text:
Blogs and Content
Category: Lacemakers' folklore
'I won't describe it because I wouldn't be believed': Lacemakers' celebrations on Kleinsacramentsdag in Ypres
By davidh
On 17th June 2020
In Lacemakers and Religion, Lacemakers' folklore, Lacemakers' holidays, Lacemakers' songs
Lancelot Théodore Turpin de Crissé, 'Corpus Christi Procession leaving the Church of Saint-Germain, Paris' (detail), 1830. From the website Schola Sainte Cécile. We have not found any paintings of Corpus Christi from nineteenth-century Ypres, but this gives an impression of the occasion.
Continuing in our series on lacemakers holidays we arrive at Corpus Christi, the celebration of the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, which is a moveable feast. This year (2020) it fell on Thursday 11 June, which means that this Thursday (18 June 2020) is the 'octave' of Corpus Christi, known as 'lesser Corpus Christi' or, in Flemish, 'Kleinsacramentsdag'. The period between was, in the Catholic sense, a week of indulgence, but for Ypres lacemakers it was a week of indulgences. Kleinsacramentsdag was the lacemakers' mass and feastday in this city, and in the mid nineteenth century they celebrated it enthusiastically. 'I won't describe it because I wouldn't be believed', wrote one local journalist.[1]
Pinot & Sagaire, imagists of Epinal, 'Corpus Christi Procession', mid nineteenth century. Note the array of lace on display.
When and why Kleinsacramentsdag became the lacemakers' holiday we don't know. The custom was limited to the city of Ypres (and perhaps Veurne[2]). In the early modern period Ypres was the seat of its own small bishopric (suppressed in 1801), and ecclesiastical authorities often shaped local festive calendars, but lacemakers in other towns within the diocese, such as Poperinge and Bailleul, followed the general West Flemish pattern of celebrating on Saint Anne's day. Perhaps it was because Corpus Christi processions – when the clergy, accompanied by congregations, confraternities, the military and others, paraded the Holy Sacrament through the streets – were major occasions for the display and purchase of lace as vestments and church ornaments. But we know that the lacemakers' celebration was already established in the eighteenth-century, because a local comic poet, Karel-Lodewijk Fournier, wrote to his niece, when she became a nun, to wish her a long life and that when she died she would be carried to heaven like the prophet Elijah in a 'klein sacramentdagwagen', the waggons lacemakers hired and decorated to carry them out to country inns to continue their partying.[3]
Louise De Hem, 'After the Procession, Ypres', 1892. Yper Museum
Despite this long history, it's rather hard to find out much definitive information about the event itself. Ypres newspapers began to mention Kleinsacramentsdag in the 1860s but usually to document its decline. In 1867 the local paper De Toekomst reported that, while fifteen years earlier the 'lacemakers' mass day' was generally celebrated, now only the children from the laceschools marked it: Kleinsacramentsdag was 'dead… and buried'.[4] And yet local papers were still complaining about lacemakers' excesses on the day well into the twentieth century.
Lacemakers of Ypres, postcard c. 1912
We do know that preparations might start some weeks before the day itself, as lace-schools, of which there were about forty in the city in the mid nineteenth century, began to learn the songs they wanted to perform. Local printers and streetsingers brought out new songs for the occasion.[5] There was a special repertoire of Kleinsacramentsdag songs which we will discuss below, but lacemakers also sang topical songs, commenting on local politics and personalities. Very few of these survive but we have already encountered one: the 1848 attack on French lace dealers and the Ypres prud'hommes. Another lamented the introduction of machine-made lace net in 1830, a major threat to the handmade lace industry.[6] It was still popular more than sixty years later:
't die wilt hooren in een lied,
wat dat 't jaar dertig is 'geschied:
De kanten geen voor nieten,
Hoe dan!
Dat zoud' een mensch verdrieten!
En wuk dink je daarvan? Who wants to hear a song,
About what happened in 1830:
Lace goes for so little,
How then!
That would make a person grieve!
And what do you think about that?
Wuk dink je van den Ingelschman?
Hij brengt de tule al in ons land!
En dat bij g'heele hoopen!
Ondamme ze zoûn koopen!
En wuk dink je daarvan? What do you think of the Englishman?
Who brings 'tulle' into our country!
And that by whole shedloads!
So that they can be damn well bought!
Het is al tule lijk papier:
't deugt voorwaar ook niet een zier!
't Is goed voor twee, drij waschten,
Zijn dat geen mooie kosten!
En wuk dink je daarvan? This tulle is like paper:
It's not worth anything!
It's good for just two or three washes,
That's no bargain!
The festivities really began on the Wednesday, which was termed 'Mooimakersdag'. To make something 'mooi' means to clean and decorate it, and in theory the afternoon before any feast could be a 'mooimakersdag', but the term is strongly associated with Ypres and lacemakers.[7] Lacemakers' homes were thoroughly scrubbed and the lace schools adorned with bouquets of flowers, ribbons and necklaces of blown egg-shells (this detail reappears frequently and so we assume it had some importance, though quite what we don't know). In the evening parties of lacemakers could be seen wandering through the streets, some in male attire, others in disguise, singing and dancing together. Mocked up mannekins of lacemakers sitting at their pillows appeared at street corners, to which passersby would tip a penny.
Jozef Quisthoudt, Ypres ramparts by the Lille Gate, and the Sint-Pieterskerk beyond, 1949. Yper Museum
The following day, the apprentice lacemakers were led through the streets singing to mass in the church of St Peter. Thereafter the festivities spread out again into the streets. The children played Flemish bowls, with the winners being named 'queens' for the day. Lace schools and other groups mounted their decorated waggons with picnics for trips to country inns. Some, presumably the more religiously minded, went to the Church of Voormezele to see the Holy Blood of Christ. In the evening lacemakers continued to sing and dance in pubs such as Den Hert, Het Smisken and Den Zoeten Inval, and the streets resonated with bawdy songs, and lewd behaviour, outraging local newspapers who pointed officials to a new 1905 law ('loi Woeste') which imposed major fines and imprisonment for offences against public morality.[8] All these scenes were repeated the following Monday which was likewise termed 'Mooimakersdag'.[9]
Paula Blyau, Portrait of Albert Blyau, her father, Yper Museum
The spirit of the celebrations are well encapsulated in the 'kleinsacramentsdagliedjes' that Ypres lacemakers sang. Nearly forty of these were noted by the local teacher Albert Blyau, with the help of the musician Marcel Tasseel, in lace schools and from lacemakers in the 1890s. We've translated a few items in this repertoire below. Some of these were general festive or drinking songs, others were part of a specific repertoire of lacemakers' feastday songs. Many proclaimed the medicinal virtues of a 'fresh young lad', while a few took aim at clerical figures and 'kwezels' (religious bigots, or specifically beguines). A substantial proportion were soldiers' songs – in folklore soldiers were 'devil-may-care' types who enjoyed a life of little work and many liberties; hence on the few days lacemakers' had leisure to enjoy they took on the character of soldiers. Not many of these songs were so blatantly obscene that one could foresee them falling foul of the loi Woeste, but according to Blyau some were accompanied by gestures which made their meaning very plain.
This first song, which has been recorded by the Belgian folk group Sidus, sets the tone:
Wij hebben ons kusje in 't kasjen gesteken,
Boutjes en spellen en g'heel de boetiek.
We'n zullen dees' week van geen werken meer spreken:
Boeravezeeve is onze muziek!
Tralala, lafaderalier'! Tralalalia, lafad'rala! We've thrown our pillow into the shed,
Bobbins and pins and the whole caboodle.
This week we shan't talk about work any more:
The tambourine is our music!
Wij hebben ons mutsje doen optooien,
Ons kapje naar de mode gezet;
Wij dragen ons kleedje van voren in plooitjes,
Wij zullen dansen proper en net!
Tralala, etc. We've decked out our bonnets,
Our hats are the height of fashion;
We wear our dresses with pleats at the front,
We shall dance neat and proper!
En als mijn moeder zal komen vragen:
Dochter, en doen je voetjes geen zeer?
Wel, moeder, zou ik durven klagen?
Morgen dans ik nog vele meer !
Tralala, etc. And if my mother comes and asks:
Daughter, don't your feet hurt?
Well mother, can I complain?
Tomorrow I'll dance a whole lot more!
This was a popular song among Ypres lacemakers, though was also associated with other lacemakers' feastdays.[10] In another song the tools of the lace trade were not just put away, the 'boutjes' or bobbins were deliberately broken.[11] Kleinsacramentsdag was really a revolt against work, and those who imposed work discipline. Hence in another a magistrate asks a lacemaker if she'll take a young man to be her husband, on condition he punches the lace mistress.[12]
As well as dancing lacemakers embraced food, drink and love. Some of these songs were variants of widely sung tunes, such as 'Zoete lieve Gerritje':
''t Is Spellewerkersmesdag,
Zoete lieve Gerritje!'
Zoete lieve Mei !
The song continues that 'these are the days of pleasure', which the lacemakers will celebrate fully. They will eat sausages and potatoes, drink sugared brandy, and make the first peasant who comes along pay for it all.[13]
Cross-dressing, one element in lacemakers' celebrations (and which is mentioned in accounts of Catterns and Tanders in the English Midlands), was also a theme in their songs. In one a young woman dresses as a sailor to follow her lover, the ship's captain. Her sex in revealed when she falls from the rigging in a storm. By the time the ship returns to port, she is nursing a little baby sailor.[14]
Although freely spending money was essential to the spirit of this feast, the lacemakers did not forget that they were numbered among the poor. This reworking of a French dance tune is one of the very few lacemakers' songs for which we have an audio record, thanks to the Belgian radio presenter Pol Heyns, who recorded from Ypres schoolgirls in January 1939.
Klein-Sakermentdag die komt aan,
Vivo lajon !
En me gaan al met den char-à-bancs.
Van vivolee en marionnee !
Siliadono ! vivo lajon !
Berlabono ! Vivo lajon ! Kleinsacramentsdag is here,
Vivo lajon!
And I'm ready to go on the waggons.
Van etc
De rijken gaan naar buiten,
En den arme gaat om stuiten.
Van vivolee, etc. The rich go out [enjoying themselves] And the poor bounce along.
Van etc!
De rijken dragen krullen,
En den arme draagt palullen. The rich wear curls
And the poor wear rags
Den rijke draagt gelapte schoên,
En den arme-n en zou 't niet durven doen. The rich wear fixed up shoes
Which the poor wouldn't dare to do.
Den rijke zit up 't hooge lood,
En den arme met z'n billen bloot. The rich are in the top positions
And the poor with their bare buttocks.
Moeder, den rijke-n en kies ik niet,
En den arme-n is m'n zoetelief! Mother, I don't choose the rich man,
The poor man is my sweetheart!
But all good things must come to an end: the celebrations closed and the lacemakers had to return to the lace school, not without one final complaint.[15]
Klein-Sacramentdag is deure:
Uus geldetje ben ik kwijt:
Nu zit ik hier en treuren
Met kleinen appetijt Kleinsacramentsdag is expensive:
I've spent all my money:
Now I sit here and cry
With little appetite.
De boutjes aan de galge!
Het kusje aan 't perlorijn!
'k Wenschte dat het alle dage
Klein-Sacramentdag mochte zijn! The bobbins to the gallows!
The pillow to the pillory!
I wish that every day
Could be Kleinsacramentsdag!
De schoolvrouw kwam vragen
'Wat, duivel ! heije in je zin?
E perkamentje in acht dagen,
Is dat geen groot gewin?' The lace mistress came and asked
'What, Devil ! Are you in your senses?
A pattern in eight days,
Is that not rich reward?
Ypres, lacemakers in the rue de Lille
[1] De Toekomst, 25 June 1870 'Stads Nieuws'.
[2] We have found a single mention that it was also the 'spellewerkersmesdag' in Veurne: Rond den Heerd, 4:26 (1869): 206.
[3] Karel-Lodewyk Fournier, Naergelaetene tooneelstukken en rymwerken (Ypres: Annoy-Vandevyver, 1821), Vol. 5, p. 354.
[5] Apparently the local printer Dedeyne produced a specific collection of 'spellewerkliedjes', but we have not been able to track down a copy.
[6] Albert Blyau and Marcellus Tasseel, Iepersch Oud-Liedboek (Brussels: Commission royale du folklore, 1962), no. 120, 'Kantwerksters Leed'.
[7] Leonard Lodewijk De Bo, Westvlaamsch Idioticon (Bruges: Edw. Gailliard, 1873), vol. 1, p. 711.
[8] 't Nieuwsblad van Yper en Ommelands, 'Oneerbaarheden', 15 June 1907, p. 1; Journal d'Ypres, 'Une publicité efficace',24 June 1911, p. 2.
[9] The two main sources for this summary are: De Toekomst, 'Het speldewerk en Klein Sacramentdag te Ijperen', 26 June 1871; and C.M. and L.D.W. [Maurits Cocle and Lodwijk De Wolf], 'Ypersche Blijdagwijzer', Biekorf 35 (1929): 273-8.
[10] Blyau and Tasseel, Iepersch Oud-Liedboek, no. 87; M.C. [Magda Cafmeyer], 'Spellewerk te Ieper', Biekorf 56 (1955): 332.
[11] Blyau and Tasseel, Iepersch Oud-Liedboek, no. 92.
[13] Blyau and Tasseel, Iepersch Oud-Liedboek, no. 88; De Wolf and Cocle, 'Ypersche Blijdagwijzer': 278.
[14] Blyau and Tasseel, Iepersch Oud-Liedboek, no. 111. This song was very popular in nineteenth and twentieth century Holland and Belgium.
[15] Blyau and Tasseel, Iepersch Oud-Liedboek, no. 123. Variants of this song was also sung after other lacemakers' feastdays. The line 'my pillow to the gallows and my bobbins to the pillory!' featured on a Ypres postcard in the early twentieth century: Johan Ballegeer and Jean-Pierre Braems, Vlas, Kant en Spellewerksters in oude prentkaarten (Zaltbommel: Europese Bibliotheek, 1981), no. 34.
'The Hunters of Pleasure': The Lacemakers' Feastday in Geraardsbergen, East Flanders
On 10th May 2020
A view of Geraardsbergen, from the 1649 Atlas Van Loon, available on Wikipedia Commons. The chapel of Our Lady of Oudenberg can be seen atop the hill.
Saint Gregory's (9 May) is a slightly belated entry in our calendar of lacemakers' feastdays.
Saint Gregory the Great, the Pope who sent Augustine to convert the Anglo-Saxons, is the patron saint of teachers, schoolchildren and choristers. Thus, by an association of ideas, he also became the patron of apprentice lacemakers in the lace schools of East Flanders. His feast is held on 12 March. According to Otto von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, the German enthusiast for all things Belgian, on the evening before 'the lace schools are decorated with garlands of flowers and greenery, and a crown is suspended from the ceiling. Annual prizes are awarded to the most assiduous workers and best behaved girls.'[1]
However, in the far south of the province, in the towns of Ninove and Geraardsbergen, the lacemakers celebrated 'Sint Gregoreken' not on 12 March but on 9 May. Why this shift of dates? 9 May is the feastday of another Saint Gregory, the fourth-century archbishop of Constantinople, but there is no obvious reason why this Anatolian theologian should be preferred to the Pope of Rome. A further clue is that 9 May commemorates the translation of the relics of Saint Nicholas, another Anatolian bishop, but more importantly an occasion honoured by the lacemakers of Lille in the great 'Feast of the Bobbin' (fête du broquelet). However, the more simple explanation offered by a Ninove lace merchant to the puzzled folklorist Herman Baccaert was that the weather was usually too bad on 12 March, and if events were postponed then they ran into Easter celebrations. Hence the new date was instated.[2]
Augusta De Clercq (1887-1944), daughter of a lacemaker and folklorist of Geraardsbergen. From the local history journal Gerardimontium.
In the 1930s the librarian Augusta de Clercq (1887-1944) wrote three overlapping accounts of how the lacemakers of Geraardsbergen celebrated Saint Gregory's sixty or more years before.[3] There were still a few dozen lacemakers in the town during the interwar years but nowhere near the two thousand (roughly half the female population) at work during the mid-nineteenth-century heyday of the industry. Geraardsbergen specialized in black Chantilly lace which was much in demand when crinolines were in fashion, but the arrival of first a match factory and then cigarette factories created a better-payed alternative for female labour, just as the market for black lace crumpled with the fall of the Second Empire. De Clercq's most important informant for this history was her mother, Rachel Anna Maquestiau (1850-1945), a lacemaker turned innkeeper: both occupations were relevant for the information she provided.[4]
Chantilly lace from Geraardsbergen, picured in Charlotte Kellogg's 'Bobbins of Belgium', 1919.
Postcard of lacemakers on the Steenstraat in Geraardsbergen
It was the lace schools, attended by girls from aged five and six to eighteen, rather than lacemakers in general, who celebrated Saint Gregory's. There were many such establishments in nineteenth-century Geraardsbergen: two were run by nuns, the Augustinian Black Sisters and the Benedictines of the Priory of Hunnegem, but the majority were private. In both types the day started at six (or seven in winter) and continued until seven in the evening, and in both songs were used to regulate work and enliven the passing hours, but the religious schools also included an hour's lesson per day in reading, writing and arithmetic. They also kept back more of the money earned by the apprentices, one reason for the continuing popularity of the private schools. Most of that money went straight into the family budget, but the girls were allowed to keep a few centimes for themselves which they saved up for Saint Gregory's.
Saint Bartholemew's, Geraardsbergen, where lacemakers celebrated mass on St Gregory's Day. Photo by Tim Bekaert, on Wikipedia Commons.
Preparations for the feast started the day before when the lacemakers covered their pillows with paper, washed and cleaned the entire school, bedecked the workroom with paper streamers and garlands. They had the afternoon off to prepare their own clothes, but on the way home they might take an offering of pins to the statue of the Virgin Mary in the chapel of the Beguinage, to pray that the weather be good. On the day itself the girls first went to school, all dressed in their Sunday best, and from there the mistress led them to the town's main church of Saint Bartholemew for mass:
En als 't dan Sint Gregoreken was
Met blijdschap in ons herte,
Dan gingen wij naar de schole
En van daar naar de kerke,
En wij gingen paar aan paar
Met eene kaarse ten offeren dààr. And as it's Saint Gregory's
With happiness in our hearts,
We went to school
And from there to church,
And we went two by two
With a candle to offer there.
A very similar song was sung in West Flanders during lacemakers' celebrations of Saint Anne's Day.[5] Clearly the repertoire of festival songs was adapted according to local traditions.
The Chapel of Our Lady of Oudenberg. This building replaced the chapel visited by lacemakers in the nineteenth century. Picture by Jean-Pol Grandmont, available on Wikipedia Commons.
After the convent school girls had offered their candles they returned to their schoolrooms for a sedate party. The others in groups climbed the hill that dominated the town to visit the chapel of Our Lady of Oudenberg (not the building now familiar to fans of cycle racing but an earlier seventeenth century construction). Lacemakers had donated a mantel to the chapel's statue of Mary in 1866, during a cholera epidemic. After prayers each group would go out into the park surrounding the chapel to dance round dances and sing:
Sint Gregoreken van plezance
Serni bleu wat zullen wij dansen;
Wij en vieren maar éénen dag
Vivan Sint Gregorekensdag! Saint Gregory of pleasure
Good heavens won't we dance;
We only have one day to enjoy
Long live Saint Gregory!
The girls then went slightly down the hill to the Hemelrijk tavern (which still exists), where with fifty centimes donated by their lace mistress, they bought themselves each two 'mattetaarten' (milk curd cakes) or apple tarts called 'schietspoelen' and two glasses of beer. And while they ate and drank they sang:
De negende van Mei
Dan zullen wij mogen drinken
Dan mogen wij mogen schinken
Goed bier, goed bier
Wij zijn de jagers, wij zijn de jagers,
Goed bier, goed bier,
Wij zijn de jagers van het plezier. The ninth of May
Then we'll be allowed to drink
The ninth of May
Then may we, may we serve
Good beer, good beer
We are the hunters, we are the hunters
Good beer, good beer,
We are the hunters of pleasure.
Mattentaarten, still a local speciality.
In het Hemelrijk, daar is het zóó goed,
De bazinne draagt er een pluim op haren hoed
En de baas tapt zóó een Leuvensch bier,
En daarmêe roept hij al zijn kalanten alhier.
Hoerah! gedronken; Hoerah! geklonken,
Liever dan te komen in de slavernij.
Wie kent er ons, wie kent er ons?
Die ons niet en ziet, en kent ons niet. At the Hemelrijk, it's so good there,
The landlady wears a feather in her hat
And the landlord taps Louvain beer,
With which he summons all his customers here.
Hurrah! Drunk; Hurrah! Toasted,
Better than to fall into slavery.
Who knows us, who knows us?
Who doesn't see us, doesn't know us.
In the evening bands of lacemakers came down the hill arm-in-arm, and treated themselves to nuts or caramels from streetstalls. The large inns such as the Plezanten Hof and the Glazen Wieg, which was run by De Clercq's parents, arranged for bands to play in their dance halls, where the lacemakers continued to drink, dance and sing:
Wilde van de mode zijn
Krinoline, krinoline,
Krinoline dat is fijn.' Crazy about fashion
Crinoline, crinoline
Crazy about fashion
Crinoline that is so fine.
This song seems to have started life as a satire on the new look before ending its career as a playground skipping rhyme, but in this intervening period it seems appropriate that lacemakers celebrated the fashion that kept them employed.[6]
Another favourite went as follows:
Streep, streep, streep, streep!
Al de meiskens van de Reep
Die dansen geren streep. Stripe, stripe, stripe, stripe!
All the girls from the Reep [a working-class district of Geraardsbergen] They love to dance the line dance.
This is a local adaption of a contredanse more generally known as the 'L'Ostendaise', in which the girls usually formed 'a line' [riep] rather than came from 'The Reep'.[7]
De hemel is den onzen,
Vivan het goed bier!
En als de hemel en onzen is,
Dan hebben wij plezier. Heaven is ours,
Long live good beer!
And as heaven is ours,
Then we have some fun!
This round dance, adapted from a religious song, was a favourite in other lacemaking districts, including Bruges and Bailleul.[8]
Finally the lace mistresses would give the signal for the party to disperse, and the lacemakers went off into the night, still singing:
Sint Gregoreken is vertrokken
Op zijn kousen en op zijn zokken;
Wij en vieren maar eenen dag
Vivan Sint Gregorekensdag. Saint Gregory is gone
With his stockings and his socks;
We only celebrate one day
Long live Saint Gregory's Day.
The excitement of Saint Gregory's Day was in inverse proportion to the monotony of the lace apprentices' working lives. None the less, they wanted to be seen and heard as a collective — 'Who doesn't see us doesn't know us'. For one day, and night, these young women took over the streets and public places of the town, and celebrated their own status as young and unmarried, but also as lacemakers. Lacemakers in Geraardsbergen, like those in other centres, had a strong collective work culture which is one reason why, despite the competition and despite poor wages, the profession still survived into the interwar period.
[1] Otto von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, Calendrier belge. Fêtes religieuses et civiles (Brussels: Ferdinand Claassen, 1861), vol 1, p. 166.
[2] Herman Baccaert, 'Bijdrage tot de Folklore van het kantwerk', Volkskunde: Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche Folklore 21 (1910): 170.
[3] Augusta de Clercq, Kantwerksters en Kantnijverheid te Geeraardsbergen. Folklore en Geschiedenis (Geeraardsbergen: Victor van Niewenhove, 1931); 'Sint Gregoreken, of het feest der kantwerksters, te Geeraardsbergen, in vroegere jaren', Oostvlaamsche Zanten 11:4 (1936): 61-7; 'Het Sint Gregorekensfeest der Geeraardsbergsche Kantwerksters', Annuaire de la Commission de la vieille chanson populaire 1 (1939): 137-50.
[4] Dirck Surdiacourt, '"Hoe wonder is soms toch een menschenhart!" Fragmenten uit het leven van Augusta De Clercq', Gerardimontium 254 (2014): 19-27, and 255 (2014): 34-38.
[5] Edmond de Coussemaker, Chants populaires des flamands de France (Ghent: F. and E. Gyselynck, 1856), pp. 310-12.
[6] Laura Hiel, Kinderspelen en liedjes uit het land van Dendermonde (Ghent: Vyncke, 1931), p. 36.
[7] Laura Hiel, Kinderspelen en liedjes uit het land van Dendermonde (Ghent: Vyncke, 1931), p. 85. The music for this dance can be heard here: www.liederenbank.nl/sound.php?recordid=76232&lan=nl
[8] Adolphe Lootens and J.M.E. Feys, Chants populaires flamands (Bruges: Desclee, De Brouwer, 1879), pp. 246-7.
Mary was a lacemaker! A post for the Feast of the Annunciation
On 25th March 2020
In Lacemakers and Religion, Lacemakers in Music, Lacemakers' folklore, Lacemakers' songs
Guido Reni, The Education of the Virgin, c.1642, now in the Hermitage. From Wikipedia Commons.
The 25 of March is the Feast of the Annunciation and we couldn't let that pass without mentioning the Catalan song l'anunciació. According to the leading Catalan folklorist Joan Amades, this was one of the most popular songs in Catalonia, and it was certainly sung in the lace schools in the region. Amades heard a version from his own mother, Teresa Gelats. Here is another, sung by Mundeta Botines, then 25, to the folksong collectors Josep Barberà and Pere Bohigas in Sant Marti Sesgayoles. around 1922.
La Mare de Déu, — quan era xiqueta,
anava a costura – a apendre de lletra,
amb son coixinet – i la cistelleta;
portava pa i nous – i alguna panseta.
En feia fusets – i teixia beta.
Ella n'ensenyava – amb dues santetes;
amb Santa Susagna – i Santa Pauleta.
Estava retirada – en una cambreta;
l'Angel n'hi va entrar – per la finestreta;
— Déu vos guard, Maria – de gracia sou plena;
parireu un fill – serà fill de verge,
se dirà Jesùs, — Rei de cel i terra.
While not claiming any competence in Catalan we offer the following rough translation.
The Mother of God, — when she was a young girl
Went to the sewing school — to learn her letters,
With her cushion — and a little basket;
She carried bread and nuts — and a few raisins.
She made some thread — and wove lace.
She taught it — to two little saints;
To Saint Susanna — and Saint Pauleta.
Having withdrawn — into a little room;
The angel flew in — through a little window;
"God bless you Mary — full of grace;
You will have a son — he will be the son of a virgin,
He will be called Jesus, — King of heaven and earth."
This combines Saint Luke's story of the Annunciation with elements from the apocryphal writings on the childhood of Mary, according to which she was dedicated to the Temple of Jerusalem when very young, and with her companions made ceremonial cloth for the Temple veil. These apocryphal legends were popular among the female teaching orders who often ran the lace schools in Catalonia and elsewhere. In the song Mary appears like any other young Catalan girl, carrying her lace cushion to the nuns' school, the costura, to work alongside her young companions, as she appears in the statue below.
A statue of 'The Mother of God when she was a girl', with her lace cushion, from the school run by the Dominican Sisters of the Annunciation in Manresa, near Barcelona.
La Mare de Déu has become an iconic Catalan song, performed by all the great Catalan singers such as Montserrat Figueras, as you can hear here. Beautiful though this is, we're going to recommend this version sung by Marina Rossell, because, as you'll hear, she is accompanied by the rattle of lacemakers' bobbins.
On the 'Street of Lacemakers', Fontenay-le-Marmion, 1876
On 18th January 2020
In Lacemakers in the Past, Lacemakers' folklore, Lacemakers' songs, Uncategorized
Lacemakers working on the street in Fontenay-le-Marmion, from a postcard c. 1900
After Argentan we stay in Normandy but move north to the 'plaine de Caen', and specifically the village of Fontenay-le-Marmion, a few miles from the city. In the nineteenth century bobbin lace was the most significant industry in this region. At its height it employed something in the region of 45,000 women, concentrated in the arrondissements of Caen and Bayeux. 'In the villages, in the towns, nay, even in the cities, you every day see people sitting before their doors working, especially the lace-makers… so inveterate their passion for shewing themselves' wrote a British visitor in 1831.[1] Fontenay too could boast its 'rue des dentellières', where lacemakers would gather to work together in the sun (in the case of the Fontenay it was officially the 'rue d'Eglise', now renamed 'rue de la République').[2] The most famous product of lacemakers from this region of Normandy was 'blonde de Caen', a lace similar to Chantilly made from silk and usually destined for export to Spain or Latin America.[3] For a variety of reasons the trade went into rapid decline from the 1870s onwards, and by the early twentieth century, despite some public investment in training, there were no more than two thousand lacemakers left.[4] One of the few villages to escape this collapse was Fontenay, as will be explained below.
A 'Blonde de Caen'. 'Blondes' could be made of white, black or natural silk.
Fontenay-le-Marmion was also the birthplace of Emile Legrand (1841-1903), probably the most important French scholar of Romeic – the language of post-classical Greece. Son of a village joiner, Legrand's path to the professorship of Modern Greek at the Paris School of Oriental Languages was long and tortuous. His parents had originally destined him for the priesthood, and he attended the seminaries of Bayeux and Lisieux. However, while studying at the Lycée de Caen he became obsessed with the modern Greek language, and in 1867 moved to Paris to pursue his studies. The long Greek campaign for independence from Ottoman rule continued to fire the French cultural imagination in this period; Claude Fauriel's Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne (1824) had done much not only to generate sympathy for the Greek rebels' cause but to stimulate the collection of folk song within France. The Cretan Revolt of 1866 may have made a similar impression on Legrand. Yet as a scholar he seems to have been remarkably retiring; according to his pupil, Hubert Pernot, Legrand only visited the theatre once during the more than thirty-five years he lived in Paris. Instead, he dedicated his time to editing volume after volume — nearly a hundred of them — of medieval, early modern and folkloric Greek texts.[5] It was Legrand who, together with Constantin Sathas (1842-1914), published a rediscovered manuscript of the early medieval epic of Digenes Akritas, a sort of Byzantine El Cid, and demonstrated its relationship to much later ballads set on the frontier between the Greeks and their Muslim neighbours. This was to prove one of the most important developments in post-classical Greek letters.[6]
The tomb of Emile Legrand, Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris
Legrand returned every summer to his family home in Fontenay, where he continued to work on his transcriptions. In the early 1870s, his focus was on folksong. In 1874 he edited a Recueil de chansons populaires grecques, followed in 1875 by his edition of the Akritas manuscript, and then a further collection of Chansons populaires grecques in 1876, which drew on the recordings he had made during a five-month long journey through Greek-speaking Italy and then Greece itself — his first, and perhaps only visit to the source of his fascination. Exotic though this material was, the experience of recording singers viva voce led him to think about songs closer to home — those sung by his mother and her neighbours. In October 1876 he noted down 49 song texts, without music, which he later sent to the philologist Gaston Paris (1839-1903), who would publish them in the journal Romania in 1881.[7]
Legrand's mother Célina (born in Fontenay in 1818) was the most important source for these songs, providing more than half of them. The other singers were Adelaïde Le Paulmier (born in Fontenay in 1807) with nine songs, Delphine Lacroix with five (probably born in Fontenay in 1834), and then Clélie Péronne (born in Fontenay in 1838), Marie Roger, Blanche Lecarpentier and Marie Dausmesnil each with one, as well as a solitary male informant, Pierre Guillot. Marie Dausmesnil was the village baker's teenage daughter but all the other women, where they can be identified with certainty, were lacemakers, as was practically the entire female population of the village. Neither Legrand nor Paris provide any information about the circumstances in which these songs were performed and transmitted, but it seems likely that we are, through Legrand, eavesdropping on the kinds of songs lacemakers sang while working together in groups, perhaps on the 'rue des dentellières' in the summer, or in the barns where they gathered to work on winter nights to benefit from the heat generated by the cattle.[8]
Lacemakers on the streets of a village in the vicinity of Caen. Detail from postcard c. 1900
As we've seen in previous posts, singing was an element in the work culture of lacemakers in various regions. A handful of nineteenth-century writers about Normandy mention the practice, as do some Norman lacemakers themselves in their letters.[9] However, whereas in the Velay and in Flanders folksong enthusiasts were making recordings of lacemakers' songs, there was no significant attempt to do the same in Normandy. Legrand's is almost the only such collection. Its contents differ markedly from the repertoire recorded later and in other parts of Normandy, with a substantial showing of the prized 'great ballads'; so surprising is the presence of these songs in nineteenth-century Normandy that some scholars have doubted the authenticity of Legrand's texts. In 1920 Joseph Lechevrel sought out one of the singers named by Legrand (unfortunately he does not say which one), to see if he could obtain any more songs from her, but her only answer to his questions was 'I don't remember any more'.[10] However, this answer was not quite the final word as we will see; the collective training and working practices of lacemakers goes a long way to explain the durability of a particular repertoire.
A couple of these song texts are unknown from any other source, and a couple of others are very rare, but the bulk of Legrand's collection was made up of songs that could have been heard in other parts of France, indeed in some cases far beyond, because versions of the same songs circulated in Catalonia, northern Italy and francophone Canada. This was not a repertoire restricted to lacemakers: none of the songs make direct mention of the trade. Nor is there any evidence that Normandy lacemakers used 'tells' to count pins as did their counterparts in Flanders and the English Midlands. In some ways these texts are at odds with what we know of lacemakers' musical tastes, whether in Normandy or in other regions. In 1839 the journalist Emile Souvestre described the lacemakers of nearby Aunay as singing 'cantiques', that is hymns, on their doorsteps, but there is not a single religious song among those recorded by Legrand.[11] Conversely there were several in which ecclesiastics engage in sexual shenanigans – these were mostly sung by Legrand's mother, who also voiced a forthright rejection of the convent in favour of the boy she loved. 'To love is not a crime,/ God does not forbid it' she claimed in another song, and while it would be a mistake to assert that a singer's words represent their own views, Célina certainly had a pronounced taste for such playful and slightly bawdy material.
Nonetheless, there are some similarities to the kind of songs we know lacemakers sang in other regions. The most striking group of songs are those performed by Adelaïde Le Paulmier, Legrand's oldest informant. By the 1870s she was a widow living with two of her sisters, all lacemakers. Her fancy was for long ballads, some full of the 'lurid, gruesome, clammy or grizzly terrors' that Thomas Wright observed was the preferred singing matter of Buckinghamshire lacemakers. Such songs feel old, even if evidence for medieval origins is often quite tenuous. In the ballad of 'Jean Renaud' (Coirault 5311), the eponymous huntsman is given a mortal bite by a wolf; news of his death and burial are kept from his wife in childbirth, but when she finally learns his fate she joins him in his grave. In 'Marianson' (Coirault 9904), a ballad of thirty verses, the eponymous heroine is tricked into lending three gold rings that her husband Renaud (the generic name for male protagonists in French narrative songs) had gifted her when he went to the wars, which are then counterfeited. On his return the unnamed villain shows the counterfeit rings to the knight to prove his claim that Marianson has been unfaithful and that the boy she has just borne is not his. Without more ado Renaud takes the baby and dashes its brains out on the cobbles; he then ties Marianson to his horse's tale and drags her from Paris to Saint-Denis, a distance of six miles, and between them 'there wasn't a hedge or bush that was not marked by the blood of Marianson'. Her mother runs after, begging Renaud to return her daughter's bloody body. On her deathbed Marianson produces the real three rings, and thus proves her fidelity. Renaud, overcome with remorse, burns his own face off, and both die within two hours of each other.
Popular woodcut image by the firm of Pellerin of Epinal, c. 1830, of the song of 'Adelaide and Ferdinand'. The story is essentially the same as that of the ballad 'Marianson'. From the collection of the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilisations in Marseille.
An even more horrifying song concerns Marguerite who lives with her mother at the 'castle of martyrs'. By night Marguerite is a woman, but by day she is a white hind hunted through the forests by her own brother Julien and his men; no explanation is proffered for this metamorphosis. She is finally caught, killed and served as the evening meal: Julien asks where is his sister, and she replies 'Sit down, gentlemen, I was the first at the table;/ My head is on the serving dish and my organs are cooking,/ and my poor entrails are being torn to pieces by your great dogs.'
Scene from the story of Nastagio degli Onesti (Boccaccio), by Sandro Botticelli, 1483. Now in the Prado, Madrid
Célina Legrand knew and sung some similar ballads, but her preferred material was lighter: dance songs, songs of love – particularly illicit love – pastorals in which girls sometimes trick the boys and the boys sometimes trick the girls. Her songs overflow with flowers and fruits to be planted, gathered or plucked. Some are so pared down that their meaning is unclear; others combine lines from a number of different songs which disorientates the reader. Such confusion is often assumed to be the result of faulty memory: the singer – entirely reliant on oral transmission – makes mistakes, skips lines and becomes lost in her own narrative. All of which is possible, but Gerald Porter, in his study of English lacemakers' tells, suggests another possibility. Lacemakers' songs are condensed and elliptical because they were performed so often by many members of the same group. 'At each performance, the sung part stands metonymically for the whole', the listeners able to fill in the gaps because they too were participants in this communal work culture. For outsiders the songs were meaningless but that was part of the point: comprehension was restricted to insiders, the group of women who shared their working lives on the 'street of lacemakers'.[12]
Singing was a way of passing the time, of enjoying oneself with one's friends and neighbours, and finding pleasure in a repetitive task. In their songs lacemakers travelled to Paris and Nantes, to England and Spain, visited palaces, encountered princes and magicians. Given that several of their narratives turned on the suffering of women one couldn't call these songs 'escapist', but they introduced fantasy and drama into their toilsome lives. Yet while the settings may have been exotic, the issues addressed in these songs were not. A king banishes his daughter's suitor, another king marries his daughter against her will, a Duke departs for war leaving a pregnant, unmarried princess to face the consequences…; strip away the titles and these would be familiar situations in any nineteenth-century village. In almost every song some domestic conflict is evoked that pitted daughters against fathers – and occasionally mothers – or wife against husband. Lovers are sought, jilted and retrieved. Many songs turn on the vulnerability of working women, for example as shepherdesses alone in the fields or market-women trying to make a sale: they are the prey of men, particularly men of superior rank. Sometimes they find a ruse or clever words through which to escape the threat, sometimes not. One could hardly describe these texts as a manual for inter-personal relationships, but they did allow singers and their audiences, to think through some of the difficulties that faced people like them – those who because of their sex or their social position were relatively powerless. In their imagination they could consider the consequences of their choices.
Unlike other villages in the region where lacemaking had more-or-less died out by the turn of the century, one could still find groups of lacemakers gathered on the streets of Fontenay even after the Second World War. At some point, and no one seems to know exactly when, they had developed a specialism: lace made from human hair which was used as the basis for wigs worn in Paris theatres. There were two local producers employing twenty or so women in the 1950s.[13] The survival of this domestic craft industry — and the work culture that surrounded it — enabled Marthe Moricet, curator of the Museum of Normandy, to collect songs in the 1950s that Legrand had noted eighty years before.[14] Contrary to Lechevrel's impression in 1920, the tradition had not been forgotten. This is an intriguing example of the resilience of a work culture, even when there was no formal institution to uphold it.
[1] J. Augustus St John, Journal of a Residence in Normandy (Edinburgh, 1831), p. 11.
[2] http://www.plainedevie.fr/spip.php?article34
[3] Claudette Bouvot and Michel Bouvot, Dentelles normandes: La Blonde de Caen (Condé-sur-Noireau, 2012).
[4] For the history of lacemaking in Calvados see: Georges Noé, L'industrie de la dentelle à la main dans le Calvados (Caen, 1910); Gabriel Désert, Une Société rurale au XIXe siècle: Les paysans du Calvados, 1815-1895 3 vols (Lille, 1975).
[5] Almost all the biographical information about Legrand comes from a sketch provided by Hubert Pernot in the introduction to Emile Legrand, Bibliographie hellénique ou description raisonnée des ouvrages publiés par des Grecs aux XV et XVIe siècles, vol. 4 (Paris, 1906).
[6] Roderick Beaton, R. and David Ricks, Digenes Akrites: New Approaches to Byzantine Heroic Poetry (Brookfield, 1993).
[7] Emile Legrand, 'Chansons populaires recueillies en octobre 1876 à Fontenay-le-Marmion, arrondissement de Caen (Calvados)', Romania 10 (1881): 365-396. A handful of texts collected by Legrand from his mother appeared in other dialect journals, for instance in Revue des patois 1 (1887): 120-125.
[9] Mireille Bossis (ed.), Ursin et Ernestine. Amours paysannes en Normandie (1863-1866) (Condé-sur-Noireau, 2006), p. 103. Ernestine Lebatard was a lacemaker from Plumetot, north of Caen; her letters were written to her fiancé Ursin Thomas, then performing his military service.
[10] Joseph Lechevrel, 'Le Folklore normand', Bulletin de la société des Antiquaires de Normandie 36 (1924/1925) : 359-382.
[11] Emil Souvestre, 'Pierre Rivière', Le Journaliste 1 (1839) : p. 173.
[12] Gerald Porter, '"Work the Old Lady Out of the Ditch": Singing at Work by English Lacemakers', Journal of Folklore Research 31:1-3 (1994): 35-55; Mary-Ann Constantine and Gerald Porter, Fragment and Meaning in Traditional Song: From the Blues to the Baltic (Oxford, 2003), pp. 63-74.
[13] André Garnier, 'Dans un village du Calvados, à Fontenay-le-Marmion, vingt paysannes tissent les perruques de la Comédie Française', Paris-Normandie, 6 March 1953
[14] Michel Boüard, 'Marthe Moricet' (obituary), Annales de Normandie 10 (1960): 86-87. Moricet died before she was able to publish any of these songs, and to date we have not been able to track down her archives.
Legends of Lacemaking: Argentan Point Lace
On 16th December 2019
In Lacemakers and Religion, Lacemakers in Drama, Lacemakers in Music, Lacemakers in the Past, Lacemakers' folklore
Gaston La Touche, 'The Legend of Argentan Point Lace', 1884. Musée des Beaux-arts et de la Dentelle, Alençon
The Virgin Mary finishes the task of a young lacemaker, too exhausted to continue the work herself. This painting, first exhibited in 1884, now adorns the walls of the Museum of Fine Art and Lace in Alençon in the Orne Department of Normandy. The painter, Gaston La Touche (1854-1913), was of Norman descent and retained links to the Orne region throughout his life. Although better known as a painter of society pleasures (he's the man buying a drink in Edouard Manet's 'A Bar at the Folies Bergères'), La Touche sometimes liked to mix fantasy with the social realist eye for detail that he had employed as an illustrator of Émile Zola's L'Assommoir.[1]
The painting is called 'The Legend of Argentan Point Lace' ('La légende du point d'Argentan'). The story goes that a young lacemaker living on the rue de la Vicomte, Argentan, was the sole provider for her two aged grandparents. But when her grandfather fell ill, her efforts were not enough. Working late into the night, she fell asleep even as she implored the aid of the Virgin Mary. The Virgin descended from heaven and continued her work while the lacemaker slept. She returned night after night, until the lacemaker had the means to support her grandparents; when the latter died, she entered the Convent of Saint Claire. The best examples of Argentan lace are supposed to date from this period. In another version of the same story, the Virgin appeared as if in a dream to the poor lacemaker, who closely observed her work and so, the following day, was able to recreate this novel lace: and thus Argentan point lace was born.
Our hunch is that this legend was, like Caroline Popp's legend of Bruges lace, an entirely literary creation. At least there is no evidence that the story was in circulation before it first appeared in print a decade before La Touche's painting as a short story in the magazine La fantaisie Parisienne.[2] The author was the marquis Eugène de Lonlay (1815-1886), a dandy poet and songwriter originally from Argentan. He had already brought out a small volume of legends about his home-town in 1873. He further developed 'The Legend of Argentan Point Lace' in a little pamphlet in 1874, asserting the divine origin of this lace. Although this pamphlet seems like an afterthought, our supposition is that it was part of a more ambitious project to revive lacemaking in this part of Normandy. Despite Lonlay's claims, we doubt he heard this tale first from lacemakers.
The illustration accompanying Lonlay's 'Légende du point d'Argentan' from the journal La fantaisie Parisienne (1874)
Although you wouldn't know it from the illustration to Lonlay's story, Argentan lace is a needle lace, similar to that of nearby Alençon, and like Alençon laces its success owed much to the mercantilist policies of Louis XIV's minister of finances, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1618-1686), who objected to French aristocrats spending their money on foreign luxuries and thus enriching other princes. If equally fine manufactures could be established in France, money would stay at home. Particular suppliers in designated towns were granted royal privileges, including Argentan in 1665. Tastes changed and Argentan lacemakers suffered numerous ups-and-downs: it was, apparently favoured by Madame du Barry, Louis XV's 'maîtresse en titre', but not by Marie-Antoinette, known to prefer less heavily decorated laces. Even so, in the last decade before the French Revolution, more than 1000 women were employed in lacemaking in Argentan and the surrounding countryside.[3]
The Revolution effectively destroyed the trade: needle lace is an even more expensive luxury than bobbin lace, and with aristocrats' emigration, the Terror, war and ruin, there was simply no market for it. Despite attempts to revive it under Napoleon I, all manufacture had effectively ceased by the first decade of the nineteenth century. And with its demise grew the legend of a lost stitch, the 'bride picotée'. Over time the two legends — of divine intervention and the lost stitch — would fuse.
In January 1874 the sub-prefect of the arrondissement, Alphonse Béchard, in conjunction with the mayor of Argentan, Emmanuel Lebouc, launched a campaign to revive needle-lace in the town, primarily as an economic venture to support poor women and girls. Béchard approached Ernest Lefébure whose family ran a lace business in Bayeux which had a reputation for revitalising old lace techniques. Lefébure explained that, to discover the secret of making Argentan lace, he needed not only examples of old lace but also the patterns on which lacemakers worked. As it happened, a few years before, the nuns of the Hospice de Saint-Thomas had discovered a load of old laces and patterns, at least one with some threads still attached, in an attic. Lefébure passed these on to one of his most skilful employees, Désirée Hamel. Once she had worked out the technique, Hamel was brought to Argentan to set up a lace workshop in the Benedictine convent. The nuns also ran an orphanage and Hamel taught Argentan point both to the nuns and to the orphan girls.[4] By 1878, when Hamel won a silver medal at the Paris World Fair, there were about forty lacemakers employed in the manufacture of Argentan lace, and the business survived, thanks to the active support of the chaplain of the order, abbé Leboulanger, until the First World War. The Benedictine nuns of Notre Dame Abbey still maintain the tradition.[5] Although we have no definite proof of this, we suspect Lonlay's story was part of a deliberate campaign to generate interest in this venture.
As a response to female unemployment the project can only be viewed as a partial success; even before 1914 young women had turned their back on lacemaking as too poorly remunerated. But the stories concerning Argentan lace took on a life of their own and were repeated in many different forms. In 1883 a British writer with a penchant for stories about artistic French women, Margaret Roberts (1833-1919), brought out a novel Bride Picotée, named for the famous lost stitch. Set in Burgundy during the French Second Empire (1852-1870), the story turns on the ardent desire of a young, disabled, orphan lacemaker Else to acquire the knowledge of this stitch from an elderly neighbour, La Brisarde, the last practitioner of Argentan point, who is equally determined never to give up her family's birthright: 'when engaged with those points of her craft which were her special secret she locked the door, and even stopped up the keyhole with jealous care.'[6] She had already resisted the blandishments of one would-be aristocratic patron who had hoped to revive the manufacture. We may return in another post to this lace-obsessed novel which, despite many implausibilities, does at least explain how a particular technique could become a family secret. Because needle lace is so time consuming, individual makers only worked on their own particular part of the pattern, as a 'réseleuse' or 'remplisseuse' or other specialist. There were few 'assembleuses' who could put the whole together.
The aged lacemaker La Brisarde refuses to teach Argentan point to the orphan Lise, an illustration from Margaret Roberts' novel Bride Picotée (1883)
In 1904 the legend of the Virgin's intervention was revived in musical form. Léon Boschet's two act play combined the story with another Argentan legend, about a Parisian merchant who had come to the town to buy laces, and made a vow to build a clock-tower for the church of Saint-Germain (at the end of the rue de la Vicomte) if he should escape brigands on his return journey to Paris.[7] Boschet was from the region, and this was not his only musical celebration of the lacemakers of Normandy.[8]
Boschet's operetta does not appear to have taken off, but perhaps it inspired an altogether more successful work, the one act operetta 'La légende du point d'Argentan', which was first performed in December 1906 at the Opéra-Comique in Paris. The composer was Félix Fourdrain (1880-1923) and the librettists Arthur Bernède and Henri Cain. Although in a romantic idiom that was passing out of fashion, it remained part of the repertoire of the Opéra-Comique for many years afterwards, as well as being regularly performed around the country.[9] Oddly, the piece is set not in Argentan but in a hovel near Granville on the Normandy coast where a desperate young lacemaker, Rose-Marie, is nursing a sick, indeed dying child through a storm. Her sailor husband, luckless in his search for work and so incapable of buying the necessary medicine or even food, threatens murder-suicide as the only resolution to their plight. Rose-Marie, however, puts her trust in the Virgin and her hope that she can rediscover the 'magic stitch', the secret of Argentan point lace. The cardinal de Rohan has promised 1000 gold écus to the person who can make the lace he wants to present to the queen (there is a vague echo here of the 'Diamond Necklace Affair'). Although her eyesight is failing, Rose-Marie hopes to win the prize, and vows to cover the steps to the Virgin's altar with her bobbins if she succeeds (Fourdrain, like Lonlay, was under the impression that Argentan point is a bobbin lace). An old beggar woman comes to her door and Rose-Marie, despite her poverty, offers her food and shelter from the storm. The old woman tells her the miraculous origin of Argentan lace: three centuries before spiders' threads had woven themselves into a diadem that adorned a statue of Mary. But Rose-Marie is exhausted and falls to sleep over her pillow. Then the stranger reveals herself as the Virgin: while the lacemaker sleeps, angels come and take threads from Mary's headdress to weave into celestial lace, singing an 'Ave Maria' while they work.
Marcel Mültzer's costume design for Rose-Marie in Fourdrain's 'La légende du point d'Argentan', available on the BNF Gallica website
Regular visitors to this site will recognize many of the motifs in this representation of a lacemaker. Lacemakers' special relationship with the Virgin has already been explored in the poetry of Guido Gezelle and the legend of Serena of Bruges. Rose-Marie sings a lullaby to her sick child not unlike Desrousseaux's 'le p'tit quinquin'. That lacemakers' suffering and sacrifice can redeem men is a motif in much nineteenth century literature, such as Dickens' 'Mugby Junction'.
Some of the same themes were picked up in two French silent films which seem to have some connection to Fourdrain's operetta, though both are set in the Middle Ages rather than the pre-revolutionary period. In the film 'La légende du point d'Argentan' (Radio, 1907), a poor girl must complete her lace for the grand lady Anne d'Argentan before the morning or she will not have the money to find food for her grandmother. When she is too exhausted to continue, a statue of the Virgin comes to life to finish the work for her.[10] 'Le rêve de la dentellière' (Lux, 1910) offers a very similar narrative in which a lacemaker falls asleep and is replaced at her pillow by the Virgin, who then carries the product to the castle herself, and returns with the money while the girl is still sleeping.[11] (We have not been able to view either of them in their entirety: we're relying on summaries, but some scenes from the latter film can be found here.)
A still from 'Le rêve de la dentellière' (Lux, 1910), Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée, catalogue des Films restaurés et numérisés
There are many lace legends, but to date the legend of Argentan point lace is the only one we've discovered that inspired painters, musicians and film-makers, alongside writers.
[1] Selina Baring Maclennan, Gaston La Touche: A Painter of Belle Epoque Dreams (Woodbridge, 2009).
[2] Marquis Eugène de Lonlay, 'Légende du point d'Argentan', La fantaisie parisienne 6:16 (September 1874): 7-8.
[3] Jean Moulinet, La Dentelle à l'aiguille en Basse Normandie (Argentan, 1912), p. 97.
[4] Ernest Lefébure, 'Point d'Argentan. Se fait-il par les anciens procédés? Est-il aussi beau que celui d'autrefois? A-t-il conservé une grande valeur?', Annuaire normand 46 (1880): 145-154. To understand precisely what it was that Hamel recreated, consult Brigitte Tambrun and Veronique Thomazo, 'La technique du " point d'Argentan " dévoilée' (2019).
[5] Danièle Foury, 'Les bénédictines, garantes de la tradition de la dentelle d'Argentan', Ouest-France (22 July, 2019). See https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7du7v5
[6] Margaret Roberts, Bride Picotée (London, 1883), p. 18.
[7] We have not yet tracked down a copy of this text, we are relying on a short summary in Bulletin de la Société historique et archéologique de l'Orne 23 (April 1904), p. 230. It was performed in April 1904 at the Theatre Athénée-Saint-Germain in Paris.
[8] See his 'Les Dentelles de l'Orne' (Argentan, 1902).
[9] Félix Fourdrain (music), Henri Cain and Arthur Bernède (lyrics), La légende du point d'Argentan (Paris, 1906). Fourdrain also set André Alexandre's poem 'La dentellière de Bayeux' to music in 1914.
[10] Christel Tailllebert, 'Collection Alan Roberts (II): Films primitifs et messages religieux. Regards sur différentes strategies cinématographiques', 1895, revue d'histoire du cinema 19 (1995): 59.
[11] François Amy de la Bretèque, 'Présence de la littérature française du Moyen Âge dans le cinéma français', Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes 2 (1996): 157.
The Revolution that Never Was: Ypres Lacemakers in 1848
In Flemish literature, Lacemakers and politics, Lacemakers in the Past, Lacemakers' folklore, Lacemakers' holidays, Lacemakers' songs
18 August 1848, and all seems quiet on the main square of Ypres. This watercolour of Ypres Town Hall (the Cloth Hall) by Justin Ouvrié (1806-1879) can now be found in Ypres Museum.
In the spring of 1848, as revolution spread from Palermo and Paris across large swathes of the continent, one country remained conspicuously quiet: Belgium. The reasons for this are not immediately clear. Belgium had come into being through revolution only a few years before in 1830. The country clearly possessed a revolutionary history and tradition. It was close to the epicentre of events in France, and Belgian exiles in Paris were busy organizing propaganda and recruiting among the large number of Belgian migrant workers in France to form a Belgian Legion which might carry armed revolution back over the border. The economic conditions in Belgium were, if anything, even worse than in France, and so ostensibly more propitious for civil conflict. This was especially true in the provinces of East and West Flanders. British competition had effectively wiped out the most important in the region, the linen industry, during the 1840s. The potato blight had ruined three harvests in a row, undermining the peasant farmers' and smallholders' ability to feed themselves. Even before 1848 local and national government recognized that the labouring populations of Flanders were suffering a crisis of hunger, poverty and unemployment. As we have seen in previous posts, one of the answers to this crisis was to invest in lace schools. However, the revolution of February 1848 in Paris would deal a blow to this industry too. Flemish lace was made for export, mostly to France. But luxury trades were always the first to suffer during political turmoil. The French fashion houses weren't buying, which meant the Belgian merchants were left with stock on their hands, which meant that they stopped putting out work to their domestic female workforce.[1]
This crisis affected the countryside but also towns like Courtrai, Bruges and Ypres where lace remained the most important employer of female labour. The local authorities were particularly worried because, as much male employment was seasonal, over winter whole families depended on the wages that lacemakers brought in. On 13 March, little more than a fortnight since news of the Paris revolution arrived in the city, the lace merchants of Ypres got together to lobby the government in Brussels on behalf of their industry.[2] They sent a deputation to the Minister of the Interior, telling him that in the borough of Ypres alone there were more than 20,000 lacemakers, that lace was the sole industry of any importance to survive the crisis years of the 1840s, but that now this population too was threatened with misery. They warned of 'grave disorders' if something was not done.[3] And something was done, as the Government provided 60,000 francs of credit to the lace merchants, so that they could keep putting out orders to their workers. Or at least that was the idea, there is some dispute about what actually happened to the money.[4]
'Lacemakers don't protest' wrote one of their foremost Belgian chroniclers, explaining their invisibility in history.[5] And so it proved in 1848, despite the fears of the authorities in Ypres and elsewhere. West Flanders in general remained remarkably calm, despite occasional incursions by radicals and armed groups from France. The border, only fourteen kilometres away from Ypres, was reinforced, adding an extra layer of difficulty for lace exporters (and smugglers).
However, there were some attempts to provoke lacemakers to action. Thursday 26 June 1848 was 'Kleinsacramentsdag', the Thursday following Corpus Christi (a moveable feast). This was the holy day of Ypres lacemakers, and the Wednesday preceding was 'Mooimakersdag', the lacemakers' holiday which in previous years had been celebrated in some style. The lace schools were festooned with garlands of flowers, while troops of lacemakers in fancy dress, and led by their 'queen', were carried off on great waggons to picnics in the surrounding countryside, much like those pictured in Watteau's painting of 'The Feast of the Bobbin' in nearby Lille. In preparation for this holiday, printers would produce new songbooks which were sold in the market-squares and other public places by street-singers.[6] On 25 June 1848 one such broadside song drew the attention of the authorities, and it is reproduced below, followed by a rough translation.
An 1864 etching of the Antwerp streetsinger Belmont by Hendrik Frans Schaefels (1827-1904). Many nineteenth-century streetsingers became quite famous characters but we have found no portraits of Ypres singers from the period.
Stemme van den Boterpot no 1 of den Brabanson
A la vrienden wilt hier aenhooren,
En blyft een weinig staen,
Ik zalt u in korte gaen verklaeren,
Hoe het in dese stad zal vergaen,
Kantwerkster, gy mag het wel weten,
t' Is van onze kante marchands,
Zy hebben lang genoeg ons herte uitgefreten, Bis
Deeze verkens moeten nu van kant. Bis, Bis.
De kleermaekers zynder espres gekomen,
Uyt de groote stad Parys,
Zy hebben het nieuws nu al vernomen,
Zy kreygen daer van den eersten prys,
Al voor de kazakken te keeren,
Van plaidons en kanten marchands,
Zy zullen haest de fransch tael gaen leeren, Bis.
Dees verraeders moeten uyt ons land. Bis, Bis.
Dat zullen deze capoenen gaen vaeren,
De plaidons zyn nu afgeschaft,
Want wy beginnen daer op te dinken,
Dees verraeders hebben te veel gemaekt,
Zy maeken met ons geld veele plaisieren,
Om te marcheren met trommels en muzik,
Wy zullen klouk op hun kazakke vieren, Bis.
Tot een exempel voor ons Belzyk. Bis, Bis.
Wy zullen onze mode doen floreeren,
Door het maeken van een nieuw kazak,
En wy ambagsheden zonder mankeren,
Hebben ook deeze mode aengevat,
Wy zullen drinken en glaezen doen klinken,
Tot floreeren voor weird en weirdin,
En de marchands van kanten te doen springen, Bis
Dat hebben wy al lang in onzen zin. Bis, Bis.
Spellewerkster laet het u niet verdrieten,
Om tegen dees barbaeren op te staen,
Zy zullen ons bloed niet meer doen vergieten,
Wy zullen stryden voor ons vaen,
Al voor het geld dat zy ons hebben genomen,
Van onze kanten en gaeren-bak,
Die schoone francs moeten weder keeren, Bis.
Dat zy van ons hebben afgepakt. Bis, Bis.
Kantwerkster al voor het letste,
En laet deeze zaeke niet meer staen,
Want ik raent u voor het alderbeste,
Eer dat zy bancroute zouden slaen,
En laet ons nu defenderen,
t'Is voor ons eygen vleesch en bloed,
Dan zullen wy ons plaisieren doen ernemen. Bis.
Al met het geld van onze kanten zoet. Bis, Bis.
Eynde.
To the tune of 'The Butterpot' no 1 or The Brabançonne
To friends who want to listen
And stay a while here,
I shall explain to you directly
How things fare in this city.
Lacemaker, you know it already,
It's about our lace merchants
They have been feasting on our hearts long enough,
These pigs need to get out the way.
The tailors [buyers] have come on purpose
From the great city of Paris
They have heard the news,
They expect to get the best price,
Ready to turn the coats
Of prud'hommes and lace merchants
They'll quickly learn French,
These traitors must be expelled.
To send these capons packing
The prud'hommes are now abolished,
Because we're beginning to think
That these traitors have made too much,
They have had too much fun with our money,
Marching around with drums and music,
We should boldly celebrate on their jackets
As an example for our Belgium [?]
We should make our fashion flourish,
By making a new jacket,
And then we'll celebrate without stint,
If we get a hold on this fashion,
We should drink and clink glasses
And so let innkeeper and his wife flourish,
And the lace merchants can go take a leap
We've wanted that for a long time.
Lacemaker, don't let it grieve you
To face up to these barbarians,
We won't let them shed our blood anymore,
We will fight for our standard,
And for the money that they took from us,
For our lace and thread casket,
The beautiful coins must return,
That they snatched from us.
Lacemakers, finally,
Don't let this situation continue,
Because I urge you for your own good,
Before you go bankrupt,
And let us defend ourselves,
It's for our own flesh and blood,
Then we can enjoy ourselves,
With the money from our sweet lace.
We must admit that some elements of this song, which was discovered by the archivist Joseph De Smet, remain opaque to us.[7] We don't really understand the author's interest in 'kazakken' or jackets (perhaps it had some dialect meaning). We don't know the tune 'The Butterpot', though we assume den Brabanson refers to the revolutionary anthem of 1830 which is now the Belgian national anthem.
However, we can explain who were the 'plaidons' or 'prud'hommes' mentioned in the text. The conseil des prud'hommes was an early form of industrial tribunal whose members were elected from both the employers and, in theory, workers. The Ypres tribunal, set up in 1842, consisted of seven members, of which at least two had to be lace-merchants and one a male foreman or senior employee in the industry. In practice almost all the elected members represented the employers, no employee representatives could be found for the simple reason that there were no male employees or tax-paying artisans of the kind designated by the legislation. No female lace merchant (of which there were several) nor any female lacemaker (of which there were thousands) could participate either as electors or as members of the tribunal. Yet almost the entire business of the tribunal was taken up by the lace industry: in 1846, of the sixty-two cases it judged, sixty-one involved lacemakers; in 1847 out of forty-three cases, forty-one involved lacemakers.[8] And the lacemakers of Ypres were not happy with its rulings. As the local papers observed, whatever the merits of such a system in an industrial town with clearly defined employees and employers, it was 'clearly not fit for the lace industry'.[9] If merchants cut lacemakers' remuneration, claiming the work was shoddy or dirty, the lacemakers could only seek justice from the conseil des prud'hommes, where they found the same merchants sitting in judgement.[10] In particular lacemakers complained that lace merchants were attempting to force on them the dreaded 'livret', or workbook which would effectively end their limited ability to negotiate wages by tying them to a single employer.[11] In June the agitation had grown so great that the Mayor of Ypres placed public notices in the newspapers (unusually in Flemish) stating that he had written to parliament and to the ministry of Justice to make them aware of the lacemakers' concerns. In October 1847 a tailor, Pierre Maerten, organized a petition on behalf of the lacemakers against the prud'hommes.[12] Neither action seems to have brought a positive result: of the seven members of the tribunal elected in January 1848, five were lace merchants.[13] This is why the song links lace merchants and prud'hommes together as enemies of lacemakers.
The authorities soon got wind of this would-be rebel anthem. The state prosecutor sent a copy to the Governor of West-Flanders on 1 July. The author was identified and arrested: his name was Auguste Plancque, a former NCO in the Belgian army, but by then a day-labourer. We do not know what punishment Plancque suffered but it was probably not too serious because when he died, in 1885, he was described as a retired postman, the kind of job that was often thought suitable for military veterans.[14] The Ypres register of births, deaths and marriages also provides an explanation for Planque's particular interest in the lace industry: in February 1843 he had married Marie de Graeve, a lacemaker.[15]
It seems Ypres lacemakers did not take up this song on Mooimakersdag in 1848. However, they did have a whole repertoire of other songs to mark that day, and we have included the first verse of one such song below, so that readers can get a feel for lacemakers' celebrations.[16] And you can hear the whole song performed by the Belgian folk group Sidus on Youtube.
Tralala, lafaderalier'! tralalala, lafad'rala!
We've thrown our pillow into the shed,
A streetsinger hawks his wares in Wervik, a town close to Ypres. This illustration by Emile Puttaert (1829-1901) appeared in Eugène Van Bemmel's 'La Belgique illustrée' (1879).
[1] Brison D. Gooch, Belgium and the February Revolution (Amsterdam, 1963); For West Flanders in particular see Joseph De Smet, 'De weerslag van de Franse Omwenteling van 1848 in West Vlaanderen', Handelingen van het Genootschap voor Geschiedenis 89 (1952): 24-38.
[2] Le Propagateur, 15 March 1848, p. 1.
[4] Le Propagateur, 4 August 1849, p. 1.
[5] Guillaume De Greef, L'ouvrière dentellière en Belgique (Brussels, 1886), p. 5.
[6] Otto von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, Traditions et légendes de la Belgique, vol. I (Brussels, 1870), p. 298.
[7] Joseph De Smet, 'De crisis in de westvlaamse kantnijverheid in 1848', Biekorf 53 (1952): 174-8.
[8] Le Propagateur 24 February 1847, p. 1; Le Progrès, 3 February 1848, p. 1.
[9] Le Propagateur, 10 February 1847, p. 2.
[10] Le Propagateur, 10 March 1847, p. 2.
[11] Le Propagateur, 28 April, 1847, p. 1.
[12] Le Progrès, 23 December 1847, p. 2.
[13] Le Progrès, 6 February 1848, p. 4.
[14] Le Progrès, 11 January 1885, p. 2.
[15] Le Progrès, 26 February 1843, p. 4.
[16] Albert Blyau and Marcellus Tasseel, Iepersch oud liedboek. Teksten en melodieen uit de volksmond opgetekend (Brussels, 1962), pp. 237-318, here 238-9.
Legends of Lacemaking: Serena of Bruges and Caroline Popp
On 2nd January 2019
In Flemish literature, Lacemakers in Fiction, Lacemakers' folklore
40 Zuidzandstraat in Bruges is now a perfume shop, but at the beginning of the twentieth century it was home to the lace firm Houpelyne-Mulier. Above the shop windows four bas-reliefs depict the invention of lace, which legend ascribes to a local girl, Serena. Of course, other lace centres dispute this claim. Serena's tale appears in several versions, what follows is a summary of what is probably the original version.
Bas-relief of the legend of lace above Zuidzandstraat 40, Bruges, from Marc Willems' website 'Brugse legenden en verhalen'.
Serena's story is set in the Middle Ages, the high point of the the city's fortunes. But twenty-year-old Serena did not partake in that wealth. Her father, a sailor (and Bruges was then a port) had died at sea; her mother had charge of four other young children, and so it fell to Serena to support the entire family from her spinning. She loved, and was loved in turn, by her neighbour, Arnold Van Oost, son of a rich merchant and an apprentice sculptor. But, as poverty threatened her family, Serena made a vow before an image of Our Lady of Sorrows: 'Holy Virgin, give me the means to aid my family and I will renounce all the joys and hopes of my heart'.
That same day, Serena's family, accompanied by Arnold, went for a walk in the countryside. It was a beautiful spring morning, and the fields were covered with the gossamer threads that in French are called 'les fils de la Vierge' [threads of the Virgin]. As she sat pondering her vow some strands floated down onto her black apron, making a beautiful pattern. For Serena, this was a lesson from the Mother of God; if spiders could create wonderful shapes with their threads, why might not she? Arnold knocked together a makeshift frame to carry the apron home and Serena set about trying to recreate the pattern with her own thread.
Her first attempts were hopelessly muddled but the use of a pin-cushion and Arnold's rapid invention of bobbins to weight the threads enabled her to find her way, and soon all the great ladies of Bruges were demanding this new textile to adorn their heads. Serena taught her younger sisters the secret and so the family's financial problems were solved. Arnold, in what would be an enduring division of labour within the lace industry, supplied the drawings on which they worked. In the meantime, he had submitted his masterpiece and become a full member of the guild of sculptors. Now in a position to marry he rushed to Serena's house to ask for her hand. But she, of course, was bound by her vow to refuse.
A year passed in mutual pain as Arnold nursed his anger and confusion and Serena became listless and pale. On the anniversary of the miracle Serena took herself once again into the fields and prayed that Arnold would recover from the hurt. In answer the gossamer strands arranged themselves again into a pattern, a crown of orange blossom. Serena exclaimed, 'If this is a martyr's crown I accept, but all others are forbidden to me'. And in response words appeared within the crown: 'I relieve you of your vow'. Soon after the couple were married.
Serena and Arnold had many children, all girls, who learnt the art of lacemaking from their mother, and thus was established the industry that spread the name of Flanders far and wide.
Because lace is a relatively modern invention it is feasible to imagine that it originated with a historical personage at a particular moment. And as it was associated with the Church – because religious institutions were responsible for teaching and spreading lace skills – it was equally feasible to imagine a miraculous origin. The legend of Serena is only one of several that ascribe a role to the Virgin Mary in the inception of lace. However, while such stories encapsulate the notion that lacemakers were engaged in a blessed occupation (a view we have seen expressed by, for example, Guido Gezelle), they are not necessarily as old as the craft itself. They do not appear to have their origin in narratives that lacemakers told among themselves, but in the efforts to defend or invigorate the handmade lace industry in the second half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Although Serena has passed into folklore, and her story told and retold by Bruges city guides and lace aficionados, her origins are literary.[1] We can be fairly certain she was the invention of Caroline Popp, who dated her text 12 May 1867.
Bas-relief of Caroline Popp, by her grandson-in-law Julien van den Broeck de la Palud. Popp edited the 'Journal de Bruges' from her home in place Hans Memling (now Woensdagmarkt). Memling's statue appears here in the background. Note Popp's lace collar!
Caroline Popp (1808-1891) was a figure of some importance in nineteenth-century Bruges.[2] Her father, Félix Nicolas Joseph Boussart, came from a military family from Binche who, having served the Austrians then fought against them, first in the Brabant Revolution of 1789 and, when that revolt was crushed, as a volunteer in the armies of the French Revolution (he would rise to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel under Napoleon; his brother, André-Joseph Boussart, became a general[3]). It was her marriage to Philippe Christian Popp (1805-1879) which brought her to Bruges, when he was appointed the surveyor of the region. She was co-owner of the newspaper Le journal de Bruges which she founded in 1837 alongside her husband and then edited for fifty-three years. She was succeeded by her daughters. Le journal de Bruges was a bastion of francophone liberalism in clerical West Flanders, having been set up in opposition to the Catholic newspaper Le Nouvelliste de Bruges. It was a campaigning newspaper on both local and national issues, such as the establishment of a museum in Bruges, the re-establishment of the city's port, the abolition of the death penalty, and women's education.
The story of Serena and 'The Legend of Lace' was published in her 1867 collection Récits et légendes des Flandres, a book which was admired by Victor Hugo, among others.[4] Later he would make the acquaintance of the Popps, who were hospitable to visiting writers and encouraging of local ones (including Frans Carrein). These legends have sometimes been cited as examples of local folklore, but in fact most were fictions inspired by the topography of Bruges.[5]
Popp was under no illusions about the reality of the lace trade, nor the lives lived by lacemakers. The Journal de Bruges had warned about the spread of lace-schools as the only solution to the linen crisis in the 1840s; was not a new crisis of overproduction being hatched? The paper also campaigned against the abusive use of advances (the theme of Carrein's Eliza de kantwerkster) and the exploitation of apprentice lacemakers by religious orders. Like Joanna Courtmans-Berchmans, Popp complained of the conditions and hours of work in the lace-schools. So it is perhaps surprising that she created such a romantic origin legend for this industry that was, in her own time, a breeding ground of poverty and ill health. Given her liberal credentials it is even more surprising that she ascribed the invention to a religious miracle. But we can perhaps unravel her motivations. In the histories of lace written in the nineteenth century, Flanders vied with Italy, and Venice in particular, for the honour of inventing lace. The weight of opinion favoured the latter, and history was supported by a legend which ascribed the inspiration to a woman from the Venetian lagoon who attempted to recreate an algae gifted by her sailor fiancé. Popp mentions this story in the introduction to her own which is clearly a retort on behalf of the north. And while Popp was critical of the way in which the lace industry was presently organized, she was indefatigable in her attempts to revive her adopted city including its native industries. Her watchword was 'en avant'; she looked back only to find the direction to go forwards. Bruges had been an economic and cultural powerhouse in the Middle Ages; she might be again. It is no surprise then that Popp located the invention of lace in this period (a century earlier than any historical evidence might allow). And just like Courtmans-Berchmans, Popp saw no incompatibility between her liberalism and her Catholic faith.
There are still a few signs of her liberal politics in 'The Legend of Lace'. Serena's mother, like Popp, believed in the importance of fresh air and exercise for young bodies, hence the walk in the fields that led to the miracle. When Arnold joined the guild of sculptors, Popp cannot resist the opportunity to condemn these medieval monopolies. And finally, she releases Serena from her vow of chastity to embrace another destiny as wife, mother and creative worker. It is unlikely that Popp's contemporary and fellow Bruggeling, the priest-poet Guido Gezelle, would consider that an appropriate ending.
'Serena, de legende van de kant', a Dutch retelling by Jean Vercammen, illustrated by Dora Rommelaere, published in 1945.
[1] See, for example, the websites of Bruges storyteller Marc Willems: http://brugselegenden.blogspot.com/2014/10/de-legende-van-serena-en-de-brugse-kant.html
[2] On Caroline Boussart-Popp see Éliane Gubin et al, Dictionnaire des femmes belges : XIXe et XXe siècles (Brussels, 2006), pp. 73-4.
[3] See the pages dedicated to the Boussart brothers on http://napoleon-monuments.eu/
[4] Caroline Popp, Récits et légendes des Flandres (Brussels, 1867), pp. 163-205. An English translation of this tale was published in 1937 by Mrs L. Paulis.
[5] So says the Flemish folklore expert Hervé Stalpaert in Westvlaamse kantwerkstersfolklore (Courtrai, 1956).
A Lacemakers' Lullaby: Alexandre Desrousseaux's 'Le P'tit Quinquin' (1853)
On 26th November 2017
In Lacemakers in Music, Lacemakers in the Past, Lacemakers' folklore, Lacemakers' songs
'Le P'tit Quinquin' features on a 2005 French stamp.
The northern French city of Lille was once a great centre of lacemaking. In the eighteenth century, lace manufacture was the dominant occupation for women. The lacemakers' feast held annually on 9 May – the 'Fête du Broquelet' or 'Feast of the Bobbin' – continued to be the city's major holiday into the first decades of the nineteenth century.[1] The women and girls from the different lace workshops and schools took a jaunt out to the taverns and parks of the surrounding villages; the drinking and dancing continued for several days. But by the mid-nineteenth century, even as the city's rapid industrialisation covered those same villages and parks with textile factories and rows of workers' tenements, the number of lacemakers declined until, by 1851, there were only 1,600 listed in the census.[2] Yet, even as she disappeared from Lille's working-class quarters, the lacemaker became a symbol of the city, and the designated transmitter of its memories and traditions.
François Louis Joseph Watteau's 'La Fête du Broquelet', c. 1803. Note the giant bobbin in the bottom right-hand corner carriage. This image from Wikipedia Commons, the original in the Musée de l'Hospice Comtesse, Lille.
It was a song, more specifically a lullaby, which brought about this transfiguration. 'Le P'tit Quinquin' [The little child] was first performed in 1851 by its author and composer, Alexandre Desrousseaux.[3] It is in the voice of a lacemaker, coaxing and threatening her child to try to get him to sleep so she can get on with her work. It would be hard to exaggerate the success of this text (originally titled 'L'canchon dormoire' or 'lullaby'): it was without contest Desrousseaux's most famous work – he is often described as 'the father of Le P'tit Quinquin' – and Desrousseaux was himself the most famous of Lille's many dialect poets and songwriters. That success was almost immediate: over 100,000 copies of the song were sold between 1853, its first publication, and 1890. It could be heard in all the bars and cafés of the city, and by 1854 newspapers had already labelled it 'The Marseillaise of the Lille worker'. 'Le P'tit Quinquin' gave his name to shops, a newspaper, a make of biscuit, a brand of pencil, and dozens of other commercial uses, not just in Lille but across France. More recently it was the title of a French TV mini-series, directed by Bruno Dumont which was set in northern France. There are several continuations of the song (some by Desrousseaux himself) as well as numerous parodies, while the tune has been endlessly borrowed. There are recordings of reggae, punk and military band versions. When a monument to Desrousseaux was erected in Lille in 1902, his bust was accompanied by the child and his mother, complete with lace cushion. In 1953 there were national, indeed international celebrations to mark the centenary of publication of the 'Le P'tit Quinquin'.
The singer and composer Alexandre Desrousseaux pictured on an 1883 calendar. Note the images from his most famous song at the bottom.
Desrousseaux (1820-1892) grew up in Saint-Sauveur, a working-class quarter of Lille: his mother had herself been a lacemaker, but was later a shopkeeper, while his father made braiding. Young Alexandre worked in a variety of textile factories and then as a tailor's apprentice before being conscripted into the army in 1840. However, he had already started to make a reputation as a musician, selling his own songsheets to the crowds during Lille's carnival. In the eighteenth century Lille had been home to a thriving dialect literary culture, with songs and plays composed in Picard, and often featuring lacemaker characters. Antoine Cottignies (known as 'Brûle-Maison') and his son Jacques were the most famous practitioners, and their works were still familiar in the early nineteenth century. Desrousseaux was determined to revive the glory days of Picard literature: almost everything he composed was in dialect. Song clubs were a vibrant feature of working-class culture in Lille and other industrial cities, and dialect was often the preferred medium as more directly expressive of workers' concerns (although the most famous piece to emerge from these clubs – Eugène Pottier's socialist anthem 'L'Internationale' which was, for many years, the national anthem of the Soviet Union – was composed in standard French). Desrousseaux himself, thanks to his military career and his growing musical fame, was taken under the wing of the deputy mayor of Lille, Arthur Gentil-Descamps, and so climbed the social ladder into the ranks of the middle classes as a municipal functionary. However, he did not lose the common touch.
Singing clubs were an important part of Lille's working-class culture (although the one illustrated here by Daumier is 'La Goguette des Joyeux' in Paris).
'Le P'tit Quinquin' was apparently born from observation. Walking through the city to visit his mother in cour Jeannette-à-vaches, Desrousseaux overheard a lacemaker, desperate to finish her order, attempting to quieten her crying child with promises of cakes and toys. However, Desrousseaux also adapted the scenario in order to incorporate other elements of Lille's traditions and working-class culture. This idea was apparently suggested to him by Auguste Charles Arnold, the editor of the Gazette de Flandre. Arnold felt that the Lille workers, overwhelmed by the changes brought on by mechanisation and, in particular, the mass migration from across the Belgian border, needed to be reminded of their own history, and to draw strength from their traditions. Desrousseaux, who would go on to write an important book on the Moeurs populaires de la Flandre française (popular customs of French Flanders), took seriously his role as a folklorist: 'Many of my songs could be considered as studies of our celebrations and pastimes, both public and private.' 'Le P'tit Quinquin' contains references to the 'Ducasse', Lille's main fair in August/September, and the puppet shows which were a mainstay of popular entertainment in northern French towns, with at least one theatre on almost every street. Saint Nicholas also appears for, as elsewhere in northern Europe, his feast day on 6 December was the main season for gift-giving. In Lille he was accompanied on his visits to children, both good and naughty, by a donkey who carried the gifts but who also carried whips to punish. Thus the lullaby of desperate worker became a survey of working-class entertainments.
Desrousseaux borrowed the voice of a lacemaker, though more often elderly, for several other songs which detailed this plebeian cultural and municipal history, such as 'Le Broquelet d'autrefois (souvenirs d'une dentellière)' [The Feast of the Bobbin of Yesteryear (memories of a lacemaker)] and 'la vieille dentellière, souvenirs et regrets' [the old lacemaker, memories and regrets]. Other songwriters also used a lacemaker character to make comparisons between the past and the present. For instance in 1908 Adolphe Desreumaux used this character to protest against the influx of Belgian migrant workers to the suburb of Wazemmes in his 'Sou'vnirs d'eun vielle dintellière' [Memories of an old lacemaker].[4] Thus the lacemaker became the Sybil of Lille's oral and popular history.
'Le P'tit Quinquin' works because it mimics genuine folk lullabies which often combined saccharine tunes with texts that reeked of despair. Indeed, travellers passing through the city have assumed that it was a traditional folk lullaby rather than the work of a male author.[5] Desrousseaux's lacemaker is simultaneously tender and desperate. Grinding poverty lurks in this text: a child crying for three-quarters of an hour was probably hungry, his good clothes were already in the pawn shop. Promises of gingerbread and toys may not work on little Narcisse because they are implausible, whereas the threat of chastisement seems more concrete.
There are numerous recordings available, but most seem intended for a nursery audience (in which the dialect is softened or entirely absent). Desrousseaux's original listeners were adult males, and to appreciate the proper effect one really needs to hear it sung by happy bands of Lille OSC fans. But in the absence of such an encounter, we recommend the version sung by Raoul de Godewarsvelde, who was born in the same quartier as Desrousseaux, and which is available on youtube.[6]
Below we provide the original text, and a rough English translation,.
Dors mon p'tit Quiquin, mon p'tit poussin, mon gros raisin
Tu me feras du chagrin, si tu ne dors point jusqu'à demain
Ainsi l'autre jour une pauvre dentelière,
En berçant son petit garçon,
Qui depuis trois quarts d'heures ne faisait que pleurer,
Tâchait de l'endormir avec une chanson,
Elle lui disait 'min narcisse,
Demain tu auras du pain d'épice,
Des bonbons à gogo, si tu es sage et si tu fais dodo.
'Et si tu me laisses faire une bonne semaine,
J'irai chercher ton beau sarrau
Ton patalon de drap, ton gilet de laine,
Comme un petit Milord tu seras faraud !
Je t'acheterai, le jour de la ducasse,
Un polichinelle cocasse
Un turlututu, pour jouer l'air du chapeau pointu.
'Nous irons dans la cour, Jeannette-aux-Vaches,
Voir les marionnettes comme tu riras
Quand tu entendras dire un sou pour Jacques,
Par le polichinelle qui parle mal
Tu lui mettras dans sa main,
Au lieu d'un sou un rond de carrotte
Il te dira merci, parce comme nous, il prendra du plaisir !
'Et si par hazard son maître se fâche,
C'est alors Narcisse que nous rirons
Sans n'avoir envie, je prendrai mon air méchant,
Je lui dirai son nom et ses surnoms
Je lui dirai des fariboles,
Il m'en répondra des drôles
Enfin, chacun verra deux spectacles au lieu d'un.
'Alors serre tes yeux, dors mon bonhomme,
Je vais dire une prière au petit Jésus,
Pour qu'il vienne ici, pendant ton somme,
Te faire rêver que j'ai les mains pleines d'écus,
Pour qu'il t'apporte une brioche,
Avec du sirop qui coule
Tout le long de ton menton, tu te pourlécheras trois heures du long.
'Le mois qui vient, c'est la fête de St Nicolas,
C'est sûr au soir il viendra te trouver
Il te fera un sermon et te laissera mettre,
En-dessous du ballot un grand panier
Il le remplira si tu es sage,
De choses qui te rendront heureux
Sinon son baudet t'enverra un grand martinet.'
Ni les marionnettes, ni le pain d'épice,
N'ont produit d'effet ; mais le martinet
A vite calmé le petit Narcisse,
Qui craignait de voir arriver le baudet
Il a dit sa berceuse,
Sa mère l'a mis dans son berceau
A repris son coussin, et répété vingt fois le refrain
Tu me feras du chagrin, si tu ne dors point jusqu'à demain. Sleep my little child, my little chick, my juicy grape,
You'll make me suffer if you don't sleep before tomorrow.
Thus the other day, a poor lacemaker,
While rocking her little boy
Who, for three-quarters of an hour had done nothing but cry,
Tried to get him to sleep with a song,
She said to him 'My Narcisse,
Tomorrow you'll have some gingerbread
and sweets galore, if you're good and go to sleep.
'And if you let me do a good week's work
I'll go and get your smart smock
Your linen trousers and your woollen cardigan,[7]
You'll be as smart as an English lord!
At the fair[8] I'll buy you
a funny jumping jack
A whistle to play the tune "the pointed hat".
'We'll go down to the yard, Jeannette-aux-Vaches,
To see the puppets, how you'll laugh
When you hear "A farthing for Jacques"
Said by Mr Punch who talks so badly
You'll put into his hand
a piece of carrot instead of a farthing
He'll say thank you, because, like us, he'll find it funny!
'And if by chance the puppetmaster gets angry
Then Narcisse we'll make a joke of it
I'll pretend to be really angry
I'll call him by his nickname, and worse
I'll tell him all kinds of nonsense
And he'll respond in kind
And that way everyone will see two spectacles instead of just one.
'So close your eyes, sleep little man
I'll say a prayer to baby Jesus
That he'll come here, while you sleep
and make you dream that you have fistsfull of silver coins
That he'll bring a bun
With syrup that drips
All the way down your chin, you'll be licking yourself for three whole hours.
'Next month, it's Saint Nicholas's day[9]
And for certain he'll come and find you in the evening
He'll give you a sermon and let you put
a big basket under his bundle
If you're good he'll fill it
With things to make you happy
But if not his donkey will give you a real whipping.'
Neither the puppets, nor the gingerbread
had produced any effect, but the whipping
quickly calmed little Narcisse
afraid to see the donkey come
He said his lullaby
His mother put him in the cot
She took up her pillow, and repeated the chorus twenty times
Sleep my little child, my little chick, my fat grape,
[1] 9 May remembers the translation of the relics of Saint Nicholas from Myra to Bari, an important feast in the Orthodox Church but less usually so in the Catholic Church.
[2] André Mabille de Poncheville, L'industrie dentelière française spécialement en Flandre : Enquête dans la région de Bailleul (Valenciennes: Librairie Giard, 1911), p. 67.
[3] For a good biography and exploration of Desrousseaux's work see Éric Lemaire, Le chansonnier lillois Alexandre Joachim Desrousseaux et la chanson populaire dialectale (DELEM, 2009). Most of the information in this post comes from this source.
[4] Adolphe Desreumaux, Mes chansons et pasquilles patoises. Etudes de moeurs lilloises (Lille: J. Hollain, 1908), p. 17-18
[5] Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco, Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1914), p. 253.
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY28zyuK1HI
[7] The implication is that the clothes are in pawn. Desrousseaux himself worked for the municipal pawn shop.
[8] The 'Ducasse' was Lille's major fair, held at the end of August – beginning of September.
[9] 6 December.
'One Moonshiny Night': A Riddle becomes a Lace Tell
In Lacemakers' folklore, Lacemakers' songs
Walter Crane's drawing to illustrate the Grimms' tale 'The Robber Bridegroom'. From Flickr thecmn
Silverstone, now best known for its racing circuit, lies at the heart of the ancient forest of Whittlewood on the Northamptonshire-Buckinghamshire border. There is an academic explanation why forest communities took up craft manufactures like lace, but we'll not go into that here. Certainly Silverstone was a lace village until the late nineteenth century.
John Edward Linnell (1842-1919), born in Silverstone, vicar of Pavenham. Image from 'Old Oak' (1932)
John Edward Linnell (1842-1919) grew up in Silverstone, or 'Silson' in the local parlance. Years later, when serving as vicar of Pavenham near Bedford (another lace village), he wrote an account of his childhood. Linnell came to holy orders by a round-about route and his memoirs are more robust than one might expect from a Victorian clergyman. While many of his peers repressed the rough games that characterised rural popular culture, Linnell commemorated them. He was also interested in more aesthetic pursuits such as ballad singing. One of the singers he mentions was a lacemaker, Sall, who kept house with her brother Simon, the sexton. We quote this section in full, including a verse of one of Sall's songs. The pair
lived in a large, lone, thatched cottage that stood on the edge of an orchard. They always had a wood fire on the hearth of their living-room, and half-way up the top of the wide, open chimney hung flitches of bacon and hams, which had been sent by their wealthier neighbours to be smoked and dried. Around a window that opened from the chimney-corner into the garden there were built into the wall a number of old Dutch tiles said to have once belonged to a mansion that had vanished from Silson centuries back, possibly the royal residence I have already mentioned. The shelves were loaded with the choicest of old china, while here and there hung a time-stained print depicting a battle-scene. When I was a boy, it was one of my greatest delights of my life to drop in on them of a winter's night, when the wind was howling among the trees outside and the sparks were flying up the chimney to lose themselves in the darkness above, and hear them tell their stories of bygone days. It was a picture many an artist would have loved to paint. Simon used to sit on a low, flag-bottomed chair, his body bent forward over the hearth so that he could better replenish the fire. Sall, with her lace pillow before her, would jangle her bobbins and place her pins with her long, bony fingers in the light of a tallow candle whose rays passed through a tall water-bottle and fell softly on her parchment. The two knew all the legends and traditions of the countryside, and it's from them I gleaned many of the incidents I now relate sixty years after.
Sir Walter Scott once declared that nothing was more dramatically effective than an old murder ballad. With anyone like Sall to recite it, I can well believe him. The murderer, the victim, the grave, and the hanging were brought before our eyes as the verses fell from her lips. To the ordinary reader the following lines would seem mere jingle: —
'One lonely night, as I sat high,
Instead of one there two pass'd by.
The boughs did bend, my soul did quake,
To see the hole that Fox did make.'
To her they presented part of a tragedy more real than Macbeth's to lovers of Shakespeare, though the heroine was only a humble serving-maid. She, it seemed, had arranged to meet her lover by moonlight in a spinney near her master's house. First at the trysting place, she climbed a fir-tree to give the laggard a fright when he should appear. After a long wait she heard footsteps and voices and, looking down, saw her lover enter the glade accompanied by a man carrying a spade. Not daring to speak, she watched them while they dug a deep hole just beneath her. Then the truth dawned on her; she was to be murdered, and it was her grave they were digging. At last their task was finished, and the villains impatiently awaited her arrival. But they were to be disappointed, for, though trembling in every limb with terror, she did not reveal her presence. Eventually they departed, and she descended the tree, fled back to her master's house, and told what she had seen. An alarm was raised, her lover, Fox, whose name seemed well suited to his character, was arrested, confessed to his evil intentions, and was hanged. 'An' sarve him right!' Simon would grunt, when Sall had left him swinging 'from the gallows tree so high.'[1]
When Linnell's memoirs appeared posthumously in 1932, this particular verse had already been recorded from lacemakers on several occasions, and now it has its own entry in the Roud Folksong Index as RN17769. It was frequently identified as a 'lace tell'. A report in The Leighton Buzzard Observer for 4 April 1893 explained that
one of the most curious features in connection with this trade was the songs of the lacemakers, known locally as lace tells, or lace tellings. These consisted of doggrel [sic] verses which remind one very forcibly of the nursery ditties that delight the juvenile mind. The proficiency of the worker was estimated by the number of pins stuck in a given time, and the singing of these tells assisted the counting and kept them together. These songs possess no merit as literary productions, if such they may be called, but they form a remarkable and interesting survival of a condition of things which has practically passed away. We give a few of the more striking.
'Nineteen miles as I sat high,
Looking for one as he passed by;
The boughs did bend, the leaves did shake,
See what a hole the fox did make!
The fox did look, the fox did see,
Digging a hole to bury me;
I saw one that ne'er saw me,
I saw a dark lantern tied to a tree.'
The allusion here is to an intended murder. A young man wishing to rid himself of his sweetheart had determined to take her life; and, with the intention of hiding all traces of the crime, he busied himself with digging her grave near the spot where they were to meet. He was turned from his wicked purpose by observing some person either up a tree or standing behind him.[2]
This lace tell was also noted by Thomas Wright, among others.[3] It is one of the few tells for which we possess a tune because the folksong collector Fred Hamer (the husband of the lace teacher Margaret Hamer) recorded a version from a Mrs White of Cranfield in Bedfordshire.[4]
James Orchard Halliwell (1820-1889), Shakespearean and nursery rhyme collector. Image from Wikipedia Commons
Lace Tells were often cut down and mashed up versions of longer ballads, and the implication of Linnell's account is that the entire narrative was sung. However, no full version of the story in ballad form has been discovered in tradition.[5] So it is more likely that this verse was meant as a sung element in a longer prose narrative, what is known as a 'cante-fable'.
The whole story, including the verse, has also been recorded on a number of occasions, the first in James Orchard Halliwell's Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales in 1849. This book has a complicated publishing history: it was the sequel to the author's Nursery Rhymes of England which first appeared in 1842, although the verse about 'the hole the fox did make' only appeared in the 1846 edition of that title.[6] Both verse and story were said by Halliwell to have been obtained in Oxfordshire.
Many years ago there lived at the University of Oxford a young student, who, having seduced the daughter of a tradesman, sought to conceal his crime by committing the more heinous one of murder. With this view, he made an appointment to meet her one evening in a secluded field. She was at the rendezvous considerably before the time agreed upon for their meeting, and hid herself in a tree. The student arrived on the spot shortly afterwards, but what was the astonishment of the girl to observe that he commenced digging a grave. Her fears and suspicions were aroused, and she did not leave her place of concealment till the student, despairing of her arrival, returned to his college. The next day, when she was at the door of her father's house, he passed and saluted her as usual. She returned his greeting by repeating the following lines:
One moonshiny night, as I sat high,
Waiting for one to come by,
The boughs did bend; my heart did ache
To see what hole the fox did make.
Astounded by her unexpected knowledge of his base design, in a moment of fury he stabbed her to the heart. This murder occasioned a violent conflict between the tradespeople and the students, the latter taking part with the murderer, and so fierce was the skirmish, that Brewer's Lane, it is said, ran down with blood. The place of appointment was adjoining the Divinity Walk, which was in time past far more secluded than at the present day, and she is said to have been buried in the grave made for her by her paramour.[7]
Even in the versions given so far one can see that the verse was more stable than the story that explains it. In the one Sall told to Linnell the would-be assassin ended on the gallows, in the Olney version he was discovered and fled, while in the Oxford version he murders the girl but not at the place and time he had planned. In another version, sent in to Notes and Queries in 1887 by Thomas Ratcliff of Worksop, the servant girl lured by her false lover to the woods is so frightened by the grave she sees him digging that she falls in a faint from the tree, and this in turn frightens off the would-be murderers.[8]
We'll give this agglomeration of stories the general title 'One Moonshiny Night', as used in Notes and Queries, to distinguish this group from a variety of other traditional tales that feature a young woman who accidentally learns that her suitor plans to murder her and later confronts him with this knowledge. In folklore studies the generic title for this plot type is 'The Robber Bridegroom', tale type number ATU 955. It is an enormously popular narrative, with variants found in many cultures.[9] It is has also inspired many writers, including Eudora Welty's 1942 novella The Robber Bridegroom and, more relevant to lacemakers, Henri Pourrat's four volume novel Gaspard des Montagnes (1922-1931). (Pourrat's literary output drew heavily on his career as a folklorist around Ambert: his most forthcoming narrators were lacemakers.)[10] The best known English version is 'Mister Fox', which John Brickdale Blakeway (1765-1821) wrote from memory, having been told it in his youth by a great-aunt, and sent by him to the Shakespearean scholar Edmond Malone (1741-1812). Malone then included it in his notes to the play Much Ado About Nothing. Why? Because it elucidates the line Benedick says to Claudio Act 1 Scene 1: 'Like the old tale, my lord: it is not so, nor 'twas not so; but, indeed, God forbid it should be so', the very words the murderer Mister Fox says to his would-be victim, Lady Mary, when she challenges him with her knowledge of his plans.[11] However, while the name 'Mister Fox' would imply some connection to 'One Moonshiny Night', the verse itself does not occur in Blakeway's version… and any further pursuit of the relationship between these narratives will take us too far from our lacemakers' tell.
Archdeacon Hugh Owen (left) and Reverend John Brickdale Blakeway (right). Painted by Philip Corbet. Blakeway collected the folktale 'Mister Fox'. Image from Ludlow Museum and reproduced by permission of Shropshire Council, Shropshire Museums
The popularity of the verse must owe something to its diffusion in printed form. The first one that we have found appears in The Trial of Wit or, A New Riddle Book, published in Glasgow in 1782 and reprinted there in 1789 and 1795. Here the verse is presented as a riddle:
As I went out in a moonlight night,
To keep from harm I took the height,
I set my back against the moon,
I look'd for one and saw two come.
The boughs did bend the leaves did shake,
I saw the hole the Fox did make.
It was a maid had a sweetheart whose name was Fox: she saw him and another come to make her grave, while she sat on a tree.[12]
The same riddle appeared in Tom Thumb's Royal Riddle Book for the Trial of Dull Wits, printed at Falkirk in 1788, and then again in Stirling in 1801.[13] It is not implausible that there were many other editions of these riddle books, in England, Ireland and North America as well, but it is also possible that copies were carried to these regions from Scotland by 'flying stationers'. Such small books were printed to be sold by pedlars; they were ephemeral and few have survived. It is unlikely that the story or the verse originated in these pamphlets because the effect of the riddle depends entirely on some pre-existing knowledge of the narrative. Nonetheless, the existence of print versions may have had a mnemonic effect.
The verse is in the first person, spoken by the intended victim. In most full versions of the story she uses this elliptical account of her experience to inform her would-be murderer that she has discovered his plan. Only the assassin would understand the meaning of her words. Choosing this riddle form to confront him is not necessary to the plot, but such circumlocutions are a common feature of oral cultures. In face-to-face communities people, especially the relatively weak like servant maids, had to be careful how they spoke. They therefore developed the art of delivering their message in forms that were opaque to those who were not involved, and inoffensive to those who were. Texts were meaningful to those in the know, but apparent nonsense to outsiders. Their incomprehensibility, 'a mere jingle' to quote Linnell, was intentional.
The riddle is a typical example of such genres that create a bond of shared understanding between insiders while remaining obscure to outsiders. Lace tells are another. As Gerald Porter explains, in performance as a lace tell the frame story that makes sense of the verse disappears: the identity of the speaker and the diggers, and the relationship between them is unclear. Yet the whole narrative remained implicit, completed in the minds of listeners who likely already knew it. This process creates an 'insider group' – in this case the lacemakers – bonded by their shared knowledge, their shared ability to interpret the riddle.[14] By speaking the riddle in the first person the lacemakers identify with the would-be victim, and here we encounter another common element to be found in the work culture of lacemakers in other countries too: men were a threat, especially strangers, and so young women had to be on their guard. Narrative and song were means to inculcate important life lessons.
[1] John Edward Linnell, Old Oak: The Story of a Forest Village, ed. Charles Linnell (London, 1932), pp. 48-51.
[2] 'Among the Buckinghamshire Pillow-Lace Makers. By our special correspondent', The Leighton Buzzard Observer, Tuesday 4 April 1893, p. 6. Precisely the same wording is given in Oliver Ratcliff and Hebert Brown, Olney: Past and Present (Olney, 1893).
[3] Thomas Wright, The Romance of the Lace Pillow (Olney, 1919), pp. 182-3.
[4] Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, Fred Hamer manuscripts, FH/4/4/124: recorded from Mrs White of Cranfield: 'I saw them that never saw me,/ I saw a lantern tied to a tree,/ The boughs did shake and I did quake,/ To see what a hole the fox did make./ The fox did roar and I did see,/ The fox made that hole to bury me.'
[5] The ballad 'Oh Bring With You Your Dowry Love', which has been commercially recorded on a few occasions, is based on this story, but appears to have been written by the folk-song collector Frank Kidson to provide a context for the verse about 'the hole the fox did make', which he heard sung by Kate Thompson in Knaresborough in 1891. His ballad version was then included in English Peasant Songs (1929). The verse also occurs in a version of 'The Cottage in the Wood', sung by Martin Carthy, but this was his own addition to a much better known song (Roud Number 608) about a pedlar calling at an isolated house, but which usually ends happily in a marriage: see https://mainlynorfolk.info/martin.carthy/songs/thecottageinthewood.html
[6] James Orchard Halliwell, The Nursery Rhymes of England, Collected Chiefly from Oral Tradition 4th edition (London, 1846), p. 3.
[7] James Orchard Halliwell, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales (London, 1849), pp. 47-50.
[8] Thomas Ratcliff, 'One Moonshiny Night', Notes and Queries 7th series 3, 19 March 1887, pp. 229-30. Several other versions – from Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Gloucestershire, Ireland and New England – were submitted to that journal in the same year: F.C. Birkbeck Terry, 'One Moonshiny Night', Notes and Queries 7th series 3, 19 February 1887, p. 149; S.O. Addy, Notes and Queries 7th series 3, 19 March 1887, p. 230; D.F. 'One Moonshiny Night', Notes and Queries 7th series 3, 21 May 1887, p. 410; other replies were submitted by 'St Swithin' (pseud. Eliza Gutch), T.H. Smith and M.L. Ferrar. Sidney Addy also published a longer version under the title 'The Girl Who Got Up The Tree' in Household Tales with Other Traditional Remains, Collected in the Counties of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Derby, and Nottingham (London, 1895), pp. 10-11.
[9] For some examples, see the ever useful website of Professor Ashliman; http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0955.html
[10] We will return to Pourrat in future blogs, but for his debt to lacemakers see Bernadette Bricout, Le Savoir et la saveur. Henri Pourrat et Le Trésor des contes (Paris, 1992).
[11] The tale is also apparently quoted in Spencer's The Fairie Queen. On these literary connections see the blog by Katherine Langrish: http://steelthistles.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/be-bold-be-bold-but-not-too-bold.html
[12] The Trial of Wit, or, a New Riddle-Book. Some of which were Never before Published (Glasgow, 1782).
[13] Tom Thumb's Royal Riddle Book: For the Trial of Dull Witts (Falkirk, 1788); Tom Thumb's Royal Riddle Book: For the Trial of Dull Wits (Stirling, 1801).
[14] Mary-Ann Constantine and Gerald Porter Fragment and Meaning in Traditional Song: From the Blues to the Baltic (Oxford, 2003), pp. 69-71.
Keeping 'Cattern' in Flanders
In Lacemakers' folklore, Lacemakers' holidays
In our last post about lacemakers 'keeping cattern' on 25 November, we said that Saint Catherine 'was not usually the named patron of European lacemakers'. However, we have learnt that there was one exception: the lacemakers of Antwerp province in Belgium, and specifically Mechelen (Malines), celebrated Saint Catherine's Eve.
We owe this information to the Flemish writer Herman Baccaert (1883-1921) who, together with Antoine Carlier de Lantsheere, compiled an Encyclopaedia of lace-related information. Sadly this manuscript was lost during the First World War, but Baccaert did publish a few articles on lacemakers' traditions, including their feast-days. He also wrote a novel set among lacemakers, which we'll return to in a future blog.
Herman Baccaert of Mechelin (1883-1921)
According to Baccaert, in most of Belgian and French Flanders, and in Brabant, the lacemakers' patron was Saint Anne, mother of Mary, whose feast fell on 26 July. There were some exceptions and additions. In Ieper (Ypres) the lacemakers' holiday was 'mooimakersdag', the Wednesday preceding 'Klein Sacramentdag', which fell on the Thursday following Corpus Christi. (As the date of Corpus Christi depended on Easter, this was a moveable feast.) In Geraardsbergen (Grammont) in southern Flanders, the lacemakers' celebrated instead Saint Gregory the Great. (Originally the holiday fell on 12 March, which oddly is Saint Gregory's feast-day in the Orthodox Church but not the Catholic Church. Then, in the nineteenth century, it was moved to 9 May. According to a local lacedealer interviewed by Baccaert, the explanation for this was that the weather was better in May. However, 9 May is the feast-day of Saint Gregory Nazianzen, a different saint; it is also the feast of the translation of Saint Nicholas, which was an important holiday for lacemakers in Lille. So there may have been more going on here.) Although Baccaert did not mention this, Saint Theresa of Avila's feast on 15 October was also popular among lacemakers in West Flanders, in Bruges and Courtrai (Brugge and Kortrijk). But this holiday was promoted by some religious orders which held the saint in particular esteem; in general Saint Anne was the recognized patron in West Flanders.
In Antwerp province, however, it was Saint Catherine. It is worth quoting Baccaert's description in full because it offers some interesting parallels with 'catterning' in the East Midlands. The lace industry had been in decline in the region for several decades, so Baccaert was referring to the past, not current practice.
"On Saint Catherine's eve, at sunset on 24 November, 'the candleblock was washed' ['den lichter begoten']. The candleblock was a wooden stand which served as an appliance to spread light over the lacemakers' pillows. It consisted of a candle or an oil-lamp as well as a spherical bottle filled with pure water, the so-called 'ordinaal', which concentrated the light falling on the pillow.
"In the evening they cooked up a brandy punch called 'the Devil in Hell', which was passed to and fro because there was always another willing mouth to take care of. It was the season for smoked herring and these were laid on the fire to sizzle and spit; everyone also had some tasty morsel, especially gingerbread and sweetmeats, and thus late into the night they would sing, gossip and tell stories."
'Washing the candleblock' was also the euphemistic name for celebrating Catterns in parts of the East Midlands. Saint Catherine's was 'Candle Day', because traditionally this was the day when lacemakers began to use artificial light. And just as there was a Cattern cake in the East Midlands, so there was a 'Sint Catharinagebak' in East Flanders: the recipe is given on p.99 of André Delcart's Winterfeesten en Gebak: Mythen, folklore en tradities (Cyclus, 2007) This is not the only parallel in the customs of the two regions: the chanting of 'tells' in Midlands lace-schools echoes the use of 'tellingen' to control the pace of work in Flemish lace workshops. Here is another which also tends to confirm the claim ― often asserted but difficult to prove ― that lace skills came to England from the Low Countries with Flemish migrants in the sixteenth century.
Alexander Struys, 'The Lacemaker of Mechelen', 1902
Baccaert, Herman. 'Gebruiken bij Kantwerksters', Volkskunde: Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche Folklore 19 (1907-8): 223-229
Baccaert, Herman. 'Bijdrage tot de Folklore van het kantwerk', Volkskunde: Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsche Folklore 21 (1910): 169-175.
There is a very good Flemish website on Mechelen lace and lace history, 'Mechelen & Kant'.
Gooding on Saint Thomas's, 21 December
The longest day and the shortest night,
Jim Horn sat by candle light.
When his mother heard it, she did stamp and swear,
And from his head pulled a handful of hair.
According to Mrs Frederica Orlebar (1887), the promoter of lace and lacemakers' feasts, this rhyme was sung during Cattern celebrations. Apparently Jim Horn was a male lacemaker whose family still lived in the village of Poddington; his mother was no doubt incensed by the waste of expensive candles when natural light was sufficient. Violence visited upon children by parents was a common theme of lacemakers' rhymes and tells, as we'll see in a subsequent post. However, the "longest day and the shortest night" element of this rhyme was more usually associated with "Barnaby Bright" and chanted on 11 June, which is Saint Barnabas's day (and which, before the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in 1752, would have fallen even closer to the summer solstice).
The winter solstice, the shortest day and longest night, when candles definitely were permitted, now falls on the feast of Saint Thomas. "Thomassing" is the last of the winter holidays associated with Midlands lacemakers. As with the other feasts we have discussed, it was not restricted to lacemakers. In fact it was celebrated much more widely than either Saint Catherine's or Saint Andrew's, as it has been recorded across most parts of England south of the Trent. The primary celebrants seem to have been older women, sometimes specifically widows, and occasionally young children. They would go "a-thomassing", or "mumping" or "gooding" from door to door, perhaps singing or chanting, and collecting money, food and candles. This rhyme was used at Bliston Staffordshire in the nineteenth-century to encourage donations (we've found no records of such rhymes used in the east Midlands):
Well a day, well a day,
St Thomas goes too soon away,
Then your gooding we do pray,
For the good times will not stay,
St Thomas grey, St Thomas grey,
The longest night and the shortest day,
Please to remember St Thomas's day.
Without these gifts from neighbours the poor would not be able to celebrate Christmas. "Mumping" is an old word meaning begging, but perhaps that does not quite capture the attitude of Thomassers. This is Walter Rose's description of "Thomassing" in Haddenham (Bucks) before the Second World War:
On the twenty-first of December each year the old dames of the village, going about in pairs, canvassed those who could afford it for alms. Their attitude was not one of indigent poverty; they came in recognition of a time-honoured custom, a rite that needed no other explanation but the plain announcement, "If you please, we've come a-thomassing". As a custom it was interesting and picturesque, but it was certainly evidence of an earlier poverty, and we may be glad that the granting of old age pensions brought it to an end. Yet one old lady (to her honour) still keeps the custom going – to whom, if it be my last, my sixpence shall be given.
The story of Saint Thomas and King Gondophares in a tapestry made by the Saint Thomas Guild of Nijmegen, a Dutch medieval re-enactment society.
The term "gooding" does not mean that Thomassers were after "goodies" but rather they presented an opportunity to do good. The story (which dates back to at least the 3rd century AD) goes that Saint Thomas the apostle was employed by a certain king Gondophares in what is now Afghanistan to build a glorious palace. Saint Thomas took all the money and gave it to the poor. The king was understandably angry until his deceased brother appeared to him in a dream and showed him the palace that his charity had built for him in heaven. Although this story does not seem to be widely known, it perhaps explains why Saint Thomas was an appropriate patron for seeking alms. According to Catholic doctrine, charity was the means to store up spiritual wealth. Yet oddly the historian Ronald Hutton (in his Stations of the Sun) has found little evidence of Thomassing before the Reformation, and while there are numerous parish benefactions, for instance at Leighton Buzzard (Beds) and Ravensden (Beds), which distributed doles to the parish poor on Saint Thomas's day, most of these seem to date from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Lacemakers very often numbered among the poor, including at Haddenham, Leighton Buzzard and Ravensden, but lacemakers were not specifically singled out for this charity. Lacemakers' connection to Saint Thomas comes through the lace-schools which, as with Catterns and Tanders, provided an institutional framework for the maintenance of old traditions even while they were falling away in other regions. According to Catherine Channer, a Northamptonshire lace teacher at the beginning of the twentieth century, the children used to take the opportunity to "turn out" their teacher.
It is St. Thomas's Day. The children are assembled; row behind row they are sitting, with their fat pillows resting against the stands before them. But by the look of repressed excitement on every face, there is evidently something about to happen. Presently the teacher leaves the room on the pretence of getting a parchment. In a minute the girl nearest the door has sprung up and bolted it; the pillows are put on one side, and an indescribable hubbub ensues. When the teacher returns she shakes the door violently, demanding to be let in; but the answer comes from thirty voices, "It's St. Thomas's Day; give us a half-holiday, and we'll let you in." For five minutes or so she stands outside grumbling and knocking, and then, finding that the children have turned the stools against her, she (not unwillingly, perhaps) gives in. The holiday is promised, the door is opened, and she walks in as the children rush out. As we watch them laughing and shouting, we think it is a pity that custom should have fixed their holiday for one of the dullest and certainly the shortest of the days in the year.
Channer does not mention the location of this school (and the implication is that the description could apply to many Midland lace schools), but possibilities include Ecton (Northants) and Stoke Goldington (Bucks). In his diary, John Cole of Ecton recorded the "turning out" of the mistress at Ecton lace school on Saint Thomas's in 1832, while Thomas Wright records the same for Stoke Goldington in his The Romance of the Pillow.
Saint Andrew and 'Tanders', Midland Lacemakers' Other Holiday
One 'keeps cattern' but one 'goes tandering'. We are not sure whether this semantic difference is meaningful. Nor are we certain why Saint Andrew became the patron of Midland lacemakers, who celebrated his feast either on 'new' (30th November) or 'old' (11 December) Saint Andrew's Day. We know no legend or song that would account for this role similar to those told about Saint or Queen Catherine, and to our knowledge Saint Andrew was not held in particular reverence by any European lacemakers. One Catholic website suggests that it was because the Saint Andrew's cross resembles intersecting threads… But we suspect that its origins are more ecclesiastical, because Saint Andrew is the patron of many of the churches in the diocese of Peterborough. It seems likely that Tanders was once a widely held village feast and that the association with lacemaking arose as other groups forgot, or were discouraged from, celebrating the saint.
Broughton village sign, featuring its tin can band on Tanders. We borrowed this image from the 'Broughton Bystander', and we hope the bystander does not mind.
In some parts of Northamptonshire Tanders was not associated with lacemakers. In Broughton 54 people were bound over to keep the peace in 1930 after a night 'tandering', and a further 14 Broughton residents received summons to appear before Kettering magistrates in 1931 for celebrating Tanders too loudly. The crowd, estimated by the police at 1000 strong, had wandered the streets after midnight, banging tin cans and saucepan lids. The background to this mass demonstration was that the Parish Council had banned 'tandering', despite an overwhelming local referendum in favour of its maintenance: Saint Andrew being the patron of village church. None of those arrested were lacemakers; in fact there was only one woman among them, a fourteen-year-old 'tailoress' who was discharged as too young to be put through the trauma of a magistrates' court hearing. The local magistrates obviously did not understand the custom, and in 1930 they assumed that this was a form of 'rough music' (a type of popular justice used to shame those who had broken the unspoken rules of community life, akin to the 'Skimmington Ride' which features in Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge). In 1931 the defendants hired a Northampton lawyer, Mr Burton, who argued, successfully, that Tanders was a traditional custom, always celebrated on the Sunday closest to 'Old Saint Andrew's'. The defendants were discharged on the basis that, as the magistrates instructed, 'nothing of the same kind occurs next year'. However, the revival of Tanders at Broughton continues still with a tin can band and other night-time revels (the website In search of traditional customs and ceremonies has some pictures of the band in action from 2014).
Although widespread across central and southern Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire (some indication of Tanders celebrations, mostly held by lacemakers, have been recorded from Blisworth, Carlton, Cranfield, Elstow, Hanslope, Harrold, Kimbolton (Huntingdonshire), Leighton Buzzard, Milton Malsor, North Crawley, Olney, Pavenham, Stevington, Spratton, Stoke Goldington, Turvey, Wilstead, and Yardley Hastings) the custom passed largely unnoticed until the mid-nineteenth century. The first detailed account we have found so far was provided by Thomas Sternberg in 1851:
Of all the numerous red-letter days which diversified the lives of our ancestors, this is the only one which has survived to our own times in anything like its pristine character. St Andrew appears to be looked upon by the lace-makers as their patron saint; which may perhaps account for the estimation in which his festival is held. In many places, where progress has not yet shown her face, the day is one of unbridled licence – a kind of miniature carnival. Village 'scholards' bar out their master; the lace-schools are deserted, and drinking and feasting prevail to a riotous extent. Towards evening the sober villagers appear to have become suddenly smitten with a violent taste for masquerading. Women may be seen walking about in male attire, while men and boys have donned the female dress, and visit each other's cottages, drinking hot 'eldern wine,' the staple beverage of the season. Then commences the Mumming, too often described to need mention here, save to note that in the rude drama performed in the Northamptonshire villages, St George has given place to George III, and the dragon, formerly the greatest attraction of the piece, been supplanted by Napoleon, who is annually killed on this night in personal encounter with the aforesaid monarch, to the intense delight and edification of the loyal audience.
Sternberg's describes something more boisterous than the 'cattern teas' described in our last post, but in many villages the two events passed off in a comparable manner, with 'washing the candle-block' the central element. This next description of 'Tanders' in Bedfordshire sounds quite like 'keeping catterns'. It was written by Mrs Kate Leila Edmonds from Summerfield, Carlton… not quite as grand as the Orlebars of Hinwick House who promoted Cattern in Podington over three generations, but still a local mover and shaker, president of the Carlton W.I. after the war, and a promoter of the lace industry. She wrote two extensive accounts of 'Tanders' for the Bedfordshire Times and Independent, one in 1900, the second in 1905. We have transcribed the first of these from The British Newspaper Archive. In neither does she give her source, but the memories are not her own; they describe events in the 1850s, whereas Mrs Edmonds was born in 1866. Both descriptions are strongly marked by nostalgia for simpler times of industrious peasants, a sentiment that often characterised attempts to revive the lace-trade:
Fifty years ago, in a little village of Bedfordshire there was great excitement amongst the pupils of the 'lace school' one cold November morning. The school dame had no need to scold that day for idleness, or for tardiness in arriving; all had come punctually, and worked with a will. For this was 'St. Andrews Day,' or as the lace-makers termed it 'Tanders' which brought a half holiday for them all. So the heads were bent over the lace pillows, and the quick fingers picked out the pins and stuck them in again rapidly that a novice would think it looked like play. Ah! but each pupil knew how much she can do in an hour; and she also knew that if she loitered or idled in the least, she could never make up for the lost time. For this lace making cannot be hurried; every stitch must receive the orthodox number of twists and crosses of the bobbins, to make good saleable lace. It was no uncommon thing for the 'lace buyer' to take off one half-penny in the yard if a lace was ill-made or not a pure white colour, and this was a consideration of much moment in days when halfpennies were so scarce. Holidays were almost as scarce as half-pennies; hence the unwonted attention of 'Tanders' morning fifty years ago. At last the welcome hour of twelve arrived, and one by one the pupils prepare to go home. Bobbins are carefully parted and pushed back each side of the pillow to prevent tangles. The 'drawer,' or narrow strip of patchwork is drawn over the lace to keep it spotless; a 'cover,' also made of print pieces, is pinned over the lace pillow, and work is over for the day. What a merry time they have! Let us look into one house and see how the lacemakers keep 'Tanders day.' The table, chairs, etc., are removed, and the 'house-place' cleared; for this is to be no stiff ceremonial party as we shall see. Someone has brought the 'blades' of a bobbin wheel, used in non-holiday times to stretch the skein of thread while winding. The 'blades' consist of two pieces of wood crossing each other in form like the letter X. The four points of the 'blades' being sharpened, a quarter of an apple is stuck on three points, and a piece of tallow candle on the fourth. Now the fun begins; the blades are suspended by a string from the ceiling. one of the party being blind-folded, the hands are tied behind, and as the blades are spun round the blind-folded one has to try to catch in the mouth a piece of apple from one of the points. Great is the fun and delight when, instead of a bite of apple, a bite of candle is taken. But much good temper prevails, and all are willing to take their turn at the 'snap-apple,' and so passes the amusement round. But now, the supply of apples being exhausted, and everybody tired of romping, the 'snap-apple' is abandoned, and the making of 'Tanders' sweets' begins. These were days when dentists were almost unknown to country folk. Was this due to the fact that sugar was 5d a lb., and sweets regarded as a great luxury for the children? Whether this was so or not, the 'Tanders' sweets' were good and wholesome, and coming only once a year they were in the eyes of the youngsters delicious. Brown sugar, and a very small lump of butter were the ingredients used in making the sweets, and until the boiling process was over everyone was in a state of great excitement and fear, lest the sweets should 'turn to sugar' and burn. The boiled sugar being poured on to a floured dish, each one had a hand in rolling or cutting sweets, and putting them by to cool.
The next morning was a trying time to the School Dame. Every lace-maker brought specimen's of 'Tander's sweets'; some burnt black, some sugary, some clear as candy, and all exceedingly sticky. In vain does the School Dame threaten to 'keep in' and 'tell your mother.' The delinquents still eat sweets and muse on the joys of 'Tander's Day,' thinking dismally what a pity it is that they have to wait a whole year before it comes again. Is it a pity? I think not.
A lacemaker's bobbin winder from the Pitt Rivers Museum (1911.29.17). It was collected by Percy Manning from Maria Woods of Launton near Bicester (Oxon) in 1894. The blades suggest a St Andrew's Cross, perhaps the reason for its use in games on Tanders.
Mrs Edmonds' second article ended with an impassioned plea: 'Wake up, English lace-makers? Teach your children all you know yourselves, and save the English lace trade from going out of the villages where it has been made for generations.' Although probably not a lacemaker herself, her description of 'snap apple' and 'Tanders sweets' tally with other accounts. The reference to a school holiday may account for why lacemakers were among the last celebrators of Saint Andrew's Day, as they were of St Catherine's. The lace-school institutionalised memory of these holidays, and gave young lacemakers an incentive to maintain them. Hence the well-known account of 'barring out' at Spratton lace school, written in the 1890s but referring to events in the 1850s:
On S. Andrew's Day they had a curious custom to seize the opportunity of the mistress leaving the room and then lock her out, and on her return they sang,
Pardon Mistress, Pardon Master, Pardon for a pin;
If you won't give a holiday, We will not let you in.
After a brief display of counterfeited anger the mistress would give way, and the pupils had their half-holiday. The mistress was pretty severe, carrying a cane, and often giving them a cut if they behaved badly, and it is more than likely, says my informant, that they from time to time deserved it.
(The author of this account, which first appeared in Northamptonshire Notes and Queries in 1892, was Margaret Emily Roberts, the daughter of the vicar of Saint Andrew's, Spratton, a lace teacher and active in the Midland Lace Association.)
Several accounts of Tanders mention a special cake consumed on that day. Pavenham W.I. contributed a recipe for a 'Tandra cake' to the 1948 Cookery Book of Traditional Dishes. We have still not tracked this down, but in the meantime here is Julia Jones' and Barbara Deer's recipe for a St Andrew's Cake from Cattern Cakes and Lace. A Calendar of Feasts:
1lb/450g plain flour
½ oz/15 g fresh or ½ tablespoon dried yeast
1 teaspoon caster sugar
½ pint/300 ml warm water
1 egg beaten
4oz/100g lard, melted
4oz/100g currants
4oz/100 g sugar
1 oz diced crystallized lemon peel
Oven 180 degrees C.
Sift the flour and salt into a bowl.
Cream the yeast with the teaspoon of sugar and blend in the water.
Leave the yeast to froth and bubble, then mix with the beaten egg and add to the flour.
Pour in the cooled, melted lard, and mix until smooth.
Knead well, cover and leave to double in size.
Knock back the dough and knead in the currants, sugar, and peel.
Transfer to a greased 2lb/1kg loaf tin.
Leave to rise until the dough reaches the top of the tin. 20-30 mins.
Then back to oven for 60-70 mins until well risen and golden.
Cool on a wire rack.
Slice and serve with butter.
Nicolette 'enjoying' David's attempts to bake a Tanders cake.
Anne Elizabeth Baker, Glossary of Northamptonshire Words and Phrases, With Examples of their Colloquial Use, And Illustrations from Various Authors: To Which are Added, the Customs of the County (London: John Russell Smith, 1854).
Kate Leila Edmonds, 'The Lace Makers' Patron Saint. Fifty Years Ago', Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 16 February 1900.
Kate Leila Edmonds, 'St. Andrew's Day or "Tanders",' Bedfordshire Times and Independent, 24 November, 1905.
Rev. E.R. Grant (Unitarian minister of Northampton), text of talk given on 'The Legends and Folk-Lore of Northamptonshire' at Northampton Town Hall, reported in the Northampton Mercury, 13 March 1880.
Dorothy Grimes, Like Dew Before the Sun. Life and Language in Northamptonshire (Northampton: Dorothy Grimes, 1991).
Julia Jones and Barbara Deer, Cattern Cakes and Lace: A Calendar of Feasts (London: Dorling Kindersley, 1987).
'M.E.R' [Margaret Emily Roberts], 'Spratton Lace School', Northamptonshire Notes and Queries, 4, 1892.
'Tin Can Band in Court: Broughton Mummers who Celebrated "Tander",' Northampton Mercury, 2 January 1931.
Thomas Sternberg, The Dialect and Folk-Lore of Northamptonshire (London & Northampton: John Russell Smith, 1851).
Thomas Wright, The Romance of the Lace Pillow (Olney: H.H. Armstrong, 1919).
Of Saints, Queens and 'Cattern Cakes': Saint Catherine's Day, the Lacemakers' Holiday
In Lacemakers' folklore, Lacemakers' holidays, Lacemakers' songs
25 November is the Feast of Saint Catherine, and historically a holiday for the Midlands lacemakers, particularly those in Buckinghamshire and some northern parts of Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire. (Lacemakers in the southern and central parts of the latter counties tended to celebrate Saint Andrew's Day instead; we deal with this holiday on his feast, 30 November.)
According to the 'official' legend — and we'll see that lacemakers, and in fact almost everybody else who celebrated her feast, told a rather different story — Saint Catherine was a virgin martyr from early fourth century Alexandria in Egypt. Her father was the Roman governor of the province, but Catherine was a philosopher and Christian convert. She refused to submit first to the persecutions of Emperor Maxentius, then to his lascivious attentions, declaring that she was the bride of Christ. Infuriated, Maxentius ordered that she be broken on a wheel, but the device fell apart at her touch. Finally he had her beheaded.
Lucas Cranach the Elder, c. 1504-9, 'The Martyrdom of St. Catherine'. The painting is in the collection of the Ráday Library of the Reformed Church, Budapest (source Wikipedia Commons)
Although there is little historical evidence for Catherine, she was one of the most popular saints in both the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and her cult clearly survived the Protestant Reformation in England. Because her attribute is the wheel, she became the patron of wheelwrights, and by extension carpenters, as well as ropemakers and spinners. She was the patron of both young women and old maids (spinsters in another sense), and as these groups formed the labour force for the needle trades, her patronage extended to all involved in textile production. The 'bal de Sainte Catherine' is still an important event in the calendar of the Paris fashion houses.[1]
A 'Catherinette' celebrating Saint Catherine's Day in early C20 France. We might explain the significance of the hat and the colours yellow and green in a future blog. For further examples of how the French celebrate Saint Catherine's Day, see Guy Larcy's pinterest board 'Fête Sainte Catherine'.
In England, 'keeping Cattern' —that is celebrating Saint Catherine's Day — was by no means confined to lacemakers. Even after the Reformation, women in the workhouse would receive a dole in order to 'keep Cattern'.[2] In some towns, such as Ware and Peterborough, women — in the latter town principally the female inmates of the workhouse — paraded behind their own 'queen', singing:
Here comes Queen Catherine, as fine as any queen,
With a coach and six horses, a-coming to be seen,
And a-spinning we will go, will go,
And a-spinning we will go.
No doubt this was an opportunity to raise money for a feast later in the day.[3] In other parts of the country, particularly Worcestershire (though the custom has been recorded elsewhere), it was young children who used this day as an opportunity to tramp from house to house collecting apples and ale, aided by a rhyme such as this one:
Catherine and Clement be here, be here,
Some of your apples and some of your beer;
Some for Peter, and some for Paul,
And some for Him that made us all.
Clement was good old man,
For his sake give us some,
None of the worst but some of the best,
And God will send your soul to rest![4]
Saint Clement's feast falls on 23 November and was another important holiday, though usually observed in different regions to Saint Catherine's. A Sussex version of this rhyme names 'Cattern' as the mother of 'Clemen', an unlikely relationship for a virgin saint![5] Other indications of her widespread popularity are a recipe for a Cattern pie from Somerset,[6] and Cattern Fair held outside Guildford, where Cattern cakes were sold well into the nineteenth century.[7]
However, by the late nineteenth century, lacemakers were almost the only group to still hold her in honour. Occasionally in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire the mummers who put on the traditional drama of Saint George and the Turkish Knight in the run-up to Christmas were called 'Katterners', though any specific memory of Saint Catherine seems to have been forgotten.[8] Newspaper accounts suggest that 'Cattern' was still kept by carpenters in Chatteris (Cambridgeshire) in the 1860s,[9] and the farmer Mr Lot Arnsby of Raunds (Northamptonshire), though a Baptist, still treated his labourers to cakes and ale on Saint Catherine's Day in the 1870s.[10] In both cases, the feast was held on 6 December, 'Old Saint Catherine's', that is date of her feast before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in Britain in 1752 had entailed the loss of eleven days. These examples are very isolated compared with the numerous newspaper mentions of lacemakers 'keeping Cattern', sometimes on Old and sometimes on New Saint Catherine's Day. In fact the feast seems to have undergone periodic revivals among lacemakers, often sponsored by local landowners and patrons of the lace industry.
Although there are references to women 'Catherning' or 'keeping Catterns' from the seventeenth and eighteenth century,[11] the earliest reference we have so far found to this day as a special feast among lacemakers is in a short article in Notes and Queries for May 1862 by 'A.A.' (we have not identified the initials) reporting that:
In Buckinghamshire, on Cattern Day (St. Catherine's, 25th of November,) these hard-working people hold merry-makings, and eat a sort of cakes they call 'wigs,' and drink ale. The tradition says it is in remembrance of a Queen Catharine; who, when the trade was dull, burnt all her lace, and ordered new to be made.[12]
Although A.A. asked readers who this Queen might have been, the topic went quiet in that journal until in 1868. Interest was revived then by a review in The Quarterly Review of Mrs Bury Palliser's 1865 A History of Lace, in which the author claimed (and in this the reviewer was following Mrs Palliser's lead) that:
Catherine of Aragon, according to tradition, introduced the art of making lace into Bedfordshire during her sojourn at Ampthill in 1531-33. She was a great adept in the arts of the needle. Until quite lately the lace-makers kept 'Cattern's-day' as the holiday of their craft, in memory of the good Queen Catherine.[13]
On what authority did Mrs Bury Palliser make this statement, asked J.M. Cowper in Notes and Queries?[14] The several responses did not resolve that issue, but they did provide plenty of evidence for lacemakers 'keeping Catterns'. For example, John Plummer, who originally came from Kettering, reported that the feast
is known to be kept, for several generations, throughout the whole of Northamptonshire lace-making districts, as well as in those of Bedfordshire. By some it is called 'candle-day,' from its forming the commencement of the season for working at lacemaking by candle-light.[15]
He reiterated the tradition that 'Queen Katherine was a great friend to the lacemakers', but suggested that instead of Catherine of Aragon, Catherine Parr was meant, because the Parrs were a Northamptonshire family. However later in the same month A.A. returned to the topic and reiterated his story, this time definitely identifying the lace-burning queen as Catherine of Aragon.[16]
Readers will have noticed that, so far, there is no reference to a saint in any of these lacemakers' celebrations, only queens. Two different stories were told. The oldest, though how old we are uncertain, concerns a queen burning her lace in order to create more work for lacemakers. A ballad, claimed as traditional (though we have our doubts) was apparently sung at a Kattern Day revival in Marsh Gibbon in 1905:
Queen Katherine loved to deck with lace
The royal robes she wore;
But though she loved to wear her lace,
She loved the lace-folk more.
So now for good Queen Katherine's sake
Put bones and sticks away,
And keep the yearly festival
And sing on 'Kattern Day.'[17]
As one recent historian has written, this story encapsulates a feminine, utopian economy which completely denies the laws of supply and demand, and in which the great existed to provide work for the small, and 'harmoniously brings together the otherwise separate processes of production and consumption."'18]
The second story, crediting Queen Catherine of Aragon as the original teacher of lace in England, is slightly later in origin but far more widespread, as it was regularly repeated in newspaper accounts in the late nineteenth century, became the focus of W.I. lectures and pageants in the twentieth, and is now regularly repeated on the web. This continuing tradition owes everything to Mrs Palliser's reputation as a reliable historian of lace, it has no basis in any oral tradition linking that queen with the genesis of the lace industry. Mrs Palliser inferred from rather vague lacemakers' traditions concerning a 'good queen who protected their craft', that the art of lace-working, as it then existed, was first imparted to the peasantry of Bedfordshire, as a means of subsistence, through the charity of Katherine of Aragon.'[19] To return to J.M. Cowper's question in Notes and Queries — on what authority had this claim been advanced — the answer is on no greater authority than Mrs Palliser's romantic inference. However, her invention has proved enormously popular, for it invoked a tradition of royal patronage of lace that was, at the time, still vital to the trade.
Catherine of Aragon by Lucas Hornebolte, now in the collection of the Duke of Buccleuch (the dukes of Buccleuch were Northamptonshire landowners as well as Scottish aristocracy; according to Rev Lindsay of Kettering, in the 1860s the then Duke of Buccleuch was responsible for promoting Katterns in that town). From Wikipedia Commons.
We doubt that Catterns had a connection to any English queen; rather it was the continuation of a Catholic saint's day feast in Protestant England. We cannot say when and where the tradition turned the saint into queen: it may have been a post-Reformation defensive measure, for it was permitted to celebrate royalty when Catholic saints had fallen into disrepute. However, it is worth pointing out that in the popular culture of Catholic Europe, Catherine was always imagined as a queen, or at least a princess. The first line of a song popular throughout Spain, France and Italy, and indeed much further afield, tells us that Catalina/Catherine/Caterina was a 'hija de un rey' (in Spanish), 'fille d'un roi' (in French), 'figlia di un re' (in Italian).[20] Sometimes she is specifically identified as the daughter of the king of Hungary; in all cases it is her father, not a Roman emperor, who is responsible for her martyrdom. And while Saint Catherine was not usually the named patron of European lacemakers, nonetheless European lacemakers knew and sang her story. For example, in an audio recording made by Jean Dumas in 1959, you can hear Virginie Granouillet, a seventy-year-old lacemaker from Roche-en-Régnier (Haute-Loire), accompanying her bobbins with a version of the song.[21]
Virginie Granouillet, lacemaker and singer of Roche-en-Régnier (Haute-Loire). The photo, c. 1960, was taken by the song collector Jean Dumas. Dumas' recordings of 178 of Virginie's songs, including 'Sainte Catherine', are now available online.
How did lacemakers 'keep Catterns'? There are vague references to an earlier period when women dressed up in male attire and indulged in unfettered merry-making, including amorous (or violent) advances to passing men, a moment of female license, but we have no specific information.[22] The fullest description comes from Mrs Frederica Orlebar of Hinwick House, Podington (Bedfordshire) who wrote an account of an attempted revival in 1887 — which would form the template for further revivals in 1906 and 1937.[23] The Orlebars were landed gentry who had provided leadership to the county, as magistrates, M.P.s and masters of the hunt for several generations. Their patronage of the lace industry was part and parcel of this paternalistic concern for their tenants and electors. Catherine Channer used the manuscript 'Orlebar Chronicles' to write her 1900 account:
Cattern Tea.
In Podington and neighbouring villages the lacemakers have, within the memory of middle-aged people, 'kept Cattern', on December 6th – St. Catherine's Day (Old Style).
I believe it was Catherine of Aragon who used to drink the waters of a mineral spring in Wellingborough, and who (as is supposed) introduced lace-making into Beds. The poor people know nothing of the Queen, only state that it was an old custom to keep 'Cattern.'
The way was for the women to club together for a tea, paying 6d. apiece, which they could well afford when their lace brought them in 5s. or 6s. a week. The tea-drinking ceremony was called 'washing the candle-block,' but this was merely an expression. It really consisted in getting through a great deal of gossip, tea, and Cattern cakes – seed cakes of large size. Sugar balls went round as a matter of course. After tea they danced, just one old man whistling or fiddling for them, and 'they enjoyed themselves like queens!
The entertainment ended with the cutting of a large apple pie, which they divided for supper. Their usual bedtime was about eight o'clock.[24]
This may be more staid than earlier celebrations, but some of the elements referred to here come up in other accounts too. The first is that it was a communal women's festival: a man might provide the music but the lacemakers danced with each other. Money was pooled to provide food, drink and entertainment: rabbit or steak with onion sauce, followed by pies and cakes. Cattern pies — sometimes containing mincemeat, sometimes apples (as we have seen, Catterners collected apples) — might be arranged in the shape of a wheel, with partakers being offered a 'spoke'.[25] Mrs Orlebar quoted a rhyme, apparently sung by the nightwatchman of Kettering, which made the pies the centrepiece of the celebration:
Rise, maids arise!
Bake your Cattern pies!
Bake enough, and bake no waste,
So that the old bell-man may have a taste!
Cattern cakes appear to be a different thing to a Cattern pie: the cakes come in various descriptions but the recipes almost always contain caraway seeds, which connects them to the 'soul cakes' consumed at Halloween in other parts of the country. The drink mentioned in connection with these festivities was methleglin, a honey mead termed 'meytheagle' in the Bedfordshire dialect.[26]
The term 'washing' or 'wetting the candle-block' explains why Plummer called this a 'candle-day'. The holiday was not just the celebration of the patroness of lacemakers, it was the ritual marking of an important moment in the lacemakers' year, for this was the day when candles, objects of enormous expense, could legitimately be used for evening work. These kind of candle feasts, opening and closing the period of neighbourly winter evening work gatherings, were quite common all over Europe. Among English lacemakers the closing day of the season appears to have been Candlemas (2 February), though it was not celebrated as much as Catterns.[27] This practice of working together to share light and heat also explains why Catterns was a communal feast. A candle-block provided light not for one lacemaker but many: a single candle would be mounted in the centre of several glass globes or flasks filled with snow-water, which would concentrate the light on the pillows of several lacemakers (the highest number of users of a single candle that we have so far encountered is eighteen!). But lacemakers did not only symbolically 'wash' the candleblock, they also leapt over it. According to John Aubrey, back in the 1680s, Oxfordshire girls (not specifically lacemakers) would 'set a candle in the middle of the room in a candlestick, and then draw up their coats into the form of breaches [another hint at cross-dressing], and dance over the candle back and forth, with these words':
The tailor of Biciter [Bicester] He has but one eye
He cannot cut a pair of green galagaskins
If he were to die.
Aubrey thought the custom was obsolete even in his time, but in fact the same game, and the same rhyme, have been recorded as late as 1910.[28]
Thomas Wright notes a different song being chanted by pupils jumping the candlestick in the lace schools at Wendover:
Wallflowers, Wallflowers, growing up so high,
All young maidens surely have to die;
Excepting Emma Caudrey, she's the best of all.
She can dance and she can skip,
She can turn the candlestick.
Turn, turn, turn your face to the wall again[29]
Given the height of a lighted candle on a block players ran significant risks during this game. It is interesting to observe that even on holiday, lacemakers insist on the presence of death.
A lacemakers' candle block or 'flash stool', with central candle and four light condensing flasks or 'flashes'. This one is from Cowper and Newton Museum, Olney. Catterns and Tanders were 'candle days', the official beginning of the season of evening work by candlelight.
We can't leave Catterns without giving a recipe for Cattern cakes. In 1948, Podington, Hinwick and Farndish Women's Institute provided a recipe for the Cookery Book of Traditional Dishes which accompanied the 'Home Produce Exhibition'.[30] We have not been able to track down a copy of this, so we have borrowed a recipe from the North Downs Lacemakers' website[31]:
9oz /275g self raising flour
1 oz/25g currants
2oz/50g ground almonds
2 teaspoons caraway seeds
7oz/200g caster sugar
4oz/100g melted butter
1 medium egg, beaten
A little extra sugar and cinnamon for sprinkling
Sift the flour and cinnamon into a bowl and stir in currants, almonds, caraway seeds and sugar.
Add the melted butter and beaten egg, mix well to give a soft dough (add a little milk if too dry).
Roll out on a floured board into a rectangle, about 12×10 inches/30x25cm.
Brush the dough with water and sprinkle with the extra sugar and cinnamon.
Roll up like a swiss roll and cut into ¾ inch/2cm slices.
Place on a greased baking tray spaced well apart and bake for 10 minutes. Oven set at 200 degrees C /400 degrees F/Gas 6.
We've tried it, and the results were very tasty, though they didn't look as much like Catherine Wheels as we had intended.
A sampling of David's Cattern cakes. They were quite popular.
[1] See Ann Monjaret's wonderful study, La Sainte Catherine: Culture festive dans l'entreprise (Paris, 1997).
[2] Robert Gibbs refers to an entry in the Aylesbury overseers' accounts for 1672: A Historyof Aylesbury with the Borough and Hundreds, The Hamlet of Walton, and The Electoral Division. Aylesbury, Bucks Advertiser, 1885
[3] A. R. Wright, British Calendar Customs, ed. T. E. Lones, (Folk-Lore Society, 1936), iii. 108, 144. The tune, presumably, is 'A begging we will go'. Pete Castle recorded a version of the song on the album 'False Waters'. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABjMfqjl2pQ
[4] James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales of England (London, 1849) p. 238. For a map of 'Catterning' in the West Midlands See Charlotte S. Burne. 'Souling, Clementing, and Catterning. Three November Customs of the Western Midlands', Folk-Lore 25:3 (1914), p. 285.
[5] William Douglas Parish, A Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect and Collection of Provincialisms in Use in the County of Sussex (Lewes, 1875), p.25: 'Catterning'.
[6] Margaret Baker. Folklore and Customs of Rural England (Newton Abbot, 1974), p. 132.
[7] A.J.M. 'Catherine Hill in Surrey', Notes and Queries 7th series II, 14 August 1886.
[8] Walter Rose, Good Neighbours. Some Recollections of an English Village and its People, Cambridge UP, 1943, pp. 131-5 (based on his experiences in Haddenham, Bucks). Fred Hamer recorded the same usage in Bedfordshire, though the 'Folk Play Distribution Map: Actors' Names' on Peter Millington's Master Mummers Website suggests it was quite rare even in this region: http://www.mastermummers.org/atlas/ActorsNames.php?maptype=outline&go=Go+%3E%3E
[9] Cambridge Independent Press, Saturday 8 December 1860.
[10] Peterborough Advertiser, 13 December 1879.
[11] Charles Lamotte, An Essay upon Poetry and Painting, with Relation to the Sacred and Profane History (London, 1730), p. 126.
[12] A.A., 'Lace-Makers' Custom: Wigs, A Sort of Cake', Notes and Queries 3rd series I, 17 May, 1862, p. 387.
[13] 'History of Lace, by Mrs Bury Palliser', review in The Quarterly Review 125 (July-Oct., 1868): pp. 166-188, p. 168.
[14] J.M. Cowper, 'Cattern's Day', Notes and Queries 4th series II, 29 August, 1868, p. 201.
[15] John Plummer, 'Kattern's Day', Notes and Queries 4th series II. 3 October, 1868., p. 333.
[16] A.A. 'Kattern's Day', Notes and Queries 4th series II, 17 October, 1868, p. 377.
[17] Buckingham Advertiser and Free Press, Saturday 2 December 1905.
[18] Elaine Freedgood, '"Fine Fingers": Victorian Handmade Lace and Utopian Consumption', Victorian Studies 45 (2003), p. 637.
[19] Fanny Bury Palliser, A History of Lace (2nd edition: London, 1869), p. 326.
[20] The Pan-Hispanic Ballad Project lists 42 versions of IGRH song-type 0126 'Santa Catalina' https://depts.washington.edu/hisprom/optional/balladaction.php?igrh=0126 ; the Coirault catalogue of French folk songs likewise lists numerous versions of song-type 8906 'Le martyre de sainte Catherine'; there is no equivalent Italian catalogue of folk-songs, but it is quite a common children's song: in our experience all Italians know of it.
[21] http://patrimoine-oral.org/dyn/portal/index.seam?aloId=15575&page=alo&fonds=3
[22] Christina Hole. A Dictionary of British Folk Customs. Hutchinson, 1976
[23] Northampton Mercury, Friday 14 December 1906; Northampton Mercury, Friday 26 February 1937.
[24] Catherine C. Channer and Margaret E. Roberts, Lace-making in the Midlands, Past and Present (London, 1900), pp. 70-71.
[25] A recipe is offered in Joanna Bogle, A Book of Feasts and Seasons (Leominster, 1992).
[26] 'Wetting the Candleblock', Bedfordshire Mercury, Friday 13 December 1912.
[27] Thomas Wright, The Romance of the Lace PillowOlney, Bucks: H.H. Armstrong, 1919, p. 202.
[28] James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales: A Sequel to the Nursery Rhymes of England (London, 1849), p.231, quoting from the manuscript of Aubrey's Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme; Arthur R. Wright and T.E. Lones, British Calendar Customs: England (London, 1940), vol. 3, p. 178.
[29] Thomas Wright, The Romance of the Lace Pillow (Olney, 1919), p. 195. Obviously the name used depends on the player. A similar rhyme was recorded by Fred Hamer at Biddenham in Bedfordshire.
[30] 'Women's Institutes. Traditional Dishes for National Exhibition. Bedfordshire's Contributions', Bedfordshire Times and Independent, Friday 24 September 1948
[31] http://www.northdownslacemakers.org.uk/features/2007/catterns-day.php A very similar recipe is provided in Julia Jones and Barbara Deer, Cattern Cakes and Lace: A Calender of Feasts (London, 1987).
Lacemakers' Songs: The Ballads of 'Sir Hugh' and 'Long Lankin'
On 8th October 2015
In the journal Notes and Queries for 22 August 1868 there appeared the following request from the Shakespearean scholar Sidney Beisly (author of Shakespere's Garden, among other things):
"The song we had last night.
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."
Twelfth Night, Act II, Sc. 4.
I should like to know if any of the songs which the lacemakers of times past sung are in existence, and where they are to be found. Am I right in believing that the free maids, noticed by Shakespeare in the above passage, were lacemakers? Any information on this subject will oblige
Over the next few months we intend to do our best to belatedly satisfy his interest, but we'll start with the articles in Notes and Queries which prompted and responded to Beisly's letter. In its nineteenth-century heyday, Notes and Queries was a meeting point for antiquarians, literacy scholars and budding folklorists. In fact the term folk-lore was coined in 1846 by the journal's founding editor, William Thoms. In 1868, folksong collecting was not an established field of endeavour in England, unlike Scotland. The first English folk-song revival would have to wait for the turn of the century. But there were a few Victorian enthusiasts connected by journals like Notes & Queries, and of course the Shakespearean reference helped, for it provided folk-songs with their letter of literary nobility. Who could dismiss what the bard himself had deigned to notice?
There are two elements of Shakespeare's depiction that are borne out by these nineteenth-century correspondents. Firstly, lacemakers had an established taste for old songs, even at the beginning of the seventeenth century when the trade was relatively new in England. Secondly, they had a penchant for the tragic and ghoulish, for the song the Feste sings in response to Duke Orsino's injunction, starts:
Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid….
We would hazard that the clown's song is but the last two verses of a longer narrative ballad, but if so we have not been able to discover which one. However, it was just such ballads — narrative in structure, presumed old in date, heart-rending in content — that excited the interest of nineteenth-century song collectors.
Most of the information on lacemakers' songs in Notes and Queries precedes Beisly's intervention. In the edition of 4 July 1868 'J.L.C' of Hanley Staffordshire inserted the following note (We have not been able to identify J.L.C., presumably he was not the genealogist Joseph Lemanuel Chester, a regular contributor under these initials, as he grew up in America):
A LACEMAKER'S SONG. — When I was a child, rising six years, my Northamptonshire nurse used to sing the following ditty to me as she rattled her bobbins over her lace-pillow:
"It rains, it rains in merry Scotland;
It rains both great and small,
And all the schoolboys in merry Scotland
Must needs to play at ball.
They tost their balls so high, so high,
They tost their balls so high,
The tost them over the Jews' castel,
The Jews they lay so low.
The Jews came up to Storling Green:
'Come hither, come hither, you young sireen,
And fetch your ball again.'
'I will not come, and I dare not come
Without my schoolfellows all,
For fear I should meet my mother by the way,
And cause my blood to fall.'
She showed him an apple as green as grass,
She gave him a sugar-plum sweet;
She laid him on the dresser board,
And stuck him like a sheep.
'A Bible at my head, my mother,
A Testament at my feet;
And every corner you get at
My spirit you shall meet.'"
This is a version of the Ballad of 'Sir Hugh', or 'The Jew's Daughter' (Child 155, Roud 73, for the folk-song aficionados), an example of the anti-Semitic accusation of ritual murder which, it appears, originated in medieval England before spreading to Europe and beyond with horrific consequences, unfortunately not altogether relegated to the past. But for the moment we will concern ourselves only with the ballad, which tends to emphasise the murder rather than the ritual part of the story, as it was sung by lacemakers.
Thomas Percy's 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, is the earliest source for the ballad 'Sir Hugh' (from Wikipedia Commons).
Lacemakers plural, because J.L.C.'s was not the first version of 'The Ballad of Sir Hugh' to appear in Notes and Queries. In the edition of 15 October 1853, C. Clifton Barry had asked "Why does not some one write a Minstrelsy of the Midland Counties", before observing that the material was just as rich, and oddly akin to the ballads of Scotland (which were far better known even south of the border, thanks to the publishing endeavours of Walter Scott, James Hogg, William Motherwell, David Herd, Peter Buchan and many others). This Scottish tincture he had noticed in Gloucestershire and Warwickshire in versions of the drunken cuckold song 'Our Goodman' (Child 274, Roud 144) and the infanticide ballad 'The Cruel Mother' (Child 20, Roud 9). In response 'B.H.C.' (almost certainly Benjamin Harris Cowper, a biblical scholar, born in Wellingborough in 1822) wrote in on 24 December 1853 with the following:
THE BALLAD OF SIR HUGH, ETC.
The fact mentioned by your correspondent C. CLIFTON BARRY, at p. 357., as to the affinity of Midland songs and ballads to those of Scotland, I have often observed, and among the striking instances of it which could be adduced, the following may be named, as well known in Northamptonshire:
"It rains, it rains, in merry Scotland;
It rains both great and small;
And all the schoolfellows in merry Scotland
Must needs go and play at ball.
"They tossed the ball so high, so high,
And yet it came down so low;
They tossed it over the old Jew's gates,
And broke the old Jew's window.
"The old Jew's daughter she came out;
Was clothed all in green;
'Come hither, come hither, thou young Sir Hugh,
"'I dare not come, I dare not come,
Unless my schoolfellows come all;
And I shall be flogged when I get home,
For losing of my ball.'
"She 'ticed him with an apple so red,
And likewise with a fig:
And sticked him like a pig.
"The thickest of blood did first come out,
The second came out so thin;
The third that came was his dear heart's blood,
Where all his life lay in."
I write this from memory: it is but a fragment of the whole, which I think is printed, with variations, in Percy's Reliques. It is also worthy of remark, that there is a resemblance also between the words which occur in provincialisms in the same district, and some of those which are used in Scotland; e.g. whemble or whommel (sometimes not aspirated, and pronounced wemble), to turn upside down, as a dish. This word is Scotch, although they do not pronounce the b any more than in Campbell, which sounds very much like Camel.
Remains of the shrine to 'Little Saint Hugh' at Lincoln Cathedral (from Wikipedia Commons).
Cowper does not say that the singer was a lacemaker, but we can probably infer this from his later contributions to Notes and Queries. For example, on 22 December 1855, he returned to this ballad:
THE BALLAD OF SIR HUGH.
In Vol. viii., p. 614., six verses of this ballad will be found contributed by myself. In replay to inquiries since made, I have received six verses and a half additional. I copy these from the original MS. of "an old lacemaker, who obliged me with these lines," as my informant says. I have corrected errors of orthography and arrangement. For the sake of the variations I copy the whole.
"It rains, it rains, in merry Scotland,
Both little, great and small;
With that it came down so low;
Was clothed all in green.
'Come hither, come hither, you young Sir Hugh,
"'I dare not come, nor will I come,
Without my schoolfellows come all;
And I shall be beaten when I go home,
She threw him over the dresser board,
"The first came out the thickest of blood,
The third that came the child's heart-blood,
Where'er his life lay in.
"'O spare my life! O spare my life!
O spare my life!' said he:
'If ever I live to be a young man,
I'll do as good chare for thee.
"'I'll do as good chare for thy true love
As ever I did for the King;
I will scour a basin as bright as silver,
To let your heart-blood run in.'
"When eleven o'clock was past and gone,
And all the schoolfellows came home,
Every mother had her own child,
But young Sir Hugh's mother had none.
"She went up Lincoln and down Lincoln,
And all about Lincoln street,
With her small wand in her right hand,
Thinking of her child to meet.
"She went till she came to the old Jew's gate,
She knocked with the ring;
Who should be so ready as th' old Jew herself
To rise and let her in.
"'What news, fair maid? what news, fair maid?
What news have you brought me?'
"'Have you seen any of my child to-day,
Or any of the rest of my kin?'
'No, I've seen none of your child to-day,
Nor none of the rest of your kin.'"
I am very anxious to complete this ballad from Northamptonshire; and I again renew my request that some of your correspondents will endeavour to supply what is deficient. The "old lacemaker" would have given more, but she could not. The pure Saxon of this ballad is beautiful.
Cowper got no answer to his request until J.L.C.'s entry in 1868 jogged the memory of Edward Peacock (1831-1915) of Bottesford Manor, near Lincoln. He supplied a full version of the ballad from a Mr W.C. Atkinson of Brigg, Lincolnshire (who had previously published it in The Athenaeum of 19 January 1867, though whether he heard it or discovered a manuscript or print version is not clear). This fills in some of the elements of the narrative: the mother calls her son and his body miraculously speaks, enabling her to find it hidden in a "deep draw-well." In other versions bells ring and books read themselves as the body is transported. Peacock explained in his article that the ballad bears some relation to events that occurred in 1255 in Lincoln, when the Jews of that city were accused of the ritual murder of a Christian boy, Hugh son of Beatrice, the future 'Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln'. Nineteen members of the Jewish community would be executed in consequence. The story occurs in three contemporary chronicles, as well as in an Anglo-Norman ballad, and would be referred to in Chaucer's 'The Prioress's Tale'. It is only one of several medieval child saint legends of a related kind (William of Norwich, Robert of Bury St Edmunds, Harold of Gloucester…). Yet while the story was old, there is no record of this particular ballad text until Thomas Percy printed a copy, supposedly from a Scottish manuscript, in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our Earlier Poets (1765). Thereafter, the ballad has been recorded frequently, in Scotland, England, Ireland and the United States; it has 295 entries in the Roud Folksong Index, the source of the Roud numbers given in this article (and available online at the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library a mine of information on everything related to folk music). The modern ballad differs considerably from the medieval saints' legends, not least in the primary role played by a woman as siren and murderer.
Lacemakers continued to sing this song while making lace well into the later nineteenth century, for Thomas Wright (1859-1936) of Olney, in The Romance of the Lace Pillow (1919) recorded versions from Weston-under-Wood and Haddenham, both in Buckinghamshire, which were used as lace tells in the lace schools. This is the text of one he gave in full.
THE JEWESS MAIDEN.
There was a Jewess maiden, or so my story states,
Who beckoned to a little boy who peeped between her gates.
An apple so red, a plum so sweet, she gave him from her tree;
She dazzled his eyes with a garry gold ring that was so fair to see.
And when she got him in the gates she laughed, he knew not why,
And uttered many wicked words and told him he must die.
She laid him on the dresser board, no mercy then she showed,
But stabbed him with a knife and stabbed until the life-blood flowed.
Wright emphasised that lacemakers' songs and tells, particularly those from Buckinghamshire, "abound in allusions to coffins, shrouds, corpses, bones, lightning flashes, sardonic laughter, hyena-like cries, and other lurid, gruesome, clammy or grizzly terrors". The next lacemakers' song to appear in Notes and Queries makes his point very aptly.
Thomas Wright, schoolteacher and writer of Olney, Buckinghamshire (from Olney and District Historical Society website).
J.L.C.'s reference to the ballad of 'Sir Hugh' prompted Cowper to return to the theme of lacemakers' songs in Notes and Queries of 19 September 1868.
LACEMAKERS' SONGS: "LONG LANKIN."
Forty years ago, when in Northamptonshire, I used to hear the lacemakers sing the now well-known ballad of "Hugh of Lincoln" ("It rains, it rains," etc.) Another, which I have never seen in print, but which I happen to have in MS., is "Long Lankin," of which I send a copy. Like the damsels whom Shakespeare represents as "chanting" the song which the Clown proceeds to sing (in Twelfth Night, Act II., c. 4), the equally "free maids" of my childhood's days often chanted, rather than sung, as they sat in rows "in the sun" or in the "lace-school," an institution which is perhaps effete. But Shakespeare's lacemakers made "bone lace," and not "bobbin lace," with which only I am acquainted. I could perhaps remember some few other ditties which the lacemakers used to sing, though my impression is that they were often mere childish nursery rhymes like "Sing a song of sixpence." Such probably was one which began in this way:
"I had a little nutting-tree,
And nothing would it bear
But little silver nutmegs
For Galligolden fair"
of which I recollect no more, but that, as a little boy, I used to tell them to say "nutmeg-tree," which they obstinately refused to do. By-the-way, there was a long piece about "Death and the Lady," which the "free maids" used to chant. This exhausts my present reminiscences so I shall proceed to give you "Long Lankin": —
"Said my lord to his lady as he got on his horse.
'Take care of Long Lankin, who lives in the moss.'
Said my lord to his lady as he rode away,
'Take care of Long Lankin who lives in the clay.
The doors are all bolted, and the windows are pinned,
There is not a hole where a mouse can creep in.'
Then he kissed his fair lady as he rode away;
For he must be in London before break of day.
The doors were all bolted, the windows all pinned,
But one little window where Lankin crept in.
'Where's the lord of this house?' said Long Lankin.
'He is gone to fair London,' said the false nurse to him.
'Where's the lady of this house?' said Long Lankin.
'She's in her high chamber,' said the false nurse to him.
'Where's the young heir of this house?' said Long Lankin.
'He's asleep in his cradle,' said the false nurse to him.
'We'll prick him, we'll prick him all over with a pin,
And that will make your lady come down to him.'
They pricked him, they pricked him all over with a pin,
And the false nurse held a basin for the blood to drop in.
'O nurse! How you sleep, and O nurse how you snore!
You leave my son Johnson to cry and to roar!'
'I've tried him with suck, and I've tried him with pap;
Come down, my fair lady, and nurse him in your lap:
I've tried him with apple, and I've tried him with pear;
Come down, my fair lady and nurse him in your chair.'
'How can I come down, it's so late in the night,
And there's no fire burning, or lamp to give light?'
'You have three silver mantles as bright as the sun;
Come down, my fair lady, all by the light of one.'
'Oh! spare me, Long Lankin, spare me till twelve o'clock!
You shall have as much money as you can carry on your back.
Oh! spare me, Long Lankin, spare me one hour!
You shall have my daughter Nancy, she is a sweet flower.'
'Where is your daughter Nancy? she may do some good;
She can hold the golden basin to catch your heart's blood.'
Lady Nancy was sitting in her window so high,
And she saw her father as he was riding by:
'O father! O father! don't lay the blame on me;
It was the false nurse and Lankin who killed your lady.'
Then Lankin was hung on a gallows so high,
And the false nurse was burnt in a fire close by."
To the best of my recollection this copy is not quite complete, and it was sung with occasional ad libitum variations, as "Sally" or "Betsy" for Nancy. It is probable that inquiry in the lace-making districts would produce copies of other old ballads.
A mid-late nineteenth-century broadside of 'Death and the Lady' printed by G. Henson of Northampton (from Broadside Ballads Online, Bodleian Libraries)
Readers will probably be familiar with 'I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear' (Roud 3749). 'Death and the Lady' (Roud 1031) was a commonly encountered ballad — or rather ballads, for there are a number of different texts that share a very similar theme. It had often appeared on broadsides from the seventeenth century onwards, and was framed as a dialogue between a fine lady and Death, in which the certainty of the grave, and the judgement beyond, is gradually forced on the former. The final verse in the version supplied by Lucy Broadwood's English Traditional Songs and Carols (1908) returns us to subtitle of this website:
The grave's the market place where all must meet
Both rich and poor, as well as small and great;
If life were merchandise, that gold could buy,
The rich would live — only the poor would die.
'Long Lankin' (Child 93, Roud 6) had also previously appeared in Notes and Queries for 25 October 1856, when M.H.R. asked for information about the ballad 'Long Lankyn' "which is derived by tradition from the nurse of an ancestor of mine who heard it sung nearly a century ago in Northumberland". Lankin (or Lamkin, or Lammikin, or Beaulampkins, or Lambert Linkin, or Bold Rankin… he goes by many names) is a particularly ghoulish ballad, frequently recorded in the English (and Scots) speaking world. In longer versions of the ballad the eponymous villain is a mason who builds a castle for a nobleman, who subsequently forgets to pay his bills. Perhaps because of its brutality, commentators have often speculated on a medieval origin, but in fact the earliest recorded version, 'Long Longkin' was noted from one of his female parishioners by the Reverend Parsons of Wye, near Ashford in Kent, and sent to Thomas Percy of Reliques fame in 1775. Another version appeared the following year in the second edition of David Herd's Ancient Scottish Songs, Heroic Ballads etc.
Neither 'Sir Hugh' nor 'Long Lankin' were only, or even primarily, sung by lacemakers. There were part of the common ballad culture of the English and Scots speaking world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if not before. It may be worth mentioning that Thomas Percy, who wrote Reliques of Ancient English Poetry while vicar of Easton Maudit in Northamptonshire, close to local centres of lace-making, nonetheless never mentions the penchant of lacemakers for old songs. However, there are some good reasons why the contributors to Notes and Queries should associate these type of songs specifically with lacemakers. The practice of singing while lacemaking was noted by several commentators after Shakespeare. For instance, Thomas Sternberg (probably Vincent Thomas, 1831-1880, who grew up in Northampton and was later librarian of Leeds Library), in his The Dialect and Folk-Lore of Northamptonshire (1851) wrote under the entry 'Lace-Songs' that "Lace making is almost always accompanied with singing". One might imagine that before machines drowned out the human voice and commercial recorded music became ubiquitous that practically all work, and many other human activities, were accompanied by song. However, from the evidence available, this was not the case. Some occupations in England were frequently associated with singing — they include carters and shoemakers, as well as Shakespeare's trio of spinners, knitters and lacemakers — but no such association was made with carpenters, blacksmiths or dressmakers. This is not to say that there were not melodious blacksmiths or lyrical carpenters, but that singing was not commonly thought to be an inherent part of their work. A blacksmith's repertoire would be individual, whereas lacemakers' was an expression of their collective identity. Hence Sternberg use of the term of "lace-songs", he associated with this manufacture. Lacemaking was not so arduous that it prevented the simultaneous use of the lungs, and as pillows were portable it was often done in company, so that singers had both an audience and an accompaniment. And in lace schools, songs or "tells" were used as part of the training process, a topic we'll return to in a later posting. This occupational tradition explains why it was logical for Cowper to suggest that "inquiry in the lace-making districts would produce copies of other old ballads".
Aranda Dill's eerie illustration of 'Long Lankin' (from Tumblr).
But why these blood-soaked songs in particular? Both 'Sir Hugh' and 'Long Lankin' are about the murder of a child, specifically the long drawn out death by blood letting. And although the perpetrators might be punished, in lacemakers' versions the emphasis is very much on the butchering of Hugh and Johnson rather than the retribution that might follow. It is particularly striking that in three cases the contributors to Notes and Queries cited children's nurses as their original source, especially so in the case of 'Long Lankin' where a treacherous nurse is the murderer's accomplice. Perhaps, like lullabies (think of 'Rock-a-bye Baby'), these songs were a cathartic release of the repressed resentment felt by servants against the object of their attentions — weak but demanding, dependant but socially superior. Mothers too could feel that children were burdens, a topic we'll return to in a future posting about lacemakers and infanticide. Is it possible that resentment also underlay lacemakers' performances of 'Sir Hugh'? Lacemakers were frequently working ten-hour days, if not more, by the age of six: perhaps they were not that sympathetic towards schoolboys playing football. Again it is worth noting that it is a male child who is killed, while in the case of 'Long Lankin' the female child survives. We last see Nancy, or Sally, or Betsy, sitting at her window, exactly where, in contemporary descriptions, we find lacemakers working. Perhaps the substitute names allowed different girls to express their own frustrations against their mothers, the person who had set them to lacemaking, and their siblings, and especially brothers whose situation, even if not petted and spoiled, was probably less restricted than lacemakers.
Gerald Porter argues that in lace tells "the theme of child death is implicit, and this relates it [the tell] to a large group of songs in which labor and early death are linked." Lacemakers sang about child death, while their own autonomy and even their health was being sapped by the very process in which they were engaged. Singing at work is very much part of "the romance of the lace pillow": the "free maids" sitting in the sun outside a cottage door; but the actual content of lacemakers' repertoire of songs undercuts this idyll. No doubt singing was a moment of freedom, of "fancy" (as some recent scholars of work-song express it), when imagination was allowed to wander in very different circumstances to those of lacemaker. But in a culture where even looking up from the pillow might be punished, songs might also express a rage that could find no other outlet.
Further Reading: from Notes and Queries.
Clifton Barry, 'Notes on Midland County Minstrelsy', Notes and Queries, 1st series VIII (October 1853), pp. 357-8.
B.H.C., 'The Ballad of Sir Hugh, Etc.', Notes and Queries, 1st series VIII (December 1853), p. 614.
B.H.C., 'The Ballad of Sir Hugh.', Notes and Queries, 1st series XII (December 1855), pp. 496-7.
J.L.C., 'A Lacemakers' Song', Notes and Queries, 4th series II (July 1868), p. 8.
Edward Peacock, 'A Lacemaker's Song', Notes and Queries, 4th series II (July, 1868), pp. 59-60.
Sidney Beisly, 'Lacemakers' Songs', Notes and Queries, 4th series II (August 1868), p. 178
B.H. Cowper, 'Lacemakers' Songs: "Long Lankin"', Notes and Queries, 4th series II (September 1868), p. 281.
Further Reading: other sources
Lucy Broadwood, English Traditional Songs and Carols (London, 1908).
Francis James Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, 5 vols (Boston, 1882-1898).
Mary-Ann Constantine and Gerald Porter, Fragment and Meaning in Traditional Song: From the Blues to the Baltic, (Oxford, 2003), chap. II, 'Singing the Unspeakable'.
Vic Gammon and Peter Sallybrass, 'Structure and Ideology in the Ballad: An Analysis of "Long Lankin"', Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 26:1 (1984), pp. 1-20.
Anne Gilchrist, 'Lambkin: A Study in Evolution', Journal of the English Folk Dance and Song Society 1:1 (1932), pp. 1-17.
David Gregory, Victorian Songhunters: The Recovery and Editing of English Vernacular Ballads and Folk Lyrics, 1820-1883 (Lanham, 2006).
Joseph Jacobs, 'Little St. Hugh of Lincoln: Researches in History, Archaeology, and Legend', reprinted in Alan Dundes (ed.) Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore (Wisconsin, 1991), pp. 41-71.
Marek Korczynski, Michael Pickering and Emma Robertson, Rhythms of Labour: Music at Work in Britain, (Cambridge, 2013).
Gavin Langmuir, 'The Knight's Tale of Young Hugh of Lincoln', Speculum 47:3 (1972), pp. 459-482.
Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs and Other Pieces of our Earlier Poets (London, 1765).
Gerald Porter, '"Work the Old Lady out of the Ditch": Singing at Work by English Lacemakers', Journal of Folklore Research 31:1-3 (1994),pp. 35-55.
Emma Robertson, Michael Pickering and Marek Korczynski, '"And Spinning so with Voices Meet, Like Nightingales they Sung Full Sweet": Unravelling Representations of Singing in Pre-Industrial Textile Production', Cultural and Social History 5:1 (2008), pp. 11-31.
E.M. Rose, The Murder of William of Norwich: The Origins of the Blood Libel in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2015).
Thomas Sternberg, The Dialect and Folk-lore of Northamptonshire (London, 1851).
James R. Woodall, '"Sir Hugh": A Study in Balladry', Southern Folklore Quarterly 19 (1955), pp. 78-84.
Thomas Wright, The Romance of the Lace Pillow (Olney, 1919), Chap XIV: 'The Lace Tells and the Lace-Makers' Holidays'.
The lace industry = a cottage industry. A representation of a lacemaker's work environment
Praying for White Lace: The Feast of Our Lady of the Snows in Turnhout
The lacemaker and the household in Canaan, Brazil
War Lace
Belgian lace
Flemish literature
Lace Beyond Europe
lace events
Lace patrons
Lacemakers and politics
Lacemakers and Religion
Lacemakers in Drama
Lacemakers in Fiction
Lacemakers in Music
Lacemakers in Poetry
Lacemakers in Slovakia
Lacemakers in the English Midlands
Lacemakers in the Low Countries
Lacemakers in the Museum
Lacemakers in the News
Lacemakers in the Past
Lacemakers' folklore
Lacemakers' holidays
Lacemakers' songs
Lacemakers' tools
Lacemaking in Ireland