Medieval Women as Textile Workers

To recap from the Why Sansa Sews section of this site: the image that Sansa Stark in HBO’s Game of Thrones projects of the medieval woman as textile worker - as an elite woman, working on her own in private spaces, and as passive and still, quiet and docile - is largely a product of the 19th century and has much more to do with the role that textile work played in 19th century constructions of femininity than with anything about Middle Ages.

One possible response to that argue would be to say that Sansa really isn’t a medieval woman at all and so the fact that this image of her as a textile worker isn’t accurate to the Middle Ages isn’t a problem. And it is true that Game of Thrones is fantasy, not history – after all the world of the show includes flying, fire-breathing dragons! But the shows’ creators, including the author of the original novels George R.R. Martin, have claimed historical authenticity for the show’s human world, and specifically as an explanation for some of its more problematic aspects – the lack of diversity among the characters and the high level of sexual violence (a lot of that directed at Sansa). The degree to which those things are historically accurate is questionable, but that claim points to a confusion between fantasy and reality in the production – and so probably the reception of this show. Most people probably do identify this human world with the European Middle Ages and do so without realizing that it is actually perpetuating a lot of common but inaccurate ideas about the medieval past - including a lack of diversity in medieval society (see the Public Medievalists' series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages and in particular the two articles on Game of Thrones here and here), the acceptability of sexual violence (see again articles from the Public Medievalist on Game of Thrones, here and here), and other aspects of women’s lives and experiences including the role of textile production.

So what role or roles did textile production play in the lives and experiences of medieval women? The first important point here is the shift from role to roleS, because women were involved in textile production in multiple ways and so looking at textile production highlights differences between medieval women, in particular differences in social class or economic standing.

Some more elite women were likely involved in textile production, possible doing some textile work themselves and/or organizing and supervising work done by other, lower-status women. It is that latter group of lower-status women who did the majority of textile work, if only because there were a lot more of them than there were higher-status women. One common problem with our approach to the past - and in particular our approach to the medieval past as filtered through medievalist fantasy like Game of Thrones – is that it tends to focus on the lives of the elites and to ignore the experiences and even the existence of all of the other people who supported them and their lifestyles. To return to a point I made in talking about Sansa’s sewing in Game of Thrones, she may make some of her own clothes, but who made all of the other clothes worn by all of the other people? Who made the sheets and napkins and wall hangings? Who made the cloth from which those finished items were made? And who made the thread from which that cloth was woven?

In the Middle Ages, the answer to both that last question would have been women.  A majority of medieval women who were involved in textile production worked at processing raw materials into useable form as thread. In wool production, as Shennen Hutton discusses for Ghent in the 14th century, large numbers of women worked at carding, combing, and spinning (see Hutton's Women and Economic Activities in Late Medieval Ghent, my discussion of Ghent below in based on Hutton’s work). In silk production, as Sharon Farmer shows for Paris in late 13th century, most women worked as “throwsters,” twisting the raw silk into yarn that could then be “cooked” to remove gums and then dyed or bleached. Farmer estimates that there were 900 women working as throwsters in Paris by the end of the 13th century ( see Farmer's The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris, my discussion of Paris here is based on Farmer’s work). This kind of work was often done as piecework, with the woman paid a set amount for processing a set amount of raw wool or silk. As piecework, it could be done in the woman’s own home. For married women, this would have allowed them to both do household tasks and care for children and contribute economically to their families' well-being. Not all women who did this work were married, however: some were single or widowed and some of these had a quasi-religious status as beguines. These women might live and work as maids in textile producing households. Or beguines in particular would live and work together in small groups.

Women also did some types of weaving. As Farmer shows for the silk industry in Paris, women made what was known as “narrow ware” and wove veils. They also made ribbons, laces, tassels, and purses. However, large-scale weaving whether of silk or wool was done by men or by entire households working together. In 14th century Ghent, the wives, widows, and daughters of weavers might start the process by winding the warp onto the loom. Women also worked as embroiderers, particularly in England, where they worked on the elaborate form of embroidery known as opus anglicanum: men did this type of work as well.

Again, some higher status women worked at organizing textile production and in the textile trade. In Ghent, the wife in a weaving household might have supervised the women pieceworkers who made the thread used for weaving and/or she might have sold the finished cloth in small amounts on the local market. Large scale trading in cloth on the international market was done by a small group of elite men. In the silk industry in Paris, a some women took on apprentices to train in their crafts and so ran small workshops. A few entered trades dominated by men including as dyers and as beaters of gold thread. A few became mercers or merchants who sold the finished goods to elite clients. And a few were able to gain authority as jurors in the guilds that oversaw silk work. However, most mercers were men and most guilds of women silk workers were run by men. Likewise, in England, by the end of the 14th century, the trade in opus anglicanum was dominated by male mercers and broders, while the work was done by both men and women.

Most women involved in textile production in the Middle Ages thus were not elite women who made their own clothes, like Sansa Stark. Most were lower-status women who did the labor-intensive work of preparing the raw materials for other workers to further process into finished goods. This was low-paid and low status work. Farmer points to multiple records of accusations of theft against throwsters for pawning the raw silk that they were supposed to process as showing, first, that these women did not even own the materials on which they worked, and second, that they frequently lived on the economic edge. The women who pawned the raw silk most likely had some pressing economic needs that they were unable to meet in another way.

Furthermore, all of these women, from wool carders and spinners and silk throwsters to the wives of weavers and beguine and other women mercers, were involved in textiles as a form of work. Textile work was just that, work, an activity done for economic gain. In contrast to the image of the medieval woman as textile worker that was created in the 19th century and is perpetuated today in Sansa’s sewing in Game of Thrones, it was not something that they did of their own accord, to fill up empty hours, or to express themselves. It was their means of supporting themselves or of helping to support their families.

That contrast between the medieval reality of textile work as a primary form of work for women and the 19th century image of the medieval woman as a leisured lady filling her time with embroidery is again largely about the role embroidery played in 19th century constructions of femininity. As Rozsika Parker argued in The Subversive Stitch, in the 19th century embroidery was identified as non-work for those who were not supposed to work, that is, for women. It could possibly become work if it had to and it allowed women to adopt some of the values associated with work, to show themselves as busy and industrious rather than idle or lazy. But it also acted as a display of leisure, of the time the woman had to spend on this activity, because they did not work. And it accentuated women’s association with domesticity, since it was something done at home and for the home in the form of cushions and fire screens and other objects of décor.

This 19th century idea of textile work as non-work for elite and middle class woman also papered over the 19th century reality that large numbers of lower-class women were involved in textile production as a form of work, work that was done for low pay and under harsh conditions. And the 19th century creation of the idea or ideal of the medieval lady as textile producer was part of that process of papering over. Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “The Lady of Shalott” is a prime example of this 19th century idea: his lady is enclosed in tower, working away at her weaving, much like the lady embroideress described in the 1845 article that I illustrated on the Why Sansa Sews page. But then she sees Sir Lancelot riding by her tower, she leaves it to follow him, and she dies. The choice for women, it seems, is between isolated hours spent on textile production or an outside world charged with sexuality that leads to death. At least one contemporary writer saw what Tennyson didn’t see - the role that textile work actually played in the lives of most 19th century women. In her short story  “The Lady of Shalott,” written as a direct response to Tennyson, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps tells a tale of two sisters who live in an attic in a tenement slum, one of whom is trying to support them both through piecework, making “nankeen vests at sixteen and ¾ cents a dozen.” She says to a doctor who  has come to visit her sickly sister:

"it may be because I make vests at sixteen and three-quarter cents a dozen, sir: but I say before God there's something cruel somewhere. Look at her. Look at me. Look at them stairs. Just see that scuttle, will you? Just feel the sun in t' these windows. Look at the rent we pay for this 'ere oven. What do you s'pose the merkiry is up here? Look at them pisen fogs arisin' out over the sidewalk. Look at the dead as have died in the Devil in this street this week."

May Morris, the daughter of William Morris and the head of the Morris & Co.’s Embroidery Department, in her 1893 book on Decorative Needlework, contrasts the images of women as textile workers that she sees in medieval manuscripts with the reality of textile work as work for women in her own day (Morris isn't specific about these images, but here is a collection of manuscript miniatures).  She writes of

"The mediaeval manuscripts, where ladies are drawn carding, spinning, weaving, and embroidering, sitting in pretty gardens, the blue sky overhead, with garlands or jewels in their hair, and graceful gowns on their bodies – a different picture from that presented by our latter-day weaving sheds, where every hour spent in the hot exhausted air among the clatter and crash of machinery is an undeserved penance to the work girls."

Morris here is at least familiar with the situation of many of the women who worked at textile production in her own day, and in describing it in a book directed at elite women interested in embroidery as a hobby she may have helped make her readers aware of their plight. But she doesn’t realize that the medieval images she is describing and promoting are just that – images.  Images that did not represent the reality of textile work for most medieval women and so did not identify the medieval past as providing an alternative model for textile production in her own day.

These medieval manuscript images were part of the medieval construction of gender: as Sharon Farmer has again shown, work was gendered as masculine in medieval texts and images, despite the fact that most middle and lower status women worked either as part of household workshops or on their own (see Farmer's Surviving Poverty in Medieval Paris). And so there was in fact much more continuity than change between the Middle Ages and the 19th century both in terms of ideas about gender that denied the reality of women’s work and in terms of the role of textile work as work done by women. Most women who were textile workers continued to do hard work for little pay and continued to live in precarious economic situations – and that continues to be true today.