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Updated: May 2, 2025
One evening, early in the month of January, as I was sitting by myself in my closet studying the Scots Magazine, which I well remember the new number had come but that very night, Mrs Balwhidder being at the time busy with the lasses in the kitchen, and superintending, as her custom was, for she was a clever woman, a great wool-spinning we then had, both little wheel and meikle wheel, for stockings and blankets sitting, as I was saying, in the study, with the fire well gathered up, for a night's reflection, a prodigious knocking came to the door, by which the book was almost startled out of my hand, and all the wheels in the house were silenced at once.
Owing to the difficulty of investing money because present-day intermediaries were absent between capital seeking employment and would-be borrowers; and because the medieval stigma attaching to money loaned at interest had by no means wholly disappeared, there grew up in Elizabethan parishes a system of laying out money, raised by the parish or donated by benefactors, in various trades, such as wool-spinning, linen-weaving, the buying of wood or coal to sell again at a profit, etc.
The same process has gone on in the weaving industry; the power-loom has taken possession of one branch of hand-weaving after another, and since it produces much more than the hand-loom, while one weaver can work two looms, it has superseded a multitude of working-people. And in all sorts of manufacture, in flax and wool-spinning, in silk-twisting, the case is the same.
So sheep must be kept and sheared, and their wool carded, rolled and spun. As linen-spinning was the fancy-work of winter, so wool-spinning was that of summer. Back and forth before the loud-humming big wheel briskly stepped the cheerful spinner through the long bright afternoons of summer, busily spinning the yarn that was to be woven into cloths and flannels of different textures.
Still more characteristic, perhaps, is the introduction of wool-spinning among purely moral qualities; which is no very unusual occurrence in Roman epitaphs. I. III. Clan-villages That Roman citizenship was a condition for the regal office as well as for the consulate, is so very self-evident as to make it scarcely worth while to repudiate expressly the fictions respecting the burgess of Cures.
Sextius Sulla of Carthage, a man neither deficient in learning or taste, told me that this word was given by Romulus as the signal for the rape, and so that all those who carried off maidens cried "Talasio." But if this be true, and the Romans at that time really used this word "talasia" for wool-spinning, as we do, we might make another more plausible conjecture about it.
Still more characteristic, perhaps, is the introduction of wool-spinning among purely moral qualities; which is no very unusual occurrence in Roman epitaphs. I. III. Clan-villages That Roman citizenship was a condition for the regal office as well as for the consulate, is so very self-evident as to make it scarcely worth while to repudiate expressly the fictions respecting the burgess of Cures.
When the treaty of peace was arranged between the Romans and the Sabines, a special provision was made about the women, that they were to do no work for the men except wool-spinning. And thus the custom remained for the friends of those who were married afterwards to call upon Talasius in jest, meaning to testify that the bride was to do no other work than spinning.
What is more, she had known the "bottom," or valley, in those primitive days when the fairies frequented the margin of the "beck" on moonlight nights, and had known folk who had seen them. But that was when there were no mills in the valleys; and when all the wool-spinning was done by hand in the farm-houses round. "It wur the factories as had driven 'em away," she said.
There were sewing and housework and a little wool-spinning, and much knitting of stockings and mittens for them all. The knitting was evening work, and, when Hamish was not reading aloud, Shenac's hands and eyes were busy with different matters.
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