought to be a Victorian invention that aided the knitting process as it moved to industrialisation. This Madonna is holding a piece of stranded colourwork which would be added as a cuff for a pair of gloves, stockings or a sleeve.
Another Madonna depiction, La Sacra Famiglio (circa 1319-1348), shows a female saint sitting knitting a pair of child’s socks, the yarn on spools at her feet, with a younger saint or holy person at her arm.
Later artists also depicted women knitting while they walked, or sat. Winslow Homer, an American living in the UK, showed girls in the fishing trade who knitted while they walked. Their clothes are working outfits: aprons, scarves over their heads and boots on their feet. They have small bags to hold the yarn pinned to their aprons. Homer lived amongst the women of Cullercoat in the North-East of England while their men folk were away fishing. The women used this time to fix nets, clothes and other fishing gear for when the men returned. Homer studied their way of life and documented it in his painting.
Homer was one of a few painters who documented poverty in Europe. Knitting, often done by workers in their down time from other paid work, to eke out earnings they made, was a common past time for the poor. Jean-Francois Millett’s Young Girl Watching Her Sheep (1860) shows a young woman in winter attire: long skirt, cape and bonnet, with four needles working on a sleeve or a sock.
Artworks through history are not the only way knitting can be tracked. In the UK the Cappers Act (1571) a sumptuary law* stated every English resident over the age of 6, except ‘maids, ladies, gentlewomen, noble personages and every Lord, Knight or gentleman of 20 marks of land’ should wear a ‘cap of wool, thickened and dressed in England, made within this realm and only dressed and finished by the trade of Cappers, upon pain of forfeit for everyday of not wearing 3s 4d’. The act was brought in as a protectionary measure. Caps were political. Philip Stubbes a Puritan wrote about the current fashions of 1580 in Anatomie of Abuses, stating that a man had ‘no account or estimation’ if he wore a cloth or wool hat, that was for common people.
Caps also provided an industry for working people. The Cappers Act listed the 15 distinct jobs that went with cap making. Among them, knitting, carding and spinning, fulling (light felting), dyeing, dressing (raising of the nap), shearing, (trimming of the raised surface), and lining. A drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger of John More the Younger, pictures him in a cap with a split brim and two overlapping sections. The height of fashion for men in 1526. Many caps like this have been found in excavations with the City of London on a probable cap-making workshop site. Three were also recovered from the Mary Rose, a Tudor ship that sank on its maiden voyage in 1545, that was excavated and brought to the surface in 1982.
These hats were all different but followed similar principles that would have been passed down from a master to an apprentice. Generally, they are made in one piece, in the round, with a flat, circular crown and differing styles of brim. The brims were often slashed into a more fashionable style once felted. This same system of knitting a hat is still used in knitting and crochet methods used today for Scottish Tam-o'-shanter and similar caps.
The Cappers Act was repealed in 1597. I can't see why!
*Sumptuary law - any law designed to restrict excessive personal expenditures in the interest of preventing extravagance and luxury. The term denotes regulations restricting extravagance in food, drink, dress, and household equipment, usually on religious or moral grounds. Such laws have proved difficult or impossible to enforce over the long term. - Britannica
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