Fashions come and go. What is in fashion one-year can be out the next, often leaving little behind apart from memories and the odd photograph that makes you chuckle when you look at it. Rarely however do new fashions leave a lasting mark on our world and drive the development of new technologies. However, this is what happened with men’s stocking and the framework knitting machine, this month’s ‘Our Favourite Thing’ from the museum collection of Strutt’s North Mill.
The 14th century saw a change in fashion amongst the nobility of Europe, from wearing long robes to shorter close fitted padded jackets, known as doublets, with stockings that showed the length and shape of the leg. This fashion for stockings began to spread from the nobility to the lower classes and became the must have attire for any relatively wealthy young man. Whilst the nobility could afford stockings made from silk, transported all the way from China, others had to settle for more affordable materials such as wool or linen.
By the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558 – 1603), stocking were still highly fashionable and were made by hand and individually knitted, a time-consuming process. However, a new technical development was about to bring a major change to this. In the village of Calverton in Nottinghamshire a clergyman, Reverend William Lee, was developing a machine that could mechanically knit a piece of cloth. Legend has it that Lee invented his machine to enable the woman he loved to be freed from having to knit stockings for her father and so allowing her to marry him. By 1589 William had got his machine working and was successfully knitting lengths of cloth. Instead of using a pair of needles as a hand knitter would to knit a stitch at a time along the length of a row and then moving onto the next, Lee’s machine used a horizontal line of specially shaped needles, called bearded needles, to knit an entire row of fabric per cycle of the machine. The bearded needles at the heart of the machine can be seen in the image. The shape of these needles with the ‘beards’ that created a folded loop allowed the replication of the knitting process, forming a loop of thread supported by other loops in the previous row. The frames in which these needles were mounted were very large and needed great physical strength to operate, leading to this becoming almost exclusively men’s work. Despite Lee’s ground breaking invention he was prevented from getting a patent for the machine. Queen Elizabeth, and later James I, both rejected Lee’s attempts to patent his machine due to fears that it would cause increased unemployment during a time of economic depression. Unable to protect his invention in England, Lee took his frames, along with their operators, to France but his fortunes did not improve and he died penniless in France in 1614. Lee’s brother brought the technology back to England and established what became the Worshipful Company of Framework Knitters in London. From London the centre of the knitting industry eventually moved to the East Midlands with large number of frames in Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire and, Leicestershire.
Portrait of Henry VIII by the workshop of Hans Holbein the Younger.
Queen Elizabeth’s father, King Henry VIII posing in the most fashionable outfit for the mid-1500s. He is wearing fine silk stockings with a tight band around the upper part of the stocking to give the appearance of a shapely calf.
The Bearded Needle: Perhaps the most revolutionary feature of Lee’s stocking frame was the bearded needle. Its design allowed the machine to replicate the actions of hand knitting by moving alength of thread into the loop at the end of the needle, then applying pressure to close the needle and finally sliding the existing length of fabric over the top.
The stages of producing a stitch on a knitting frame
- The existing length of cloth is hanging from the stem of the needles, the needles are open and ready to start the knitting cycle.
- A length of thread, shown in red, is laid across the needles at right angles to the stem of the needles.
- The thread is pushed down creating the base of each loop.
- The thread with it newly made loops is pushed into the head of the open needles.
- A presser bar (not show) presses the beards of the needles closed. The existing length of fabric is brought forwards, it slides up over the closed needles.
- The presser bar is lifted and the existing length of fabric is pushed off the front of the needles, it falls and is caught in the base of the previously loops in step 3. These are then moved out of the beards of the needles onto the stem of the needle and the process can begin again.
Initially framework knitting in the three counties was a cottage industry with entire families working to keep a single frame operating, leasing their frames, and often their homes, from a Master Hosier. But the high overheads and poor pay for finished cloth saw many knitters suffering from malnutrition and poor working condition and pay led to frequent outbreaks of machine breaking during the early 1800s. At this time there were approximately 200,000 frames in the East Midlands.
The development of the frames did not end with William Lee’s death, and other budding inventors and business pioneers began to improve the machines and find new ways of working them. Groups of frames started to be grouped together working in factories instead of in the home. The firm of Ward, Brettle & Ward of Belper was an example of one of the newer generation of knitwear producers who made a huge range of knitted products for the newly emerging middle classes. Additions and improvements to the frames allowed them to knit better-quality fabrics and different types of knitted stitches. Early frames could initially only knit basic plain cloth made up of a single type of stitch and there were a number of further process that had to be completed by hand to create a finished stocking. Jedediah Strutt’s invention of the Derby Rib attachment in 1759 allowed a ribbed stitch to be knitted that could be used on the top of a stocking to provide grip and ensure the stockings didn’t fall down the wearer’s legs. Strutt’s invention made him a very wealthy man. Later he would provide initial capital for Sir Richard Arkwright’s first water powered cotton spinning mill in Cromford, and later entering the cotton spinning business in his own right with the construction of the first water powered cotton spinning mills in Belper.
“Old Neddy” at his stocking frame
Edward Smith began working stocking frames at the age of 10. He was later employed by Brettles making stocking and other pieces of knitwear and continued to work his frame until three weeks before his death in January 1914. Brettle’s continued to use knitting frames until the 1930s although by this time they had been superseded several times over by new advances in knitting technology and only a small number were kept for special orders for wealthy customers.
Strutt’s North Mill houses two examples of these frames. The older of the two dates to around 1750, the younger to around 1800. The machine’s construction requires a number of different skills including carpentry and blacksmithing / metal working to produce the wooden frame and intricate metal parts of the machine. The newer frame demonstrates about 50 years of rapid technical development. It is a much larger frame featuring more needles, spaced closer together, capable of knitting a wider and higher quality piece of cloth or, as in the case of the machine in the museum, multiple separate narrower pieces of cloth at the same time. This frame also has two additional features that differentiate it from the older, and smaller frame. It features a Derby Rib needle attachment that allows that machine to knit a ribbed stitch. This mechanism is behind the main knitting needles and is difficult to see. In addition, there is a lace bar attached to the front of the machine. This allowed the operator to produce decorative lace by getting the machine to drop stitches in certain places in the finished cloth, creating patterns or even images for decorative purposes. Despite their differences both frames work in the same way requiring the operator to manipulate the frame using the foot pedals and moving the metal parts of the machine manually. The bearded needles on these frames remain stationary, as the other parts of the machine move around them. Although neither of these frames are operational working examples can be seen at the Frame Work Knitters Museum at Ruddington in Nottinghamshire shown in the video to the left.
Lee’s invention of the frame work knitting machine was a key development in the history of textile production. For the first time a machine had been developed that could mechanically perform a task that until then had required a skilled human operative. It was a similar process of invention that would, nearly 200 years later, go on to kickstart the industrial revolution in textile production. In this regards Lee’s invention was very much ahead of its time. Knitting frames also played an important role in the birth of the Industrial Revolution as their increasing proliferation within the East Midlands led to a shortage of spun thread, especially cotton. These shortages had The effect of driving the development of mechanised cotton spinning machinery, of the type also on display at Strutt’s North Mill. At the time Lee was inventing his machine there were no similar machines that he could draw inspiration from, as was the case later with Richard Arkwright and Samuel Crompton who could built upon the ideas of others with their spinning machines. Having to developed his machine from scratch and invent a mechanism that was more efficient and quicker than hand knitting without directly mimicking the process sets Lee apart from the other inventors of the Industrial Revolution, and makes his invention one of the most important objects in Strutt’s North Mill.
The older of the two knitting frames on display at Strutt’s North Mill. The seat is a simple piece of wood with a hole in the middle bridged by leather straps. Over long use these would assume the shape of the operator’s bottom.
The line of Bearded Needles on the knitting frame
This frame has about 120 needles.
The younger of the two frames is set up to knit three separate lengths of cloth. Some of the additional features of this frame are also visible including the lace bar extending from the front of the machine. The seat on this frame is removable to allow knitters to take their seat to different frames that they may be working on.