In 1578 when Elizabeth visited Yarmouth she was treated to a display of knitting. On a specially erected stage
there stood at one end eight small women children spinning worsted yarn and at the other end as many knitting of worsted yarn hose…59
By the time Shakespeare was writing Twelfth Night in 1600, knitting had taken its place among the skills of working women: Orsino tells Cesario to pay particular attention to the song Feste is about to sing.
Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain.
The spinsters, and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones
Do use to chant it…(II. iv. 44–7)
Knitting was probably one of the skills Ann had acquired when she was growing up in Shottery in the 1570s:
Joan can spin and Joan can card,
Joan keeps clean both house and yard.
She can dress both flesh and fish
or anything that you can wish.
She can sew and she can knit.
Joan for anything is fit.60
The milkmaid Launce wants to marry in The Two Gentlemen of Verona can knit, and Launce interprets this skill in her as being as good as a dowry: ‘What need a man care for a stock with a wench when she can knit him a stock?’ (III. i. 301–3). An odd light is cast on the way in which knitting served as a source of income for poor women by the discovery that, when Ann Morgan of Wells in Somerset, who combined knitting with occasional prostitution, was overheard bargaining with a man who asked ‘Shall I lie with thee and I will give thee a shilling?’ she replied, ‘No, I will have eighteenpence for thou has torn my coat and has hindered me the knitting of half a hose.’61
In early November 1598 Adrian Quiney wrote from Stratford to his son Richard, who was in London on Corporation business, advising him to invest in ‘knit stockings’:
if you may have carriage to buy some such wares as you may sell presently to proft. If you bargain with W[illia]m Sh[akespeare] or receive money there, or bring your money home you may. I see how knit stockings be sold. There is great buying of them at Evesham. Edward Wheat and Harry your brother’s man were both at Evesham this day sevennight and as I heard bestow £20 there in knit hose, wherefore I think you may do good if you can have money.62
Quiney’s excitement suggests that the demand for knit stockings was greater than the supply, so that if they could buy up large quantities at Evesham they stood to make a tidy profit.
More skilled knitters could knit finer, decorative stockings, with more stitches to the inch, as well as fancy stitches and embroidery, and for them they could charge enormous prices. Stubbes was particularly outraged by the extravagance of the hosiery affected by all classes:
Then have they nether stocks to these gay hose, not of cloth (though never so fine) for that is thought too base, but of jersey, worsted, crewell, silk, thread, and such like, or else at the least of the finest yarn that can be got and so curiously knitted with open seam down the leg with quirks and clocks around the ankles and sometime haply interlaced with gold or silver threads…it is now grown that everyone (almost), though otherwise very poor, having scarce forty shillings of wages by the year, will not stick to have two or three pair of these silk nether stocks or else of the finest yarn that may be got, though the price of them be a royal or twenty shillings, or more, as commonly it is…63
And that’s just the men. Women go even further:
Their nether stocks in like manner are either of silk, jersey, worsted, crewell, or at least of as fine yarn, thread or cloth as is possible to be had…they are not ashamed to wear hose of all kind of changeable colours, as green, red, white, russet, tawny, and else what, which wanton light colours any sober chaste Christian…can hardly without suspicion of lightness at any time wear. And then these delicate hose must be cunningly knit and curiously indented in every point, with quirks, clocks, open seam, and everything else accordingly.64
If Ann were involved in the upper end of the stocking manufacture, spinning her own thread of ‘changeable’ or mixed colours and knitting it into elaborate patterns, she could have earned a good living for herself and her little ones. If she taught other women to knit up her designs and provided them with patterns and materials, she could have earned much more. Such goods were manufactured in the midlands; in Stratford in 1598 the haberdasher William Smith sued one Perry for failing to pay him for ‘fustians, lace, worsted stockings, silk buttons, taffeta &c’.65 A cottage industry like this has to be organised and co-ordinated; evidence of female entrepreneurs in this field is hard to come by but there is some. In 1622 when she accompanied her husband to Ireland, Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, undertook to organise a local textile industry there:
she procured some of each kind to come from those other places where those trades are exercised, as several sorts of linen and woollen weavers, dyers, all sorts of spinners and knitters, hatters, lace-makers and many other trades at the very beginning, and for this purpose she took of beggar children (with which that country swarms) more than eight score apprentices, refusing none above seven year old, and taking some less. These were disposed to their several masters and mistresses to learn those trades they were thought most fit for, the least amongst them being set to something, as making points, tags, buttons or lace…66
Lady Falkland was no businesswoman and her noble project eventually failed. If Ann had tried something similar in Warwickshire with the wives and daughters of the growing horde of landless workers, she could well have succeeded. All sources note that agriculture was employing fewer and fewer people in the midlands in the 1580s and 1590s, and that the clothing trades were becoming more and more important. 67 What we lack is any account of just how that happened. If Ann Shakespeare had both skill and business acumen, she could have become a wealthy woman in her own right. So far we don’t know that she did, but we don’t know that she didn’t either.
We can be sure that there were women in Stratford who made a living by knitting because the Overseers of the Poor, among whom were numbered various of Ann Shakespeare’s nephews at different times, included knitting among the useful trades to be taught to orphan girls. In 1607 eleven-year-old Dorothy Mather was placed with George Davis and his wife Margaret for fourteen years as an indentured servant ‘to learn to knit and weave bone lace’.68 In the same year fourteen-year-old Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Bayliss, was placed with Anne Curtis, widow, a knitter, to be taught ‘knitting, carding, spinning and other housewifery’. In 1612–13 Widow Curtis took on thirteen-year-old Margaret Getley, to learn ‘the trade of knitting and other housewifery’.69 In 1615 Dorothy Mather’s sister Katherine was apprenticed to Margery Shepherd for eight years ‘to learn the art and science of knitting’.70
In his History of Myddle, the Shropshire yeoman Richard Gough mentions one house-bound woman who survived by knitting:
I knew but one of Parkes’s children. Her name was Anne. She was taken in her youth by that distemper which is called the rickets. She could not go or walk until she was nineteen years of age. Afterwards her limbs received strength and she was able to walk. She learnt to knit stockings and gloves, in which employment she was very expert and industrious, and thereby maintained herself after the death of her parents…71
Elinor, widow of Richard Ralphs, one-time Parish Clerk of Myddle, is likewise described as being able to ‘knit very well and thereby gets her maintenance’.72
In 1589 William Lee of Calverton in Nottinghamshire, graduate of St John’s College Cambridge, devised a mechanical knitting machine. It was promoted at court by Shakespeare’s patron Lord Hunsdon, who secured an opportunity for Lee to demonstrate his machine to the queen, in hopes that she would grant him a patent. Elizabeth refused. For one thing the worsted stockings made by his machine were too coarse, but, revealingly, she feared that recourse to the machine would throw too many knitters out of work. Lee improved his machine, increasing the number of stitches to twenty per inch, but still the queen refused.
Nobody has ever been quite sure what a haberdasher does. In 1502 the original haberdashers who sold ribbons, beads, purses, gloves, pins, caps and toys, were amalgamated with the Guild of Hat-makers, in an odd confederation of manufacturers of one product with traders in different products. If we may believe Robert Greene, the connection between the two was not always to the customer’s advantage.
The haberdasher…trims up old felts and makes them very fair to the eye, and faceth and edgeth them neatly, and then he turns them away to such a simple man as I am, and so abuseth us with his cozenage. Beside you buy gummed taffeta, wherewith you line hats, that will straight asunder, as soon as it comes to the heat of a man’s head…74
Though in 1446 the Haberdashers’ Company was accorded a grant of arms, and in 1448 a charter of incorporation, the business of haberdashery remains inextricably connected with merchandising all kinds of trumpery, much of it done by travelling chapmen and chapwomen. In 1550 haberdashery was thought to consist of ‘French or Milan caps, glasses, daggers, swords, girdles and such things’.75 Because of the Milan connection haberdashers were also called milliners: ‘the other a Frenchman and a milliner in St Martin’s, sells shirts, bands, bracelets, jewels and such pretty toys for gentlewomen…’.76 In 1561 Stow lists ‘mousetraps, bird cages, shoe horns, lanterns and Jews’ trumps’ as part of a particular haberdasher’s ware.77 In 1576 haberdashery is described as ‘bells, necklaces, beads of glass, collars, points, pins, purses, needles, girdles, thread, knives, scissors, pincers, hammers, hatchets, shirts, coifs, headkerchiefs, breeches, clothes, caps, mariners’ breeches…’.78 ‘Trash’ and ‘haberdash’ went together. Cotgrave defines a ‘mercerot’ as ‘a pedlar, a paltry haberdasher’.79
Obviously, haberdashery is closely related to the other clothing trades, spinning, weaving, wool drapery, linen drapery, tailoring, knitting, lace-making, gloving, shoe-making, hosiery. As a glover John Shakespeare would have sold some of his production to haberdashers, and he would also have needed the services of haberdashers in supplying him with yarn, braid and other trimmings as well as needles, pins and scissors for his workwomen. Mercers, hatters, hosiers and woollen drapers too would have distributed their wares with the help of haberdashers and chapmen. Stratford, not far from the point where the London road split to serve the fast-growing industrial towns of Coventry and Birmingham, was well placed to serve as a depot for luxury goods, which might explain why the town was virtually run by businessmen who called themselves mercers. Strictly speaking mercers dealt in the top end of the fabric range, in the silks and velvets which hardly anyone in Stratford was entitled to wear. The Sumptuary Law of 1597 stipulated that ‘None shall wear velvet in gowns, cloaks, coats and upper garments, or satin, damask, taffeta or grograin…or embroidery with silk or netherstocks of silk except knights and all above that rank, their heirs apparent, those with net income of £200.’80
There were no knights and only one esquire among the parishioners at Holy Trinity and very few gentlemen. The wives of gentlemen who had the right to a coat of arms might wear kirtles of satin, as well as gowns of damask, tufty taffeta, plain taffeta and grosgrain, but there were hardly enough of them in Stratford to keep a single mercer busy. Mercers did sell silks and velvets to people not qualified to wear them, thus enabling them ‘playerlike, in rich attires not fitting [their] estate’ to counterfeit their betters and impose upon the public.81 Mercers supplied fabrics for making up by tailors, and were so often kept waiting for their money by spendthrift gallants that the ‘mercer’s book’ of outstanding debts was a byword. In Measure for Measure, among those languishing in prison is a gallant who has been put there by the mercer because he has not paid ‘for some four suits of peach-coloured satin’ (IV. iii. 8–9).
The senior Stratford mercer was Thomas Phillips who had been master of the Guild of the Holy Cross in 1536; his daughter Elizabeth would marry a mercer, Richard Quiney, son of another founding alderman, also a mercer, Adrian Quiney. Adrian Quiney, bailiff in 1559, 1571 and 1582, managed the sale of the guild chapel vestments in 1571. When Quiney was elected bailiff for the third time in 1571 John Shakespeare served under him as head alderman; in Hilary Term the next year they travelled together to London. Quiney’s second wife, whom he married in 1557, was the widow of another Stratford mercer, Laurence Baynton, whose son followed his profession. Charles Baynton is described as a mercer ‘in country term’, meaning that he was also a grocer and fishmonger, in partnership with William Court, who sold everything from loaf sugar to gunpowder. Country mercers seem in fact to have dealt in all kinds of wares. Baynton sold the Corporation a pound of sugar to regale the justices in 157782 and in 1579 at the time of the muster sold them gunpowder, ‘a pint of sallet oil’ and ‘a girdle and hangles’ in 1580 he sold the Corporation a girdle for John the tabor player, more ‘solett oil’ and thirty-nine shillings and five pence worth of sugar loaves for New Year’s gifts. In 1577 Adrian Quiney supplied the New Year’s gifts for the farmer of tithes of Stratford at a cost of six shillings and eight pence; in 1579 he was paid sixteen pence for two ells of Southwich cloth and twice sold the Corporation twelve pounds of red lead at three pence a pound.84 William Smith, mercer and haberdasher, also supplied the Corporation with ‘red lead’. Mistress Quiney sold the Corporation a pound of ginger for twenty pence.85 In 1581 it was Adrian Quiney’s turn to sell the Corporation ‘a pint of sollett oil’. In 1583 William Smith shared with Charles Baynton the duty of supplying sugar.86
Mercery may have been the trade these men claimed to follow, but they seem to have spent most of their time working for the Corporation, and to have been trading in land and rents rather more than in mercery. The ascription mercer was itself unstable; Humphrey Plumley, bailiff in 1562 and 1574, is described at various times as a mercer, a yeoman and a draper. One of his associates was Robert Hynd, called a chapman in 1562 and haberdasher in his will of 1588. Hynd brought goods by packhorse from Birmingham and leased a shop at Shipston on Stour. The trade of haberdasher, especially one who travelled with his wares from fair to fair and market to market, seems indistinguishable from that of chapman or pedlar. William Rogers, married to the sister of Henry Walker, mercer, who was elected Bailiff of Stratford in 1607, 1624 and 1635, is variously described as a mercer and a victualler.
The inventory of Anne Lloyd, who died in Stratford in 1617, is unusual in that it itemises articles of apparel, which have been taken by the compiler to have been her own, when usually the testator’s apparel was not itemised and listed merely as such. One of the two appraisers was John Smith, son
of the mercer, and it seems altogether more likely that the inventory represents Lloyd’s stock in trade as a dealer. It includes a velvet cape, old taffeta and lace, a pair of silk garters, silk girdles and a grogram gown, none of which she would have been entitled to wear. Such clothing represented an important part of a gentleman’s outlay and it seems that Anne worked both with the mercers and with gentlemen desirous of recouping some of the initial outlay on garments that were no longer useful. Two gentlemen owed her considerable amounts of money, amounting to nearly a third of her total estate, so she may have advanced money on the garments in her possession. In her will Lloyd left two white lace handkerchiefs to Henry Smith, mercer, who was bailiff that year, as well as two stomachers to his wife, and her brass and pewter to his daughters. She also left a scarf to Alice, wife of Francis Smith. The inventory reads like a pedlar’s list, with assorted scarves, ‘a mask and tiffany’, aprons, skirts, purses, girdles, gloves, aprons, ‘little books’, a fiddle and fiddle cloth, and spectacles, to the considerable total value of £56 8s 10d.87
Joan Perrott seems to have been working as a dealer in mixed goods of a similar kind. In 1596 Richard Field’s sister, Margaret Young, who was left with three small children when her husband died in February 1595, sued Perrott in the Court of Record claiming recompense for goods supplied to her on 25 July 1595, namely:
a woman’s gown of a sad tawny colour, faced with velvet and a velvet cape, value £5, another woman’s gown of rat colour faced with taffeta, with a cape of tufty taffeta and laid about with silk lace, value £3, a kirtle of broad worsted laid about with billiment lace and fringe, value 30s, a petticoat of stammel with a bodice of durance and fringed about, value 30s, a cloak of rat’s colour lined with tawny baize, value 4 marks, 2 daggers, value 6s 8d, a coverlet of red, black and yellow, value 40s, and three prayerbooks, value 10s.88
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