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Updated: June 21, 2025
As they worked in the flickering light, they stretched their distaffs at arm's length into the air like witches waving their wands; and with that the elfland picture was complete.
Half a dozen old hags with the parchment also sat upon the rocks in the sun, spinning from distaffs, exactly as their ancestors did in Greece two thousand years ago, I doubt not. I do not know that it is true, as Tasso wrote, that this climate is so temperate and serene that one almost becomes immortal in it.
The Indians, squatting on their withers among the tufts of white feathers, restrained them with their spoon-headed harpoons, while the men in the towers, who were hidden up to their shoulders, moved about iron distaffs furnished with lighted tow on the edges of their large bended bows.
Saint Paul earnestly dissuades from it. So do the saints. So do the philosophers of ancient times. Think a while. What a ridiculous association, the philosopher and the chambermaids, writing-desks and cradles, books and distaffs, pens and spindles!
Then came the Feast of Lovers, called the Buscou, on the last day of the year, where, in a large chamber, some hundred distaffs were turning, and boys and girls, with nimble fingers, were winding thread of the finest flax. Franconnette was there, and appointed queen of the games. After the winding was over, the songs and dances began to the music of a tambourin.
In the winter evenings, while the women work at their distaffs, the men frequently skin chestnuts either for drying or for food the next day. But while there was any work to be done out-of-doors, there they were busy from sunrise until dusk. Supper over, the beasts were looked after.
Their fathers were off on the fields since dawn; their mothers, as wan-looking and thin as the children, sat at the entrance of their hovels upon bunches of decaying straw; they were clad in rags and busily plied their distaffs for the benefit of the bishop; their long and unkempt hair tumbled over their foreheads upon their bony shoulders; their eyes were hollow, their cheeks sunburnt and sunken; the aspect that they presented was at once so repulsive and painful that the hermit-laborer could not refrain from pointing them out to the bishop, saying: "Look at those unhappy creatures!"
What possible concord could there be between scholars and domestics, between authors and cradles, between books or tablets and distaffs, between the stylus or the pen and the spindle? What man, intent on his religious or philosophical meditations, can possibly endure the whining of children, the lullabies of the nurse seeking to quiet them, or the noisy confusion of family life?
The hostess, who, as I entered, was gossiping with some cronies in the dark doorway, while she pretended to twist the wool that she carried upon the most rustic of distaffs a common forked stick laid this down, and, blowing up the embers on the hearth, proceeded to cook some eggs sur le plat.
"They say," he observed, "that king's chaff is better than other folk's corn; but I think that canna be said o' king's soldiers, if they let themselves be beaten wi' a wheen auld carles that are past fighting, and bairns that are no come till't, and wives wi' their rocks and distaffs, the very wally-draigles o' the countryside.
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