Back in 2018 we posted a blog piece on this website about the Flemish priest Constant Duvillers and the songs he wrote for use in the lace-school he set up in the parish of Middelburg, East Flanders, in the 1840s. We’ve extended the analysis and quoted more of the songs in a recent article: David Hopkin, ‘Lace Songs and Culture Wars: A Nineteenth-Century Flemish Village Soap Opera’, Folk Music Journal 12 (2024): 92-116. Unlike some other recent articles mentioned on this site, this one is not available open access. But if anyone would like a copy please just email David at david.hopkin@hertford.ox.ac.uk
Category: Lacemakers’ songs Page 1 of 2
If you happen to be in reach of Brioude, France, this coming weekend 18-19 September, we can recommend a visit to the Hôtel de la Dentelle where Éric Desgrugillers will be giving a talk and concert, on both the Saturday and Sunday at 2.30pm, about the songs sung by lacemakers in the Haute-Loire. This event is part of the annual French festival ‘les journées du patrimoine’. In particular Éric will examine the repertoire of one lacemaker, Virginie Granouillet, known as ‘La Baracande’. Virginie was born in 1878 in Mans, a hamlet adjacent to the village of Roche-en-Régnier which perches high above the Loire valley. Unable to read or write, she worked as a lacemaker from her childhood into her eighties. Jean Dumas, a professor of Italian at Clermont-Ferrand University, recorded 178 songs from Virginie between 1958 and 1961, the year before her death. (Jean came from Vorey, another lacemaking village on the Loire.) Virginie probably knew many more – as Jean put to one side her religious songs and songs in the local dialect of Occitan.
If, like us, you’re unable to get to Brioude this weekend, you can still hear 146 of Virginie’s songs, as well as some of her conversations with Jean, as they are available on the Base inter-régionale ‘Patrimoine oral‘. (In theory they are also accessible on the website ‘Portail du patrimoine oral‘, but in our experience this is less reliable.) Jean’s many other recordings of singing lacemakers, such as Virginie’s neighbour Marie Soulier, are available on the same website. Éric has also written a book – Des chansons tissées aux fuseaux [songs woven with bobbins] – which includes a CD of Virginie’s songs.
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.
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]
‘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.
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]
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]
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: |
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! |
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.
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]
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.
[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.
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.
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]
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.
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. |
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).
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’
‘En we hebben een boog besteld’
[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.
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]
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]
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.
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.
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]
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? |
[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.
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]
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]
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.
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.
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. |
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.
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.
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.
After Argentan we stay in Normandy but move north to the ‘plaine de Caen’, and specifically the village of Fontenay-le-Marmion, a few miles from the city. In the nineteenth century bobbin lace was the most significant industry in this region. At its height it employed something in the region of 45,000 women, concentrated in the arrondissements of Caen and Bayeux. ‘In the villages, in the towns, nay, even in the cities, you every day see people sitting before their doors working, especially the lace-makers… so inveterate their passion for shewing themselves’ wrote a British visitor in 1831.[1] Fontenay too could boast its ‘rue des dentellières’, where lacemakers would gather to work together in the sun (in the case of the Fontenay it was officially the ‘rue d’Eglise’, now renamed ‘rue de la République’).[2] The most famous product of lacemakers from this region of Normandy was ‘blonde de Caen’, a lace similar to Chantilly made from silk and usually destined for export to Spain or Latin America.[3] For a variety of reasons the trade went into rapid decline from the 1870s onwards, and by the early twentieth century, despite some public investment in training, there were no more than two thousand lacemakers left.[4] One of the few villages to escape this collapse was Fontenay, as will be explained below.
Fontenay-le-Marmion was also the birthplace of Emile Legrand (1841-1903), probably the most important French scholar of Romeic – the language of post-classical Greece. Son of a village joiner, Legrand’s path to the professorship of Modern Greek at the Paris School of Oriental Languages was long and tortuous. His parents had originally destined him for the priesthood, and he attended the seminaries of Bayeux and Lisieux. However, while studying at the Lycée de Caen he became obsessed with the modern Greek language, and in 1867 moved to Paris to pursue his studies. The long Greek campaign for independence from Ottoman rule continued to fire the French cultural imagination in this period; Claude Fauriel’s Chants populaires de la Grèce moderne (1824) had done much not only to generate sympathy for the Greek rebels’ cause but to stimulate the collection of folk song within France. The Cretan Revolt of 1866 may have made a similar impression on Legrand. Yet as a scholar he seems to have been remarkably retiring; according to his pupil, Hubert Pernot, Legrand only visited the theatre once during the more than thirty-five years he lived in Paris. Instead, he dedicated his time to editing volume after volume — nearly a hundred of them — of medieval, early modern and folkloric Greek texts.[5] It was Legrand who, together with Constantin Sathas (1842-1914), published a rediscovered manuscript of the early medieval epic of Digenes Akritas, a sort of Byzantine El Cid, and demonstrated its relationship to much later ballads set on the frontier between the Greeks and their Muslim neighbours. This was to prove one of the most important developments in post-classical Greek letters.[6]
Legrand returned every summer to his family home in Fontenay, where he continued to work on his transcriptions. In the early 1870s, his focus was on folksong. In 1874 he edited a Recueil de chansons populaires grecques, followed in 1875 by his edition of the Akritas manuscript, and then a further collection of Chansons populaires grecques in 1876, which drew on the recordings he had made during a five-month long journey through Greek-speaking Italy and then Greece itself — his first, and perhaps only visit to the source of his fascination. Exotic though this material was, the experience of recording singers viva voce led him to think about songs closer to home — those sung by his mother and her neighbours. In October 1876 he noted down 49 song texts, without music, which he later sent to the philologist Gaston Paris (1839-1903), who would publish them in the journal Romania in 1881.[7]
Legrand’s mother Célina (born in Fontenay in 1818) was the most important source for these songs, providing more than half of them. The other singers were Adelaïde Le Paulmier (born in Fontenay in 1807) with nine songs, Delphine Lacroix with five (probably born in Fontenay in 1834), and then Clélie Péronne (born in Fontenay in 1838), Marie Roger, Blanche Lecarpentier and Marie Dausmesnil each with one, as well as a solitary male informant, Pierre Guillot. Marie Dausmesnil was the village baker’s teenage daughter but all the other women, where they can be identified with certainty, were lacemakers, as was practically the entire female population of the village. Neither Legrand nor Paris provide any information about the circumstances in which these songs were performed and transmitted, but it seems likely that we are, through Legrand, eavesdropping on the kinds of songs lacemakers sang while working together in groups, perhaps on the ‘rue des dentellières’ in the summer, or in the barns where they gathered to work on winter nights to benefit from the heat generated by the cattle.[8]
As we’ve seen in previous posts, singing was an element in the work culture of lacemakers in various regions. A handful of nineteenth-century writers about Normandy mention the practice, as do some Norman lacemakers themselves in their letters.[9] However, whereas in the Velay and in Flanders folksong enthusiasts were making recordings of lacemakers’ songs, there was no significant attempt to do the same in Normandy. Legrand’s is almost the only such collection. Its contents differ markedly from the repertoire recorded later and in other parts of Normandy, with a substantial showing of the prized ‘great ballads’; so surprising is the presence of these songs in nineteenth-century Normandy that some scholars have doubted the authenticity of Legrand’s texts. In 1920 Joseph Lechevrel sought out one of the singers named by Legrand (unfortunately he does not say which one), to see if he could obtain any more songs from her, but her only answer to his questions was ‘I don’t remember any more’.[10] However, this answer was not quite the final word as we will see; the collective training and working practices of lacemakers goes a long way to explain the durability of a particular repertoire.
A couple of these song texts are unknown from any other source, and a couple of others are very rare, but the bulk of Legrand’s collection was made up of songs that could have been heard in other parts of France, indeed in some cases far beyond, because versions of the same songs circulated in Catalonia, northern Italy and francophone Canada. This was not a repertoire restricted to lacemakers: none of the songs make direct mention of the trade. Nor is there any evidence that Normandy lacemakers used ‘tells’ to count pins as did their counterparts in Flanders and the English Midlands. In some ways these texts are at odds with what we know of lacemakers’ musical tastes, whether in Normandy or in other regions. In 1839 the journalist Emile Souvestre described the lacemakers of nearby Aunay as singing ‘cantiques’, that is hymns, on their doorsteps, but there is not a single religious song among those recorded by Legrand.[11] Conversely there were several in which ecclesiastics engage in sexual shenanigans – these were mostly sung by Legrand’s mother, who also voiced a forthright rejection of the convent in favour of the boy she loved. ‘To love is not a crime,/ God does not forbid it’ she claimed in another song, and while it would be a mistake to assert that a singer’s words represent their own views, Célina certainly had a pronounced taste for such playful and slightly bawdy material.
Nonetheless, there are some similarities to the kind of songs we know lacemakers sang in other regions. The most striking group of songs are those performed by Adelaïde Le Paulmier, Legrand’s oldest informant. By the 1870s she was a widow living with two of her sisters, all lacemakers. Her fancy was for long ballads, some full of the ‘lurid, gruesome, clammy or grizzly terrors’ that Thomas Wright observed was the preferred singing matter of Buckinghamshire lacemakers. Such songs feel old, even if evidence for medieval origins is often quite tenuous. In the ballad of ‘Jean Renaud’ (Coirault 5311), the eponymous huntsman is given a mortal bite by a wolf; news of his death and burial are kept from his wife in childbirth, but when she finally learns his fate she joins him in his grave. In ‘Marianson’ (Coirault 9904), a ballad of thirty verses, the eponymous heroine is tricked into lending three gold rings that her husband Renaud (the generic name for male protagonists in French narrative songs) had gifted her when he went to the wars, which are then counterfeited. On his return the unnamed villain shows the counterfeit rings to the knight to prove his claim that Marianson has been unfaithful and that the boy she has just borne is not his. Without more ado Renaud takes the baby and dashes its brains out on the cobbles; he then ties Marianson to his horse’s tale and drags her from Paris to Saint-Denis, a distance of six miles, and between them ‘there wasn’t a hedge or bush that was not marked by the blood of Marianson’. Her mother runs after, begging Renaud to return her daughter’s bloody body. On her deathbed Marianson produces the real three rings, and thus proves her fidelity. Renaud, overcome with remorse, burns his own face off, and both die within two hours of each other.
An even more horrifying song concerns Marguerite who lives with her mother at the ‘castle of martyrs’. By night Marguerite is a woman, but by day she is a white hind hunted through the forests by her own brother Julien and his men; no explanation is proffered for this metamorphosis. She is finally caught, killed and served as the evening meal: Julien asks where is his sister, and she replies ‘Sit down, gentlemen, I was the first at the table;/ My head is on the serving dish and my organs are cooking,/ and my poor entrails are being torn to pieces by your great dogs.’
Célina Legrand knew and sung some similar ballads, but her preferred material was lighter: dance songs, songs of love – particularly illicit love – pastorals in which girls sometimes trick the boys and the boys sometimes trick the girls. Her songs overflow with flowers and fruits to be planted, gathered or plucked. Some are so pared down that their meaning is unclear; others combine lines from a number of different songs which disorientates the reader. Such confusion is often assumed to be the result of faulty memory: the singer – entirely reliant on oral transmission – makes mistakes, skips lines and becomes lost in her own narrative. All of which is possible, but Gerald Porter, in his study of English lacemakers’ tells, suggests another possibility. Lacemakers’ songs are condensed and elliptical because they were performed so often by many members of the same group. ‘At each performance, the sung part stands metonymically for the whole’, the listeners able to fill in the gaps because they too were participants in this communal work culture. For outsiders the songs were meaningless but that was part of the point: comprehension was restricted to insiders, the group of women who shared their working lives on the ‘street of lacemakers’.[12]
Singing was a way of passing the time, of enjoying oneself with one’s friends and neighbours, and finding pleasure in a repetitive task. In their songs lacemakers travelled to Paris and Nantes, to England and Spain, visited palaces, encountered princes and magicians. Given that several of their narratives turned on the suffering of women one couldn’t call these songs ‘escapist’, but they introduced fantasy and drama into their toilsome lives. Yet while the settings may have been exotic, the issues addressed in these songs were not. A king banishes his daughter’s suitor, another king marries his daughter against her will, a Duke departs for war leaving a pregnant, unmarried princess to face the consequences…; strip away the titles and these would be familiar situations in any nineteenth-century village. In almost every song some domestic conflict is evoked that pitted daughters against fathers – and occasionally mothers – or wife against husband. Lovers are sought, jilted and retrieved. Many songs turn on the vulnerability of working women, for example as shepherdesses alone in the fields or market-women trying to make a sale: they are the prey of men, particularly men of superior rank. Sometimes they find a ruse or clever words through which to escape the threat, sometimes not. One could hardly describe these texts as a manual for inter-personal relationships, but they did allow singers and their audiences, to think through some of the difficulties that faced people like them – those who because of their sex or their social position were relatively powerless. In their imagination they could consider the consequences of their choices.
Unlike other villages in the region where lacemaking had more-or-less died out by the turn of the century, one could still find groups of lacemakers gathered on the streets of Fontenay even after the Second World War. At some point, and no one seems to know exactly when, they had developed a specialism: lace made from human hair which was used as the basis for wigs worn in Paris theatres. There were two local producers employing twenty or so women in the 1950s.[13] The survival of this domestic craft industry — and the work culture that surrounded it — enabled Marthe Moricet, curator of the Museum of Normandy, to collect songs in the 1950s that Legrand had noted eighty years before.[14] Contrary to Lechevrel’s impression in 1920, the tradition had not been forgotten. This is an intriguing example of the resilience of a work culture, even when there was no formal institution to uphold it.
[1] J. Augustus St John, Journal of a Residence in Normandy (Edinburgh, 1831), p. 11.
[2] http://www.plainedevie.fr/spip.php?article34
[3] Claudette Bouvot and Michel Bouvot, Dentelles normandes: La Blonde de Caen (Condé-sur-Noireau, 2012).
[4] For the history of lacemaking in Calvados see: Georges Noé, L’industrie de la dentelle à la main dans le Calvados (Caen, 1910); Gabriel Désert, Une Société rurale au XIXe siècle: Les paysans du Calvados, 1815-1895 3 vols (Lille, 1975).
[5] Almost all the biographical information about Legrand comes from a sketch provided by Hubert Pernot in the introduction to Emile Legrand, Bibliographie hellénique ou description raisonnée des ouvrages publiés par des Grecs aux XV et XVIe siècles, vol. 4 (Paris, 1906).
[6] Roderick Beaton, R. and David Ricks, Digenes Akrites: New Approaches to Byzantine Heroic Poetry (Brookfield, 1993).
[7] Emile Legrand, ‘Chansons populaires recueillies en octobre 1876 à Fontenay-le-Marmion, arrondissement de Caen (Calvados)’, Romania 10 (1881): 365-396. A handful of texts collected by Legrand from his mother appeared in other dialect journals, for instance in Revue des patois 1 (1887): 120-125.
[8] J. Augustus St John, Journal of a Residence in Normandy (Edinburgh, 1831), p. 24.
[9] Mireille Bossis (ed.), Ursin et Ernestine. Amours paysannes en Normandie (1863-1866) (Condé-sur-Noireau, 2006), p. 103. Ernestine Lebatard was a lacemaker from Plumetot, north of Caen; her letters were written to her fiancé Ursin Thomas, then performing his military service.
[10] Joseph Lechevrel, ‘Le Folklore normand’, Bulletin de la société des Antiquaires de Normandie 36 (1924/1925) : 359-382.
[11] Emil Souvestre, ‘Pierre Rivière’, Le Journaliste 1 (1839) : p. 173.
[12] Gerald Porter, ‘“Work the Old Lady Out of the Ditch”: Singing at Work by English Lacemakers’, Journal of Folklore Research 31:1-3 (1994): 35-55; Mary-Ann Constantine and Gerald Porter, Fragment and Meaning in Traditional Song: From the Blues to the Baltic (Oxford, 2003), pp. 63-74.
[13] André Garnier, ‘Dans un village du Calvados, à Fontenay-le-Marmion, vingt paysannes tissent les perruques de la Comédie Française’, Paris-Normandie, 6 March 1953
[14] Michel Boüard, ‘Marthe Moricet’ (obituary), Annales de Normandie 10 (1960): 86-87. Moricet died before she was able to publish any of these songs, and to date we have not been able to track down her archives.
Jackie Oates, a folk singer who was, until recently, in residence at the Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, has created a play with songs about East Midlands lacemakers. There are two performances coming up in the new year: at South Street Arts Centre in Reading on 25 January 2020 at 7.30; and at Cecil Sharp House, the home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, in London on 29 January 2020 at 7.30. For further details see the Society’s website.
Jackie’s is not quite the first play to make use of lacemakers’ tells for dramatic effect. We’ve discussed the pageants organized by Prudence Summerhayes which included performances of tells in a setting by Greville Cooke in a previous post. Another, much less celebratory play is Shirley Gee’s Ask for the Moon, first performed in 1986 and published in 1987. Gee’s play emphasises the continuity in women’s working experience as the lives of Devon lacemakers from the 1840s and London sweatshop workers in the 1980s interweave. From time to time the lacemakers sing a tell, though as regular visitors to this blog will know, this is inaccurate, because Devon lacemakers did not use tells (to our knowledge!).
In the spring of 1848, as revolution spread from Palermo and Paris across large swathes of the continent, one country remained conspicuously quiet: Belgium. The reasons for this are not immediately clear. Belgium had come into being through revolution only a few years before in 1830. The country clearly possessed a revolutionary history and tradition. It was close to the epicentre of events in France, and Belgian exiles in Paris were busy organizing propaganda and recruiting among the large number of Belgian migrant workers in France to form a Belgian Legion which might carry armed revolution back over the border. The economic conditions in Belgium were, if anything, even worse than in France, and so ostensibly more propitious for civil conflict. This was especially true in the provinces of East and West Flanders. British competition had effectively wiped out the most important in the region, the linen industry, during the 1840s. The potato blight had ruined three harvests in a row, undermining the peasant farmers’ and smallholders’ ability to feed themselves. Even before 1848 local and national government recognized that the labouring populations of Flanders were suffering a crisis of hunger, poverty and unemployment. As we have seen in previous posts, one of the answers to this crisis was to invest in lace schools. However, the revolution of February 1848 in Paris would deal a blow to this industry too. Flemish lace was made for export, mostly to France. But luxury trades were always the first to suffer during political turmoil. The French fashion houses weren’t buying, which meant the Belgian merchants were left with stock on their hands, which meant that they stopped putting out work to their domestic female workforce.[1]
This crisis affected the countryside but also towns like Courtrai, Bruges and Ypres where lace remained the most important employer of female labour. The local authorities were particularly worried because, as much male employment was seasonal, over winter whole families depended on the wages that lacemakers brought in. On 13 March, little more than a fortnight since news of the Paris revolution arrived in the city, the lace merchants of Ypres got together to lobby the government in Brussels on behalf of their industry.[2] They sent a deputation to the Minister of the Interior, telling him that in the borough of Ypres alone there were more than 20,000 lacemakers, that lace was the sole industry of any importance to survive the crisis years of the 1840s, but that now this population too was threatened with misery. They warned of ‘grave disorders’ if something was not done.[3] And something was done, as the Government provided 60,000 francs of credit to the lace merchants, so that they could keep putting out orders to their workers. Or at least that was the idea, there is some dispute about what actually happened to the money.[4]
‘Lacemakers don’t protest’ wrote one of their foremost Belgian chroniclers, explaining their invisibility in history.[5] And so it proved in 1848, despite the fears of the authorities in Ypres and elsewhere. West Flanders in general remained remarkably calm, despite occasional incursions by radicals and armed groups from France. The border, only fourteen kilometres away from Ypres, was reinforced, adding an extra layer of difficulty for lace exporters (and smugglers).
However, there were some attempts to provoke lacemakers to action. Thursday 26 June 1848 was ‘Kleinsacramentsdag’, the Thursday following Corpus Christi (a moveable feast). This was the holy day of Ypres lacemakers, and the Wednesday preceding was ‘Mooimakersdag’, the lacemakers’ holiday which in previous years had been celebrated in some style. The lace schools were festooned with garlands of flowers, while troops of lacemakers in fancy dress, and led by their ‘queen’, were carried off on great waggons to picnics in the surrounding countryside, much like those pictured in Watteau’s painting of ‘The Feast of the Bobbin’ in nearby Lille. In preparation for this holiday, printers would produce new songbooks which were sold in the market-squares and other public places by street-singers.[6] On 25 June 1848 one such broadside song drew the attention of the authorities, and it is reproduced below, followed by a rough translation.
Stemme van den Boterpot no 1 of den Brabanson
A la vrienden wilt hier aenhooren,
En blyft een weinig staen,
Ik zalt u in korte gaen verklaeren,
Hoe het in dese stad zal vergaen,
Kantwerkster, gy mag het wel weten,
t’ Is van onze kante marchands,
Zy hebben lang genoeg ons herte uitgefreten, Bis
Deeze verkens moeten nu van kant. Bis, Bis.
De kleermaekers zynder espres gekomen,
Uyt de groote stad Parys,
Zy hebben het nieuws nu al vernomen,
Zy kreygen daer van den eersten prys,
Al voor de kazakken te keeren,
Van plaidons en kanten marchands,
Zy zullen haest de fransch tael gaen leeren, Bis.
Dees verraeders moeten uyt ons land. Bis, Bis.
Dat zullen deze capoenen gaen vaeren,
De plaidons zyn nu afgeschaft,
Want wy beginnen daer op te dinken,
Dees verraeders hebben te veel gemaekt,
Zy maeken met ons geld veele plaisieren,
Om te marcheren met trommels en muzik,
Wy zullen klouk op hun kazakke vieren, Bis.
Tot een exempel voor ons Belzyk. Bis, Bis.
Wy zullen onze mode doen floreeren,
Door het maeken van een nieuw kazak,
En wy ambagsheden zonder mankeren,
Hebben ook deeze mode aengevat,
Wy zullen drinken en glaezen doen klinken,
Tot floreeren voor weird en weirdin,
En de marchands van kanten te doen springen, Bis
Dat hebben wy al lang in onzen zin. Bis, Bis.
Spellewerkster laet het u niet verdrieten,
Om tegen dees barbaeren op te staen,
Zy zullen ons bloed niet meer doen vergieten,
Wy zullen stryden voor ons vaen,
Al voor het geld dat zy ons hebben genomen,
Van onze kanten en gaeren-bak,
Die schoone francs moeten weder keeren, Bis.
Dat zy van ons hebben afgepakt. Bis, Bis.
Kantwerkster al voor het letste,
En laet deeze zaeke niet meer staen,
Want ik raent u voor het alderbeste,
Eer dat zy bancroute zouden slaen,
En laet ons nu defenderen,
t’Is voor ons eygen vleesch en bloed,
Dan zullen wy ons plaisieren doen ernemen. Bis.
Al met het geld van onze kanten zoet. Bis, Bis.
Eynde.
To the tune of ‘The Butterpot’ no 1 or The Brabançonne
To friends who want to listen
And stay a while here,
I shall explain to you directly
How things fare in this city.
Lacemaker, you know it already,
It’s about our lace merchants
They have been feasting on our hearts long enough,
These pigs need to get out the way.
The tailors [buyers] have come on purpose
From the great city of Paris
They have heard the news,
They expect to get the best price,
Ready to turn the coats
Of prud’hommes and lace merchants
They’ll quickly learn French,
These traitors must be expelled.
To send these capons packing
The prud’hommes are now abolished,
Because we’re beginning to think
That these traitors have made too much,
They have had too much fun with our money,
Marching around with drums and music,
We should boldly celebrate on their jackets
As an example for our Belgium [?]
We should make our fashion flourish,
By making a new jacket,
And then we’ll celebrate without stint,
If we get a hold on this fashion,
We should drink and clink glasses
And so let innkeeper and his wife flourish,
And the lace merchants can go take a leap
We’ve wanted that for a long time.
Lacemaker, don’t let it grieve you
To face up to these barbarians,
We won’t let them shed our blood anymore,
We will fight for our standard,
And for the money that they took from us,
For our lace and thread casket,
The beautiful coins must return,
That they snatched from us.
Lacemakers, finally,
Don’t let this situation continue,
Because I urge you for your own good,
Before you go bankrupt,
And let us defend ourselves,
It’s for our own flesh and blood,
Then we can enjoy ourselves,
With the money from our sweet lace.
We must admit that some elements of this song, which was discovered by the archivist Joseph De Smet, remain opaque to us.[7] We don’t really understand the author’s interest in ‘kazakken’ or jackets (perhaps it had some dialect meaning). We don’t know the tune ‘The Butterpot’, though we assume den Brabanson refers to the revolutionary anthem of 1830 which is now the Belgian national anthem.
However, we can explain who were the ‘plaidons’ or ‘prud’hommes’ mentioned in the text. The conseil des prud’hommes was an early form of industrial tribunal whose members were elected from both the employers and, in theory, workers. The Ypres tribunal, set up in 1842, consisted of seven members, of which at least two had to be lace-merchants and one a male foreman or senior employee in the industry. In practice almost all the elected members represented the employers, no employee representatives could be found for the simple reason that there were no male employees or tax-paying artisans of the kind designated by the legislation. No female lace merchant (of which there were several) nor any female lacemaker (of which there were thousands) could participate either as electors or as members of the tribunal. Yet almost the entire business of the tribunal was taken up by the lace industry: in 1846, of the sixty-two cases it judged, sixty-one involved lacemakers; in 1847 out of forty-three cases, forty-one involved lacemakers.[8] And the lacemakers of Ypres were not happy with its rulings. As the local papers observed, whatever the merits of such a system in an industrial town with clearly defined employees and employers, it was ‘clearly not fit for the lace industry’.[9] If merchants cut lacemakers’ remuneration, claiming the work was shoddy or dirty, the lacemakers could only seek justice from the conseil des prud’hommes, where they found the same merchants sitting in judgement.[10] In particular lacemakers complained that lace merchants were attempting to force on them the dreaded ‘livret’, or workbook which would effectively end their limited ability to negotiate wages by tying them to a single employer.[11] In June the agitation had grown so great that the Mayor of Ypres placed public notices in the newspapers (unusually in Flemish) stating that he had written to parliament and to the ministry of Justice to make them aware of the lacemakers’ concerns. In October 1847 a tailor, Pierre Maerten, organized a petition on behalf of the lacemakers against the prud’hommes.[12] Neither action seems to have brought a positive result: of the seven members of the tribunal elected in January 1848, five were lace merchants.[13] This is why the song links lace merchants and prud’hommes together as enemies of lacemakers.
The authorities soon got wind of this would-be rebel anthem. The state prosecutor sent a copy to the Governor of West-Flanders on 1 July. The author was identified and arrested: his name was Auguste Plancque, a former NCO in the Belgian army, but by then a day-labourer. We do not know what punishment Plancque suffered but it was probably not too serious because when he died, in 1885, he was described as a retired postman, the kind of job that was often thought suitable for military veterans.[14] The Ypres register of births, deaths and marriages also provides an explanation for Planque’s particular interest in the lace industry: in February 1843 he had married Marie de Graeve, a lacemaker.[15]
It seems Ypres lacemakers did not take up this song on Mooimakersdag in 1848. However, they did have a whole repertoire of other songs to mark that day, and we have included the first verse of one such song below, so that readers can get a feel for lacemakers’ celebrations.[16] And you can hear the whole song performed by the Belgian folk group Sidus on Youtube.
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’! tralalala, 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!
[1] Brison D. Gooch, Belgium and the February Revolution (Amsterdam, 1963); For West Flanders in particular see Joseph De Smet, ‘De weerslag van de Franse Omwenteling van 1848 in West Vlaanderen’, Handelingen van het Genootschap voor Geschiedenis 89 (1952): 24-38.
[2] Le Propagateur, 15 March 1848, p. 1.
[3] Le Propagateur, 18 March 1848, p. 1.
[4] Le Propagateur, 4 August 1849, p. 1.
[5] Guillaume De Greef, L’ouvrière dentellière en Belgique (Brussels, 1886), p. 5.
[6] Otto von Reinsberg-Düringsfeld, Traditions et légendes de la Belgique, vol. I (Brussels, 1870), p. 298.
[7] Joseph De Smet, ‘De crisis in de westvlaamse kantnijverheid in 1848’, Biekorf 53 (1952): 174-8.
[8] Le Propagateur 24 February 1847, p. 1; Le Progrès, 3 February 1848, p. 1.
[9] Le Propagateur, 10 February 1847, p. 2.
[10] Le Propagateur, 10 March 1847, p. 2.
[11] Le Propagateur, 28 April, 1847, p. 1.
[12] Le Progrès, 23 December 1847, p. 2.
[13] Le Progrès, 6 February 1848, p. 4.
[14] Le Progrès, 11 January 1885, p. 2.
[15] Le Progrès, 26 February 1843, p. 4.
[16] Albert Blyau and Marcellus Tasseel, Iepersch oud liedboek. Teksten en melodieen uit de volksmond opgetekend (Brussels, 1962), pp. 237-318, here 238-9.
Regular visitors to this site will know of our interest in lace songs and ‘tells’. Tells were rhymes used in Midlands lace schools, seemingly as a means to increase the pace of work and to count pins. We have the text of about 80 English lace tells recorded by folklorists and other visitors to Midlands lace villages from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. But in almost every case we have the words but no tune, the collector not having the technical knowledge or recording device necessary to capture the music. In some cases, because the words of the tell are adapted from some familiar rhyme or ballad, one can offer a reasonable guess as to how the tune went, but for others the hunt still goes on.
We are not the first to engage in this hunt. The following encounter between a song enthusiast and a lacemaker appeared in the magazine The Countryman in 1964. It was written by Prudence Summerhayes (1906-1984), a writer and occasional radio producer married to J. Alan Turner, the Clerk to Northamptonshire County Council. Prudence had been writing plays and novels since childhood, several of which were published in the 1930s, but after the war, as wife of an important local government official, she became more involved in cultural patronage. She wrote short plays for use in schools and was an active organizer of historical pageants in the East Midlands, performed in places like Delapre Park, Rockingham Castle and Hatfield House. Some of these pageants involved the Women’s Institute and other women’s organisations.[1] As we have seen, such short plays and pageants were a significant vehicle for popularizing a particular history, or rather legend, of lace, such as the role of Katherine of Aragon. Lace was certainly a theme in some of Prudence Summerhayes’ pageants. In the one she organized on behalf of the Northamptonshire Rural Community Council at Castle Ashby (home of the Marquess of Northampton) in July 1949, and largely built around moments in the history of the Compton family, one scene presented lacemakers singing their tells while working.[2] This section was apparently based on a short play about Flemish migrants bringing lace skills to the region, and had originally been written by local schoolmistress at Yardley Hastings.
Prudence had certainly done some research about tells. She gave talks about the history of lace to local W.I.s and indeed contributed a section about them to Woman’s Hour on the radio in 1954. And the lack of tunes clearly bothered her because she wrote about it in her memoirs: ‘To this day it is uncertain whether there were tunes for the words, though I had two fairly good proofs that they were, though in spite of all my efforts I never tracked them down.’[3] The encounter related below was presumably one of these efforts; it probably dates to the period when she lived in Northamptonshire. In the 1950s and 60s it was still possible to order handmade lace from the leading department stores in these Midlands cities, if one was prepared to wait a long time for delivery. The article illustrates a recurrent trope of folksong research, ‘the one that got away’. Almost every memoir of a song collector contains a similar moment when vast melodic treasures were on the verge of discovery, only to be stymied by the death of the singer.
However, if one can’t find the original tunes, one can always invent one’s own. Serving alongside Prudence Summerhayes on the Drama Committee of the Northamptonshire Arts Association was the clergyman and composer Greville Cooke (1894-1989) whom Summerhayes described as ‘a rather high-church canon’ (of Peterborough Cathedral). Cooke set seven of the tells to music; ‘difficult somewhat modern music’ in Summerhayes’ opinion. For the first performance at Castle Ashby in 1949 they were sung by fifty-seven girls from the Rockingham Road School, Kettering, ‘while country-women worked pillow-lace’ according to the report in the Northamptonshire Mercury. In 1953 Cooke published these tells and they were ‘broadcast and sung all over the county where I went until I got heartily sick of them’ said Summerhayes. But up till now we have not discovered a recording of them.[4]
Prudence Summerhayes, ‘A Country Lacemaker’ The Countryman 62 (Summer 1964), pp. 261-4.
[261] I had been scouring the neighbourhood for someone to make a bit of pillow lace for me; and there she was all the time, only a stone’s throw from where I lived. It was not in any romantic stone cottage that I found her, but in a drab street of an industrial town. An odd current of life had stranded her there. She was quite alone in the world, her husband long since dead and all her children grown up and gone away.
I looked up and down the street in doubt; dust and dirty newspapers blew along the pavement. This did not seem at all the place for a country lacemaker; but somebody had said she lived there and, as soon as I reached her window, I guessed I was on the right track. Everything about the house was spotless; the step was freshly scrubbed, the door-handle shone and, as if I had not already guessed it, there in the window under a vase of paper roses was an immaculate lace mat. Lacemakers are always scrupulously clean. They have to be by the nature of their work, which also exacts infinite patience and a delicate sense of precision.
When my lacemaker opened the door I saw that she was very old. She appeared frail too; but her skin was smooth and fine, and she was still astonishingly beautiful. She looked at me uncertainly as I tried to explain who I was, until I mentioned the magic word ‘lace’ and a delightful smile touched her eyes. I was immediately welcome, and I was not surprised, for lacemakers are invariably enthusiasts. Otherwise no doubt the craft would have died long ago; the slowness of the work prevents it from being an economic proposition in a machine age. You do it, in the end [262] as you do most of the arts, simply because you love it.
It as soon obvious that this lacemaker loved it. Almost at once we found ourselves talking away about the delights of our mutual interest. Then followed the time-honoured ritual which I had come to know so well in my encounters with lacemakers all over the East Midlands, and in the Auvergne, Spain and Italy as well. Out came the dumpy patchwork pillow covered with its fresh-laundered cloth. There were the bobbins carved with the names of dead sweethearts – ‘Nance’ and ‘Betsy’ – or touchingly inscribed with mementos of bygone days and with naïve sentiments: ‘Marry me quick and lowly speak’; ‘Mother, when shall I marry?’ There they all were, the winders, the pins, the parchments and the inevitable stories of lace made for royal households and great historic occasions.
It is an odd thing; wherever there is lace, you will find royalty. And it is not only lace; many crafts appear to have these traditional associations, real or imaginary, which are most persistent. Indeed these traditions are such treasured possessions that one would hesitate to destroy them, even though at times one suspects they are largely fictitious. Some of the tales, of course, are perfectly genuine; but true or not, the fact is that generation after generation love to think they are true. Naturally my lacemaker had her own special royalty story of a grandmother who had made lace for a princess’s petticoat. Finally, to wind up the ritual, out came the precious odds and ends of lace, carefully wrapped in blue tissue paper to protect them from the light; there was old lace as fine as a spider’s web, and a Honiton handkerchief with tracery like a feathery fern.
‘But they’re exquisite’, I cried, caught afresh by their loveliness, as always. She smiled and, at my [263] request, sat down at her pillow to work some lace for me. Her hands flew as swiftly as a bird. They were astonishingly white, almost transparent, with beautifully kept fingernails. I watched and was fascinated by the complicated movements as she worked away, throwing the bobbins over each other with the quick staccato action and the little turn of the wrist that makes good quality lace.
For it was good lace, and she knew it. There was a touch of charming vanity about her – the contented look of a person who knows she is doing something worth while and doing it well. Besides, she was the proud owner of a gift which gave her a sense of importance and even power. Were there not always plenty of people bothering her for bits of lace to go round table-cloths and baby clothes and handkerchiefs? Far more than she could ever undertake. Certainly she made little money out of her orders but she did not really mind; it was enough to cover the cost of materials and provide a little pocket-money, and she was satisfied.
‘What design are you doing?’ I asked, bending over work that was as filmy as gossamer; but she did not know. These old lacemakers seldom do, though they may call the pattern by some such fancy country name as Wedding Bells, Honeysuckle or Bunch o’ Nuts. Usually it is something mother or aunty ‘learned’ them; something they had been taught as girls in the village, where anyone made lace as a matter of course, and the great day of the week had been when the pedlar came round selling new parchments and thread. This lacemaker knew only that she had to make certain movements, largely dictated by the colour of the beads which hung on the bobbins. She did not know that the design she was doing had perhaps travelled from far across Europe and was similar to one brought over [264] to England by Catherine of Aragon. She knew that the yellow beads went over the scarlet, that the wrists must be kept so and the thread tight, just as her mother had done and her grandmother before her, for these skills often run in families.
‘Ah, they were happy days’, she sighed. ‘Though mind you, we had to work real hard, me and my sister. Up at six and on till dark, it was a long day; but there, it wasn’t too bad, we used to while away the time singing.’
‘Singing?’ I broke in quickly, and my spirits soared. For a long time I had been searching for the authentic lace tells, which were sometimes sung in the old country lace-schools and whose rhythm is thought to fit the movements of the work. Although I had come across the words of these songs fairly frequently, the airs still eluded me. ‘You don’t mean you know the actual tunes?’ I asked, trying not to frighten her with my eagerness.
But she did mean it. ‘Yes’, she said sedately. Her grandmother had learnt them, tunes and all, in the lace-school which once stood at the corner of their village street. There had been quite a number, and though she could not remember them all, she had the words written down; she could not mind just where. She began rummaging about in a somewhat confused way through her cupboards, and I did not like to press her. Our enthusiasm had exhausted us, so I said I would come back another time, and she promised to look out the songs and sing them to me ‘with the chorus and all the verses’. But I was not to hear them. I had to go away for a while and on my return, a few weeks later, the blinds of the house were drawn. I have continued my search ever since, and I have still to find those lost airs to the Midland lace tells.
[1] I am extremely grateful to Derek Turner, the son of Prudence Summerhayes and Alan Turner, for providing bibliographical and biographical information about his mother, including sections of her unpublished memoir ‘The Raging Dream’. Summerhayes’ archive has been donated to Headington Girls’ School, though so far I have been unable to access it. For further biographical information on the Summerhayes family see the blog http://tacadrum.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-summerhayes-first-world-war.html
[2] See the report in The Northampton Mercury and Herald Friday 15 July, 1949.
[3] ‘The Raging Dream’, p. 116.
[4] Greville Vaughan Turner Cooke, Seven Lace Tells of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire. For 2-part Treble Voices (Joseph Williams, London 1953). On Cooke’s other work see http://www.duncanhoneybourne.com/articles/greville_cooke
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.
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.
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]
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]
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 Vangen zult ge, o, schatten geene; Geren zie ‘k uw lantje, al pinken, Spellewerkster, wat al reken “Ieder steke maakt me indachtig “En ik rake, alzoo ‘t voorheden Zingen hoor ik u, bij ‘t nokken En zij zong, de maged mijne, Dan, den ‘teling’ zong zij mede, Zingt mij nog, mijn lieve kleene, Zong zij dan, al twee drie hoopen “Reine maged, wilt mij leeren, Onbevlekt zijt ge, en gebleven Laat mij, een voor een, de vlassen On bevlekte, nooit volprezen, Dan, wanneer mij garen, stokken,
|
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, You will certainly not gain riches I love your lamp that flames Lacemaker, how many pins You say ‘Each prick reminds me ‘And so, just as in the past Sometimes I hear you as you weave And she sang, this maid of mine Then she also sang a ‘telling’ Sing for me again, my poppet, Then she sang, as she made the bunches ‘Oh pure Virgin, please teach me ‘You are, and will remain, immaculate ‘Let my linen chains one by one ‘Immaculata, never praised enough, ‘Then, when my threads, bobbins, |
[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’.
In the nineteenth century there were lots of Catholic priests like Giovannino Guareschi’s fictional Don Camillo — opinionated, prejudiced and pugnacious, but also deeply committed to the welfare of their parishioners and devoted to their ‘little world’. They dominated their communities and examples of both their authoritarianism but also their humour have passed into folklore. The Flemish priest Constant Duvillers was one of their number. In Woubrechtegem, the tiny parish he was sent to in 1854 by the Bishop of Ghent (probably as punishment for his outspoken defence of the Flemish language), people still remembered him nearly 100 years after his death. Some of the stories that had become attached to him are standards of clerical folklore, such as his ability to compel thieves to return stolen goods. Others are perhaps more reflective of his personal eccentricities. Priests were obliged to read the Bishop’s annual Easter message from the pulpit: Duvillers, who disliked both the Bishop and long services, would announce ‘Beloved parishioners, it’s exactly the same as last year: those that can remember it, that’s good; those that cannot, that’s just as well too.’[1]
However, this post concerns his time at his first parish ― Middelburg ― where he served from 1836 to 1854. This village sits right on the corner where East and West Flanders meet the border with the Netherlands. It is in ‘Meetjesland’, a nickname for the region that Duvillers popularized through his annual Almanak van ‘t Meetjesland, which he published under the pseudonym ‘Meester Lieven’ from 1859 until his death. The story Duvillers told (and possibly invented) was that, when the locals learnt that the notorious womanizer Emperor Charles V was to travel through the region, they hid all the young women and only old women were visible, leading the Emperor to exclaim ‘This is little old lady land’ [Meetje is a colloquial term for ‘granny’].
The almanac, with its plain-speaking moralizing and practical advice, demonstrated Duvillers’ commitment to popular education and the promotion of the Flemish language. There was nothing he disliked more than a Fleming putting on French airs, or a ‘Fransquillon’ to use the pejorative term popularized in the 1830s, and the subject of a bad-tempered satirical poem by Duvillers, ‘De Fransquiljonnade’ (1842). For Duvillers and many other Flemish priests, French was the language of Robespierre, of irreligion and revolution. Inoculating the good Catholic Flemish population against this toxin required the provision of wholesome and comprehensible literature in their own language. Duvillers was responsible for a host of such small, cheap books, often pseudonymous, which, like his almanac, mixed the homely wisdom and folk humour of proverbs with overt moralizing and religious instruction.
The proverb was one of Duvillers’ favourite genres, the song was another. Among his publications are three books of songs, the first of which (1844) was dedicated for the use of the Middleburg girls’ school: several of its twenty songs refer to lacemaking. In 1846 and 1847 there followed two more volumes containing fourteen and fifteen songs respectively, which were intended for use in the lace schools.
The background to these publications was the devastating crisis that affected Flanders principal industry, linen manufacturing, during the 1840s. In 1840 linen occupied nearly 300,000 people in Flanders, about twenty per cent of the population. They were employed in their own homes as spinners and weavers, supplementing their incomes by growing their own food on smallholdings. By the end of the decade this entire sector had all but disappeared. The causes included competition from British factory-produced linens and the displacement of linen by cotton, but this crisis in manufacturing was also exacerbated by poor harvests in the late 1840s, the same period as the Irish Potato Famine. Unemployment and high food prices coincided with typhus and cholera epidemics. For the fledgling Belgian state, born out of an earlier revolution in 1830, misery and starvation in Flanders presented a crisis of legitimacy. In other European countries the ‘Hungry Forties’ led to protest and even the overthrow of the political order. How could that outcome be avoided in Flanders too?[2]
One answer was to retrain the population to make lace. This might seem an odd choice given that machine-made lace was already a source of competition for Flemish handmade lace. Nottingham and Calais tulle had effectively wiped out Lille’s lace industry in the 1830s. But the fashion for tulle had crashed, and the market for Flemish Valenciennes lace was sufficiently recovered for this project to make sense. Up until 1830 lacemaking had been a largely urban manufacture in Flanders, but in the 1840s it would desert the cities such as Antwerp and Ghent (though not Bruges) to take up its abode in the countryside, and especially in the villages of West Flanders that had been most affected by the linen crisis.
However, lacemaking is not a skill acquired overnight: it required teachers and schools. According to the historian of the Belgian lace industry, Pierre Verhaegen, ‘it was now that, under the influence of humble parish priests, of charitable persons, and some convent superiors, the lace industry suddenly took flight again. In the convents of the two Flanders and Brabant, children started to be taught to make lace; where there was no establishment of this kind then one was founded and soon there was hardly a convent in Flanders which did not possess a lace school. New female congregations of nuns sprang up and gathered around themselves the children of the villages where they were implanted.’[3] This describes the role of Duvillers in Middelburg: at his initiative local elites provided the funding for a lace school, and the staff was supplied by one of the new teaching congregations of nuns.
There are many ironies to this story. The political cleavage in the young Belgian state was between the liberals and the clericals. During the 1840s the liberals, who were largely French speaking and anticlerical, were the dominant party, but their response to the linen crisis, including the funding of the lace schools, required their collaboration with their political arch-rivals, the Flemish clergy. Later in the century, the creation of hundreds of lace workshops masquerading under the name ‘school’ created a new battlefront in ‘culture wars’ between clericals, liberals and, later, socialists. In the meantime, hundreds of thousands of young Flemish women were trained in a trade that effectively trapped them in poverty. For liberals, the failure of the clergy to provide a decent education for their charges, as well as the profits the Catholic Church drew from their ignorant, emaciated and tubercular lace apprentices, was a scandal. For socialists, the impoverished lacemaker became a symbol for ‘Arm Vlaanderen’ [Poor Flanders]: she was the personification of the entrenched misery which demanded radical action, such as the banning of domestic manufacture. But for the clergy and their supporters the homeworking lacemaker, trained by nuns simultaneously in religion and labour, was the epitome of domestic virtue.[4]
The battle over the lace schools was fought in literature as well as in the newspapers and the chambers of parliament, as we will see in future posts on the work of Johanna Courtmans-Berchmans, Virginie Loveling, Guido Gezelle, Stijn Streuvels, and Reimond Stijns, among others. All of these, however, had the opportunity to reflect after several decades on the success and failures of the lace schools: Duvillers was there at the start.
The Middleburg Girls School, for whom the 1844 volume of songs was intended, was Duvillers own project, or at least so claimed a song in which trainee seamstresses thanked ‘Our Pastor, who erected this school’.[5] This series of songs predates the onset of the linen crisis; nonetheless, the industry was clearly in trouble. In ‘The Song of the Spinners’, the speakers lament that ‘Wages are small, and living expensive/ There’s no butter on our bread’.[6] However, at that time lacemaking was only one of the replacement trades being taught: ‘I feel motivated / always to go to school. I learn lovely things there;/ I learn how to make nice lace;/ I sew, I knit,/ it is all profitable for me’.[7] Nonetheless lace was, to judge by the number of songs on the topic, the dominant occupation taught in the school, and Duvillers was clearly on a mission to promote it: ‘O blessed land!/ Where even small a small child’s hands/ Can sustain her parents,/ By playing, [she] can earn,/ By playing.’[8] Observers like Duvillers often thought of lacemaking as a form of play, an association made easier by the fact that in Flemish the terms are homonyms ― ‘spelen’ and ‘speldewerk’: ‘Here we play a game/ Where anyone might see us;/ The lace shines/ Like a genuine fairy art.’[9] Duvillers frequently used the term ‘toover’ – meaning magic or fairy – to describe lace, as did many other commentators on the industry.
By 1846, when Duvillers’ next volume of songs appeared, lace had become the single focus of Middelburg’s and many other schools across Flanders. The first song in the volume describes the situation as the linen crisis reached its peak. In years gone by father had sat to weave and mother to spin, and the loom and spinning-wheel together had saved the children from anxiety and grief as they could get their daily bread. But now that ‘Frenchmen wear no linen anymore’ (the French army had replaced its red linen trousers with cotton ones) the girls must go to the lace-school.[10] Yet despite the problems besetting Flanders, Duvillers’ tone in this volume is, overall, positive. In ‘Flora, the Bold Lacemaker’, for example, the eponymous heroine sings ‘Long live lacework! Farewell to the droning spinning wheel!/ I’ll follow the girls from the town,/ my fingers will play both large and small,/ and so Flora will earn her bread.’[11] Here, as elsewhere in these songs, the purchaser of the lace schools’ product is identified as ‘the Englishman’ or even ‘John Bull’. The lace school is clearly a developing proposition: one song describes the pristine building ‘on two floors!’, so much better than the ‘dark hole’ where they have been working up till now.[12]
This set of fourteen songs is essentially a promotional campaign to convince parents, and the apprentices themselves, of the benefits of the lace school. Duvillers highlights not only the monetary rewards but also that the girls can meet their friends, be warm and safe, and kept on the path of moral rectitude by ‘singing God’s praises’ and saying the rosary. However, they also sing other, secular songs ‘of the little weaver, or of the cat’ (probably references to lace tells).[13] In particular he dwells on the fun and games held on the Feast of St Gregory (12 March or 9 May, see our post on Geraardsbergen), the patron of lacemaking in East Flanders, when there would be a prize-giving attended by priest, the lord and lady from the chateau, as well as all the members of the philanthropic institute that supports the school, who will give out ‘big books clothes, hats and cloth’ to the pupils.[14] Later the whole school will go on jaunt to Ghent. In other songs Duvillers contrasts lacemaking to other occupations in agriculture or food production that might, on the surface, appear better remunerated. For instance he relates the cautionary tale of ‘Anastasia De Bal’ who threw her lace cushion in the fire and went to work for a farmer who taught her to swear like trooper. Although she earns a tad more, she is out shivering in the fields, her clothes are worn and tattered, and the work makes her hungry and thirsty (and implicitly food is costly). And of course agricultural work stops in the winter, and then she’ll be forced to live on potato peelings and even grass.[15]
A large number of Duvillers’ songs in this and the next volume are in the form of dialogues, and between them they cover many of the daily interactions experienced in and around the lace-school. For example, apprentice Mietje meets a gentleman on her way to the school, and when he learns that she is supporting her sick father as well as six children he gives her ten francs.[16] In the next song the priest visits the school to see how the apprentices are doing, and the lace-mistress gives a run-down on each individual’s progress, or lack of it.[17] The priest seems to be constantly dropping in on the school, either showing around other clergy who are interested in setting up their own school, or philanthropic gentry who might support the enterprise, or handing out prizes. Other visitors include the ‘koopvrouw’, the female intermediary who collected lace on behalf of the merchants in the distant cities.[18] In another song she is named as ‘Mevrouwe Delcampo’ from Bruges, while the teacher is frequently referred to as ‘Sister Monica’.
Both of these were probably real people, though so far I have been unable to verify this. Hopefully Duvillers was more careful to use pseudonyms to hide the identities of the numerous girls and young women who attended the school. Dozens are named, and in many cases in order to be upbraided. Wantje Loete, Cisca Bral, Mie d’Hont, Genoveva d’Hont, Barbara Kwikkelbeen, all had done something to annoy Duvillers. Most of these appear in the third, 1847 volume which is markedly more bad-tempered than its predecessors. In the winter of 1846-7 it appears that the children were being withdrawn from the school. Duvillers was particularly infuriated by the parents who, now their daughters had learnt the rudiments of lacemaking, kept them at home to save the few pennies that attendance at the lace-school incurred; or, just as bad, sending them out into the fields to do agricultural work. He warns Wantje Loete that once at home her cushion will stand empty because her mother will need her to look after her latest sibling, while her father will send her to look after the goats and pigs. Meanwhile she, and the other girls staying away from school, will never really master lacemaking.[19] The issue, though, was not entirely economic: for Duvillers the key success of the school was establishing religious oversight of all the young women in the parish and it was this moral authority which parents and some girls, were challenging.
All was not well in the school either: in the song ‘The School Mistress and the Foolish Mother’, the latter comes to complain that her daughter Mie has been beaten, and that she will take her, her stool and her cushion out of school if another finger is laid on her. The school mistress answers that no one has been beaten, she’s only dragged Mie into the middle of the school and made her kneel and pray because she is so lazy. And while the stool belongs to the family, the other tools belong to the school. ‘Don’t come back later and try to flatter us/ and ask us if she can [learn to] knit,/ Or even sew your clothes:/ Woman, this is no dovecot!’[20] However, the mistress’s protestations that no-one has been beaten are undermined by other songs in which she directly tells the children that she’s been instructed by the pastor himself ‘not to spare the rod’.[21] Perhaps this was the reason girls like Barbara Kwikkelbeen preferred hanging around in the street or wandering through the parish. In a fury over all this backsliding Duvillers declares ‘But as the poor are so pigheaded,/ Then I will not lift my hand to help them,/ And I’ll send them a punishment.’[22] If these songs in any way represent the priest’s actual relations with his parishioners, then it is plausible that it was this breakdown that brought about his removal from Middelburg, and not his obstreperous involvement in language politics.
As any regular visitor to this site will know, apprentice lacemakers sang while they worked. Duvillers frequently alludes to this custom, and even names some of the songs they sang, such as ‘Pierlala’. He presumably wanted his songs to be adopted by the Middelburg lace school as more suitable for future ‘brides of Christ’ (that is nuns, which was clearly Duvillers’ hope for at least some of the girls) than those currently in use, that is if his choice of tunes is indicative of what was being sung. Most of these seem derive from the theatre, such as ‘The Best is Good Enough for Me’, or ‘The Frozen Nose’.
Presumably also he hoped that his songs would be taken up in other lace schools, but is there evidence of this? Although Flemish lacemakers sang a lot of songs, not many of them were actually about lacemaking itself. If anything their songs served as an imagined escape from their task. Duvillers’ songs, on the other hand, offer a detailed picture of life in a lace-school, of how the children interacted with each other, of the injunctions of the lace-mistress, of the various visitors during the day… the kind of nitty-gritty quotidian commonplaces that are a goldmine for the social historian but unlikely to excite a singer. This mundane character, and the highly localized references, made me think that, as songs, Duvillers’ work had probably fallen rather flat.
However, at least one of Duvillers’ songs did become a lace tell, and a version was still sung a century after publication. In 1948 Magda Cafmeyer published a series of articles ‘From Cradle to Grave’ about life-cycle traditions in Bruges and its immediate surrounding villages. She included, under youth, lace tells, and offered one that she herself had heard.[23]
It is worth seeing
Us making net (i.e. lace)
For the bonnets
of the young ladies of the city.
The finest lace
For our customers
Enriched with flower and leaf
one link, one lattice opening made
Wantje’s lace rests unsold
Isabelle gets
Ten franks the ell (the unit used for measuring lace, about 70 cm)
But she’s a fierce one
She doesn’t even look up
Her fingers twirl
The sticks (bobbins) roll;
They seem to dance before one’s eye.
O wonder, especially if anyone sees it,
But this tough one (‘schrimmer’ in Cafmeyer’s tell, ‘grimmer’ in Duvillers’ song), hardly ever leaves the house.
Just like magic!
Says boss de Lye (an unidentified figure),
As he quickly leaves the school.
Farewell to the field
The farmer and the baker
How fast and how wide-awake (I am)
And I also get a little wage
I work here peacefully
By my sister
I sit here warm and clean.
Unknown to Cafmeyer, these are two verses, albeit slightly rearranged, of one of Duvillers’ Speldewerksters-liedjes which appeared in his first, 1844 collection. In his own way, he had contributed to the craft culture of Flemish lacemakers.
[1] For a fuller biography of Father Duvillers, and detail of his works and his legend, see J. Muyldermans, ‘Constant Duvillers (1803-1885). Zijn leven en zijne schriften’, in Verslagen en Mededelingen der Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde (1928): 148-202, and F. van Es, Pastoor Constant Duvillers, Folklorist en folkloristische figuur (Ghent, 1949).
[2] G. Jacquemyns, Histoire de la crise économique des Flandres (1845-1850) (Brussels, 1929).
[3] Pierre Verhaegen, Les industries à domicile en Belgique: La dentelle et la broderie sur tulle (Brussels: Office du Travail, 1891), vol. 1, p. 49.
[4] We will return to this political debate in future posts, but for liberal/socialist critiques of the Catholic Church’s involvement in the lace schools see Guillaume Degreef, L’ouvrière dentellière en Belgique (Brussels, 1886) and Auguste de Winne, À travers les Flandres (Ghent, 1902). Although Pierre Verhaegen’s father, Pierre-Théodore Verhaegen (1796-1862) was the effective leader of the Belgian liberals and anticlericals, and at the forefront of the battle over education (students at the Free University of Brussels – free of Catholic influence that is – still celebrate ‘Saint Verhaegen’s Day’), he himself took a more positive view on the Church’s lace schools.
[5] C. Duvillers, Twintig Nieuwe Liedjes, ten geebruyke der Meysjesschool van Middelburg, in Vlaenderen (Ghent, 1844): Naeystersliedje ‘O! dank zy onzen pastor:/ Hij heeft de school gesticht’.
[6] Duvillers, Twintig Nieuwe Liedjes: ‘T Liedje der Spinnetten ‘Den loon is kleyn; en ‘t is duer leven;/ Er ligt geen’ boter op ons brood’.
[7] Duvillers, Twintig Nieuwe Liedjes: Huys-liedje ‘ ‘k Voel mij gedreven/ Om altyd school te gaen./ Daer leer ik fraeye zaken:/ ‘k Leer nette kantjes maken;/ Ik naey, ik brey,/ ‘t Is al profyt voor my’.
[8] Duvillers, Twintig Nieuwe Liedjes: Kantwerksters-Liedje ‘O zalig land!/ Waer ook een’ kinderhand/ Zyn’ ouders onderstand,/ Al spelen, kan verschaffen,/ Al spelen, ja!’
[9] Ander Kantwerksters-Liedje ‘Wy spelen hier een spel/ Waer ieder moet op kyken;/ Dat speldenwerken schynt/ Een’ regte tooverkonst.’
[10] C. Duvillers, Liedjes voor de Kantwerkscholen, Gevolge door de Spreuken van baeske Van de Wiele (Bruges: Vandecastell-Werbrouck, 1846): no. 1: ‘Toen ik nog een kleyn boontje was,/ Deed vader ook in ‘t linnen,/ Terwyl ik in een boekske las,/ Zat moeder daer te spinnen; En ‘t spinnewiel en ‘t weefgetouw/ Bevrydden ons van druk en rouw,/ Wy konden ‘t broodje winnen.’
[11] Duvillers, Liedjes voor de Kantwerkscholen (1846): Flora, of de moedige kantwerkster ‘Vivat het spellewerk! Vivat!/ Vaerwel het ronkend spinnewielken!/ Ik volg de meysjes van de stad,/ ‘k speel met ving’ren, kleyn en groot,/ En zoo wint Floorken ook haer brood.’
[12] Duvillers, Liedjes voor de Kantwerkscholen (1846): no. 6: ‘Er ryst voor ons een’ nieuwe school,/ Ze zyn al de tweede stagie,/ Sa! Dochters, schept maer goê couragie:/ Haest krupt gy uyt uw donker hol.’
[13] Duvillers, Liedjes voor de Kantwerkscholen (1846): De Schoolvrouw, den pastor en de dry vreemde heeren ‘Sa! Kinders, zingen wy eens dat/ Van ‘t Weverken of van de Kat’. Neither reference can be clearly identified as weavers and cats are both common characers in Flemish folksong, but two popular lace tells were ‘Daar waren vier wevers’ and ‘De katje aan de zee’.
[14] Duvillers, Liedjes voor de Kantwerkscholen (1846): Den Pastor en de Schoolvrouw ‘En, dan kom ik afgetreden/ Met den heere van ‘t kasteel,/ En mevrouw, en al de leden/ Van ‘t weldadigheyds-bureel,/ En wy geven groote boeken,/ Nieuwe kleedren, mutsen, doeken,/ Al die braef is krygt zyn deel.’
[15] Duvillers, Liedjes voor de Kantwerkscholen (1846): no. 14.
[16] Duvillers, Liedjes voor de Kantwerkscholen (1846): Den Heer en het schoolkind.
[17] Duvillers, Liedjes voor de Kantwerkscholen (1846): Den pastor en de schoolvrouw.
[18] Duvillers, Liedjes voor de Kantwerkscholen (1846): De Koopvrouw en de zuyster.
[19] C. Duvillers, Liedjes voor de Kantwerkscholen en Spreuken van baeske Van de Wiele (Ghent, 1847): Wantje Loete.
[20] Duvillers, Liedjes voor de Kantwerkscholen (1847): De Schoolvrouw en d’onverstandige Moeder ‘Brengt u ‘t meysken in ‘t verdriet,/ Threse, en kom dan later niet/ Schoone spreken, en ons vleyen,/ En ons vragen of ‘t mag breyen,/ Of eens naeyen aen uw kleed:/ Vrouw, ‘t is hier geen duyvenkeet.’
[21] Duvillers, Liedjes voor de Kantwerkscholen (1847): De Zuster en de Schoolkinders ‘Den pastor heeft my streng bevolen/ Van in de beyde kantwerkscholen/ Daer op te letten, en de roê/ Zoo niet te sparen, lyk ik doe.’
[22] Duvillers, Liedjes voor de Kantwerkscholen (1847): Genoveva d’Hont ‘Maer al den armen ‘t zoo verstaet,/ Dan doe ‘ker maer myn hand van af,/ En ‘k jon ze hem, de straf.’
[23] Magda Cafmeyer, ‘Van de wieg tot het graf III: Dat was de jeugd’, Biekorf 49 (1948): 206-7.
The northern French city of Lille was once a great centre of lacemaking. In the eighteenth century, lace manufacture was the dominant occupation for women. The lacemakers’ feast held annually on 9 May – the ‘Fête du Broquelet’ or ‘Feast of the Bobbin’ – continued to be the city’s major holiday into the first decades of the nineteenth century.[1] The women and girls from the different lace workshops and schools took a jaunt out to the taverns and parks of the surrounding villages; the drinking and dancing continued for several days. But by the mid-nineteenth century, even as the city’s rapid industrialisation covered those same villages and parks with textile factories and rows of workers’ tenements, the number of lacemakers declined until, by 1851, there were only 1,600 listed in the census.[2] Yet, even as she disappeared from Lille’s working-class quarters, the lacemaker became a symbol of the city, and the designated transmitter of its memories and traditions.
It was a song, more specifically a lullaby, which brought about this transfiguration. ‘Le P’tit Quinquin’ [The little child] was first performed in 1851 by its author and composer, Alexandre Desrousseaux.[3] It is in the voice of a lacemaker, coaxing and threatening her child to try to get him to sleep so she can get on with her work. It would be hard to exaggerate the success of this text (originally titled ‘L’canchon dormoire’ or ‘lullaby’): it was without contest Desrousseaux’s most famous work – he is often described as ‘the father of Le P’tit Quinquin’ – and Desrousseaux was himself the most famous of Lille’s many dialect poets and songwriters. That success was almost immediate: over 100,000 copies of the song were sold between 1853, its first publication, and 1890. It could be heard in all the bars and cafés of the city, and by 1854 newspapers had already labelled it ‘The Marseillaise of the Lille worker’. ‘Le P’tit Quinquin’ gave his name to shops, a newspaper, a make of biscuit, a brand of pencil, and dozens of other commercial uses, not just in Lille but across France. More recently it was the title of a French TV mini-series, directed by Bruno Dumont which was set in northern France. There are several continuations of the song (some by Desrousseaux himself) as well as numerous parodies, while the tune has been endlessly borrowed. There are recordings of reggae, punk and military band versions. When a monument to Desrousseaux was erected in Lille in 1902, his bust was accompanied by the child and his mother, complete with lace cushion. In 1953 there were national, indeed international celebrations to mark the centenary of publication of the ‘Le P’tit Quinquin’.
Desrousseaux (1820-1892) grew up in Saint-Sauveur, a working-class quarter of Lille: his mother had herself been a lacemaker, but was later a shopkeeper, while his father made braiding. Young Alexandre worked in a variety of textile factories and then as a tailor’s apprentice before being conscripted into the army in 1840. However, he had already started to make a reputation as a musician, selling his own songsheets to the crowds during Lille’s carnival. In the eighteenth century Lille had been home to a thriving dialect literary culture, with songs and plays composed in Picard, and often featuring lacemaker characters. Antoine Cottignies (known as ‘Brûle-Maison’) and his son Jacques were the most famous practitioners, and their works were still familiar in the early nineteenth century. Desrousseaux was determined to revive the glory days of Picard literature: almost everything he composed was in dialect. Song clubs were a vibrant feature of working-class culture in Lille and other industrial cities, and dialect was often the preferred medium as more directly expressive of workers’ concerns (although the most famous piece to emerge from these clubs – Eugène Pottier’s socialist anthem ‘L’Internationale’ which was, for many years, the national anthem of the Soviet Union – was composed in standard French). Desrousseaux himself, thanks to his military career and his growing musical fame, was taken under the wing of the deputy mayor of Lille, Arthur Gentil-Descamps, and so climbed the social ladder into the ranks of the middle classes as a municipal functionary. However, he did not lose the common touch.
‘Le P’tit Quinquin’ was apparently born from observation. Walking through the city to visit his mother in cour Jeannette-à-vaches, Desrousseaux overheard a lacemaker, desperate to finish her order, attempting to quieten her crying child with promises of cakes and toys. However, Desrousseaux also adapted the scenario in order to incorporate other elements of Lille’s traditions and working-class culture. This idea was apparently suggested to him by Auguste Charles Arnold, the editor of the Gazette de Flandre. Arnold felt that the Lille workers, overwhelmed by the changes brought on by mechanisation and, in particular, the mass migration from across the Belgian border, needed to be reminded of their own history, and to draw strength from their traditions. Desrousseaux, who would go on to write an important book on the Moeurs populaires de la Flandre française (popular customs of French Flanders), took seriously his role as a folklorist: ‘Many of my songs could be considered as studies of our celebrations and pastimes, both public and private.’ ‘Le P’tit Quinquin’ contains references to the ‘Ducasse’, Lille’s main fair in August/September, and the puppet shows which were a mainstay of popular entertainment in northern French towns, with at least one theatre on almost every street. Saint Nicholas also appears for, as elsewhere in northern Europe, his feast day on 6 December was the main season for gift-giving. In Lille he was accompanied on his visits to children, both good and naughty, by a donkey who carried the gifts but who also carried whips to punish. Thus the lullaby of desperate worker became a survey of working-class entertainments.
Desrousseaux borrowed the voice of a lacemaker, though more often elderly, for several other songs which detailed this plebeian cultural and municipal history, such as ‘Le Broquelet d’autrefois (souvenirs d’une dentellière)’ [The Feast of the Bobbin of Yesteryear (memories of a lacemaker)] and ‘la vieille dentellière, souvenirs et regrets’ [the old lacemaker, memories and regrets]. Other songwriters also used a lacemaker character to make comparisons between the past and the present. For instance in 1908 Adolphe Desreumaux used this character to protest against the influx of Belgian migrant workers to the suburb of Wazemmes in his ‘Sou’vnirs d’eun vielle dintellière’ [Memories of an old lacemaker].[4] Thus the lacemaker became the Sybil of Lille’s oral and popular history.
‘Le P’tit Quinquin’ works because it mimics genuine folk lullabies which often combined saccharine tunes with texts that reeked of despair. Indeed, travellers passing through the city have assumed that it was a traditional folk lullaby rather than the work of a male author.[5] Desrousseaux’s lacemaker is simultaneously tender and desperate. Grinding poverty lurks in this text: a child crying for three-quarters of an hour was probably hungry, his good clothes were already in the pawn shop. Promises of gingerbread and toys may not work on little Narcisse because they are implausible, whereas the threat of chastisement seems more concrete.
There are numerous recordings available, but most seem intended for a nursery audience (in which the dialect is softened or entirely absent). Desrousseaux’s original listeners were adult males, and to appreciate the proper effect one really needs to hear it sung by happy bands of Lille OSC fans. But in the absence of such an encounter, we recommend the version sung by Raoul de Godewarsvelde, who was born in the same quartier as Desrousseaux, and which is available on youtube.[6]
Below we provide the original text, and a rough English translation,.
Dors mon p’tit Quiquin, mon p’tit poussin, mon gros raisin Ainsi l’autre jour une pauvre dentelière, Refrain ‘Et si tu me laisses faire une bonne semaine, Refrain ‘Nous irons dans la cour, Jeannette-aux-Vaches, Refrain ‘Et si par hazard son maître se fâche, Refrain ‘Alors serre tes yeux, dors mon bonhomme, Refrain ‘Le mois qui vient, c’est la fête de St Nicolas, Refrain Ni les marionnettes, ni le pain d’épice, Dors mon p’tit Quiquin, mon p’tit poussin, mon gros raisin |
Sleep my little child, my little chick, my juicy grape, You’ll make me suffer if you don’t sleep before tomorrow. Thus the other day, a poor lacemaker, Chorus ‘And if you let me do a good week’s work Chorus ‘We’ll go down to the yard, Jeannette-aux-Vaches,
Chorus ‘And if by chance the puppetmaster gets angry Chorus ‘So close your eyes, sleep little man Chorus ‘Next month, it’s Saint Nicholas’s day[9] Chorus Neither the puppets, nor the gingerbread Sleep my little child, my little chick, my fat grape, |
[1] 9 May remembers the translation of the relics of Saint Nicholas from Myra to Bari, an important feast in the Orthodox Church but less usually so in the Catholic Church.
[2] André Mabille de Poncheville, L’industrie dentelière française spécialement en Flandre : Enquête dans la région de Bailleul (Valenciennes: Librairie Giard, 1911), p. 67.
[3] For a good biography and exploration of Desrousseaux’s work see Éric Lemaire, Le chansonnier lillois Alexandre Joachim Desrousseaux et la chanson populaire dialectale (DELEM, 2009). Most of the information in this post comes from this source.
[4] Adolphe Desreumaux, Mes chansons et pasquilles patoises. Etudes de moeurs lilloises (Lille: J. Hollain, 1908), p. 17-18
[5] Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco, Essays in the Study of Folk-Songs (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1914), p. 253.
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uY28zyuK1HI
[7] The implication is that the clothes are in pawn. Desrousseaux himself worked for the municipal pawn shop.
[8] The ‘Ducasse’ was Lille’s major fair, held at the end of August – beginning of September.
[9] 6 December.
We have already met the Kettering staymaker John Plummer (1831-1914): he was one of the contributors to the Notes & Queries series on ‘Catterns’. Plummer was also an example of an ‘English labouring-class poet’ (like John Askham of Wellingborough, who featured in an earlier post).[1] Plummer published only one volume of poems – Songs of Labour, Northamptonshire Rambles and Other Poems (1860) – but he is probably better known than Askham. That is not necessarily because he was a better poet. Although some of his more lighthearted pieces work well, Plummer too had a weakness for highfalutin language and poetic clichés, so all mothers are ‘angels’, all earls are ‘belted’… But Plummer led a more adventurous and combative life than Askham, and above all was more politically engaged, which brought him public attention.
Given his interest in lacemaking, the title Songs of Labour led us to hope that lacemakers would feature prominently. Sadly, they are not mentioned even once; nonetheless, their influence may still be detected, as we will explain at the end of this post.
Plummer was born in the East End of London, where his father worked as a staymaker. His youth was marked by periods of poverty, and made more difficult by partial deafness and lameness, consequences of a childhood illness. Despite receiving almost no schooling, he became obsessed with the written word, seeking out books wherever he could find them. He started writing poetry in the wake of the revolutionary events of 1848, inspired by reading the Chartist poet Gerald Massey’s ‘Song of Welcome’ to the exiled Hungarian rebel Kossuth. In 1853 he and his father took jobs at a Kettering stay factory, but he quickly established a second career as a local newspaper commentator on a range of political and social issues.[2] In 1860 he married Mary Ann Jenkinson, a milliner from Kettering, and soon after the couple moved to Hackney to work for publishing house Cassell & Co., which specialized in improving literature aimed at the working class.[3] In London Plummer pursued a new career as journalist and newspaper editor. He became quite well known, corresponding with Lord Brougham (to whom his book of poems was dedicated) and John Stuart Mill: the latter described him as one of ‘the most inspiring examples of mental cultivation and high principle in a self-instructed working man’.[4] (Mary Ann Plummer, meanwhile, was a signatory of Mill’s petition in favour of women’s suffrage in 1866.[5]) In 1879 the Plummer family emigrated to Australia where John became editor of the Illustrated Sydney News among many other activities. Northamptonshire was not, however, forgotten: his house in Sydney was named after the village near Kettering where he had married, and about which he had written a poem, Thorpe Malsor.[6]
This background, and the title Songs of Labour, might lead one to think that Plummer’s politics were radical. And in lots of ways they were: Plummer’s poems condemned poverty, war and the tyranny of kings, and celebrated the virtues of the labouring classes. However, he first came to national prominence when he wrote in support of his brother Japheth who had attempted to set himself up as a shoemaker in the teeth of a closed shop operated by the powerful Northamptonshire shoemakers’ trade union. Japheth was eventually driven out of the neighbourhood (he became a soldier) while John was burnt in effigy. Plummer was not entirely hostile to trade unions, but his ideal social type, which he celebrated in poems such as ‘The Poor Man’s Dream’ and ‘The Emigrant’s Song’, was the homesteader. In North America the working man could find land of his own to farm and be beholden to no one, neither aristocratic landlord, nor factory owner nor even his fellow worker. As a political economist Plummer supported technical innovation such as steam engines and factories, but in his poems he fled the ‘smoke-dried teeming Cities, where/ Is often heard the low and wailing sob/ Of Labour mourning in despair’ for the ‘grassey lea’ of Thorpe Malsor. Education, self-help, sobriety, Christian charity, these were his regular themes. Australia, another pioneer society, suited him admirably.
In 1878, the ever prolific Plummer wrote three articles on ‘The Northamptonshire Lace-Making Industry Past and Present’ for the Northampton Mercury.[7] This is a rather useful series because, while Plummer made use of existing printed material such as the Children’s Employment Commission reports, he also included anecdotes told to him and his own observations. For instance he cites the local names given to lacemaking equipment and to common patterns. The picture he paints of the industry in the past was largely negative: lacemakers were impoverished, unhealthy and immoral. He had few hopes for its future either. But he does offer little insights into their social history, such as lacemakers were prone to a ‘nervous twitching of the fingers’, that they were good at mental arithmetic because of counting pins, and that they were proud of the tools of their trade such as their spangled bobbins and their cushions. One story he tells concerns a deceased lacemaker whose daughter was presented with a bill which she believed her mother had paid even though she could find no receipt. The creditor sent bailiffs to seize the lacemaker’s property, but the daughter was determined to hold onto her mother’s pillow as a memento. During the struggle, the cover of the pillow was torn and out fell the missing receipt together with other documents and some coins.
Like almost every other commentator on Midlands lacemaking, Plummer tackles the topic of ‘lace songs’. He quotes the usual sources such as the Notes & Queries articles, and includes the unavoidable Shakespearean reference, but he also mentions that while living in Kettering he ‘formed a small collection of lace-makers’ songs, which has, unfortunately, become lost.’ Nonetheless, he could recall some of the contents. They included the gruesome ‘Little Sir Hugh’ which we discussed in a previous post, and in general Plummer observed that ‘the more horrible and revolting the details, the greater the popularity’ of lace songs. He also cites ‘Long Lankin’ and ‘Death and the Maiden’, which are both well known songs, and mentioned by other collectors of lacemakers’ oral traditions. However, the rest are much more difficult to identify and to date we have been unable to trace any text or tune for the following seven listed by Plummer as ‘lace songs’.
1) ‘’The Lord of Burleigh’. This ballad narrates a kind of She Stoops to Conquer in reverse. It is the same story as Tennyson’s 1835 poem, in which a rich lord pretends to be poor in order to win a woman’s heart. Both were inspired by the 1791 marriage of Henry Cecil (first Marquess of Exeter and eponymous Lord of Burghley House in Cambridgeshire) to Sarah Hoggins, a farmer’s daughter from Great Bolas in Shropshire. The opening stanza went ‘A noble lord a-wooing went,/ A-wooing went my lord;/ She was a maid of low degree,/ And would not speak a word’. That is all that Plummer tells us, other than it was considerably ruder than Tennyson’s version.
2) ‘Blackberry Nan’. The first lines ran ‘Blackberry Nan, Blackberry Nan/ Killed a cat in her milking can.’
3) ‘The Squire’s Ghost’. The title is all the information Plummer provides. There are some well-known folksongs that might fit this rubric.
4) ‘Christian and the Money-lender’. The title is all the information Plummer provides which is particularly unfortunate, as this is a theme evoked in lacemakers’ songs in France and Flanders, so there may be a connection.
5) ‘Betsy’s Dream’. The title is all the information Plummer provides.
6) A ballad which alludes to Simon de St. Liz (or rather Simon de Senlis, first earl of Northampton and 2nd earl of Huntingdon, one of William the Conqueror’s knights). A medieval legend tells that William intended that Simon should marry Judith, widow of the executed Earl of Northumbria Waltheof, but she refused him on account of his lameness. Furious, Simon pursued Judith until pacified by her daughter Maud’s promise to marry him instead. Maud’s influence was supposed to have turned the old soldier into something of a saint.
7) A song celebrating the lacemakers’ patron Saint Catherine that commenced ‘On Cattern’s Day we sing and play,/ And wear our Sunday gown’.
We would be delighted if anyone was able to provide us with more information about any of these, or even better Plummer’s manuscript of lacemakers’ songs. But in the meantime it might be worth mentioning that two of these themes had already been used by Plummer in his poems. After ‘Songs of Labour’, Plummer had a section dedicated to ‘Northamptonshire Rambles’ which took their cue from some item of local history or a recent event. One retold ‘The Legend of Burleigh House’; another the story of ‘Simon de St. Liz’. Is it impossible that these topics were suggested to him by songs he heard lacemakers sing?
[1] Although this label is retrospective, this group does have some coherence, not least in the interest its members had in each others’ work. Askham named his house after John Clare, the Northamptonshire ‘peasant poet’; while Plummer actually went to visit Clare in his asylum in 1861.
[2] Most information on his early life comes from the ‘autobiographical sketch’ that served as an introduction to his Songs of Labour. Another short biography was included in a collection edited the penal reformer Matthew Davenport Hill for the publisher John Cassell, himself one of Plummer’s patrons: Our Examples, Poor and Rich; Or, Biographical Sketches of Men and Women Who have by an Extraordinary Use of their Opportunities, Benefitted their Fellow Creatures (London, 1861), pp. 287-96.
[3] See the post on the website ‘Ringstead People’ dedicated to Mary Ann Jenkinson and her family.
[4] John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy ed. Jonathan Riley (Oxford, 1994), p. 151. Mill and Plummer wrote and met with each other regularly in the 1860s and 70s.
[5] On which see the post ‘The South Hackney Connection’ on the blog ‘Woman and Her Sphere’.
[6] Hence Plummer has an entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.
[7] Appearing on 19 January, 2 February and 16 March 1878.
Silverstone, now best known for its racing circuit, lies at the heart of the ancient forest of Whittlewood on the Northamptonshire-Buckinghamshire border. There is an academic explanation why forest communities took up craft manufactures like lace, but we’ll not go into that here. Certainly Silverstone was a lace village until the late nineteenth century.
John Edward Linnell (1842-1919) grew up in Silverstone, or ‘Silson’ in the local parlance. Years later, when serving as vicar of Pavenham near Bedford (another lace village), he wrote an account of his childhood. Linnell came to holy orders by a round-about route and his memoirs are more robust than one might expect from a Victorian clergyman. While many of his peers repressed the rough games that characterised rural popular culture, Linnell commemorated them. He was also interested in more aesthetic pursuits such as ballad singing. One of the singers he mentions was a lacemaker, Sall, who kept house with her brother Simon, the sexton. We quote this section in full, including a verse of one of Sall’s songs. The pair
lived in a large, lone, thatched cottage that stood on the edge of an orchard. They always had a wood fire on the hearth of their living-room, and half-way up the top of the wide, open chimney hung flitches of bacon and hams, which had been sent by their wealthier neighbours to be smoked and dried. Around a window that opened from the chimney-corner into the garden there were built into the wall a number of old Dutch tiles said to have once belonged to a mansion that had vanished from Silson centuries back, possibly the royal residence I have already mentioned. The shelves were loaded with the choicest of old china, while here and there hung a time-stained print depicting a battle-scene. When I was a boy, it was one of my greatest delights of my life to drop in on them of a winter’s night, when the wind was howling among the trees outside and the sparks were flying up the chimney to lose themselves in the darkness above, and hear them tell their stories of bygone days. It was a picture many an artist would have loved to paint. Simon used to sit on a low, flag-bottomed chair, his body bent forward over the hearth so that he could better replenish the fire. Sall, with her lace pillow before her, would jangle her bobbins and place her pins with her long, bony fingers in the light of a tallow candle whose rays passed through a tall water-bottle and fell softly on her parchment. The two knew all the legends and traditions of the countryside, and it’s from them I gleaned many of the incidents I now relate sixty years after.
Sir Walter Scott once declared that nothing was more dramatically effective than an old murder ballad. With anyone like Sall to recite it, I can well believe him. The murderer, the victim, the grave, and the hanging were brought before our eyes as the verses fell from her lips. To the ordinary reader the following lines would seem mere jingle: —
‘One lonely night, as I sat high,
Instead of one there two pass’d by.
The boughs did bend, my soul did quake,
To see the hole that Fox did make.’
To her they presented part of a tragedy more real than Macbeth’s to lovers of Shakespeare, though the heroine was only a humble serving-maid. She, it seemed, had arranged to meet her lover by moonlight in a spinney near her master’s house. First at the trysting place, she climbed a fir-tree to give the laggard a fright when he should appear. After a long wait she heard footsteps and voices and, looking down, saw her lover enter the glade accompanied by a man carrying a spade. Not daring to speak, she watched them while they dug a deep hole just beneath her. Then the truth dawned on her; she was to be murdered, and it was her grave they were digging. At last their task was finished, and the villains impatiently awaited her arrival. But they were to be disappointed, for, though trembling in every limb with terror, she did not reveal her presence. Eventually they departed, and she descended the tree, fled back to her master’s house, and told what she had seen. An alarm was raised, her lover, Fox, whose name seemed well suited to his character, was arrested, confessed to his evil intentions, and was hanged. ‘An’ sarve him right!’ Simon would grunt, when Sall had left him swinging ‘from the gallows tree so high.’[1]
When Linnell’s memoirs appeared posthumously in 1932, this particular verse had already been recorded from lacemakers on several occasions, and now it has its own entry in the Roud Folksong Index as RN17769. It was frequently identified as a ‘lace tell’. A report in The Leighton Buzzard Observer for 4 April 1893 explained that
one of the most curious features in connection with this trade was the songs of the lacemakers, known locally as lace tells, or lace tellings. These consisted of doggrel [sic] verses which remind one very forcibly of the nursery ditties that delight the juvenile mind. The proficiency of the worker was estimated by the number of pins stuck in a given time, and the singing of these tells assisted the counting and kept them together. These songs possess no merit as literary productions, if such they may be called, but they form a remarkable and interesting survival of a condition of things which has practically passed away. We give a few of the more striking.
‘Nineteen miles as I sat high,
Looking for one as he passed by;
The boughs did bend, the leaves did shake,
See what a hole the fox did make!
The fox did look, the fox did see,
Digging a hole to bury me;
I saw one that ne’er saw me,
I saw a dark lantern tied to a tree.’
The allusion here is to an intended murder. A young man wishing to rid himself of his sweetheart had determined to take her life; and, with the intention of hiding all traces of the crime, he busied himself with digging her grave near the spot where they were to meet. He was turned from his wicked purpose by observing some person either up a tree or standing behind him.[2]
This lace tell was also noted by Thomas Wright, among others.[3] It is one of the few tells for which we possess a tune because the folksong collector Fred Hamer (the husband of the lace teacher Margaret Hamer) recorded a version from a Mrs White of Cranfield in Bedfordshire.[4]
Lace Tells were often cut down and mashed up versions of longer ballads, and the implication of Linnell’s account is that the entire narrative was sung. However, no full version of the story in ballad form has been discovered in tradition.[5] So it is more likely that this verse was meant as a sung element in a longer prose narrative, what is known as a ‘cante-fable’.
The whole story, including the verse, has also been recorded on a number of occasions, the first in James Orchard Halliwell’s Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales in 1849. This book has a complicated publishing history: it was the sequel to the author’s Nursery Rhymes of England which first appeared in 1842, although the verse about ‘the hole the fox did make’ only appeared in the 1846 edition of that title.[6] Both verse and story were said by Halliwell to have been obtained in Oxfordshire.
Many years ago there lived at the University of Oxford a young student, who, having seduced the daughter of a tradesman, sought to conceal his crime by committing the more heinous one of murder. With this view, he made an appointment to meet her one evening in a secluded field. She was at the rendezvous considerably before the time agreed upon for their meeting, and hid herself in a tree. The student arrived on the spot shortly afterwards, but what was the astonishment of the girl to observe that he commenced digging a grave. Her fears and suspicions were aroused, and she did not leave her place of concealment till the student, despairing of her arrival, returned to his college. The next day, when she was at the door of her father’s house, he passed and saluted her as usual. She returned his greeting by repeating the following lines:
One moonshiny night, as I sat high,
Waiting for one to come by,
The boughs did bend; my heart did ache
To see what hole the fox did make.
Astounded by her unexpected knowledge of his base design, in a moment of fury he stabbed her to the heart. This murder occasioned a violent conflict between the tradespeople and the students, the latter taking part with the murderer, and so fierce was the skirmish, that Brewer’s Lane, it is said, ran down with blood. The place of appointment was adjoining the Divinity Walk, which was in time past far more secluded than at the present day, and she is said to have been buried in the grave made for her by her paramour.[7]
Even in the versions given so far one can see that the verse was more stable than the story that explains it. In the one Sall told to Linnell the would-be assassin ended on the gallows, in the Olney version he was discovered and fled, while in the Oxford version he murders the girl but not at the place and time he had planned. In another version, sent in to Notes and Queries in 1887 by Thomas Ratcliff of Worksop, the servant girl lured by her false lover to the woods is so frightened by the grave she sees him digging that she falls in a faint from the tree, and this in turn frightens off the would-be murderers.[8]
We’ll give this agglomeration of stories the general title ‘One Moonshiny Night’, as used in Notes and Queries, to distinguish this group from a variety of other traditional tales that feature a young woman who accidentally learns that her suitor plans to murder her and later confronts him with this knowledge. In folklore studies the generic title for this plot type is ‘The Robber Bridegroom’, tale type number ATU 955. It is an enormously popular narrative, with variants found in many cultures.[9] It is has also inspired many writers, including Eudora Welty’s 1942 novella The Robber Bridegroom and, more relevant to lacemakers, Henri Pourrat’s four volume novel Gaspard des Montagnes (1922-1931). (Pourrat’s literary output drew heavily on his career as a folklorist around Ambert: his most forthcoming narrators were lacemakers.)[10] The best known English version is ‘Mister Fox’, which John Brickdale Blakeway (1765-1821) wrote from memory, having been told it in his youth by a great-aunt, and sent by him to the Shakespearean scholar Edmond Malone (1741-1812). Malone then included it in his notes to the play Much Ado About Nothing. Why? Because it elucidates the line Benedick says to Claudio Act 1 Scene 1: ‘Like the old tale, my lord: it is not so, nor ‘twas not so; but, indeed, God forbid it should be so’, the very words the murderer Mister Fox says to his would-be victim, Lady Mary, when she challenges him with her knowledge of his plans.[11] However, while the name ‘Mister Fox’ would imply some connection to ‘One Moonshiny Night’, the verse itself does not occur in Blakeway’s version… and any further pursuit of the relationship between these narratives will take us too far from our lacemakers’ tell.
The popularity of the verse must owe something to its diffusion in printed form. The first one that we have found appears in The Trial of Wit or, A New Riddle Book, published in Glasgow in 1782 and reprinted there in 1789 and 1795. Here the verse is presented as a riddle:
As I went out in a moonlight night,
To keep from harm I took the height,
I set my back against the moon,
I look’d for one and saw two come.
The boughs did bend the leaves did shake,
I saw the hole the Fox did make.
It was a maid had a sweetheart whose name was Fox: she saw him and another come to make her grave, while she sat on a tree.[12]
The same riddle appeared in Tom Thumb’s Royal Riddle Book for the Trial of Dull Wits, printed at Falkirk in 1788, and then again in Stirling in 1801.[13] It is not implausible that there were many other editions of these riddle books, in England, Ireland and North America as well, but it is also possible that copies were carried to these regions from Scotland by ‘flying stationers’. Such small books were printed to be sold by pedlars; they were ephemeral and few have survived. It is unlikely that the story or the verse originated in these pamphlets because the effect of the riddle depends entirely on some pre-existing knowledge of the narrative. Nonetheless, the existence of print versions may have had a mnemonic effect.
The verse is in the first person, spoken by the intended victim. In most full versions of the story she uses this elliptical account of her experience to inform her would-be murderer that she has discovered his plan. Only the assassin would understand the meaning of her words. Choosing this riddle form to confront him is not necessary to the plot, but such circumlocutions are a common feature of oral cultures. In face-to-face communities people, especially the relatively weak like servant maids, had to be careful how they spoke. They therefore developed the art of delivering their message in forms that were opaque to those who were not involved, and inoffensive to those who were. Texts were meaningful to those in the know, but apparent nonsense to outsiders. Their incomprehensibility, ‘a mere jingle’ to quote Linnell, was intentional.
The riddle is a typical example of such genres that create a bond of shared understanding between insiders while remaining obscure to outsiders. Lace tells are another. As Gerald Porter explains, in performance as a lace tell the frame story that makes sense of the verse disappears: the identity of the speaker and the diggers, and the relationship between them is unclear. Yet the whole narrative remained implicit, completed in the minds of listeners who likely already knew it. This process creates an ‘insider group’ – in this case the lacemakers – bonded by their shared knowledge, their shared ability to interpret the riddle.[14] By speaking the riddle in the first person the lacemakers identify with the would-be victim, and here we encounter another common element to be found in the work culture of lacemakers in other countries too: men were a threat, especially strangers, and so young women had to be on their guard. Narrative and song were means to inculcate important life lessons.
[1] John Edward Linnell, Old Oak: The Story of a Forest Village, ed. Charles Linnell (London, 1932), pp. 48-51.
[2] ‘Among the Buckinghamshire Pillow-Lace Makers. By our special correspondent’, The Leighton Buzzard Observer, Tuesday 4 April 1893, p. 6. Precisely the same wording is given in Oliver Ratcliff and Hebert Brown, Olney: Past and Present (Olney, 1893).
[3] Thomas Wright, The Romance of the Lace Pillow (Olney, 1919), pp. 182-3.
[4] Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, Fred Hamer manuscripts, FH/4/4/124: recorded from Mrs White of Cranfield: ‘I saw them that never saw me,/ I saw a lantern tied to a tree,/ The boughs did shake and I did quake,/ To see what a hole the fox did make./ The fox did roar and I did see,/ The fox made that hole to bury me.’
[5] The ballad ‘Oh Bring With You Your Dowry Love’, which has been commercially recorded on a few occasions, is based on this story, but appears to have been written by the folk-song collector Frank Kidson to provide a context for the verse about ‘the hole the fox did make’, which he heard sung by Kate Thompson in Knaresborough in 1891. His ballad version was then included in English Peasant Songs (1929). The verse also occurs in a version of ‘The Cottage in the Wood’, sung by Martin Carthy, but this was his own addition to a much better known song (Roud Number 608) about a pedlar calling at an isolated house, but which usually ends happily in a marriage: see https://mainlynorfolk.info/martin.carthy/songs/thecottageinthewood.html
[6] James Orchard Halliwell, The Nursery Rhymes of England, Collected Chiefly from Oral Tradition 4th edition (London, 1846), p. 3.
[7] James Orchard Halliwell, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales (London, 1849), pp. 47-50.
[8] Thomas Ratcliff, ‘One Moonshiny Night’, Notes and Queries 7th series 3, 19 March 1887, pp. 229-30. Several other versions – from Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Gloucestershire, Ireland and New England – were submitted to that journal in the same year: F.C. Birkbeck Terry, ‘One Moonshiny Night’, Notes and Queries 7th series 3, 19 February 1887, p. 149; S.O. Addy, Notes and Queries 7th series 3, 19 March 1887, p. 230; D.F. ‘One Moonshiny Night’, Notes and Queries 7th series 3, 21 May 1887, p. 410; other replies were submitted by ‘St Swithin’ (pseud. Eliza Gutch), T.H. Smith and M.L. Ferrar. Sidney Addy also published a longer version under the title ‘The Girl Who Got Up The Tree’ in Household Tales with Other Traditional Remains, Collected in the Counties of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, Derby, and Nottingham (London, 1895), pp. 10-11.
[9] For some examples, see the ever useful website of Professor Ashliman; http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0955.html
[10] We will return to Pourrat in future blogs, but for his debt to lacemakers see Bernadette Bricout, Le Savoir et la saveur. Henri Pourrat et Le Trésor des contes (Paris, 1992).
[11] The tale is also apparently quoted in Spencer’s The Fairie Queen. On these literary connections see the blog by Katherine Langrish: http://steelthistles.blogspot.co.uk/2016/09/be-bold-be-bold-but-not-too-bold.html
[12] The Trial of Wit, or, a New Riddle-Book. Some of which were Never before Published (Glasgow, 1782).
[13] Tom Thumb’s Royal Riddle Book: For the Trial of Dull Witts (Falkirk, 1788); Tom Thumb’s Royal Riddle Book: For the Trial of Dull Wits (Stirling, 1801).
[14] Mary-Ann Constantine and Gerald Porter Fragment and Meaning in Traditional Song: From the Blues to the Baltic (Oxford, 2003), pp. 69-71.
In a 1994 article on the literary image of the lacemaker, Nichola Anne Haxell complained that she had found only four relevant works: “These four texts have to bear the full weight of my analysis: considerable investigation has failed to bring forth any other texts which situate a lacemaker in or near the centre of the narrative.” Her four were Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor (1846, though published in 1857), Gérard de Nerval’s “Sylvie” (1853), Pascal Lainé’s La dentellière (1974, and, despite the title, not actually about a lacemaker), and Chantal Chawaf’s Retable: La Rêverie (1974).[1]
If we say that we know of about forty it will sound like boasting, but really it’s a testament to the wonder of search engines. And it has to be said that many of our authors are not particularly well known. But Charles Dickens certainly is a canonical writer, how could his contribution be overlooked in a “considerable investigation”? The answer to that depends on whether you have heard of “Mugby Junction”, a set of stories written by Dickens and collaborators for the Christmas 1866 edition of the magazine All The Year Round. We hadn’t until a search engine led us to it. It may be familiar to Victorian steam enthusiasts as most of the stories are in the voices of railway employees: the engine-driver, the signalman, the engineer, the boy who serves in the refreshment room… But there is also a frame story about a character known as “Barbox Brothers” on the basis of the label on his luggage, or the “Gentleman for Nowhere”, as he hangs around Mugby Junction station without taking a train. His name, however, is Jackson; he got off a train from London at Mugby in the middle of the night with no particular object. He develops the plan of travelling all the lines that meet there. Dickens creates here an opportunity for many spin-off stories, though in fact only one, Jackson’s visit to Birmingham, ever materializes. “Mugby”, as you may have guessed, is Rugby in Warwickshire, then still a rural market town with a large railway junction attached, rather than the industrial centre it would become a decade or two later.
“Mugby Junction” is not, to be frank, a very good story. Jackson is rather like Arthur Clennam in Little Dorrit, a man oppressed by his bigoted upbringing and the moneygrubbing tedium of his work in the City. Having sold his business, he is searching for some purpose to his life, but has no clue how to find it. He wanders the streets and surrounding countryside until he encounters an odd sight: the fragile but bright face of a young woman, with her cheek on a cottage windowsill. “And now there were a pair of delicate hands too. They had the action of performing on some musical instrument and yet it produced no sound that reached his ears.” His walks over the following days are all directed past this cottage which he observes also serves as a village school. From one of the children he learns that the sideways woman is called Phoebe, who sings in order to instruct.
A few days later, having introduced himself through the window, Jackson visits Phoebe who, unable to walk, lies on a couch all day. “She was engaged in very nimbly and dexterously making lace. A lace-pillow lay upon her breast; and the quick movements and changes of her hands upon it as she worked, had given them the action he had misinterpreted” as playing an instrument. When he explains his mistake she replies “That is curious… For I often fancy, myself, that I play tunes while I am at work.” Jackson, unused to any form of human contact, is at a loss for further small talk, but “there was a kind of substitute for conversation in the click and play of its pegs… The charm of her transparent face and large bright brown eyes, was, not that they were passively resigned, but that they were actively and thoroughly cheerful. Even her busy hands, which of their own thinness alone might have besought compassion, plied their task with a gay courage that made mere compassion an unjustifiable assumption of superiority, and an impertinence.” Jackson cannot help but compare this young woman’s pleasant outlook with his own melancholy. He had loathed his work whereas she loves hers, both her teaching and “my lace-pillow… it goes with my thoughts when I think, and it goes with my tunes when I hum any, and that’s not work. Why, you yourself thought it was music, you know sir. And so it is, to me.” Her father, a railway worker that Jackson has already met, adds that Phoebe is “Always working – and after all, sir, for but a very few shillings a week – always contented, always lively, always interested in others, of all sorts.”
Dickens had a penchant for women who suffer while retaining their vivacity and compassion. Like Phoebe, Little Dorrit was a textile worker (a seamstress). One suspects that, if the”‘Mugby Junction” story had been taken further, it would have been Phoebe’s role to save Jackson from himself, as Amy Dorrit saves Arthur Clennam. It was a commonplace of nineteenth-century fiction that women’s pain redeemed men.
Lacemaking appears like playing an instrument, lacemakers hum and sing as they work. The idea of music is bound together with Phoebe’s lace, and her character. We have often encountered this image of the singing textile worker, contented with her domestic lot. But Dickens introduces a novel synonym for lace, “those threads of railway”, that Phoebe can observe from her window, but not follow. Jackson undertakes to explore them and report back on what he discovers. As she weaves her threads so he will weave narratives for her.
Much of this coincides with Haxell’s “paradigm of the lacemaker” derived from her four texts. In most of these, and especially those authored by men, “a lacemaker is a young woman of humble background or reduced circumstances who attempts to make her way in the world through patient and unassuming craft. Although she has little formal education, there is a modest desire within her for self-improvement. Beneath her demure manner, she often demonstrates qualities and modes of behaviour which make her an outsider to the lowly class and social position where her occupation situates her. A lacemaker will inevitably enter into an emotional relationship with a smug young man, socially and educationally superior to her. He will be attracted initially to her docility and “naturalness”, which correspond to his personal ideal of femininity.” Jackson may not be young, nor particularly smug, but otherwise the literary model is replicated. However Dickens might have allowed for a happier ending than that permitted in Nerval’s ‘Sylvie’ or Lainé’s La Dentellière.
What did Dickens know about lacemaking? Rugby borders the Northamptonshire lace districts, and Dickens had other opportunities to see lacemakers at work, for instance when he covered the 1835 by-election in Kettering (we know how important the lace interest was in that town). He returned quite often to Northamptonshire to visit his friends the Watsons at Rockingham Castle. However, we are not aware of any other text in which he showed any interest in this manufacture. We are also a little doubtful about Phoebe’s prone position as an effective way to work on a lace pillow. Certainly the illustrator of the American edition of Dickens’ complete works, Arthur Jules Goodman, had difficulty picturing the scene.
[1] Nichola Anne Haxell, ‘Woman as Lacemaker: The Development of a Literary Stereotype in Texts by CharlotteBrontë, Nerval, Lainé, and Chawaf’, The Modern Language Review 89 (1994): 545-60.
We were wrong to claim that Goldoni’s Le baruffe chiozzotte (The Squabbles in Chioggia) is the only play to feature lacemakers as its main characters. Frans Carrein’s Elisa de Kantwerkster (Eliza the lacemaker) puts one of them even more firmly centre stage. This piece of musical theatre was first performed in Bruges in 1859 by the Flemish amateur dramatic society Yver en Broedermin (Zeal and Brotherhood). Such ‘chambers of rhetoric’, as they were known, had a long history in the Low Countries as promoters of middle-class sociability and civic ideals. In the nineteenth century they were, additionally, important vehicles for Flemish as a language of culture in Belgium. Yver en Broedermin, for example, organized the first competition for new plays in Flemish in 1835.[1]
Yver en Broedermin, founded in 1822, was more socially open than its relatively exclusive rival in Bruges, the Maatschappy van Vaderlandsche Taal en Letterkunde. Frans Carrein (1816 Eernegem – 1877 Ostend) was typical of its urban artisan and clerk membership. His day-job was a pastry chef, but literature had become his passion. He had started in a rival society, Kunstliebe, in 1843 (Kunstliebe had broken away from Yver en Broedermin in 1841, no doubt largely as a vehicle for personal ambitions, but it also took a more radical position on the language question).[2] Carrein’s initial dramatic excursions, in which he often acted himself, were translations of French melodramas and vaudevilles, which were staple fare for Flemish chambers of rhetoric at the time. But Carrein had ambitions to foster a native Flemish theatre.[3] The nineteenth century witnessed the deliberate creation of repertoires of ‘national’ dramas which drew their inspiration from moments of national history. Flanders was no exception, and so Carrein’s first major work told the story of Pieter Lanchals (1849), the leader of the Bruges Revolt against the Emperor Maximilian of Austria in the 1480s. This is evidence of the tremendous influence of Hendrik Conscience’s 1838 novel – effectively the first Flemish novel – De Leeuw van Vlaanderen, which took as its inspiration an earlier revolt of the Flemish cities against their overlords. The late medieval period was central to the Flemish Movement’s cultural memory.
However, Carrein soon shifted towards a theatre of social criticism; a transition from romantic to realist drama in other words. So contentious was his 1851 play Arm en Ryk (Poor and Rich) that it was banned by the mayor of Bruges. Arm en Ryk was set in a Flemish village of weavers and spinners; the villain of the piece is a linen-merchant and also, as it happens, mayor of the village, who not only exploits the weavers but also opposes the love between his son and a weaver’s daughter. All ends happily but the depiction of social conflict, including a crowd of weavers threatening death to the cowering merchant, was uncomfortable viewing in Flanders in the mid-nineteenth century. The 1840s had witnessed the catastrophic collapse of the once dominant linen trade in Flanders as handloom weavers and spinners succumbed under the dual effects of factory-made competition from Britain and harvest failure.[4] The crisis gave rise to widespread hunger and even starvation. A similar set of circumstances had led to armed rebellion among the weavers of Silesia in 1844 (the theme of Louise Otto’s novel Schloss und Fabrik which has a rather similar plotline to Carrein’s play, see our blog entry); the ‘Hungry Forties’ were part of the background to the Europe-wide series of revolutions in the spring and summer of 1848. Belgium did not witness any similar outbreak of violence; instead the Belgian government responded by setting up lace schools in the Flemish countryside, in the hope that lace might take the place of spinning as a means of supporting the population. But the mayor of Bruges may have feared that the play could enflame social conflict. After all, the revolt that had led to the creation of the state of Belgium in 1830 had itself started at the theatre.[5] In the absence of fully democratic institutions, theatre was a locus where protest could be voiced and rebellion enacted.
Carrein, however, was not really a revolutionary. Workers’ violence, Carrein believed, was a consequence of ignorance, especially among the poor. Ignorance could be combated through literature, which would impart moral guidance as well as knowledge. As society became more democratic and not ruled by a single class, it was vital that the masses be provided with instruction. But for this campaign to be successful, literature had to be in the common tongue, that is in Flemish. Carrein set out this programme in a speech to the third Congress dedicated to Dutch Literature, held in Brussels in 1851, where he proposed the foundation of a society for the distribution of pamphlets to the people, and which would also support the writers of such works.[6] (Carrein spoke immediately after Jan van Beers, whose own contribution to the literature of lacemaking, ‘Begga’, will be discussed in another blog.)
The fate of Arm en Ryk seems to have left Carrein a little bitter; or at least it was several years before he tried his hands at theatre again. In the introduction to his next piece, Elisa de Kantwerkster, Carrein took his Flemish audience to task because they only had a taste for for comic pieces and songs. Nonetheless he bent to the fashion, and Eliza is a relatively light piece with lots of music provided by P. Cools. In a way he was proved right because Elisa was certainly his most popular work, repeatedly restaged in Ypres, Ghent and Brussels as well as Bruges. It was a standard in the repertory of the company De Vlaams Ster who were still performing it in the 1900s. And as if to bear out Carrein’s words, when it put on in Brussels in March 1862, ‘the public heartily laughed’.[7] However, Carrein explicitly wanted the play to achieve something more than amusement: it was meant as a critique of the way the lace industry was run, based on his own observations and interviews with lacemakers. In particular he attacked the practice of advancing money to workers as a means of making them dependent. They could not change employer while they remained in debt, and there were all kinds of tricks to keep them in debt.[8]
The play opens with Elisa Nolf sitting at her pillow before dawn. She has a lamp and a waterfilled flask beside her to concentrate light on her work, and a firepot to keep her feet warm, the standard accoutrements of the lacemaker. She is singing, but her song is a lament: the lacemaker works from early morning to late into the night, damaging her eyes for a pitiful salary, while duchesses and baronesses wear her work to balls and grand dinners, she suffers in body and soul. Elisa is an orphan: her father died not long before, and to pay for medicine during his last sickness she borrowed thirty francs from the lace-merchant Gierbaert (‘vulture beard’; Carrein played this part when the play was first performed). Until she has cleared this debt she cannot work for anyone else. She has also been left with the care of a younger brother, Joseph, a bravehearted lad but not entirely reliable. He has in fact just been sacked though Elisa does not know this. She sends him to the baker for a loaf, but Joseph has to tell her that the baker won’t give them credit anymore (they are two francs and thirteen centimes in debt), not now Elisa has a rich boyfriend. The baker’s implication is that Adolf, the writer-friend of Elisa’s father, is visiting too often for her reputation. Elisa is horrified. She has been slaving away, denying herself all pleasures, preserving her virtue as best she can, and yet is still the subject of the neighbours’ gossip. Unfortunately Adolf himself appears at exactly this moment, and Elisa, in her shame, sends him away.
Adolf leaves, and Rooze Dorn (there is no rose without a thorn), an elderly neighbour (played by a man) arrives to sit and work with Elisa. Her language is colourful and plebian, and includes bits of English (eg: ‘nottink’). The women plan to sing while they work because, as Elisa says, ‘song makes the work lighter; it gives spirit and courage’. However, before they sit down, Joseph whispers to Rooze that ‘magerman is kok’ (‘lean man is the cook’; in other words they have had nothing to eat). Rooze hurries off to get bread, leaving her pillow. Elisa chides Joseph: time is the only precious thing that the poor have, and if Rooze is giving up her time for them, then she should make up time for her. She picks up Rooze’s pillow and starts on her pattern.
Just at that moment Gierbaert appears and, spying the other cushion, accuses Elisa of making ‘dievenkanten’ (‘thieves’ lace’, that is lace for another merchant other than the one she owes). Joseph claims that this other pillow is his, and in a song celebrates that men are now doing women’s work. Gierbaert finds Joseph tiresome and, after he leaves, suggests to Elisa that as his own son has been selected for military service, Joseph could replace him and then the debt would be paid. In nineteenth-century Belgium conscripts were chosen by lottery, and if someone unfortunate enough to pull a ‘bad number’ could find, that is buy, a replacement, he did not have to go. Effectively this made military service a burden that fell disproportionately on the poor, and it was much resented. Elisa refuses to sell her brother, but this only brings Gierbaert to the real point of his bargaining. He wants Elisa to become his lover; and perhaps she might be his wife later, when he has first ‘tried on the shoe’. When the indignant Elisa refuses, he explains that ‘your fate is in my hands, believe me’. At this moment Rooze returns to hear the full force of Elisa’s anger: Gierbaert has profited from her misery, now he comes to buy her brother’s blood, her honour and her emaciated body. Gierbaert leaves, threatening that she will soon have news from him.
Rooze herself brings news that she has just seen Joseph step in the path of a run-away coach and horses carrying a woman and children. Joseph follows soon after, safe and sound, having stopped the coach. But he too is followed by a policeman, who tells Elisa that Gierbaert has brought a complaint, and she must accompany him. While Joseph and Rooze argue about what to do, Adolf appears just in time to meet Elisa returning from the magistrate, hopeless and despairing. She has to pay her debt today or she will go to prison. Although Rooze herself has only 30 centimes in the world, she sets off at once to rouse the other lacemakers and see if they can get the money together. Adolf and Joseph both have plans too and leave Elisa. Alone she soliloquizes: is honour just a foppery, something the poor cannot afford? She could now be surrounded by luxury, her sense of honour has led her only to the gates of the prison. Gierbaert overhears some of this and sees his chance. He gives her the note of her debt (telling the audience in passing that it has already been repaid by Rooze and her friends), and while she is overcome with gratitude, pulls her to his chest and strokes her hair. But before things go too far Adolf arrives to defend Eliza.
It was a commonplace of nineteenth-century gender politics that young women could not defend themselves. Law and custom were stacked against them, as Adolf explains. The law, he argues, that enables Gierbaert to send a worker to prison simply for trying to make a living from her work, should properly be described as ‘the white slave law’. It was a relic from more barbarous times, incompatible with the march of civilisation. Adolf, who is described as a writer, is evidently the mouthpiece for Carrein’s own views. He is not impressed by Gierbaert’s surrender of the debt: what he couldn’t obtain by force he is now trying to get through a hypocritical show of generosity, making Elisa’s good heart an accomplice of his wickedness. Gierbaert finally slinks away.
Adolf reveals that the family saved by Joseph was his sister’s. But he also claims to be deeply unfortunate himself. He is love with a young woman, less than half his age; he can’t reveal it for fear of rejection. Elisa urges him to declare his feelings; the woman, of course, is Elisa, who falls into his arms. (Isn’t it a bit hypocritical of Adolf to make Elisa’s feelings of gratitude the auxiliary of his own desires?) At that moment Joseph and then Rooze return: Joseph with thirty francs whose origin he refuses to reveal, but Rooze, who always seems to know what’s up, explains that she saw him at the ‘soul merchant’ (i.e. the man who arranges military replacements). As Elisa begins to lament again Adolf says he will save the man who rescued his sister and her children, and the man who is about to become his brother now that Elisa has agreed to become his wife. They will all be one happy family, and when Rooze pops round they will all sing the song of the lacemaker. The curtain comes down as the actors repeat the chorus of Elisa’s song from the beginning of the show.
Lacemakers’ songs are a common motif in the literature of Flemish Movement. We will meet other examples, but this is one of the earliest songs ascribed to lacemakers to appear in print, and one which would have some influence on later representations of lacemakers, so we reproduce it in full. It is not clear whether Carrein and Cools made up the text himself or were reproducing a song that they had heard sung on the streets of Bruges. It certainly has some similarity to text in the Flemish lacemakers’ repertoire. Unfortunately, the music was not included with the printed text.
Laet rollen de klosjes
Chorus
Laet rollen de flosjes,
En vlecht met uw draedjes,
En oogjes en naedjes,
Met lustigen zwier,
Op ‘t glib’rig papier.
Zy ritz’len en klotsen,
Zy tuim’len en botsen,
En glyden op ‘t kussen,
En ram’len en sussen;
Zoo ras en gezwind,
Als loof in den wind.
Verse 1
Reeds van in den vroegen morgen,
Zit ik aen het werk met vlyt,
Om myn’ nooddruft te bezorgen,
In dees guren slechten tyd.
Gauw is thans de dag vervlogen,
En het loon is toch zoo kleen;
‘T nachtwerk drukt, verkrent myn oogen,
Als ik by myn lampje ween.
Verse 2
Ach! hoe prachtig en hoe kunstig,
Is hy toch die blanke kant!
By haer die het lot was gunstig
Prykt hy eens naest diamant:
Hertogin of baronnesse,
Praelt er mede op bal en feest;
En ik, arme lyderesse,
Lyd aeen lichaem en aen geest.
Ida von Düringsfeld thought that Elisa gave a ‘good picture of working-class life (Volksleben) in Bruges’, and she also translated the chorus of this song into German (though she kept the Flemish terms ‘Klosjes’ and ‘Flosjes’, two different types of bobbin). Perhaps as a baroness herself she was not so inclined to include the second verse, in which the pleasures of the lace-buying classes are compared with the misery of the lace-producing classes.
Lasst rollen die Klosjen,
Lasst rollen die Flosjen,
Und webt mit den Fädchen,
So Säumchen, wie Näthchen,
Mit Eil und mit Zier,
Auf’s glatte Papier.
Sie fallen und rasseln,
Sie wirbeln und prasseln
Sie gleiten und schwirren,
Sie klappern und klirren,
So seltsam geschwind,
Wie Blätter im Wind.
[1] ‘IJver en Broedermin’, openbare bibliotheek Brugge, blog.
[2] “Letterbroeders zedenvoeders”: De opkomst van Kunstliefde, Brugse toneel- en letterkundige vereniging (1841-1887), Onttoovering blog.
[3] Most of what we know of Carrein’s early literary career comes from an interview he gave, c. 1860, apparently in the middle of his pastry shop, to the German author Baroness Ida von Düringsfeld: Von der Schelde bis zur Maas: Das geistige Leben der Vlaminge seit des Wiederaufblühen der Literatur 3 vols (Leipzig and Brussels: Lehmann, 1861), vol. 1, pp. 68-71. Carrein adapted and performed in works by French dramatists including Adolphe Poujol, Charles Desnoyer, Eugène Labiche, Adolphe Dennery and Felicien Mallefille.
[4] Eric Vanhaute, ‘“So Worthy an Example to Ireland”: The Subsistence and Industrial Crisis of 1845–1850 in Flanders’, in Cormac Ó Gráda, Richard Paping, Eric Vanhaute (eds), When the Potato Failed. Causes and Effects of the Last European Subsistence Crisis, 1845-1850 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007).
[5] Sonia Slatin, ‘Opera and Revolution: La Muette de Portici and the Belgian Revolution of 1830 Revisited’, Journal of Musicological Research 3:1-2 (1979): 45-62.
[6] Handelingen van het derde Nederlandsch letterkundig congres, gehouden te Brussel, den 30 en 31 Augustus en 1 September 1851 (Brussels: J.-H. Dehou, 1852), pp. 187-91.
[7] De Toekomst, ‘Stad nieuws’, 6 April 1862, p.1.
[8] The epigraph to the play, from from the French writer Bernardin de Saint Pierre, states: ‘Ils ont mille ruses pour les reduire à la plus petite paie possible, par exemple, de l’argent d’avance: et quand ils en ont fait des débiteurs insolvables, ce qui est l’affaire de quelques écus, alors ils les ont à leur discrétion.’
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.
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.
25 November is the Feast of Saint Catherine, and historically a holiday for the Midlands lacemakers, particularly those in Buckinghamshire and some northern parts of Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire. (Lacemakers in the southern and central parts of the latter counties tended to celebrate Saint Andrew’s Day instead; we deal with this holiday on his feast, 30 November.)
According to the ‘official’ legend — and we’ll see that lacemakers, and in fact almost everybody else who celebrated her feast, told a rather different story — Saint Catherine was a virgin martyr from early fourth century Alexandria in Egypt. Her father was the Roman governor of the province, but Catherine was a philosopher and Christian convert. She refused to submit first to the persecutions of Emperor Maxentius, then to his lascivious attentions, declaring that she was the bride of Christ. Infuriated, Maxentius ordered that she be broken on a wheel, but the device fell apart at her touch. Finally he had her beheaded.
Although there is little historical evidence for Catherine, she was one of the most popular saints in both the Catholic and Orthodox churches, and her cult clearly survived the Protestant Reformation in England. Because her attribute is the wheel, she became the patron of wheelwrights, and by extension carpenters, as well as ropemakers and spinners. She was the patron of both young women and old maids (spinsters in another sense), and as these groups formed the labour force for the needle trades, her patronage extended to all involved in textile production. The ‘bal de Sainte Catherine’ is still an important event in the calendar of the Paris fashion houses.[1]
In England, ‘keeping Cattern’ —that is celebrating Saint Catherine’s Day — was by no means confined to lacemakers. Even after the Reformation, women in the workhouse would receive a dole in order to ‘keep Cattern’.[2] In some towns, such as Ware and Peterborough, women — in the latter town principally the female inmates of the workhouse — paraded behind their own ‘queen’, singing:
Here comes Queen Catherine, as fine as any queen,
With a coach and six horses, a-coming to be seen,
And a-spinning we will go, will go,
And a-spinning we will go.
No doubt this was an opportunity to raise money for a feast later in the day.[3] In other parts of the country, particularly Worcestershire (though the custom has been recorded elsewhere), it was young children who used this day as an opportunity to tramp from house to house collecting apples and ale, aided by a rhyme such as this one:
Catherine and Clement be here, be here,
Some of your apples and some of your beer;
Some for Peter, and some for Paul,
And some for Him that made us all.
Clement was good old man,
For his sake give us some,
None of the worst but some of the best,
And God will send your soul to rest![4]
Saint Clement’s feast falls on 23 November and was another important holiday, though usually observed in different regions to Saint Catherine’s. A Sussex version of this rhyme names ‘Cattern’ as the mother of ‘Clemen’, an unlikely relationship for a virgin saint![5] Other indications of her widespread popularity are a recipe for a Cattern pie from Somerset,[6] and Cattern Fair held outside Guildford, where Cattern cakes were sold well into the nineteenth century.[7]
However, by the late nineteenth century, lacemakers were almost the only group to still hold her in honour. Occasionally in Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire the mummers who put on the traditional drama of Saint George and the Turkish Knight in the run-up to Christmas were called ‘Katterners’, though any specific memory of Saint Catherine seems to have been forgotten.[8] Newspaper accounts suggest that ‘Cattern’ was still kept by carpenters in Chatteris (Cambridgeshire) in the 1860s,[9] and the farmer Mr Lot Arnsby of Raunds (Northamptonshire), though a Baptist, still treated his labourers to cakes and ale on Saint Catherine’s Day in the 1870s.[10] In both cases, the feast was held on 6 December, ‘Old Saint Catherine’s’, that is date of her feast before the adoption of the Gregorian calendar in Britain in 1752 had entailed the loss of eleven days. These examples are very isolated compared with the numerous newspaper mentions of lacemakers ‘keeping Cattern’, sometimes on Old and sometimes on New Saint Catherine’s Day. In fact the feast seems to have undergone periodic revivals among lacemakers, often sponsored by local landowners and patrons of the lace industry.
Although there are references to women ‘Catherning’ or ‘keeping Catterns’ from the seventeenth and eighteenth century,[11] the earliest reference we have so far found to this day as a special feast among lacemakers is in a short article in Notes and Queries for May 1862 by ‘A.A.’ (we have not identified the initials) reporting that:
In Buckinghamshire, on Cattern Day (St. Catherine’s, 25th of November,) these hard-working people hold merry-makings, and eat a sort of cakes they call ‘wigs,’ and drink ale. The tradition says it is in remembrance of a Queen Catharine; who, when the trade was dull, burnt all her lace, and ordered new to be made.[12]
Although A.A. asked readers who this Queen might have been, the topic went quiet in that journal until in 1868. Interest was revived then by a review in The Quarterly Review of Mrs Bury Palliser’s 1865 A History of Lace, in which the author claimed (and in this the reviewer was following Mrs Palliser’s lead) that:
Catherine of Aragon, according to tradition, introduced the art of making lace into Bedfordshire during her sojourn at Ampthill in 1531-33. She was a great adept in the arts of the needle. Until quite lately the lace-makers kept ‘Cattern’s-day’ as the holiday of their craft, in memory of the good Queen Catherine.[13]
On what authority did Mrs Bury Palliser make this statement, asked J.M. Cowper in Notes and Queries?[14] The several responses did not resolve that issue, but they did provide plenty of evidence for lacemakers ‘keeping Catterns’. For example, John Plummer, who originally came from Kettering, reported that the feast
is known to be kept, for several generations, throughout the whole of Northamptonshire lace-making districts, as well as in those of Bedfordshire. By some it is called ‘candle-day,’ from its forming the commencement of the season for working at lacemaking by candle-light.[15]
He reiterated the tradition that ‘Queen Katherine was a great friend to the lacemakers’, but suggested that instead of Catherine of Aragon, Catherine Parr was meant, because the Parrs were a Northamptonshire family. However later in the same month A.A. returned to the topic and reiterated his story, this time definitely identifying the lace-burning queen as Catherine of Aragon.[16]
Readers will have noticed that, so far, there is no reference to a saint in any of these lacemakers’ celebrations, only queens. Two different stories were told. The oldest, though how old we are uncertain, concerns a queen burning her lace in order to create more work for lacemakers. A ballad, claimed as traditional (though we have our doubts) was apparently sung at a Kattern Day revival in Marsh Gibbon in 1905:
Queen Katherine loved to deck with lace
The royal robes she wore;
But though she loved to wear her lace,
She loved the lace-folk more.
So now for good Queen Katherine’s sake
Put bones and sticks away,
And keep the yearly festival
And sing on ‘Kattern Day.’[17]
As one recent historian has written, this story encapsulates a feminine, utopian economy which completely denies the laws of supply and demand, and in which the great existed to provide work for the small, and ‘harmoniously brings together the otherwise separate processes of production and consumption.”’18]
The second story, crediting Queen Catherine of Aragon as the original teacher of lace in England, is slightly later in origin but far more widespread, as it was regularly repeated in newspaper accounts in the late nineteenth century, became the focus of W.I. lectures and pageants in the twentieth, and is now regularly repeated on the web. This continuing tradition owes everything to Mrs Palliser’s reputation as a reliable historian of lace, it has no basis in any oral tradition linking that queen with the genesis of the lace industry. Mrs Palliser inferred from rather vague lacemakers’ traditions concerning a ‘good queen who protected their craft’, that the art of lace-working, as it then existed, was first imparted to the peasantry of Bedfordshire, as a means of subsistence, through the charity of Katherine of Aragon.’[19] To return to J.M. Cowper’s question in Notes and Queries — on what authority had this claim been advanced — the answer is on no greater authority than Mrs Palliser’s romantic inference. However, her invention has proved enormously popular, for it invoked a tradition of royal patronage of lace that was, at the time, still vital to the trade.
We doubt that Catterns had a connection to any English queen; rather it was the continuation of a Catholic saint’s day feast in Protestant England. We cannot say when and where the tradition turned the saint into queen: it may have been a post-Reformation defensive measure, for it was permitted to celebrate royalty when Catholic saints had fallen into disrepute. However, it is worth pointing out that in the popular culture of Catholic Europe, Catherine was always imagined as a queen, or at least a princess. The first line of a song popular throughout Spain, France and Italy, and indeed much further afield, tells us that Catalina/Catherine/Caterina was a ‘hija de un rey’ (in Spanish), ‘fille d’un roi’ (in French), ‘figlia di un re’ (in Italian).[20] Sometimes she is specifically identified as the daughter of the king of Hungary; in all cases it is her father, not a Roman emperor, who is responsible for her martyrdom. And while Saint Catherine was not usually the named patron of European lacemakers, nonetheless European lacemakers knew and sang her story. For example, in an audio recording made by Jean Dumas in 1959, you can hear Virginie Granouillet, a seventy-year-old lacemaker from Roche-en-Régnier (Haute-Loire), accompanying her bobbins with a version of the song.[21]
How did lacemakers ‘keep Catterns’? There are vague references to an earlier period when women dressed up in male attire and indulged in unfettered merry-making, including amorous (or violent) advances to passing men, a moment of female license, but we have no specific information.[22] The fullest description comes from Mrs Frederica Orlebar of Hinwick House, Podington (Bedfordshire) who wrote an account of an attempted revival in 1887 — which would form the template for further revivals in 1906 and 1937.[23] The Orlebars were landed gentry who had provided leadership to the county, as magistrates, M.P.s and masters of the hunt for several generations. Their patronage of the lace industry was part and parcel of this paternalistic concern for their tenants and electors. Catherine Channer used the manuscript ‘Orlebar Chronicles’ to write her 1900 account:
Cattern Tea.
In Podington and neighbouring villages the lacemakers have, within the memory of middle-aged people, ‘kept Cattern’, on December 6th – St. Catherine’s Day (Old Style).
I believe it was Catherine of Aragon who used to drink the waters of a mineral spring in Wellingborough, and who (as is supposed) introduced lace-making into Beds. The poor people know nothing of the Queen, only state that it was an old custom to keep ‘Cattern.’
The way was for the women to club together for a tea, paying 6d. apiece, which they could well afford when their lace brought them in 5s. or 6s. a week. The tea-drinking ceremony was called ‘washing the candle-block,’ but this was merely an expression. It really consisted in getting through a great deal of gossip, tea, and Cattern cakes – seed cakes of large size. Sugar balls went round as a matter of course. After tea they danced, just one old man whistling or fiddling for them, and ‘they enjoyed themselves like queens!
The entertainment ended with the cutting of a large apple pie, which they divided for supper. Their usual bedtime was about eight o’clock.[24]
This may be more staid than earlier celebrations, but some of the elements referred to here come up in other accounts too. The first is that it was a communal women’s festival: a man might provide the music but the lacemakers danced with each other. Money was pooled to provide food, drink and entertainment: rabbit or steak with onion sauce, followed by pies and cakes. Cattern pies — sometimes containing mincemeat, sometimes apples (as we have seen, Catterners collected apples) — might be arranged in the shape of a wheel, with partakers being offered a ‘spoke’.[25] Mrs Orlebar quoted a rhyme, apparently sung by the nightwatchman of Kettering, which made the pies the centrepiece of the celebration:
Rise, maids arise!
Bake your Cattern pies!
Bake enough, and bake no waste,
So that the old bell-man may have a taste!
Cattern cakes appear to be a different thing to a Cattern pie: the cakes come in various descriptions but the recipes almost always contain caraway seeds, which connects them to the ‘soul cakes’ consumed at Halloween in other parts of the country. The drink mentioned in connection with these festivities was methleglin, a honey mead termed ‘meytheagle’ in the Bedfordshire dialect.[26]
The term ‘washing’ or ‘wetting the candle-block’ explains why Plummer called this a ‘candle-day’. The holiday was not just the celebration of the patroness of lacemakers, it was the ritual marking of an important moment in the lacemakers’ year, for this was the day when candles, objects of enormous expense, could legitimately be used for evening work. These kind of candle feasts, opening and closing the period of neighbourly winter evening work gatherings, were quite common all over Europe. Among English lacemakers the closing day of the season appears to have been Candlemas (2 February), though it was not celebrated as much as Catterns.[27] This practice of working together to share light and heat also explains why Catterns was a communal feast. A candle-block provided light not for one lacemaker but many: a single candle would be mounted in the centre of several glass globes or flasks filled with snow-water, which would concentrate the light on the pillows of several lacemakers (the highest number of users of a single candle that we have so far encountered is eighteen!). But lacemakers did not only symbolically ‘wash’ the candleblock, they also leapt over it. According to John Aubrey, back in the 1680s, Oxfordshire girls (not specifically lacemakers) would ‘set a candle in the middle of the room in a candlestick, and then draw up their coats into the form of breaches [another hint at cross-dressing], and dance over the candle back and forth, with these words’:
The tailor of Biciter [Bicester]
He has but one eye
He cannot cut a pair of green galagaskins
If he were to die.
Aubrey thought the custom was obsolete even in his time, but in fact the same game, and the same rhyme, have been recorded as late as 1910.[28]
Thomas Wright notes a different song being chanted by pupils jumping the candlestick in the lace schools at Wendover:
Wallflowers, Wallflowers, growing up so high,
All young maidens surely have to die;
Excepting Emma Caudrey, she’s the best of all.
She can dance and she can skip,
She can turn the candlestick.
Turn, turn, turn your face to the wall again[29]
Given the height of a lighted candle on a block players ran significant risks during this game. It is interesting to observe that even on holiday, lacemakers insist on the presence of death.
We can’t leave Catterns without giving a recipe for Cattern cakes. In 1948, Podington, Hinwick and Farndish Women’s Institute provided a recipe for the Cookery Book of Traditional Dishes which accompanied the ‘Home Produce Exhibition’.[30] We have not been able to track down a copy of this, so we have borrowed a recipe from the North Downs Lacemakers’ website[31]:
Ingredients
- 9oz /275g self raising flour
- ¼ teaspoon ground cinnamon
- 1 oz/25g currants
2oz/50g ground almonds - 2 teaspoons caraway seeds
- 7oz/200g caster sugar
- 4oz/100g melted butter
- 1 medium egg, beaten
- A little extra sugar and cinnamon for sprinkling
Instructions
- Sift the flour and cinnamon into a bowl and stir in currants, almonds, caraway seeds and sugar.
- Add the melted butter and beaten egg, mix well to give a soft dough (add a little milk if too dry).
- Roll out on a floured board into a rectangle, about 12×10 inches/30x25cm.
- Brush the dough with water and sprinkle with the extra sugar and cinnamon.
- Roll up like a swiss roll and cut into ¾ inch/2cm slices.
- Place on a greased baking tray spaced well apart and bake for 10 minutes. Oven set at 200 degrees C /400 degrees F/Gas 6.
- Cool on a wire rack.
We’ve tried it, and the results were very tasty, though they didn’t look as much like Catherine Wheels as we had intended.
[1] See Ann Monjaret’s wonderful study, La Sainte Catherine: Culture festive dans l’entreprise (Paris, 1997).
[2] Robert Gibbs refers to an entry in the Aylesbury overseers’ accounts for 1672: A Historyof Aylesbury with the Borough and Hundreds, The Hamlet of Walton, and The Electoral Division. Aylesbury, Bucks Advertiser, 1885
[3] A. R. Wright, British Calendar Customs, ed. T. E. Lones, (Folk-Lore Society, 1936), iii. 108, 144. The tune, presumably, is ‘A begging we will go’. Pete Castle recorded a version of the song on the album ‘False Waters’. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABjMfqjl2pQ
[4] James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales of England (London, 1849) p. 238. For a map of ‘Catterning’ in the West Midlands See Charlotte S. Burne. ‘Souling, Clementing, and Catterning. Three November Customs of the Western Midlands’, Folk-Lore 25:3 (1914), p. 285.
[5] William Douglas Parish, A Dictionary of the Sussex Dialect and Collection of Provincialisms in Use in the County of Sussex (Lewes, 1875), p.25: ‘Catterning’.
[6] Margaret Baker. Folklore and Customs of Rural England (Newton Abbot, 1974), p. 132.
[7] A.J.M. ‘Catherine Hill in Surrey’, Notes and Queries 7th series II, 14 August 1886.
[8] Walter Rose, Good Neighbours. Some Recollections of an English Village and its People, Cambridge UP, 1943, pp. 131-5 (based on his experiences in Haddenham, Bucks). Fred Hamer recorded the same usage in Bedfordshire, though the ‘Folk Play Distribution Map: Actors’ Names’ on Peter Millington’s Master Mummers Website suggests it was quite rare even in this region: http://www.mastermummers.org/atlas/ActorsNames.php?maptype=outline&go=Go+%3E%3E
[9] Cambridge Independent Press, Saturday 8 December 1860.
[10] Peterborough Advertiser, 13 December 1879.
[11] Charles Lamotte, An Essay upon Poetry and Painting, with Relation to the Sacred and Profane History (London, 1730), p. 126.
[12] A.A., ‘Lace-Makers’ Custom: Wigs, A Sort of Cake’, Notes and Queries 3rd series I, 17 May, 1862, p. 387.
[13] ‘History of Lace, by Mrs Bury Palliser’, review in The Quarterly Review 125 (July-Oct., 1868): pp. 166-188, p. 168.
[14] J.M. Cowper, ‘Cattern’s Day’, Notes and Queries 4th series II, 29 August, 1868, p. 201.
[15] John Plummer, ‘Kattern’s Day’, Notes and Queries 4th series II. 3 October, 1868., p. 333.
[16] A.A. ‘Kattern’s Day’, Notes and Queries 4th series II, 17 October, 1868, p. 377.
[17] Buckingham Advertiser and Free Press, Saturday 2 December 1905.
[18] Elaine Freedgood, ‘“Fine Fingers”: Victorian Handmade Lace and Utopian Consumption’, Victorian Studies 45 (2003), p. 637.
[19] Fanny Bury Palliser, A History of Lace (2nd edition: London, 1869), p. 326.
[20] The Pan-Hispanic Ballad Project lists 42 versions of IGRH song-type 0126 ‘Santa Catalina’ https://depts.washington.edu/hisprom/optional/balladaction.php?igrh=0126 ; the Coirault catalogue of French folk songs likewise lists numerous versions of song-type 8906 ‘Le martyre de sainte Catherine’; there is no equivalent Italian catalogue of folk-songs, but it is quite a common children’s song: in our experience all Italians know of it.
[21] http://patrimoine-oral.org/dyn/portal/index.seam?aloId=15575&page=alo&fonds=3
[22] Christina Hole. A Dictionary of British Folk Customs. Hutchinson, 1976
[23] Northampton Mercury, Friday 14 December 1906; Northampton Mercury, Friday 26 February 1937.
[24] Catherine C. Channer and Margaret E. Roberts, Lace-making in the Midlands, Past and Present (London, 1900), pp. 70-71.
[25] A recipe is offered in Joanna Bogle, A Book of Feasts and Seasons (Leominster, 1992).
[26] ‘Wetting the Candleblock’, Bedfordshire Mercury, Friday 13 December 1912.
[27] Thomas Wright, The Romance of the Lace PillowOlney, Bucks: H.H. Armstrong, 1919, p. 202.
[28] James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps, Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales: A Sequel to the Nursery Rhymes of England (London, 1849), p.231, quoting from the manuscript of Aubrey’s Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme; Arthur R. Wright and T.E. Lones, British Calendar Customs: England (London, 1940), vol. 3, p. 178.
[29] Thomas Wright, The Romance of the Lace Pillow (Olney, 1919), p. 195. Obviously the name used depends on the player. A similar rhyme was recorded by Fred Hamer at Biddenham in Bedfordshire.
[30] ‘Women’s Institutes. Traditional Dishes for National Exhibition. Bedfordshire’s Contributions’, Bedfordshire Times and Independent, Friday 24 September 1948
[31] http://www.northdownslacemakers.org.uk/features/2007/catterns-day.php A very similar recipe is provided in Julia Jones and Barbara Deer, Cattern Cakes and Lace: A Calender of Feasts (London, 1987).