The weavers of West Stow

The geography of elite women’s lives was necessarily played out in grand spaces and over great distances. Women like Osthryth were professional exiles, forced to adapt to the mores of a foreign court, often on the move touring their husband’s estates.

At West Stow, on the north bank of the River Lark a few miles northwest of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk, visitors can experience something of the social and working spaces of Anglo-Saxon women in a series of reconstructions largely based on excavations at the site in the 1960s and 1970s by the archaeologist Stanley West. The settlement, a small village of perhaps four households and a cemetery, was first occupied during the fifth century – the so-called Migration Period of Anglo-Saxon settlement – and lasted into the seventh century, when its timber halls reached their most elaborate form. Each hall was associated with a number of more modest buildings, many of them with the sunken bases so diagnostic of early Anglo-Saxon settlement. These seem to have been used to store grain, possibly also wool, and many examples have yielded telltale rows of doughnut-shaped clay loom weights. These, and the discarded spindles and spindle whorls that littered the site, allow us to glimpse what women were doing, and where, in their daily routines.

The humble loom weight, ironically, is the best clue to the social space that weaving occupied in settlements. They might seem relatively easy to make, but they must be absolutely consistent for the sake of correct tensioning, and the clay of good quality or they fracture or flake, potentially ruining the cloth.

Two almost parallel lines of loom weights were recovered intact from an excavation at Pakenham in Suffolk in the 1950s. From their design and position in the soil, a working model of the loom from which they had hung – just before fire consumed the work in progress and the shed in which it stood burned down – has been reconstructed by archaeologists. It seems that the original loom and, therefore, the maximum width of the fabric that could be produced, had been an impressive 95 inches across – almost 8 feet or 2.4 metres. Comparison of its width with the number of loom weights allowed a thread count of thirty warps per inch to be calculated – giving a coarse cloth like a blanket or rug.

All the evidence available to us suggests that it was for the most part women who processed, dyed, spun, wove and finished cloth, both during the Roman empire and throughout the Early Medieval period. Women were buried with spindles and spindle whorls, beating pins and needle cases; they are often depicted with shears, for fleecing sheep and cutting cloth. They operated looms, designed new and complex weaves, shaped their own and their families’ identities through colour, pattern and design. In legends, women wove their own stories into tapestries and it would be surprising if grandmother did not pass on her own unique methods and designs to daughter and granddaughter.

Cloth production was a vital domestic industry in the tribal societies of Europe, as it seems to have been globally. Cloth was made from a variety of yarns: principally wool and flax (for linen) but also hemp and very occasionally imported silk.

The weight and shape of the whorl, and the shape and direction of rotation of the spindle, determined the twist of the thread, its fineness or coarseness. A female head of a large household may have possessed a large set of spindles to cover the variety of yarns that she might wish to produce. Dyes were prepared from native plants like woad (for a blue colour) or madder (for red) and, occasionally, in a precious purple colour achieved by expertly processing the mucus of the Atlantic dog whelk.

The standard loom of the Early Medieval period was a warp-weighted upright wooden frame, like that described in the story of St Brigit, leant against a wall. Warps (from Old English verb weorp, meaning ‘to cast down’) were hung from a bar at the top of the frame and, in bunches, weighted with clay, stone or bone rings – the loom weights – attached beneath the lower cross beam. Each warp or pair of warps was lifted outwards to the ‘counter-shed’ or dropped backwards to the natural ‘shed’ or hang of the loom by the positioning of horizontal ‘heddle bars’, as the skein holding the weft (from Old English verb weofan, ‘to weave’) was passed to and fro. The yarn of the weft was beaten upwards onto the existing cloth with a weaving batten or sword, and the warps were plucked with a pin beater to keep them straight and true.

A very small number of Early Medieval fabrics remains intact, having survived in preserving burial environments: the coffin of St Cuthbert, for example, which yielded several astonishing ecclesiastical vestments that can still be seen in the Durham Cathedral treasury; the clothing of the women in the Oseberg ship burial;^# and cloth preserved by the desiccating sands of deserts in North Africa, South America and China. But hundreds more samples of weaving patterns survive because men and women of the Early Medieval period were often buried in their clothes, with chosen possessions (keys, knives, spindles, whorls and brooches, for example, with women; swords, buckles, knives and spears with men). Where metal decorative fittings – brooches, pins, belt buckles or scabbard mounts – survive, the imprint of the cloth to which they were attached has often been fossilised in its corrosion products: a small miracle of preservation.

Penelope Walton Rogers, a specialist in analysing the tantalising evidence of cloth recovered from excavations, has produced an outstanding survey, Cloth and Clothing in Early Anglo-Saxon England, in which she draws out the impressive range and technical expertise of – predominantly – women weavers. The standard weave was the tabby, a word deriving from the name of a specialist silk-weaving quarter in Islamic Baghdad, Al-Attabiya. In a tabby, each single warp and weft crosses alternately to produce a conventional flat cloth. Much more sophisticated twills, broken twills, diamond twills and variations that depended on the direction of spin of the yarn allowed weavers to create a rich variety of cloths: warm and cool, waterproof, lightweight, heavyweight and ceremonial. The addition of narrow, tablet-woven cuffs, collars, braids and bands in distinctive patterns, made using perforated wooden cards that could be rotated to cross weft over warp and back again, allowed women to dress themselves, and their men, in designs that reflected their status and kinship affiliations and their artistic and technical skills.

Penelope Walton Rogers’s analysis of the artefacts associated with cloth production at West Stow is highly revealing. Spindles and spindle whorls were found in and around a variety of structures from each period of occupation: women spun yarn as they went about their everyday chores, minded children and tended sheep or cattle; and occasionally they lost and failed to retrieve their spindles. Loom weights, on the other hand, are associated with many fewer buildings: generally, in the early period, the larger sunken-floored buildings in each household. But in the later decades of the settlement, only the largest and most complex structures showed clear evidence for weaving – in two adjacent buildings. It is as if production of textiles had become concentrated at the site of the largest and latest hall. This process of consolidation might reflect increased investment by the whole community in producing cloth, not just for domestic consumption but for trade – a notable feature of the seventh-century economy. If this is the case then we might suspect, as Walton Rogers intimates, the emergence of certain females in a supervisory role above the other women – and men – involved in production. From a position not unlike the mistress of a medieval manor house, the female supervisor of a textile atelier exercised artistic and technical authority over a hierarchy of warp-makers, weavers, yarn spinners, dyers and combers, right down to the humblest drudge retting or scutching flax.

An equally fascinating study by the historian David Herlihy, called Opera Muliebria: Women and Work in Medieval Europe, records many laws and commentaries referring to women’s role in cloth production; and it is from these complex, technically demanding crafts that women’s own narratives are beginning to emerge.