Shakespeare's Wife (21 page)

Just how expensive they were we may deduce from an entry in the London port book of 1567–68. Twelve pairs of silk hose were shipped from Malaga to London and valued by the customs officers at nearly £4 a pair. Since such valuations were well below, and sometimes only half, the true value, we may estimate their full worth at something nearer £8 a pair.
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In 1560 Mistress Mountague, silk woman to Elizabeth I, presented her with a pair of black silk stockings that she had knitted herself; the queen was so delighted with them that she never wore woven hose again.
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According to Stow:

In the year one thousand five hundred and sixty four, William Rider, being an apprentice with Master Thomas Burdet…chanced to see a pair of knit worsted stockings in the lodging of an Italian merchant that came from Mantua, borrowed those stockings and caused other stockings to be made by them, and these were the first worsted stocking to be made in England. Within few years after, began the plenteous making both of kersey and woollen stockings, so in short space they waxed common.
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In 1578 when Elizabeth visited Yarmouth she was treated to a display of knitting. On a specially erected stage

there stood at one end eight small women children spinning worsted yarn and at the other end as many knitting of worsted yarn hose…
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By the time Shakespeare was writing
Twelfth Night
in 1600, knitting had taken its place among the skills of working women: Orsino tells Cesario to pay particular attention to the song Feste is about to sing.

 

Mark it, Cesario, it is old and plain.

The spinsters, and the knitters in the sun,

And the free maids that weave their thread with bones

Do use to chant it…(II. iv. 44–7)

 

Knitting was probably one of the skills Ann had acquired when she was growing up in Shottery in the 1570s:

 

Joan can spin and Joan can card,

Joan keeps clean both house and yard.

She can dress both flesh and fish

or anything that you can wish.

She can sew and she can knit.

Joan for anything is fit.
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The milkmaid Launce wants to marry in
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
can knit, and Launce interprets this skill in her as being as good as a dowry: ‘What need a man care for a stock with a wench when she can knit him a stock?' (III. i. 301–3). An odd light is cast on the way in which knitting served as a source of income for poor women by the discovery that, when Ann Morgan of Wells in Somerset, who combined knitting with occasional prostitution, was overheard bargaining with a man who asked ‘Shall I lie with thee and I will give thee a shilling?' she replied, ‘No, I will have eighteenpence for thou has torn my coat and has hindered me the knitting of half a hose.'
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In early November 1598 Adrian Quiney wrote from Stratford to his son Richard, who was in London on Corporation business, advising him to invest in ‘knit stockings':

if you may have carriage to buy some such wares as you may sell presently to proft. If you bargain with W[illia]m Sh[akespeare] or receive money there, or bring your money home you may. I see how knit stockings be sold. There is great buying of them at Evesham. Edward Wheat and Harry your brother's man were both at Evesham this day sevennight and as I heard bestow £20 there in knit hose, wherefore I think you may do good if you can have money.
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Quiney's excitement suggests that the demand for knit stockings was greater than the supply, so that if they could buy up large quantities at Evesham they stood to make a tidy profit.

More skilled knitters could knit finer, decorative stockings, with more stitches to the inch, as well as fancy stitches and embroidery, and for them they could charge enormous prices. Stubbes was particularly outraged by the extravagance of the hosiery affected by all classes:

Then have they nether stocks to these gay hose, not of cloth (though never so fine) for that is thought too base, but of jersey, worsted, crewell, silk, thread, and such like, or else at the least of the finest yarn that can be got and so curiously knitted with open seam down the leg with quirks and clocks around the ankles and sometime haply interlaced with gold or silver threads…it is now grown that everyone (almost), though otherwise very poor, having scarce forty shillings of wages by the year, will not stick to have two or three pair of these silk nether stocks or else of the finest yarn that may be got, though the price of them be a royal or twenty shillings, or more, as commonly it is…
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And that's just the men. Women go even further:

Their nether stocks in like manner are either of silk, jersey, worsted, crewell, or at least of as fine yarn, thread or cloth as is possible to be had…they are not ashamed to wear hose of all kind of changeable colours, as green, red, white, russet, tawny, and else what, which wanton light colours any sober chaste Christian…can hardly without suspicion of lightness at any time wear. And then these delicate hose must be cunningly knit and curiously indented in every point, with quirks, clocks, open seam, and everything else accordingly.
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If Ann were involved in the upper end of the stocking manufacture, spinning her own thread of ‘changeable' or mixed colours and knitting it into elaborate patterns, she could have earned a good living for herself and her little ones. If she taught other women to knit up her designs and provided them with patterns and materials, she could have earned much more. Such goods were manufactured in the midlands; in Stratford in 1598 the haberdasher William Smith sued one Perry for failing to pay him for ‘fustians, lace, worsted stockings, silk buttons, taffeta &c'.
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A cottage industry like this has to be organised and co-ordinated; evidence of female entrepreneurs in this field is hard to come by but there is some. In 1622 when she accompanied her husband to Ireland, Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, undertook to organise a local textile industry there:

she procured some of each kind to come from those other places where those trades are exercised, as several sorts of linen and woollen weavers, dyers, all sorts of spinners and knitters, hatters, lace-makers and many other trades at the very beginning, and for this purpose she took of beggar children (with which that country swarms) more than eight score apprentices, refusing none above seven year old, and taking some less. These were disposed to their several masters and mistresses to learn those trades they were thought most fit for, the least amongst them being set to something, as making points, tags, buttons or lace…
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Lady Falkland was no businesswoman and her noble project eventually failed. If Ann had tried something similar in Warwickshire with the wives and daughters of the growing horde of landless workers, she could well have succeeded. All sources note that agriculture was employing fewer and fewer people in the midlands in the 1580s and 1590s, and that the clothing trades were becoming more and more important.
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What we lack is any account of just how that happened. If Ann Shakespeare had both skill and business acumen, she could have become a wealthy woman in her own right. So far we don't know that she did, but we don't know that she didn't either.

We can be sure that there were women in Stratford who made a living by knitting because the Overseers of the Poor, among whom
were numbered various of Ann Shakespeare's nephews at different times, included knitting among the useful trades to be taught to orphan girls. In 1607 eleven-year-old Dorothy Mather was placed with George Davis and his wife Margaret for fourteen years as an indentured servant ‘to learn to knit and weave bone lace'.
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In the same year fourteen-year-old Elizabeth, daughter of Thomas Bayliss, was placed with Anne Curtis, widow, a knitter, to be taught ‘knitting, carding, spinning and other housewifery'. In 1612–13 Widow Curtis took on thirteen-year-old Margaret Getley, to learn ‘the trade of knitting and other housewifery'.
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In 1615 Dorothy Mather's sister Katherine was apprenticed to Margery Shepherd for eight years ‘to learn the art and science of knitting'.
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In his
History of Myddle
, the Shropshire yeoman Richard Gough mentions one house-bound woman who survived by knitting:

I knew but one of Parkes's children. Her name was Anne. She was taken in her youth by that distemper which is called the rickets. She could not go or walk until she was nineteen years of age. Afterwards her limbs received strength and she was able to walk. She learnt to knit stockings and gloves, in which employment she was very expert and industrious, and thereby maintained herself after the death of her parents…
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Elinor, widow of Richard Ralphs, one-time Parish Clerk of Myddle, is likewise described as being able to ‘knit very well and thereby gets her maintenance'.
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In 1589 William Lee of Calverton in Nottinghamshire, graduate of St John's College Cambridge, devised a mechanical knitting machine. It was promoted at court by Shakespeare's patron Lord Hunsdon, who secured an opportunity for Lee to demonstrate his machine to the queen, in hopes that she would grant him a patent. Elizabeth refused. For one thing the worsted stockings made by his machine were too coarse, but, revealingly, she feared that recourse to the machine would throw too many knitters out of work. Lee improved his machine, increasing the number of stitches to twenty per inch, but still the queen refused.

The key to how Shakespeare's wife could have managed to make a living may be his brother Gilbert, the haberdasher. We have very few
hard facts about Gilbert. We know that he was christened at Holy Trinity on 13 October 1566. He was probably named for Gilbert Bradley, John Shakespeare's fellow glover, who had been made a burgess in 1565. We have no way of knowing if Gilbert attended the Stratford grammar school, but we do know that he could write a fine italic hand, because he signed his full name as witness to the lease of a property in Bridge Street, Stratford, in 1610. In 1597 when he stood bail for William Sampson in the Court of Queen's Bench in London, he was described as a ‘haberdasher of St Bride's Parish'.
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If Gilbert had ever been apprenticed to a haberdasher it would have been in 1580 or so, and by 1587 he would have been newly out of his articles and looking to set himself up, but so far no record of any apprenticeship has turned up. There is no mention of a Gilbert Shakespeare in the registers of St Bride's parish nor is he listed as a member of the Worshipful Company of Haberdashers. He was clearly still connected with Stratford; William Sampson, the man he went bail for, was from Stratford. Gilbert was in Stratford on 1 May 1602, when he acted for his brother in the conveyancing of the land he bought in Old Stratford. On 3 February 1612 Gilbert was buried in Stratford. We have no record of his owning a shop in Stratford or in London, or of his being a householder in either place; his haberdashery business seems to have been peripatetic at best.

Nobody has ever been quite sure what a haberdasher does. In 1502 the original haberdashers who sold ribbons, beads, purses, gloves, pins, caps and toys, were amalgamated with the Guild of Hat-makers, in an odd confederation of manufacturers of one product with traders in different products. If we may believe Robert Greene, the connection between the two was not always to the customer's advantage.

The haberdasher…trims up old felts and makes them very fair to the eye, and faceth and edgeth them neatly, and then he turns them away to such a simple man as I am, and so abuseth us with his cozenage. Beside you buy gummed taffeta, wherewith you line hats, that will straight asunder, as soon as it comes to the heat of a man's head…
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Though in 1446 the Haberdashers' Company was accorded a grant of arms, and in 1448 a charter of incorporation, the business of
haberdashery remains inextricably connected with merchandising all kinds of trumpery, much of it done by travelling chapmen and chapwomen. In 1550 haberdashery was thought to consist of ‘French or Milan caps, glasses, daggers, swords, girdles and such things'.
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Because of the Milan connection haberdashers were also called milliners: ‘the other a Frenchman and a milliner in St Martin's, sells shirts, bands, bracelets, jewels and such pretty toys for gentlewomen…'.
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In 1561 Stow lists ‘mousetraps, bird cages, shoe horns, lanterns and Jews' trumps' as part of a particular haberdasher's ware.
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In 1576 haberdashery is described as ‘bells, necklaces, beads of glass, collars, points, pins, purses, needles, girdles, thread, knives, scissors, pincers, hammers, hatchets, shirts, coifs, headkerchiefs, breeches, clothes, caps, mariners' breeches…'.
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‘Trash' and ‘haberdash' went together. Cotgrave defines a ‘mercerot' as ‘a pedlar, a paltry haberdasher'.
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Obviously, haberdashery is closely related to the other clothing trades, spinning, weaving, wool drapery, linen drapery, tailoring, knitting, lace-making, gloving, shoe-making, hosiery. As a glover John Shakespeare would have sold some of his production to haberdashers, and he would also have needed the services of haberdashers in supplying him with yarn, braid and other trimmings as well as needles, pins and scissors for his workwomen. Mercers, hatters, hosiers and woollen drapers too would have distributed their wares with the help of haberdashers and chapmen. Stratford, not far from the point where the London road split to serve the fast-growing industrial towns of Coventry and Birmingham, was well placed to serve as a depot for luxury goods, which might explain why the town was virtually run by businessmen who called themselves mercers. Strictly speaking mercers dealt in the top end of the fabric range, in the silks and velvets which hardly anyone in Stratford was entitled to wear. The Sumptuary Law of 1597 stipulated that ‘None shall wear velvet in gowns, cloaks, coats and upper garments, or satin, damask, taffeta or grograin…or embroidery with silk or netherstocks of silk except knights and all above that rank, their heirs apparent, those with net income of £200.'
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