Category: Lacemakers and Religion

Saint Nicholas, patron of lacemakers

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On 4th September 2022

In French lacemakers, Lace patrons, Lacemakers and Religion, Lacemakers in art, Lacemakers' holidays

In our series on lacemakers’ holidays we have yet to fully cover the ‘Broquelet’, the ‘Feast of the Bobbin’ held in Lille on and around 9 May.  This date marks the ‘translation of Saint Nicholas’, that is the transfer of his relics from Myra in what is now Turkey to Bari in Italy, and it is known as ‘Summer Saint Nicholas’ to distinguish it from the saint’s other feastday on 6 December.  The Broquelet, which could last a week or more, was the major holiday for the city’s working women at the end of the eighteenth century, when Lille was home to 15,000 lacemakers.  Their pleasures are celebrated in a painting by François Watteau, dating from around 1800.[1]

François Louis Joseph Watteau’s ‘La Fête du Broquelet’, c. 1803. This image from Wikipedia Commons, the original in the Musée de l’Hospice Comtesse, Lille.

We’ll return to the Broquelet in a future post: today we’re just considering how Nicholas became the lacemakers’ patron saint.  Nicholas is, of course, Santa Claus, and so is a patron of children generally.  Children, and specifically the girls who attended Lille’s lace schools, were participants in the Broquelet – they can be seen in the foreground of Watteau’s painting, presenting a branch of hawthorn to their teacher.  However, in Catholic culture in general Nicholas is more associated with boys than with girls.  Across north-eastern France, and in the Low Countries, parishes organized their youth into single-sex companies dedicated to Saint Nicholas for boys, and Saint Catherine the girls.  These associations were carried over into schools in the nineteenth century, which continued to mark their respective feastdays of 6 December and 25 November.  And as we know Saint Catherine was a patron of lacemakers, and her feast was a lacemakers’ holiday in parts of the English Midlands and Antwerp province.

So how did Nicholas come to take on this role in the case of Lille’s lacemakers?  There is almost no official documentation concerning the Broquelet, and none of the chroniclers who attended the festival offer a clear answer.  By and large it was only incorporated trades – that is occupations which were represented by a guild — that held masses, paraded through the city and celebrated holidays; but lacemaking was a ‘free trade’ (as were most female-dominated occupations), and so it possessed no guild structure.  One possibility, then, is that the lacemakers simply joined in, and then took over, a feast originally celebrated by one of Lille’s male guilds.  Watteau’s painting offers some corroboration of this theory, because in front of the float carrying the lacemakers’ giant bobbin is a carriage on top of which sit two male workers – ‘filtiers’ [linen spinners] – carrying the flag of their confraternity which features Saint Nicholas performing one of his more famous miracles, the resurrection of three murdered children whose bodies had been left in a butcher’s brine tub.

However, there is another possible connection, and it relates to another of Saint Nicholas’s miracles.  According to the most widely read hagiography of the medieval period, Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, as a young man (and not yet a cleric) Nicholas had a neighbour, a man of noble birth who had fallen into poverty.  This nobleman had three daughters whom he intended to prostitute in order that he might survive from the money they earned.  To avert this fate, Nicholas threw a lump of gold through the family’s window at night on three separate occasions.  Each lump was sufficient to provide one of the daughters with a dowry.

In early modern Catholic Europe, the skills of lacemaking were taught in the institutions of the ‘great confinement’ of the poor, such as orphanages and workhouses, precisely because it would provide young women with a livelihood and thus save them from becoming prostitutes.  The same logic was invoked well into the nineteenth century.  When in 1841 the Mayor of Valenciennes appealed to Maria Amalia, Queen of the French, to support the re-establishment of a lace school in his town, he claimed that the project ‘would be of the highest moral value by teaching lacemaking to young girls whose poverty, in most cases, dooms to prostitution, the first of the vices that misery brings in its train.’[2]

However, are there stronger connections between Saint Nicholas and lacemaking than a general desire to keep young women off the streets?  In Valenciennes Museum of Fine Arts (currently closed) there is a painting that originally hung in the town’s Saint Nicholas church.  It depicts Saint Nicholas in the act of throwing the gold through his neighbour’s window.  Inside we see the father and his three despairing daughters, one of whom is sitting a lace pillow.  The painting is by Henri de Vermay (active 1612-1642), the second artist of that name, and the last in dynasty of painters from the nearby city of Cambrai.  The Vermays of Cambrai were possibly descendants of the Dutch painter Jan Cornelisz Vermeyen (c. 1504-1559).[3]

Henri II de Vermay (active Cambrai 1612-42), ‘The Charity of Saint Nicholas’, Musée des Beaux Arts de Valenciennes, photo © Claude Thériez. Image from POP, la plateforme ouverte du patrimoine.

This is not the only painting from the period that depicts the beneficiaries of Saint Nicholas’s charity as lacemakers.  The Amsterdam Museum of Our Lord in the Attic has another representation of the charity of Saint Nicholas by Vermay’s better-known Antwerp contemporary Cornelis de Vos (1584-1651), in which two of the daughters can be seen working at lace pillows, while the third is busy with embroidery.

Cornelis de Vos, ‘The Charity of Saint Nicholas’, Ons’ Lieve Heere op Solder Museum, Amsterdam. http://www.stnicholascenter.org/media/images/d/de-voss.jpg

Paintings are only indirect evidence, but it seems that, in the Flemish-French borderlands, an association had become established in the seventeenth century between Saint Nicholas, his patronage of marriageable women, and lacemaking as a recourse of the poor.   This was the same period in which lace schools were being established in towns like Valenciennes and, possibly, Lille.  Although the history lacemaking in Lille is very obscure, it seems plausible that this same association of ideas explains why Lille’s lacemakers took Saint Nicholas to be their patron saint.

 

[1] The painting now hangs in Lille’s Musée de l’Hospice Comtesse: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZLwgRe1_n8

[2] Archives Départementales du Nord, M 581-13: Commerce et Industries: Spécialités, Dentelles, letter dated 14 September 1841.

[3] The only source of information on the Vermay dynasty I have been able to discover is a pamphlet by Achille Durieux, Les peintres Vermay (Cambrai: J.  Renaut, 1880).

Mary was a lacemaker! A second post for the Feast of the Annunciation (25 March)

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On 10th March 2022

In Lacemakers and Religion, Lacemakers in art

A year ago we posted a Catalan song about the Annunciation in which the archangel Gabriel appears to the Virgin Mary while she sits working in a lace-school, with her companions Susannah and Pauleta.  That song was popular in the lace and sewing schools run by female teaching orders in Catalonia.  The newly established active orders of nuns that were springing up all over Europe in the nineteenth century were keen on the apocryphal legends about the childhood and youth of the Virgin, and in particular the time she spent, supposedly, crafting textiles for the Temple of Jerusalem.

In medieval and early modern visual representations of the Annunciation, these legends are invoked through the presence of the basket of white linen that is often depicted at Mary’s side as she receives the Angel’s message.  Artists clearly thought of Mary as an embroiderer.  Did any think of her as a lacemaker?

Alessandro Allori, ‘The Annunciation’, 1603, Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze.

It’s taken us a while but we have discovered one painting which features Mary with a lace pillow.  It’s dated to 1603, and it’s by the Florentine artist Alessandro Allori (1535-1607).  It can now be found in the Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze.  It came to the Galleria from the Medici’s villa di Castello, though it’s not clear whether the Medici family were the original patrons for this work.

Alessandro Allori, ‘The Annunciation’, 1577-78, Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze. Note the basket and embroidery.

Allori had painted annunciations before, and included the more traditional basket of linen to embroider (there’s one in the Galleria’s collection, from 1577-8).  So the lace pillow, with its eight bobbins containing gold thread, is definitely a departure.  It’s also an unusual picture because the Virgin is not facing the angel Gabriel but towards the viewer.  These peculiarities have led one art historian to suggest this was not originally designed for display in a church, but for the rooms of an aristocratic lady, where it would have formed part of her private devotions.

Detail: Alessandro Allori, ‘The Annunciation’, 1577-78, Galleria dell’Accademia di Firenze.

 

 

On the symbolism of the basket of linen in portrayals of the Annunciation, see Marlène Albert-Llorca, ‘Les fils de la Vierge.  Broderie et dentelle dans l’éducation des jeunes filles’, L’Homme 35:133 (1995): 99-122.

 

Legends of Lace – a new article

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On 22nd November 2021

In French lacemakers, Lacemakers and Religion, Lacemakers in Drama, Lacemakers in Fiction, Lacemakers in the Low Countries, Lacemakers' folklore, Uncategorized

A performance of Geneviève Hennet de Goutel’s ‘The Miracle of the Bobbins’, by girls of the free (ie. Catholic) school of Pussaye, France, 1913.  Kindly supplied by www.pussayetsonpays.fr.

We’ve talked on this site about several lace legends, the legend of Queen Catherine, the legend of Argentan lace, the legend of Serena of Bruges…  David’s article ‘Legends of Lace: Commerce and Ideology in Narratives of Women’s Domestic Craft Production’, which covers these and other lace legends (including the ‘miracle of the bobbins’ depicted above) has just been published in the folklore journal Fabula.  The article appears to be on open access at the moment so if people are interested they can read it and download it for themselves.  The abstract for the article is reproduced below.

 Abstract

Although a relatively recent invention (c. 1500), many legends have accumulated around the origins of lace, more than have been recorded for other crafts.  Almost every region involved in pillow or needle lace had its own origin story: I will concentrate on those circulating in Italy, Catalonia, France, Belgium and England.  Lacemaking was a poorly paid, dispersed and overwhelmingly female occupation, but none the less it had a strong craft tradition, including the celebration of particular saints’ feastdays.  The legends drew on elements of this work culture, and especially the strong connections to royal courts and the Catholic Church, but they did not originate among lacemakers themselves.  Rather they were authored by persons – lace merchants and other patrons – who in the nineteenth century took on the task of defending homemade lace in its drawn-out conflict with machine-made alternatives.  Legends first circulated in print, in lace histories, newspapers and magazines, before transferring to other media such as the stage, historical pageants, even the visual arts.  More recently they have continued to propagate on the web.  While not originally oral naratives, they behave much like legends in oral storytelling environments: they are usually unsourced; they accumulate and shed motifs; they are adapted to new circumstances and audiences.  They were told with the intention of creating a special status for handmade lace, and to mobilize protectors and consumers.

Keywords: Lace, legends, craft, patronage, gender, Bruges, Le Puy, Argentan, Saint Catherine

Saintly lacemakers: Catherine Jarrige of Mauriac

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On 14th October 2021

In French lacemakers, Lacemakers and Religion

Lacemaking saints?  There are some but – given the close ties between lacemaking, female religious orders and the Catholic Church – perhaps not as many as one might have expected.

A lacemaker who was (and is) considered saintly, indeed was beatified by Pope John-Paul II in 1996, is the blessed Catherine Jarrige, known in her lifetime and after her death as Catinon-Menette.  Catinon is a diminutive of Catherine in the Oc dialect of the Auvergne, while menette is a popular term for a devout woman, or specifically a sister in one of the numerous tertiary orders found in the region.  The word may derive from ‘moine’ [monk] from which one gets ‘moinette’, little or female monk, and thus ‘menette’.  Menettes were akin to the ‘béates’ of the Velay and the ‘beguines’ of Flanders: while they took vows, they were not enclosed but lived in the world, practicing their vocation among the laity.  Tertiary orders of this kind were involved in making lace and teaching lacemaking in many regions.

Most of our information about Catherine Jarrige comes from a biography written by abbé Jean-Baptiste Serres who, as a boy, witnessed her funeral and in later life interviewed many people who had known her.[1]  She was born in 1754 into a poor peasant family in Doumis, in the highlands around the gorges of the Dordogne.  Her education was minimal: she was hired out to other farms as a shepherdess from the age of nine (she told some stories about the tricks that children played while supposedly guarding their animals).  When and how she learnt lacemaking we don’t know, but according to Serres, the occupation fitted with her plans for a pious life.  We do know that she was already established as a lacemaker in the town of Mauriac in 1774.  Lacemaking was a major industry in the region in the eighteenth century when, according to a local doctor, ‘this trade was the unique subsistence for the daughters of the labouring classes in Aurillac, Saint-Flour, Mauriac, Murât, and several of the country parishes’.[2]  While the industry declined with the French Revolution, and was in a parlous state at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the prefect of the Department of the Cantal was able to report that there were still 1000 lacemakers in Aurillac, 800 in Murat, 400 in Saint-Flour and 300 in Mauriac.[3]  However, as was the case of nearby Tulle, the industry did not long survive the dislocations of the period, and by the mid nineteenth century it had disappeared completely.

In Mauriac, where she would spend the rest of her life sharing a home with her sister, Catherine joined the tertiary order of Saint Dominic.  From then on, her life seems to have been entirely dedicated to feeding the poor, watching over the sick, bringing comfort to prisoners, and preparing the dead for burial.  Given her total commitment to these tasks, and given her complete abnegation (when people gave her food or clothing for herself, she handed it straight on to some other unfortunate), it seems likely that that lacemaking did not occupy a huge part of her life.  Serres barely mentions it.  None the less, in judicial documents of the revolutionary period, she is referred to as a lacemaker.

The Revolution was the epic of Catherine’s life: along with other tertiaries such as Françoise Maury, also a lacemaker, she organized a veritable resistance network.  The Revolutionary authorities (the ‘patriots’ in the language of the time) persecuted the Catholic Church before outlawing it completely.  From 1792 priests and other religious who refused to swear an oath to uphold the new constitution faced deportation.  From March 1793 non-juring priests found on the territory of France could be executed.  Some fled abroad, but others took to the woods and mountains, or found shelter with supporters, and continued to hold mass, give confession, baptize and marry the faithful.  If they were caught they might imprisoned, or transported to French Guyana, or guillotined.  Catherine carried messages to priests in hiding, she brought them food or warnings of patrols and roundups.  As priests were in danger of their life if caught with religious material, she carried sacred vessels for them to covert religious ceremonies held in barns, private rooms and sometimes in the open air.  These, along with religious writings, she concealed in leather (later metal) containers under her skirts.  She hid two priests in Mauriac for eighteen months, bringing them babies to baptize, alerting them to the dying who required last unction, serving as witness at clandestine weddings and godmother at christenings.  When priests or nuns were arrested she visited them in prison, and when one, abbé Filhol, was led to execution she accompanied him on his way to the scaffold.

The gorges of the Dordogne, the region where Catherine Jarrige grew up. This landscape of mountains, forests and caves was ideal for hiding priests during the French Revolution.  Photo from Tripadvisor.

Both her convictions and her actions seem to have been common knowledge in region.  She was challenged by gendarmes and national guardsmen on dozens of occasions, questioned and even brought to court several times, but she came through the maelstrom relatively unscathed.  For example, on the night of 12 Thermidor Year 2 of the Republic (30 July 1794) she went to warn some priests of an impending search.  On her return in the early hours of the following day, she was arrested by National Guardsmen ‘soaked the skin and in a state that showed she had made a long journey’.  Arrested and brought before the Committee of Surveillance, she was accused, alongside Françoise Maury, of being ‘fanatics without limits, plotters with refractory priests, declared enemies of the Revolution, of liberty, of equality and of the Republic, and who in contempt of all laws, hide and conceal refractory priests, they provide them with means to live, and they use every means to protect them from the penalties that the law has pronounced against them.’[4]  On this occasion, news of the fall of Robespierre (on 27 July), may have helped save the two menettes.

Cyrielle Forses, from whose masters thesis we have borrowed this quotation, argues that misogyny prevented the authorities from taking Jarrige seriously: in the new Revolutionary world only men’s words and actions had weight, women were excluded from the rights of citizenship.  Yet elsewhere in France this did not prevent the authorities from imprisoning and executing women for far less serious crimes than Jarrige’s.  Serres offers at least two other explanations.  In his general characterisation of the menette, he alternates between portraying her as a ‘holy fool’, ‘she was the poorest and most ignorant, she stumbled as she read, she couldn’t even make the signs of the alphabet’ – and a cunning, artful peasant, constantly able to pull the wool over the patriots’ eyes, not least by playing the idiot.  One time she was stopped carrying a pyx (a container for wafers or, as the authorities put it, ‘a box in which Papists keep their God’).  Asked what it was she replied, ‘for tobacco’.  In Auvergne as elsewhere, lacemakers were famous snuff users and so the response seemed satisfactory.  (She used the same skills – audacity, verbal wit, and a certain slyness – to cajole the rich citizens of Mauriac into giving to the poor.)  The other reason was that at least some self-declared ‘Patriots’ retained sympathies for her cause, including at least one gendarme brigadier who were able to pass messages to Jarrige.  Serres notes that several revolutionaries none the less chose to be married by a Catholic priest, and have their children baptised.

The period of persecution lasted, with some periods of détente, nearly ten years, and Jarrige’s activities through this whole period read like a spy novel with disguises, secret signs, camouflaged hideouts, and many near misses.  All of which seems quite a long way from making lace, except that when priests were on the move they sometimes disguised themselves as lace dealers; an ideal deception because of course such dealers had every reason to move about the countryside, meeting their dispersed workforce, and carrying their produce to market.

Jarrige’s reputation for saintliness was well established in Mauriac long before her death in 1836.  According to contemporary accounts, the entire townsfolk, rich and poor, turned out for her funeral, and people literally fought to obtain a piece of her clothing as a relic.  Her memory is still honoured in the region today, as witnessed by this statue which we saw, last week, in the Church of Our Lady of the Snows in Aurillac.

The Blessed Catherine Jarrige, known as Catinon-Menette. Statue in the Church of Notre-Dames-aux-Neiges, in Aurillac, photo David Hopkin.

 

[1] Abbé J.-B. Serres, La Catinon-Menette (Clermont-Ferrand: Mont-Louis, 1864).  Available online at www.gallica.fr.

[2] Jean Joseph de Brieude, Topographie médicale de la Haute-Auvergne (Aurillac: Picut, 1821; first published 1782/3), p. 116.

[3] Pierre Wirth, ‘La “fièvre statistique” et les premières enquêtes économiques dans le Cantal (suite)’, Revue de la Haute-Auvergne 37 (1961), p. 271-2.

[4] Cyrielle Forses, Des paroles et des actes : les Résistances à la Révolution et à l’Empire dans le Cantal (1791-1815) (Mémoire de maîtrise, Université de Toulouse, 2017), p. 62.  Available online at http://dante.univ-tlse2.fr/3434/.  In an appendix, Forses includes other documents relating to this case.

26 July in Flanders: ‘I wish every day could be Saint Anne’s Day’

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On 17th July 2021

In Lacemakers and Religion, Lacemakers in the Low Countries, Lacemakers' holidays, Lacemakers' songs

‘Saint Anne and the Virgin Mary’, copy of work by Giovanni Antonio Galli, known as ‘lo Spadarino’. Sold at Christies in 2010.

Saint Anne’s day falls on 26 July.  As we know, lace has many patron saints but, in West Flanders, Saint Anne was particularly fêted.  According to the apocryphal gospels Anne was the mother of Mary.  It was she who dedicated Mary to the service of the Temple where the future Mother of God wove the veil which, as we have seen, is a textile of some importance in the legendary history of lace.  In Catholic iconography Anne is usually depicted teaching Mary to read the scriptures, but sometimes she is shown training her daughter in needlework, weaving and embroidery; Mary was exercising these domestic skills at the very moment she was visited by the angel Gabriel, hence the basket of linen beside her in depictions of the Annunciation.  Anne was, therefore, a suitable patron for seamstresses and everyone involved in the needle trades, whose skills and heritage were passed on from mother to daughter.  Flemish lacemakers were more likely to be trained in lace schools than at home, but these too provided a female-led pedagogical environment.  In Bruges, Poperinge and Bailleul, lace schools celebrated Saint Anne’s Day.

Jan-Frans Willems (1793-1846), ‘Father of the Flemish Movement’. Unknown C19 painter. From Wikipedia Commons.

We know of this tradition indirectly, from the attempts to record lacemakers’ songs.  The first person to draw attention to the lacemakers’ musical cult of Saint Anne was the philologist Jan-Frans Willems (1793-1846), known as ‘the Father of the Flemish Movement’.[1]  Willems sought to defend the imperilled position of Dutch within the new Belgian state by demonstrating that it too was a literary language with a noble history, but he also emphasised the moral qualities of one’s ‘mother-tongue’.  Knowledge and traditions – culture in other words – were passed on from mother to her nursing child.  One of the primary vehicles for both literary and popular traditions were songs.  Songs had taken on a huge significance as expressions of national thought and feeling in the romantic period.  Willems’ final – indeed posthumous – publication was Oude Vlaemsche Liederen ten deele met de melodieën (Old Flemish Songs, some with melodies), which was completed in 1848 by his friend Ferdinand Snellaert (1809-1872).  At the very end of this volume Snellaert included two lacemakers’ songs in honour of Saint Anne.[2]

‘Het vlaamsche lied’ (Flemish song). Relief adorning Isidoor de Rudder’s monument to Jan-Frans Willems in Ghent.

 

‘t Is van dage Sint Anna-dag,
Wy kijken al near den klaren dag,
En wy kleên ons metter spoed,
Om te gaen ter kerke toe.
Als de misse wierd gedaen
Wy zijn al blijde van deure te gaen.
Josephus is gekomen al hier
Met zijnen wagen en zijn bastier:		 Today is Saint Anna’s day,
We look out for sunrise,
And we dress ourselves with haste,
To go to church.
As soon as the mass is over
We are glad to get outside.
Josephus is already there
With his wagon and its cover:
De provianden,
Koeken in manden,
De provianden
Dragen wy meê.		 The provisions,
Cakes in baskets,
The provisions
We’ll take with us.
Die willen met onzen wagen meêgaen
Moeten ‘t geheel jaer hen mestdag doen;
En die ‘t niet en hebben gedaen,
Moeten ‘t huis blijven en niet meêgaen.		 Those that want to go in our wagon
Must have completed their daily tasks
through the whole year;
And those who haven’t,
Must stay at home and not come along.

 

Sint Anna-dag is deure,
‘k Ben mijn geldetje kwijt;
Nu zit ik hier en treure
Met kleinen appetijt.
‘K En heb geen zin van werken,
Het werken doet my pijn;
‘k Wilde dat ‘t heele dagen
Sint Anna mogte zijn.		 Saint Anna’s Day is done
I’ve spent all my money;
Now I sit here and lament
With little appetite.
I’m not in the mood for work,
Work makes me miserable;
I wish that every day
Could be Saint Anna’s.
De schoolvrouw komt te vragen :
Wel duiv’l hebt gy geen zin ?
Een perkment in acht dagen
Is dat geen schoon gewin?
Mijn kussen aen de galge,
Mijn boutjes aen ‘t perlorin.
‘k Wilde dat ‘t heele dagen
Sint Anna mogte zijn.		 The school mistress comes and asks:
Hell’s bells, you’re not in the mood?
A pattern in eight days
Is that not a decent wage?
My cushion to the gallows,
My bobbins to the pillory.
I wish that every day
Could be Saint Anna’s.

 

These two songs had been sent to Willems in October 1841 by Edmond de Coussemaker, a lawyer, musician and a fellow enthusiast for all things medieval, who wrote to him from the Flemish-speaking corner of France known as the Westhoek.[3]  Although then living in Douai, Coussemaker had collected the Saint-Anne songs from the lace schools of his native Bailleul (or Belle to give the town its Flemish name).  In 1852, Coussemaker was moved to start collecting songs again, prompted by the new French government’s sudden enthusiasm for folk music, and its simultaneous desire to eradicate regional languages such as Flemish, which was banned from French schools in January 1853.  Shortly afterwards Coussemaker would help found, and then lead, the Comité flamand de France (The Flemish Committee of France) whose motto was Moedertael en Vaderland (Mother-tongue and Fatherland).  Coussemaker was not a Flemish nationalist, but he wanted to celebrate the Flemish contribution to French history and culture, and to demonstrate that Flemings too had a literature and a language worth preserving.[4]  His most important contribution in this undertaking was his 1856 volume of Chants populaires des Flamands de France (Folksongs of French Flanders).  This contains a whole section dedicated to ‘Sinte-Anna-liedjes’, including both the two given above and five more, together with a short description of the festivities arranged in the lace schools that day.

Edmond de Coussemaker (1805-76), lawyer, musician, folksong collector. Engraving by Isnard Desjardins, from the British Museum.

According to Coussemaker, Saint Anne’s Day was,

for the young women who attend the lace schools, just as it was for women of every age who shared this occupation, a feast that was celebrated with every sign of joy.  It was a veritable holiday in which the popular muse takes a large part.  The evening before Saint Anne’s Day, the schools and workrooms are decorated with flowers and garlands.  Early the next morning, all the young women, dressed in their best clothes, come to wish a happy holiday to their lace mistress; then they take themselves to the church, singing all the while.  After having heard the mass in honour of their holy patron, they return to the school where a breakfast of cakes is served.  The meal over, they get ready for a trip by wagon or coach to a nearby town or village.  Sometimes the pleasure-trip goes as far as Dunkirk.  Every July one sees, in the streets of Dunkirk or at the seaside, groups of young women from Bailleul, who are recognizeable from the equal simplicity of their dress and their manners.  If the weather proves inclement, they pass the day at the school, dancing and singing.[5]

Edmond de Coussemaker, Chants populaires des Flamands de France (1856). Illustration depicting Saint Anne’s Day in the lace schools.

Some of the songs associated with this holiday directly honour Saint Anne, but most concentrate on the associated festivities.  From these songs we learn that the lacemakers got up early, drank coffee, went two by two from the laceschool to the church to offer candles to their patron.  When in the country they played ‘tir du roy’ (a verticle archery game) and danced with the villagers.  But the songs also acknowledge the fleeting nature of lacemakers’ pleasures.[6]

Jonge dochter, en wilt niet treuren,
‘t Is Sint’ Anna die komt aen;
En ‘t zal nog wel eens gebeuren,
En den dag die zal vergaen.
Laet ons dansen, laet ons springen,
Laet ons maken groot plaisier.
En dat met contentement,
Zoo een leven, zoo een eind’.		 Young woman, don’t be sad,
Saint Anna’s Day is coming.
She’ll soon be here
And then the day will be gone.
Let us dance, let us jump,
Let us enjoy ourselves
As much as we can;
Such a life, such an end.
En Sint’ Anna die gaet deure,
Zy ga naer een ander land:
Eu wy zitten hier en treuren
Met ons geldjen heel van kant.
En wy zitten in de kamer
Met ons kussen op de knien.
Is dat niet een groot verdriet?
Geerne werken en doen ik niet.		 Saint Anne has departed;
She’s gone to another country.
We sit here and lament
All our money is gone.
Here we sit in the workroom
With our cushions on our knees.
Isn’t it a great pity?
I don’t want to work anymore.

 

Despite Coussemaker’s reference to the ‘simplicity’ of Saint Anne’s celebrations, there is evidence that things could get out of hand.  In 1858, when Bailleul contained ten or more lace schools and almost the entire female population of the town was engaged in lacemaking, the mayor complained about disorders in the street and stipulated that from then on

dances and public merrymaking in the street cannot take place except on the days specially reserved for the celebration of this holiday, and should only include women and children, and no men.  These entertainments should not begin before 7 in the morning, nor continue after 8:30 at night.[7]

Such official restrictions may have restrained the celebrations, but a more important factor was the decline of domestic lacemaking; by the first decade of the twentieth century there was only one lace school still functioning, which had just 30 apprentices.[8]  Yet they continued to honour Saint Anne’s day.  The girls who attended the school run by Euphrasie Roelandt went to mass on that day, and then returned to the school for cakes and hot chocolate.  Then the teacher was crowned by her pupils: an enormous floral crown was slowly lowered onto her head while they sang a hymn to ‘Moeder Anna’ [a song present in Coussemaker’s collection].  The identification between the mother of the mother of God and the educator could not be more obvious.  Madame Roelandt rewarded each pupil with a five-centime piece.  In the afternoon the party walked up to a local beauty spot, the Mont Noir, to hold a picnic.[9]  (Mont Noir, or Zwarteberg, was the family demesne of the novelist Marguerite Yourcenar, who has something to say about lacemakers in her memoirs.)  In previous years the girls from the lace-schools had also honoured the lace merchants on this day, by dancing round-dances outside their houses (probably in hope of a financial reward).[10]

 

The children from the Babelaarstraat lace school, Poperinge, run by Zoete Mène (Philomène) Matton (seen on the left), 1906.

Sometimes lacemakers from Bailleul and the surrounding villages met up with their fellows from Poperinge, a few miles away over the border in Belgium.  Again, our knowledge of events there largely depends on folksong collectors.  We have already consulted Albert Blyau’s collection of songs for information on Kleinsacramentsdag, the Ypres lacemakers’ holiday, but he also attended the lace school run by ‘zoete Mène’ (Philomène Delporte, b. 1845) in the Babbelaarstraat in nearby Poperinge, where they celebrated Saint Anne’s instead.[11]  Blyau’s ‘Sint-Annaliedjes’ have relatively little to say about lacemakers’ religious life, but rather concentrate on the fun they intend to have.  The repertoire contains a large number of soldiers’ songs because, for working women mired in poverty and domestic responsibilities, the soldier’s life represented an ideal of minimum labour with maximum personal autonomy.  In popular culture generally soldiers were compounded with the nobility as a leisured, feckless class, which is what lacemakers aspired to be on their holiday.  Some songs also poked fun at ‘kwezels’, a nickname for ostentatiously devout older women, precisely the kind of person who might run a lace-school.  In some ways Saint Anne’s celebrations were, like Saint Gregory’s Day in Geraardsbergen or Our-Lady-of-the-Snows in Turnhout, directed at the lace mistresses who might receive floral tributes or other acknowledgements of gratitude from their pupils, but these songs suggest an undertow of resentment.[12]

In Poperinge the festivities lasted two days: the first consisted of an outing to a nearby park but the highlight was the second day, when they went to the seaside.  The programme is laid out in one of their songs.

Courage, kinders al te saam,
En Sint-Anna die komt aan !
Wij zullen vroolijk spelen,
En wat dan!
‘t En zal ons niet vervelen :
En wat dink je daarvan ?		 Come on children all together,
And Saint Anna is coming!
We will play merrily
And how!
And we won’t be bored:
And what do you think of that?
Onze sneuklaar is verkocht
En ons geld is thuis gebrocht.
Wij zullen taarten bakken,…
Van peren en van appels :…		 Our snacks have been bought
And we’ve brought our money home.
We will bake tarts,
From pears and apples.
Alles is zeer wel bereid
Tegen dezen blijden tijd.
De koeken en de hespe, …
‘t Is alles van het beste : …		 Everything is very well prepared
For this happy time.
The cakes and the ham,
It’s all the best quality
Eer wij van den tafel gaan,
Wij zijn van alles wel voldaan,
Van éten en van drink en,…
Van tappen en van schinken, …		 Before we leave the table
We’ll be absolutely full
Of eating and drinking,
Drinks from the tap and the jug.
Maar als den eersten dag komt aan,
‘t Is om naar ‘t Koethof toe te gaan.
Wij zullen vroolijk wandelen, …
Van ‘t eene naar het ·andere: …		 And when the first day comes,
It’s off we go to the Koethof [Castle Couthof, near Poperinge].
We will wander merrily,
From one thing to another.
Maar als den tweeden dag komt aan,
‘t Is om naar Duinkerk toe te gaan.
Wij zeggen ‘t zonder liegen, …
De scherrebank zal vliegen : …		 But when the second day comes,
It’s off we go to Dunkirk.
We say it without lying,
The charabanc will fly.
Maar als wij in Duinkerk zijn,
Wij zullen stil. en zedig zijn;
Wij zull’n met goede manieren, …
Onze feestdag wel vieren : …		 But when we get to Dunkirk,
We will be quiet and modest;
We will be well mannered
Celebrating our holiday:

Couthof Castle, near Poperinge, destination of local lacemakers on Saint Anne’s Day.

The last claim to quiet and modesty may be ironic, given the other song they sang boasted of their ability to make noise.  This song, which has been recorded by the Belgian folk groups Sidus and Kotjesvolk, is a powerful expression of local and craft pride, as lacemakers collectively took over the streets of Dunkirk for the day.  However, the boast that they made lots of money should be taken with a pinch of salt.

De kinders van de Babbelaarsstrate
Zoûn zoo geern naar Duinkerke gaan,
Om da’ n-hunder dust te laven
En naar Duinkerk toe te gaan.
Zoete merronton, merronton, merronteine !
Zoete merronton, de postiljon !		 The children from Babbelaarstrate
Really want to go to Dunkirk
And there to quench their thirst
And to go to Dunkirk.
En wij zull’n de koetsen pareeren
Met de bloemptjes zoet en schoon,
En ons ook wel defendeeren,
G’lijk den keizer op zijn troon.
Zoete merronton, etc.		 And we will decorate the coaches
With sweet, beautiful flowers
And we’ll stand up for ourselves,
Like the emperor on his throne.
En wij zull’n al omdermeest schreeuwen :
“Vivan van Sint-Annadag !”
En ons ook wel defendeeren :
‘t Is de spellewerkige’s feestdag !		 And we will loudly cry
Long Live Saint Anna’s Day.
And we’ll stand up for ourselves:
It is the lacemakers’ holiday.
Maar als wij in Duinkerke komen,
En wij rijen al door de stad;
Iedereen zal buiten komen
En zal zeggen : “Wat is dat ?”		 But as we come into Dunkirk
And we ride right through the town
Everyone will rush outside
And they’ll say: ‘What’s going on?’
“ ‘t Zijn de Poperingschenaren,
Die daar komen met geweld;
En ze werken heele jaren,
En ze winnen vele geld !”		 It’s the girls from Poperinge,
And their coming out in force;
And they work the whole year,
And they earn lots of money!

 

Adeletje Deklerck making lace in the Bruges almshouse, August 1968. From Biekorf (1968)

The strongest concentration of lacemakers in Bruges lived in the parish of Saint Anne, but we have less information about Saint Anne’s Day celebrations there, suggesting that they may have been a fairly modern innovation.  Most of what we know depends on the oral history interviews undertaken in the 1960s by the folklorist Magda Cafmeyer with old lacemakers resident in the city’s almshouses.[13]  For instance Adeletje Deklerk explained that the young women in the lace school saved one or two centimes a week which they put together to pay for the wagon and cakes, but that for three weeks before they worked solidly on earning some drinking money.  As at Poperinge it was a two-day holiday.  On the second day there was a prize-giving ceremony in the school itself.  But the main event was on the first day, when the the lacemakers took a horse-drawn charabanc trip to Gistel and the shrine of Saint Godelieve (the pious wife of an abusive and, finally, murderous husband – a story familiar in many forms to lacemakers).  While on the way, they sang:

Wij zijn bijeen en we trekken naar Sint Annetje,
wij gaan op zoek al achter een ander mannetje,
wij zijn bijeen
en we zullen niet meer scheen,
wij zijn gezworen kameraden
en ze zien’ aan onze trein (bis)
dat we van Sint Anne zijn (bis)		 We’re all together and we’re off to Saint Anne’s
We’re looking out for another man,
We’re all together
And we’ll never part no more,
We’re sworn comrades
And they can see from our verve
That we’re from [the parish of] Saint Anne.

The camaraderie of the lacemakers, their sense of collective identity, both local and occupational (which sometimes included, and sometimes excluded, the nuns who accompanied them on the trip) comes across strongly in these songs.

After the First World War there was a concerted attempt to revive lacemaking and its associated customs in Bailleul and the surrounding region.  The town was almost totally destroyed during the Ludendorff Offensive in the spring of 1918 but when a visiting American philanthropist, Richard Nelson Cromwell, toured the region in 1919, he was moved by the sight of lacemakers working among the ruins.  His support for the French charity ‘Retour au foyer’ (Back to the hearth) underwrote the establishment of lace schools in Bailleul and nearby Méteren and Saint-Jans-Cappel.  The underlying philosophy was that the traditions and values interrupted by the war should be renewed, including a proper gender order.  Lacemaking would enable women to contribute to the household budget without leaving their homes.  The charity not only funded the schools but also undertook the sale of their produce in Lille and Paris.

Le Petit Journal, supplement illustré, no. 1539, 20 June 1920 : ‘La Résurrection de la Dentelle des Flandres’. From Gallica.

Part of this ‘return’ involved reviving Saint Anne’s Day celebrations.  In 1921 the local organiser in Méteren, Marguerite de Swarte (1874-1948), wrote to the charity’s president Paul Dislère to explain how the children had passed the day.

On the day before, our young workers and brought in armlods of flowers with which they made garlands to decorate both the front and the interior of the school.  A [lace-maker’s] chair, a pillow, a support and an aune [used to measure lace] were festooned with flowers, you would think it was a flower festival.  In the evening, after work, the local lacemakers came to admire the charming school which reminded them of the holidays of yesteryear, they enjoyed themselves with the children and brought to mind the old Flemish songs…  The following morning our children, and all the lacemakers of Méteren, went to mass in honour of Saint Anne, then they returned to the school, singing their old songs.  There a meal of Flemish cakes and chocolate awaited them, which they enjoyed very much.  Then a bus came to take them to Ypres…  There they had a cold lunch of ham sandwiches, Flemish cake, pears and beer, and they walked among the ruins.  At 3:00pm they went on to Poperinge, to visit the lace school, and with the fifty young lacemakers they shared more local specialities, bars of chocolate and beer.  Then there were songs and round-dances in the school playground, until at 7:00pm the happy band climbed back aboard the bus to return to Méteren via Saint-Jans-Cappel.[14]

Marguerite de Swarte (1874-1948), patron of the lace revival in Méteren

Saint Anne celebrations continued throughout the interwar period, and there is even a picture of the crowning of the Méteren lace mistress, Hélène Loozen, in 1936, surrounded by the garlanded tools of the lacemaker’s trade.

Hélène Loozen, crowned lace mistress at Méteren, Saint Anne’s Day 1937. The lady with the pillow is Marie Delie, lace mistress of the school before the war and a well-known lacemaker.

 

 

[1] Ludo Steyn, Jan Frans Willems: Vader der Vlaamsche Beweging (Antwerp: De Bezige Bij, 2012).

[2] Jan-Frans Willems and Ferdinand Snellaert, Oude Vlaemsche Liederen ten deele met de melodieën (Ghent: F. and E. Gyselynck, 1848), nos. 256-7.

[3] Jan Bols (ed.) Brieven aan Jan-Frans Willems (Ghent: A. Siffer, 1909), p. 452.

[4] Stefaan Top, ‘Chants populaires des flamands de France (1856): A Contribution to Comparative Folksong Research, France/Belgium : Flanders’ in James Porter (ed.) Ballads and Boundaries: Narrative Singing in an Intercultural Context (Los Angeles: UCLA, 1995), pp. 315-24.

[5] Edmond de Coussemaker, Chants populaires des flamands de France (Ghent: F. and E. Gyselynck, 1856), xii-xiii.

[6] Coussemaker, Chants populaires, pp. 307-19.

[7] Arreté, Maire de la ville de Bailleul, 2 juillet 1858

[8] Stéphane Lembré, ‘Les écoles de dentellières en France et Belgique des années 1850 aux années 1930’, Histoire de l’éducation 123 (2009): 55.

[9] Michel Le Calvé, Souvenir de Bailleul (Dunkerque: Westhoek, 1983), pp. 40-1.

[10] Eugène Cortyl, ‘La dentelle à Bailleul’, Bulletin du Comité flamand de France (1903) : 231.

[11] For information on ‘zoete Mène’ see https://westhoekverbeeldt.be/ontdek/detail/8d838922-bbc5-11e3-a56d-875083d05b38

[12] Albert Blyau and Marcellus Tasseel, Iepersch Oud-Liedboek (Brussels: Commission royale du folklore, 1962), pp. 237-318 : ‘Het boek der Klein-Sacramentdagliedjes en Sint-Annaliedjes’.  See, especially, no. 124 ‘Sint-Annadag’ and no. 125 ‘De Kinders van de Babbelaarsstrate’.

[13] Magda Cafmeyer, ‘Oude Brugse spellewerksters vertellen: Adeletje in ‘t Godshuis’, Biekorf 69 (1968): 364-5.

[14] The story of the lace revival in Méteren and Bailleul is well told on the Méteren village website: https://meteren.pagesperso-orange.fr/IV.1%20Dentelles-%20Accueil%20et%20presentation.htm as well as in the catalogue of the exhibition Bailleul en dentelles: Exposition, 27 juin-15 octobre 1992 (Bailleul: Musée Benoît de Puydt, 1992).  Both quote the letter from Marguerite de Swarte.

Did men make lace? A social investigation from the ‘Flanders Hell’.

By

On 14th February 2021

In Belgian lace, Flemish literature, Lacemakers and politics, Lacemakers and Religion, Lacemakers in the Low Countries

‘Kantwerkers’ [male lacemakers], photograph by Charles Lefébure from ‘Door arm Vlaanderen’ by August De Winne (Ghent, 1903)

In historical sources almost all the commercial lacemakers one encounters were women. But did men not make lace? It’s a question we’ve often been asked, and the answer is yes – but how many it’s hard to say.  Occasionally one discovers evidence of men making lace, but these reports usually concern periods of high demand when wages were very good, or periods when male-dominated industries had collapsed (such as the Breton herring fishing industry at the beginning of the twentieth century), and lace was introduced as a makeshift way for the unemployed to earn a living.  But it’s likely, not least because lacemaking was so clearly identified as women’s work, that official reports undercount the number of men who made lace on either a full-time or a part-time basis.

August De Winne (1865-1935, sometimes written Dewinne) was certainly shocked to discover that, in 1902 in Belgium, some men worked as lacemakers.  De Winne was a journalist for the Socialist newspaper Le Peuple.  The socialist movement was growing in Belgium in the period, but it had achieved greater success in the industrial towns of French-speaking Wallonia than in Flanders where the political influence of the Catholic Church still held sway.  In 1901 De Winne set out to discover the true conditions of the working population of Flanders, and the reasons behind their political attitudes. He particularly focused on the rural, inland regions of east and west Flanders which came to be known in the first decade of the twentieth century as ‘The Flanders Hell’, characterised by overpopulation, underemployment, poverty and misery. Here villagers did not work in factories, but laboured in their cottages at ‘sweated trades’ such as weaving, spinning, basket-making, rabbit-rearing (for fur rather than meat) and, of course, lace-making.  The collected articles were published as A travers les Flandres in 1902, and then again in 1903 in an extended Dutch language edition as Door arm Vlaanderen – ‘through poor Flanders’.  The title is an echo of an earlier novel of social protest, Arm Vlaanderen, by Reimond Stijns (1850-1905) and Isidoor Teirlinck (1851-1934). That novel was set during the first ‘School War’ which, as we know, directly concerned the lace schools.

The section below, focusing on male lacemakers, only figures in the Dutch edition.  De Winne’s interest had been piqued by a report on lacemaking in Belgium by Pierre Verhaegen. This was the first really serious Belgian study of workers’ conditions and pay in the industry, and although De Winne considered Verhaegen to be too close to the Catholic Church, he nonetheless thought his information was reliable.  Both De Winne and Verhaegen quote figures from the industrial census of 1896 which recorded that there were 47,571 lacemakers in Belgium, of which just 117 were men. But was that an underestimate?

Two other persons are named in the text: Charles Beerblock (1854-1914), a socialist activist from Lokeren; and Charles Lefébure (1862-1943), an engineer and amateur photographer who had accompanied De Winne and documented the social conditions he encountered on his visits. If you’re looking for Miere on a map, note that it is now spelt Mere.

‘Kantwerker’ [male lacemaker], photograph by Charles Lefébure from ‘Door arm Vlaanderen’ by August De Winne (Ghent, 1903)

“So it is true, there are men in Flanders who make lace?” I asked Beerblock.

“It was news to me. I discovered it from Monsieur Verhaegen’s report. I went with Monsieur Lefébure to meet the lacemakers from around Aalst; he took several lovely photographs. Would you like to go back there together?”

“Very willingly”.

On a lovely spring morning we made our way to Meire, a small township of about 3,500 inhabitants, in an out-of-the-way corner of Aalst district, beyond the main lines of communication, just on the local railway to Ronse.

The town appears rather sweet and charming, bathed as it is in light and warmth. The road, lined with small, very neat houses, meanders gracefully through the smiling fields. The buds are sprouting on the hedges. The houses are hidden behind a curtain of trees.

What a delightful spot!

We enter a house. Potatoes are boiling away on a Leuven stove. The tall fireplace is covered with very rough religious prints. And to think that this is the picture that poor folk have of the Mother of God and of the saints! Is there really any difference between this crude religion and idolatry?

  The mother, a little old woman, chats to a neighbor who has two children hanging from her skirt. By the window in a low chair sits an old man in a silk cap, a long beard like an apostle hangs down to his chest, in front of him a lace pillow.

At first, as I watch him turning the bobbins with his stiff hands, I find him a little ridiculous, but then I feel pity for this dignified old man, thus obliged to do women’s work, children’s work.

The mother stops chattering, the father and the young girls have turned to look at us. Beerblock is known here. He has come to show M. Lefébure’s beautiful photos. He takes them out of a large folder and displays them to the simple people. They marvel, utter cries of joy and surprise. “Look father! Look mother!” the young girls shout. “That’s John ‘the Frenchman’, that’s big Theresa, that’s Mary’s house!”

“How wonderful they are!”

We ask:“Old man, how long have you followed this occupation?”

“Since the age of six, sir. I have never done anything else and am now sixty years old.”

“What do you earn? How many hours a day do you work?”

“My wages vary between 70 centimes and 1 franc per day for 11 and 12 hours of work.”

“What would you say were the average earnings for the women of the village?”

“That depends both on the type of work and also on the skill of the workers. My daughters earn 1 franc a day for 12 to 13 hours of work. But a few steps further on from here lives a lace-worker who sits at her chair from 6:30 in the morning until 8 in the evening, with an hour of rest at noon. At the end of the week she will have earned just 3.80 francs.”

The amount earned in this house and in other houses in Meire is similar to that reported by Verhaegen. Here are some other figures quoted by that clerical writer: 1 franc per day for 13½ hours of work; 85 centimes for 10 hours; 64 centimes for 12 hours; 75 centimes for 8 hours; 48 centimes for 10 hours; 96 centimes for 13½ hours, and so on.

They are the figures for women’s earnings. Verhaegen only mentions a single male lacemaker, who was paid 70 centimes a day for 11 hours of work.

We leave the house in the company of the neighbour with her two children.

“They are good people, but under the thumb of the Church” she whispers to us when we have come a little way.

“Are there any villagers who are not of that persuasion?”

“People here have all kinds of convictions, sir: Catholics, Liberals, Christian Democrats and Socialists.” She adds, not without pride, “My husband is a Socialist.  He’s employed at the gas works in Brussels, where he earns 4 francs a day.”

“That’s better than making lace.”

“Certainly, but it’s not an easy life nonetheless. My husband has to leave at 3.45 in the morning, and gets to Brussels at 5am. In winter, when the works only open at 7am, he has to hang around for two hours, wandering through the streets or sitting in a bar. In the evening he gets back at 8.30. No, it’s no picnic his life!”

We say goodbye to the good woman. Beerblock tells me that about 40 gas workers, roadmen and masons live here, who travel to the capital every day. Those employed in the gas works have alternating shifts – one week of day work followed by one week of night work.  They prefer night work because the day trains provide better connection, so less time is lost.

Three hundred “Frenchmen” also live in Meire, so called because during the harvest season they go to France to find work. Some of these migrants also make lace during the winter. The same is true of the agricultural workers and the brickmakers who live in the village. We met some in the other houses we visited.

According to the industrial census [conducted in 1896], there are 114 men in Flanders who make lace, but Verhaegen thinks, with good reason, that the number of those who engage in this type of work in their free time, for whom it is an additional source of income, is much larger.

In Meire we also saw a number of boys sitting next to their mothers or sisters and who, like them, were working with bobbins. “It keeps them quiet” say the good people of the region.

Does a child actually need to play, to run about, to have fun, to go to school, to breathe the air, to strengthen his muscles, in order to develop? Why?

Later, as a man, he’ll become a farmer or a brick maker; maybe he’ll travel along the roads of France looking for work or he’ll sit in front of a lace cushion for thirteen hours a day. On Sunday he’ll first pray and then get drunk on gin.Work, prayer, and generating more members of their unfortunate race, that is the whole destiny of these men and women, and the destiny of the children of Flanders!

Poor people!

Emiel Jacques (1874-1937), ‘De Kantklossers’. Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

 

Praying for White Lace: The Feast of Our Lady of the Snows in Turnhout

By

On 4th October 2020

In Lace Schools, Lacemakers and Religion, Lacemakers in the Low Countries, Lacemakers' holidays, Lacemakers' songs

‘The Miracle of the Snows’. Late C15, probably Flemish painting.

A very belated post for the Feast of Our Lady of the Snows, which fell on 5 August.  One of the Virgin Mary’s many titles, her legend is set in 4th century Rome, where a couple wanted to leave their fortune to the Virgin but had not decided how it should be spent.  At the height of summer, snow fell on the Esquiline Hill, and this miracle was taken as a sign that a church should be built there – what is now the Basilica of St Mary Major.  Until the fifteenth century Our Lady of the Snows was a largely Roman cult, but during the Counter-Reformation it spread across the Catholic world.

Our Lady of the Snows was much celebrated by lacemakers.  Some Bruges lacemakers said a daily prayer to her to keep their lace snow-white, as money would be deducted from their earnings if their lace was tarnished.[1]  (Historically lacemakers had several ways of making their lace as white as snow; some, such as the use of white lead, were incredibly damaging to their health.)  Lacemakers in the same city carried a gift of lace to the statue of Our Lady of the Snows in Bruges cathedral on her feast day.[2]  Brussels lacemakers had done the same until her chapel was pulled down during the French occupation of the city.[3]  However, we only know of two places where she was the patron of lacemakers: Almagro in central Spain – to which we hope to return – and Turnhout on the Belgian border with the Netherlands, which is our focus today.

The model lace school in the Klinkstraat, Turnhout, founded in 1910. Old Postcard.

Unlike other Flemish centres, the lace industry in Turnhout seems to have thrived into the first decades of the twentieth century.  According to the American visitor Charlotte Kellogg, half the female population of the city were involved in the trade, including 1,800 girls and young women enrolled in the numerous lace schools.[4]  The largest of these were the religious institutions run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart and the Sisters of the Holy Sepulchre, as well as the model school established in 1910 by Father Berraly, but there were also many smaller, private institutions with 30 to 50 lace apprentices.  Turnhout lacemakers graduated from the supposedly easier ‘Engelsche grond’ (point de Paris) to ‘halve slag’ (point de Lille) to the extremely fine and very expensive ‘Ijsgrond’ (point de Malines).  Perhaps it was this specialism in difficult laces that kept the handmade lace business buoyant in the region.  A Dutch socialist newspaper in 1910 complained that the women workers earned only 9-10 francs a week for 70-80 hours work, but compared with salaries in other centres in the west of Belgium this was comparatively high.[5]  The trainees in the lace schools earned much less, of course.  None the less, lacemakers in Turnhout had a strong sense of their own skill and worth, which found expression in their songs and in their patronal feastday celebrations.[6]

A lace school working in the open air. Turnhout postcard

As we’ve seen in previous posts about Saint Gregory’s in Geraardsbergen and Klein-Sacramentsdag in Ypres, the feastday celebrations were led by the lace schools rather than lacemakers more generally – indeed in Turnhout the day was named ‘domineeren’, that is the teachers’ holiday (akin to ‘dominie’ in Scots).  On the morning of the Saturday nearest to 5 August, the lace apprentices, in costumes covered with ribbons and paper streamers, formed rows behind a ceremonial arch likewise decorated with paper flowers and coloured, blown eggshells, from which was suspended a life-size effigy of a lacemaker at her pillow.  Each school, led by its mistress, then marched through the city, ‘singing, skipping, laughing and chattering’ as they went according to one witness, towards one of the numerous chapels and wayside shrines nearby.  The most popular was the chapel of Our Lady of the Snows (Onze Lieve Vrouw ter Sneeuw) in Oosthoven.

The chapel of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw ter Sneeuw in Oosthoven, near Turnhout

Here is one of the songs the lacemakers sang on their way:

Den dag is nu al aangekomen,
Den dag van O.L.V. Ter Sneeuw,
Hoe zullen wij dezen dag nu vieren,
Den dag dat wij nu feest genieten.		 The day has now arrived,
The day of Our Lady of the Snows,
How shall we celebrate this day,
This day on which we enjoy a party.
Refrein: Het is maar voor de jonge jeugd,
De feest die wij nu vieren,
Dan roepen wij met een blij gemoed,
Dan gaan wij naar den doolhof toe.		 Chorus: It’s only for the young,
The feast that we’re now celebrating,
Then we’ll shout with an eager heart,
Then we’ll go to ‘the Maze’ (a wilderness area near Oosthoven)
Als wij in den doolhof zijn gekomen,
Wat zullen wij dan eens gaan doen,
Wij zullen ons eigen goed gedragen,
En ons Meesteressen geerne zien.		 As we come to the Maze,
What shall we do there,
We shall do ourselves some good,
And our mistresses see with pleasure.

Some schools visited the chapel of Onze-Lieve-Vrouw van Troost in Lokeren instead

After a brief ceremony at the chapel, where the lacemakers prayed to Our Lady of the Snows that their lace should always remain white, the group travelled on to one of the nearby country inns, such as ‘De Vrat’ which features in one song.  Here the mistress stood the workers a drink – beer for the older girls, sage milk for the younger – and many ‘mastellen’, a local type of cinnamon bun (which also is named in a song).

Mastellen in the oven. Eaten ‘without number’ by lacemakers on the feastday of Our Lady of the Snows

In return the lacemakers toasted their mistresses:

Vivat onze Meesteressen,
Zij hebben voor ons zooveel gedaan,
Zij hebben ons slagjes leeren maken,
En onze handjes laten gaan.		 Long live our mistresses,
They have done so much for us,
They have taught us how to make stitches,
And let loose our hands.
Refrein: En zullen wij dan eens schoon palleeren,
En onze geldekens daaraan geven,
Als wij den druk der scholen zien,
Hoe wij de feest van de werksters zien.		 Chorus: And then we shall doll ourselves up,
And spend our money,
As we see the schools busy,
That’s how we see the workers’ feastday.
Engelsche grond willen wij niet werken,
Dat is voor ons veel te gemijn,
Dat is maar voor de kleine kinderen,
Die eerst op ‘t werken gekomen zijn.		 We don’t want to make ‘Point de Paris’,
That’s too base for us,
That’s more for the small children,
That’s the first work they do.
Wij kunnen allerhande kanten werken,
Zoowel ijsgrond als halve slag,
En daar een bloemeke in zetten,
Zoowel een rooske als eenen tak.		 We can make all kinds of lace,
‘Point de Malines’ as much as ‘Point de Lille’
And set a flower in it,
A rose as easily as a sprig.
Wij hebben den naaam dat wij zijn lui werksters,
Wel lieve vrienden het is niet waar,
En komt dan Zaterdag’s eens kijken,
Of dat er een zonder cent zal gaan.		 People say we’re lazy workers,
But friends that’s just not true,
Just come and have a look on Saturday,
Whether any of us is penniless.

But while the lacemakers celebrated their skill, as we have seen on other Flemish holidays they could also express frustrations with the demands the work placed upon them:

Een en dertig, twee en dertig,
drij, vier, vijf, zes, zeven en dertig!
Toujours,toujours
En mijnen boutenbak, mijnen boutenbak!
Toujours, toujours,
En mijnen boutenbak viel op den vloer!		 One and thirty, two and thirty,
Three, four, five, six, seven and thirty!
Still, still
And my bobbin-case, my bobbin-case!
Still, still,
My bobbin-case lies on the floor!
Ongeneerd zoo zullen wij wezen,
ongeneerd zoo zullen wij zijn!
Laat ons, laat ons
vreugde rapen, vreugde rapen;
Laat ons, laat ons
vreugde rapen al onder ons!		 Unabashed we shall become,
Unabashed we shall be,
Let us, let us
Gather pleasure, gather pleasure:
Let us, let us
Gather pleasure among us!

On the journey back to the city, the various schools taunted each other:

Al de scholen gaan te niet,
uitgenomen, uitgenomen,
al de scholen gaan te niet,
uitgenomen Lis Verwilt’es niet!		 All the schools are rubbish,
Except, except,
All the schools are rubbish,
Except Lis Verwilt’s, that’s not!

But before they went home, there was one last symbolic act: the lacemakers’ burnt their festive arch and their lacemaker guy – a reprensentation of their teacher? – in a field, while singing:

En wij hebben onzen boog verspeld
in Oosthoven, in Oosthoven!
En wij hebben onzen boog verspeld
in Oosthoven, op het veld!		 And we’ve thrown away our arch
In Oosthoven, in Oosthoven!
And we’ve thrown away our arch
In Oosthoven, on the field!
En wij hebben onzen boog verbrand
in Oosthoven, in Oosthoven!
En wij hebben onzen boog verbrand
in Oosthoven, op het veld!		 And we’ve burnt our arch
In Oosthoven, in Oosthoven!
And we’ve burnt our arch
In Oosthoven, on the field!

Most of these songs were first collected by Canon Jozef Jansen, a priest and also later Turnhout’s archivist.  He noted that the custom was already moribund in 1910.  However, when another priest-cum-local historian Jozef Nuyts wrote an account of the feastday in 1939, he could still find living witnesses to tell him about it, while the radio producer Pol Heyns was able to record schoolchilden in Turnhout singing several of the songs.  Links to these recordings are provided here:

‘Een-en-dertig, twee-en-dertig’

‘Al de scholen gaan teniet’

‘En we hebben een boog besteld’

Pol Heyns (top right) on his radio car, from which he recorded songs all over Flanders. From the website https://schrijversgewijs.be/schrijvers/heyns-pol/

[1] M[agda] C[afmeyer], ‘Leerschool en spellewerkschool te St.-Kruis’, ‘t Beertje (1969): 20-48, 34.

[2] Rond den Heerd 5, no. 36 (July 1870): p. 282 ‘Dagwijzer’.  This cult is mentioned in Guido Gezelle’s poem ‘Spellewerkend zie ‘k u geerne’, to which we dedicated a previous post.

[3] Baron Otto von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, Traditions et légendes de la Belgique: Descriptions des fêtes religieuses et civiles, usages, croyances et pratiques populaires des Belges anciens et modernes (Brussels, 1870), vol. 2, p. 74.

[4] Charlotte Kellogg, Bobbins of Belgium (New York, 1920), chap. 1.

[5] ‘Iets over huisarbeid’, De Proletarische Vrouw, 1 October 1910, p. 2.

[6] Most of the information in this post comes from two articles in the local historical journal: Jozef Jansen, ‘De kantvervaardiging in Turnhout: Haar geschiedenis en bewerking’, Taxandria 8 (1911), p. 117- 82; Jozef Nuyts, ‘Het Domineeren der Turnhoutsche Kantwerksters’, Annuaire de la Commission de la vieille chanson populaire (1939): 119-33.  A special issue of the journal Taxandria was dedicated to the Turnhout lace industry in 2003.

‘I won’t describe it because I wouldn’t be believed’: Lacemakers’ celebrations on Kleinsacramentsdag in Ypres

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On 17th June 2020

In Lace Schools, 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!
Hoe dan!
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!
How then!
So that they can be damn well bought!
And what do you think about that?
Het is al tule lijk papier:
‘t deugt voorwaar ook niet een zier!
‘t Is goed voor twee, drij waschten,
Hoe dan!
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,
How then!
That’s no bargain!
And what do you think about that?

 

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!’
‘t Is Spellewerkersmesdag,
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.

[4] De Toekomst, 30 June 1867 ‘Stads Nieuws’.

[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.

[12] Blyau and Tasseel, Iepersch Oud-Liedboek, no. 95.

[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

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On 10th May 2020

In Lace Schools, Lacemakers and Religion, Lacemakers' folklore, Lacemakers' holidays, Lacemakers' songs

 

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
De negende van Mei
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.

And:

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,
Wilde van de mode zijn
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
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]

And:

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

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On 25th March 2020

In Lacemakers and Religion, Lacemakers in Catalonia, 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.

 

 

Legends of Lacemaking: Argentan Point Lace

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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.

‘I love to watch you making lace…’ Guido Gezelle’s ode to a lacemaker

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On 2nd April 2018

In Flemish literature, Lacemakers and Religion, Lacemakers in Poetry, Lacemakers' songs

Guido Gezelle (Bruges 1830 – Bruges 1899) was the most important poet of the nineteenth century to use the Flemish language.[1]  He is often compared to Gerard Manley Hopkins and not just because he too was a Catholic priest.  Both poets took a Franciscan delight in God’s creation; both steeped themselves in the possibilities of language, all but inventing words to help the alliteration flow.  In the case of Gezelle, he really was forging a new language.  French was dominant culturally in the new Belgian state and even poets from Flanders, like Émile Verhaeren, frequently preferred it.  Flemish was in danger of becoming a rural dialect, the kind of thing that the poetry-consuming class only used to speak to their servants.  The cultural activists of the Flemish Movement were determined to rescue the language but, as we’ve seen in some earlier posts on this site, they were too often trapped in a simplistic language suitable for their moralizing precepts.  Gezelle too was a fierce advocate for Flemish, but he was also determined to reshape the language for literary purposes.  Modern Dutch would not do for him because it was the language of Calvinism, so he drew on the West Flemish dialect of his native Bruges.  Yet one cannot label him a dialect poet: he rather used the spoken vernacular to construct a new, and idiosyncratic, poetic language.

Guido Gezelle in Courtrai, 1898.  From the Stichting de Bethune.

One is less likely to encounter human beings in Gezelle’s poetry than animals, flowers, God, or all together in a celebration of the divine manifested in nature.  However, one exception is the lacemaker to whom the poem Spellewerkend zie ‘k u geerne is addressed.  Below we give the Flemish text and an, admittedly very rough, English translation.  The poem was first published in 1893 in the Bruges review Biekorf which Gezelle had helped to found.  The poem uses some well-known tropes associated with lacemakers, such as the ‘bolglas’, the focusing bottle of pure water which concentrated a light source onto the pillow, which we have already encountered in the poetry of John Askham.  However, he avoided one stereotype, for his lacemaker is not old but clearly a young woman or girl.  So strong has the expectation become that a lacemaker should be old that when Bruges Municipal Library acquired the manuscript poem in 2009 they described it as ‘Gezelle’s masterful description of an old woman lacemaking by the dim light of an oil lamp’!  Given that the poet calls the lacemaker ‘kleene’ (‘little one’) and ‘lieve’ (‘sweetheart’), we suspect that the lacemaker in question was considerably younger than even this example, pictured by the Belgian painter Firmin Baes.

Firmin Baes, ‘The Lacemaker’, 1913.  We found this image on Pinterest and do not know its current location.

Gezelle, an anglophile, wanted to become a missionary to England (he had good connections to the British Catholic community in Bruges, and he was serving as chaplain to the English Convent in the city when he died).  This ambition was quashed, apparently because his prominence on language and social questions had annoyed the ecclesiastical authorities.  In consequence, Gezelle passed his entire life in the lace-making regions of West Flanders – Bruges, Roeselare, and Courtrai.  However, it is not clear how much this poem was based on direct observation.  Gezelle was intimately connected with the movement to preserve and revive Flemish folk culture and was familiar with the growing literature on lacemakers’ traditions and songs whose influence one can observe in this poem.

One source was the collection of songs recorded by Adolphe-Richard Lootens (Bruges 1835- London 1902) from his mother Catherine Beyaert (born 1795), a Bruges lacemaker.  Lootens, who worked as a surveyor before his move to London, was certainly acquainted with Gezelle.  He contributed articles to the antiquarian and pious journal Rond den Heerd that Gezelle co-founded in 1865, and Gezelle reviewed Lootens’ collection of folktales taken down from his mother: Oude Kindervertelsels in den Brugschen Tongval (1868).  Perhaps surprisingly, Gezelle was not very enthusiastic about Lootens’ attempt to represent Bruges dialect.[2]  Published in 1879, Lootens’, or rather his mother’s songs are present in this poem.  Gezelle refers to the lacemakers’ custom of pricking their forehead with each pin before placing it in the pillow, in memory of Christ’s crown of thorns.  This practice was recorded by Lootens as the accompaniment to a particular song sung by Bruges lacemakers at the end of the end of the eighteenth century: it continued for seventy-seven pins, the traditional number of thorns in Christ’s mock crown.[3]

Gezelle likewise invokes the lacemakers’ practice of singing songs, and specifically ‘tellings’ as they count pins, which was described by Lootens.  However, none of the songs referred to are directly taken from Lootens’ collection.  The one telling he names, ‘Een is eene’ – a direct parallel with the English song ‘One is one and all alone’, actually comes from an earlier collection made in and around the town of Bailleul in French Flanders by the judge and antiquarian Edmond de Coussemaker.[4]  Lootens’ mother knew a version of this verse catechism but it did not include this line.[5]  She also knew a ballad about ‘Heer Alewijne’, another song mentioned in Gezelle’s poem; however her version did not end with the knight/prince murdering the king’s daughter (as Gezelle would have it), but rather returning from the Crusades to find his fiancée abused by his mother.  It is his mother he kills, not the bride to be.  As Lootens noted, this song is very different from the standard version of ‘Heer Halewijn’, the text of which could be bought from ballad singers in the marketplaces of Bruges even in the 1870s.  However, although the mysterious knight in that song certainly intends to kill the king’s daughter, in fact it is she, by cunning, who ends up beheading him and returning to her castle in triumph.  (Lootens’ mother sang a version of this in which the anti-hero was named Roland.)[6]

Illustration to the ballad ‘Heer Halewijn’ by Henricus Jansen, 1904. The ballad, though only recorded in modern times, is assumed to have a medieval origin.  Source: Wikipedia Commons.

The last five verses of Gezelle’s poem are in the voice of the young lacemaker, singing a song in praise of the Virgin Mary, protector of lacemakers like her mother Saint Anne (the patron of lacemakers in Bruges), and refers directly to the dogmas of the Immaculate Conception and Mary’s Perpetual Virginity.  We might suspect that such a doctrinally informed text owes more to the priest than to folk traditions.  Certainly I have found no song that exactly matches these verses, though a praise song addressed to the Immaculate Conception, and recorded by Coussemaker in Bailleul, is thematically very close.[7]  In West Flanders religious orders were very active in lace-teaching.  In Bruges itself the leading lace-school was run by the Apostolate Sisters.  Gezelle’s assumption that lacemaking was a holy craft, and that it might serve as an apprenticeship for life in a religious order, was widely shared.  Indeed this message was inculcated in the lace-schools through the medium of song.  According to a legend (of recent, literary origin, but widely disseminated), Mary herself had inspired a Bruges girl, Séréna, to invent the craft of lacemaking.[8]

The final vow to Our Lady of the Snows concerns a cult held in particular honour among lacemakers, and not only in Flanders but also in Catalonia .  The story originates in early Christian Rome when a couple, intending to dedicate their wealth to the Virgin Mary, asked her to reveal how it should best be disposed.  Snow falling in August on a nearby hill led to the building of the Basilica of St Mary Major there.  However, the cult really took off with the Counter-Reformation.  Before the French Revolution, Brussels lacemakers carried their lace to the Chapel of Our Lady of the Snows in that city to place their work under her protection and thus preserve its whiteness.[9]  According to an article in Rond den Heerd Bruges lacemakers did the same on 5 August before a statue of a similar statue of Mary in the Cathedral of Bruges.[10]

Guido Reni, ‘Our Lady of the Snows’ with Mary Magdalen and Saint Lucia (1623).  Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

Gezelle’s poem encapsulates a particular vision of lacemaking, which in part explain’s the Catholic Church’s continuing efforts, in the late nineteenth century, to defend women’s home work in general and lacemaking in particular.  The Church was not only the patron of most lace schools but was a substantial purchaser of lace as well.  For Gezelle lace was a tradition that linked contemporary Flanders to its medieval glory days when songs like ‘Heer Halewijn’ were composed.  And the medieval was preferable to the modern above all because it was an age of faith.  Lacemakers earned little but, in this version at least, enough to supply their basic needs and thus save themselves from prostitution, the inevitable consequence of female poverty in the eyes of the Church.  And lace itself was almost a holy textile: white like the head-dress of the Virgin herself, white like miracle snows in August.  Lace and its producers were under the protection of Mary and her mother Anne.  Those engaged in its production were materially deprived but spiritually rich, and would remain so in Gezelle’s eyes as long as they too remained ‘onbevlekte’, virginal, immaculate.

Spellewerkend zie ‘k u geerne,
vingervaste, oudvlaamsche deerne;
die daar zit aan ‘t spinnen, met
‘t vlugge allaam, uw kobbenet.
Vangen zult g’… hoe menig centen
in die looze garenprenten,
die grij neerstig, heen en weêr
krabbelt, op uw kussen neêr?

Schaars genoeg om licht en leven
schamel dak en doek te geven
u, die kanten wijd en breed
werkt aan ‘t koninginnenkleed.

Vangen zult ge, o, schatten geene;
maar mijn hert, dat hebt ge, kleene,
vast gevangen in den draad,
dien gij van uw’ stokken laat.

Geren zie ‘k uw lantje, al pinken,
nauwe een leeksken olie drinken,
en u, ‘t bolglas doorgerand,
volgen, daar ge uw’ netten spant.

Spellewerkster, wat al reken
spellen zie ‘k u neêrwaards steken
in uw kussen, slag op slag,
meer als ik getellen mag!

“Ieder steke maakt me indachtig
hoe men ‘t hoofd van God almachtig”
zegt ge, “en tot zijn bitter leed
vol van scherpe doornen smeet.”

“En ik rake, alzoo ‘t voorheden
altijd mijns gelijken deden,
eerst mijn hoofd, een spelle in d’hand,
eer ik ze in mijn kussen plant.”

Zingen hoor ik u, bij ‘t nokken
met uw’ honderd spinnerokken,
wijla een lied wel, lieve: och laat
mij eens hooren hoe dat gat.

En zij zong, de maged mijne,
‘t liedje van Heer Alewijne,
hoe, vol wreedheid ongehoord,
‘s konings dochter hij vermoordt.

Dan, den ‘teling’ zong zij mede,
na der spellewerkers zede,
“Een is een”, dat oud gezang,
van wel dertig schakels lang.

Zingt mij nog, mijn lieve kleene,
van de Moeder maged reene,
van sinte Anne, die gij dient,
als uw’ besten hemelvriend.

Zong zij dan, al twee drie hoopen
stokken deur malkaar doen loopen,
weêr een liedtjen, op den trant
van heur spellewerkend hand:

“Reine maged, wilt mij leeren,
na verdienste uw’ schoonheid eeren,
die, van Gods gena verrijkt,
versh gevallen snee gelijkt.

Onbevlekt zijt ge, en gebleven
reine maged, al uw leven:
wit als snee’ zoo, Moeder mijn,
laat mij, laat mijn handwerk zijn.

Laat mij, een voor een, de vlassen
webben aan malkaar doen wassen,
die ge mij beginnen zaagt,
te uwer eere, o Moeder Maagd!

On bevlekte, nooit volprezen,
laat ‘t begin en ‘t ende wezen,
van al ‘t gene ik doe en laat,
als dit maagdelijk gewaad.

Dan, wanneer mij garen, stokken,
webbe en al wordt afgetrokken,
zoete lieve-Vrouw-ter-snee’,
spaart mij van ‘t onendig wee!”

 

 I love to watch you making lace
You sure-fingered true Flemish lass;
There you sit, the bobbins flying,
As you weave your spider’s web.
You’ll get, how few centimes
From the clever design of threads
that you rapidly scribbleack and forth on your pillow?

Barely enough to earn your keep,
a light, a roof and clothes for your back
You, whose acres of lace
adorns the queen’s own dress.

You will certainly not gain riches
But, little one, you have captured my heart,
Caught fast in the thread
that you release from your bobbins.

I love your lamp that flames
as it drinks up a drop of oil
and which follows you through the flash glass
where you stretch your lace net.

Lacemaker, how many pins
have I seen you stick down
In your cushion, one after the other
Many more than I can count!

You say ‘Each prick reminds me
how the head of God almighty
was, for his bitter suffering,
heaped with sharp thorns.

‘And so, just as in the past
my peers have likewise done,
I touch the pin in hand to my forehead
before I plant it in my pillow.’

Sometimes I hear you as you weave
with your hundred twirling bobbins
sing a song, sweetheart: Oh let
me hear again how that goes.

And she sang, this maid of mine
The ballad of Sir Halewijn,
how, in his unfathomable cruelty
he kills the king’s daughter.

Then she also sang a ‘telling’
as the lacemakers do
‘One is one’, that old song which lasts
for at least thirty links in the lattice.

Sing for me again, my poppet,
about the pure virgin mother,
and of Saint Anne, who you serve
your best friend in heaven.

Then she sang, as she made the bunches
of bobbins run through each other
another little song, to the rhythm
of her lacemaking hands.

‘Oh pure Virgin, please teach me
how to honour your beauty gracefully
You who, enriched through God’s bounty
ressemble freshly fallen snow.

‘You are, and will remain, immaculate
Virgin pure, all your life:
Oh Mother mine, let me and my handiwork
always be as white as snow.

‘Let my linen chains one by one
join each other and grow the work
that I began in your sight
and in your honour, Virgin Mother!

‘Immaculata, never praised enough,
Let the beginning and end
Of all that I do and make
be like this virginal garment.

‘Then, when my threads, bobbins,
net and everything is taken from me,
Our sweet Lady of the Snows
save me from unending pain!’

 

[1] For an English biography of Gezelle see Gustave L. Van Roosbroeck, Guido Gezelle: The Mystic Poet of Flanders (Vinton, 1919).  A recent bilingual edition of his poems is freely available: Paul Vincent (ed.) Poems of Guido Gezelle: A Bilingual Anthology (London, 2016).  His collected works in Flemish are all online at the ever useful Digitale Bibliotheek voor de Nederlandse Letteren (DBNL).

[2] On Lootens and his relationship to Gezelle and other Bruges clerical antiquarians see Hervé Stalpaert, ‘Uit de Geschiedenis der Vlaamsche Volkskunde: Adolf-Richard Lootens, Brugge 1835-Londen 1902’, Volkskunde: driemaandelijksch Tijdschrift voor de studie van het volksleven 46 (new series 5, issue 1) (1946): 1-21; and Hervé Stalpaert, ‘Bij een honderdste verjaring Lootens’ kindervertelsels’, Biekorf 69 (1968): 273-5.

[3] Adolphe-Richard Lootens and J.M.E. Feys, Chants populaires flamands avec les airs notés et poésies populaires diverses recueillis à Bruges (Bruges, 1879), pp. 262-3: ‘De Doornen uit de Kroon’.

[4] Edmond de Coussemaker, Chants populaires des Flamands de France (Ghent, 1856), pp. 129-33: ‘De Twaelf Getallen’.

[5] Lootens and Feys, Chants populaires flamands, pp. 260-1: ‘Les Nombres’.

[6] Lootens and Feys, Chants populaires flamands, pp. 66-72: ‘Mi Adel en Hir Alewijn’; pp. 60-6: ‘Roland’.

[7] Coussemaker, Chants populaires des Flamands, pp. 60-2: ‘D’ onbevlekte ontfangenisse van Maria’.

[8] The story originates in a collection by Caroline Popp, Récits et légendes des Flandres (Brussels, 1867), pp 163-205: ‘Légende de la dentelle’.  Popp was the first female newspaper editor in Belgium, and her paper, Le journal de Bruges, was francophone and Liberal in its politics.  It is therefore surprising to find that she and Gezelle shared a similar set of ideas about lace.  However, Popp allows her heroine to give up her vow of virginity and marry, which Gezelle would definitely not have thought an appropriate ending.

[9] Baron Otto von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, Traditions et légendes de la Belgique: Descriptions des fêtes religieuses et civiles, usages, croyances et pratiques populaires des Belges anciens et modernes (Brussels, 1870), vol. 2, p. 74.  Despite stiff resistance from local lacemakers, the chapel was demolished during the French occupation.

[10] Rond den Heerd 5, no. 36 (July 1870): p. 282 ‘Dagwijzer’.

Eliza Westbury, Northampton Lacemaker and Composer of Hymns

By

On 25th January 2016

In Lacemakers and Religion, Lacemakers in Music, Lacemakers in the Past, Lacemakers' songs

Eliza Westbury was born in 1808 and died in 1828. She lived for all of her short life in the village of Hackleton, Northamptonshire, where she made a living as a lacemaker.

We know this from the introduction to Hymns by a Northamptonshire Village Female, to which is added a Short Account of Her Life. (Note that ‘Female’; obviously Eliza could not aspire to the title ‘Lady’!) This book, containing 70 or so of Westbury’s hymns and poems, was published shortly after her death, probably by the local Baptist minister William Knowles. It seems likely that Knowles encouraged Eliza’s writing after her conversion and acceptance into the Baptist congregation in 1826.

 

Carey's College, Hackleton. William Carey (1761-1834) was a shoemaker turned minister and missionary in India. He lived a while in Hackleton.

Carey’s College, Hackleton. William Carey (1761-1834) was a shoemaker turned Baptist minister and missionary in India. He lived a while in Hackleton.

 

This is what Knowles, if he was editor, had to say about Eliza: this is the promised short account of her life.

Eliza Westbury was the daughter of William and Elizabeth Westbury of Hackleton, Northamptonshire. She was born in the year 1808. Her father died in the faith of the gospel, in the year 1811. At an early age she was sent to a Sabbath School, and made pleasing progress in learning. She, at times, felt conviction of sin; but remained a stranger to religion until the beginning of the year 1825, when it pleased God to seal upon her heart a few words which were spoken to her after she had been hearing a Sermon to young people. In May, 1826, she joined the Baptist Church at Hackleton, of which she was an honourable member till her death. During the last two years of her life she composed about one hundred and fifty Hymns, besides other poetry from which the following are selected and published, under the impression that they will be acceptable to her Christian friends. Most of them where [sic] composed while she was earning her living at lace-making, and which she used to write at her leisure. Her own experience will be seen in the piece of poetry at the end of the hymns, which was found after her death. She was frequently deeply impressed with the evil of sin, and was fearful lest she should deceive herself: but her death was attended with peace and with the hope of a blessed immortality.

The providences with which the family to which she belonged was visited were very affecting; within sixteen weeks out of five persons who resided in the same house, four were removed by death. On the fourth of January, 1828, her mother died; on the 20th, one of her mother’s sisters; on the 11th of April, death visited her, and on the 18th of the same month another of her mother’s sisters; and unto them all there is ground for hope that death was gain, and that though they are absent from the body, they are present with the Lord.

Reader! Prepare to meet thy God!

We came across Eliza Westbury through the writings of Sibyl Phillips whose thesis, ‘Women and Evangelical Religion in Kent and Northamptonshire, 1800-1850’ (2001) is available online. (Nancy Jiwon Cho has also written a little about Westbury in her thesis, ‘The Ministry of Song: Unmarried British Women’s Hymn Writing, 1760-1936’ (Durham, 2006).) We were intrigued by the fact that Westbury “composed while she was earning a living at lace making”. As discussed in previous posts, many observers of Midland life in the nineteenth century commented on lacemakers’ habit of singing at work. Eliza’s compositions might strengthen the case for a connection between this occupation and song.

We were hoping that Westbury’s hymns would reference, either in words or tune, the other songs associated with lacemakers – either the long ballads discussed in our post on Long Lankin and Little Sir Hugh, or the “tellings” which were the particular musical property of lacemakers. Unfortunately, Eliza’s book, which contains no indication of melodies, is extremely rare (in the UK the only copy seems to be in Northampton itself) and, partly because David is currently in Caen researching Normandy lacemakers, we have not been able to access it. However, to judge by the numerous verses reproduced by Phillips and Cho, the answer appears to be no. Perhaps unsurprisingly Westbury modelled her compositions more on other Evangelical hymnsters and poets, first and foremost Cowper’s and Newton’s Olney Hymns. Olney is only a few miles from Hackleton.

We offer, as an example, Hymn 27, ‘Discontent’, which given the poverty and hard-work associated with lacemaking, may have spoken to one of their habits:

Christians, beware of discontent,
‘Tis a besetting sin;
It will all happiness prevent
When once it is let in.

We murmur at our Maker’s will
Complain of our hard lot;
Calamities remember still,
But mercies are forgot.

Pardon, O Lord, our discontent;
Forgiveness now display;
And may thy spirit now be sent
To guide us lest we stray.

 

It does not appear that Westbury mentioned lacemaking by name in any of her surviving works, though some of the texts do refer to the events of her life such as  ‘On the Death of the Author’s Mother’, which, as we know, preceded her own by only a few weeks. Here are three of the eight verses:

Who lov’d to see me walk the way
That leads to everlasting day,
And check’d me when about to stray?
My Mother!

It has pleas’d God her soul to take
To heaven, where no alarms can shake;
There may I meet, for Jesu’s sake,
My Mother!

Then with my Saviour I shall be,
And I shall from all sin be free,
And there in glory I shall see
My Mother!

As Phillips and Cho have shown, this is modelled quite closely on Ann Taylor’s (at the time) very famous poem ‘My Mother’, which itself borrowed its distinctive metre from Cowper’s ‘To Mary’.

The final piece in the collection contains 54 stanzas and is titled ‘Verses, Containing an Account of the Writer’s Experience’. These tell us relatively little about Westbury’s working life, it is her spiritual life that matters: her youthful waywardness, the depression brought on by her sense of sin, her conversion, and her ongoing doubts. But in the absence of any other autobiography of a lacemaker from the period, we quote them here… or as many verses as were quoted by Phillips.

I at an early age was taught
That God should be in every thought,
My Mother brought me up with care.
And led me to the house of prayer.

Unto a Sabbath School I went,
To gain instruction I was sent;
And there it was my constant aim
To strive to gain the greatest name.

‘Twas my desire (the truth I’ll tell)
That I in reading might excel;
My chief concern and labour then,
Was how to gain the praise of men.

…

I many strong convictions had,
But I to stifle them was glad:
I knew my ways did God offend,
But I to this would not attend.

I for my chief companions chose
Those who religion did oppose,
Who disobey’d each warning voice
They were the objects of my choice.

Thus with the thoughtless, gay, and vain,
God’s holy day I did profane;
For oft we in the fields did walk,
To join in vain and trifling talk.

But conscience told me all along
That I was surely acting wrong:
This fill’d my soul with sore dismay
And oft I did attempt to pray.

…

All sacred things I did deride,
But my companions would me chide,
And oft they unto me would say,
That I indeed was worse than they.

…

Who hath ascended up, thought I,
And seen a God above the sky?
Who of the dead came back to tell,
That there was either heaven or hell?

…

A minister of God above,
Bid me from Christ no longer rove,
But now to seek in days of youth,
The God of mercy, love, and truth.

He bid me also not to be
A servant of God’s enemy.

…

My sins as mountains did appear
Which filled my soul with grief and fear.
No hope of mercy could I see,
For bold transgressors such as me.

I thought I oft heard something say,
That t’was in vain for me to pray;
I at religion used to scoff,
And now the Lord would cast me off.

At length God’s holy word I took,
But fear’d to open that blest Book,
Lest in its pages I should see
A curse denounc’d on such as me.

My mind was devoid of peace
And fast my misery did increase.
At length, I fully did intend
To my own life to put an end.

… (but is prevented by remembering a chapter from the Bible on suicide)

No murderer shall enter heaven,
His crimes shall never be forgiven;
And should I be my murderer now,
To endless torment I must go.

… (Instead she joins the Baptist congregation)

With the saints I lov’d to meet
To worship at the Saviour’s feet.

…

But soon my mind was fill’d with care,
For Satan tempted to despair;
He told me ‘I did not believe,
‘But only did my self deceive,
‘That mercy I need not expect,
‘For I was not of God’s elect;’
Could I forgiveness hope to find,
A sinner of the vilest kind?

… (These doubts keep her from Church for a while, but in the end she is accepted and baptised)

Now those who read these lines may see
The goodness of my God to me.

He could have stop’d my feeble breath,
And sent me to eternal death:
But he has spar’d me still to tell
How he has sav’d my soul from hell.

…

God’s grace to sinners doth abound,
I sought the Lord and mercy found;
The vilest sinner need not fear,
For God will his petitions hear.

Lord, may thy spirit guide me now,
While I am in this world below:
And then when I am call’d to die,
Receive my soul above the sky.

 

Hackleton Baptist Church, the successor to the one where Eliza worshipped.

Hackleton Baptist Church, the successor to the one where Eliza worshipped.

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