Wool In The Pre-Industrial East Anglian Textile Industry 1500s
Valina Bowman-Burns
Wednesday, 1 July 2020
How do you make cloth into clothing without machines? The labour-intensive process involved men, women and children. The Tudors and Stuarts were certainly involved in some way in the cloth trade. Did they take on the risky trade of ‘clothier’ and become rich and powerful? Or were they the unacknowledged ‘spinsters’ working for pennies?
We heard from Valina Bowman-Burns at a recent series of seminars hosted by Essex county Council, and with research primarily from the Essex Record Office, to learn about the East Anglian pre-industrial textile trade. Here, we round up her presentation.
Valina covers terms that we use today that can help to better understand the impact of the industrial revolution, along with an explanation of what the roles in the traditional textile trade were and how they've changed. She also looks at the wool processing stages, and how they fit into Tudor England society. It is a fascinating subject, however, this is just a short snippet of research to easily dive in to and digest.
In this lesson you'll learn:
- How to research historic records
- The types of textile occupations in Tudor England
- Historic wool processing steps
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