coarse coverlets and the like. The rest she is to break in pieces and tease, lock by lock, with her hands open, and so divide the wool as not any part may be feltered or close together, but all open and loose. Then such of the wool as she intends to spin white she shall put by itself and the rest she shall weigh up and divide into several quantities, according to the proportion of the web she intends to make, and put every one of them into particular lays of netting, with tallies of wool fixed into them with privy marks thereon, for the weight, colour, and knowledge of the wool, when the first colour is altered. Then she shall if she please send them to the dyer to be dyed after her own fancy,” or dye them herself (recipes for which are given).

“After your wool is mixed, oiled and trimmed (carded), you shall then spin it upon great wool wheels, according to the order of good housewifery; the action whereof must be got by practice, and not by relation; only this you shall be carefull, to draw your thread according to nature and goodness of your wool, not according to your particular desire; for if you draw a fine thread from wool which is of a coarse staple, it will want substance ... so, if you draw a coarse thread from fine wool, it will then be much overthick ... to the disgrace of good housewifery and loss of much cloth.”

Weaving and Spinning as a Woman’s Trade.—The employments carried on by women in the household may have yielded money occasionally, as we have seen from some of the foregoing quotations, but the work appears in these excerpts to have been carried on rather as a bye-industry, as a means of utilising surplus produce, than as a recognised trade for gain or profit. Did women carry on the manufacture of woollen goods definitely as a craft or trade? The evidence on this head is not very clear. A statute of Edward III.[4] expressly exempts women from the ordinance, then in force, that men should not follow more than one craft. “It is ordained that Artificers Handicraft people hold them every one to one Mystery, which he will choose between this and the said feast of Candlemas; and Two of every craft shall be chosen to survey, that none use other craft than the same which he hath chosen.... But the intent of the King and of his Council is, that Women, that is to say, Brewers, Bakers, Carders and Spinners, and Workers as well of Wool as of Linen Cloth and of Silk, Brawdesters and Breakers of Wool and all other that do use and work all Handy Works may freely use and work as they have done before this time, without any impeachment or being restrained by this Ordinance.” The meaning of this ordinance is rather obscure, but the greater liberty conferred on women would seem to imply that they were not carrying on the trades mentioned as organised workers competing with men, but that they performed the various useful works mentioned at odd times, incidentally to the work of the household. Miss Abram says women were sometimes cloth-makers (see 4 Edw. IV. c. 1), and often women cloth-makers, combers, carders, and spinners are mentioned in the Parliamentary Rolls. There were women amongst the tailors of Salisbury, and amongst the yeoman tailors of London, also among the dyers of Bristol and the drapers of London. Women might join the Merchant Gild of Totnes, and some belonged to the Gild Merchant of Lyons.

There appear to have been women members of the Weavers’ Company of London in Henry VIII.’s time. Again at Bristol, in documents dating from the fourteenth century, we find mention of the “brethren and sistern” of the Weavers’ Gild.

In the next century, in the first year of Edward IV., complaint was, however, made that many able-bodied weavers were out of work, in consequence of the employment of women at the weaver’s craft, both at home and hired out. It was ordered that henceforward any one setting, putting, or hiring his wife, daughter, or maid “to such occupation of weaving in the loom with himself or with any other person of the said craft, within the said town of Bristol” should upon proof be fined 6s. 8d., half to go to the Chamber of Bristol and half to the Craft. This regulation was not, however, to apply to any weaver’s wife so employed at the time it was made, but the said woman might continue to work at the loom as before.

Professor Unwin quotes a rule of the Clothworkers of London, in the second year of Edward VI., imposing a fine of 20 pence on any member employing even his own wife and daughter in his shop. At Hull, in 1490, women were forbidden working at the weaver’s trade. But in 1564 the proviso was introduced that a widow might work at her husband’s trade so long as she continued a widow and observed the orders of the company. The London Weavers clearly recognised women members, for they enacted that “no man or woman of the said craft shall entice any man’s servant from him.” But another rule prohibited taking a woman as apprentice. The statutes of the Weavers of Edinburgh in the sixteenth century provided that no woman be allowed to have looms of her own, unless she be a freeman’s wife. Probably it was felt in practice to be impossible to prevent a woman helping her husband, or carrying on his trade after his death, although there was evidently a desire to keep women out of the craft as much as possible. By the seventeenth century Gervase Markham writes as if women did no weaving at all. “Now after your cloth is thus warped and delivered up into the hands of the Weaver, the Housewife hath finished her labour, for in the weaving, walking, and dressing thereof she can challenge no property more than to entreat them severally to discharge their duties with a good conscience.” At Norwich, in 1511, the Ordinance of Weavers forbade women to weave worsted, “for that they be not of sufficient power to work the same worsteds as they ought to be wrought.”

Records of rates of pay to journeymen weavers, tuckers, fullers, etc., 1651,[5] ignore women as textile workers altogether; the only women mentioned in this assessment are agricultural workers and domestic servants. Nevertheless, old accounts of the seventeenth century do show payments to women, not only for spinning, but for weaving and “walking” woollen cloth, and we can only conclude that while the progress of technical improvements had made weaving largely a men’s trade, it was yet also carried on by women to a considerable extent.

Apprenticeship.—It seems appropriate here to give some little space to the subject of apprenticeship. Miss Dunlop points out, in her recent valuable work on that subject, that the opposition of some of the gilds to women’s work was not hostility to women as women, so much as distrust of the untrained, unqualified worker. “At Salisbury the barber-surgeons agitated against unskilled women who medelled in the trade.” “In the Girdlers’ Company the officers forbade their members to employ foreigners and maids, not out of any animosity to the women, but because unscrupulous workmen had been underselling their fellows by employing cheap labour.” At Hull, as we have seen, the employment of women was forbidden, but so was the employment of aliens. According to Miss Dunlop, the great difficulty in the way of women was the onerousness of domestic work, which prevented girls undertaking apprenticeship to a skilled craft. It appears that women and girls were largely employed as