yale university press findings the material culture of needlework and sewing jan 2007

But, as I explore in chapter 2, common straight pins were used to fas-ten both men’s and women’s clothing, to fasten documents, to fasten shrouds, toserve as guides for thread in lace-ma

Findings

Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College

Copyright © 2006 by Yale University All rights reserved This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers Set in Electra type by Tseng Information Systems, Inc Printed in the

United States of America by Sheridan Books.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Beaudry, Mary Carolyn, 1950–

Findings : the material culture of needlework and sewing / Mary C Beaudry.

p cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn-13: 978-0-300-11093-7 (clothbound : alk paper)

isbn-10: 0-300-11093-6 (clothbound : alk paper)

1 Pins and needles—History 2 Sewing—Equipment and supplies—History.

3 Needlework—Equipment and supplies—History I Title.

a gt2280 b43 2006 306.4—dc22 2006015214

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability

of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the

Council on Library Resources

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Mary Mason Barkuloo Beaudry,

who continued to take joy in her sewing despite losing her sight

Acknowledgments ix

one Introduction: Small Finds, Big Histories 1

two The Lowly Pin 10three The Needle: ‘‘An Important Little Article’’ 44four The Ubiquitous and Occasionally Ordinary Thimble 86

five Shears and Scissors 115six Findings: Notions, Accessories, and

the Artifacts of Textile Production 137

seven Stitching Together the Evidence 169

Notes 179References 207Index 227

vii

I owe great thanks to many people for their assistance and supportiveness overthe years as I have worked in my halting fashion on this book Carl Crossman’senthusiasm on finding a monogrammed silver thimble at my site, the Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm in Newbury, Massachusetts, inspired me to research the arti-facts of needlework and sewing, and I thank him for that as well as for all themany volunteer hours he donated to the Spencer-Peirce-Little Project, enlight-ening me and my students all the while about ceramics and material culture ingeneral George Miller, Richard Candee, and Jane Nylander encouraged me topursue this project and were instrumental in my good fortune in securing a fel-lowship to conduct research at the Winterthur Museum and Library

As I embarked on my research, Jean Wilson, through the good offices of herhusband, Norman Hammond, told me to read Roszika Parker’s bookThe Sub- versive Stitch Parker’s insightful book helped frame my thinking, and I am ex-

ceedingly grateful to Jean for putting me on to it in my early research

I am also grateful to have been blessed twice, in 1994–95 and in 2001, with theopportunity to pursue research at the Winterthur Museum and Library, in bothinstances funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship forAdvanced Study Winterthur is, of course, a mecca for material culture research-ers, and it is not just the library and its marvelous resources that make workingthere so special Neville Thompson, now retired, was librarian during both of myfellowship periods; she was a marvel at recommending relevant resources in theWinterthur collection and in suggesting avenues I might pursue in winkling outthe sorts of information I was after She has been called ‘‘Librarian Extraordi-naire’’ with good reason! I also thank E Richard McKinstry, Andrew W MellonSenior Librarian, for his help with archival materials; Linda Eaton, Curator ofTextiles, for her generosity with her time and expertise; Gary Kulik, Director of

ix

Library Operations, and J Ritchie Garrison, Director of the Winterthur Program

in Early American Culture, for their guidance; Gretchen Buggeln for her ful support and assistance; Bert Denker for help with photography and photo-graphic resources; Sue Newton and Dot Wiggins for assisting me with securingillustrations of Winterthur materials; and Pat Eliot for being the best

cheer-One of the delights of the Winterthur experience is the opportunity to teract with other visiting scholars, and I enjoyed the many conversations withother Winterthur researchers Bernard Cotton, Tom Denenberg, Terence Lock-ett, Carl Lounsbury, Joe Torre, and Shirley Wadja

in-In 1995 I was able to continue my research in England while I was a ing Professor at the Department of Archaeology and Prehistory at the University

Visit-of Sheffield, and I thank then Head Visit-of Department, Keith Brannigan, and thenHead of the Research School, Barbara Ottaway, for hosting me so graciously,providing office space, and including me so thoroughly in department activities.James Symonds, Director of the Archaeological Research Consultancy at theUniversity of Sheffield (ARCUS), took me under his wing, as it were, befriended

me, and assisted me in innumerable ways Among his many kindnesses was ducing me to John Widdowson, Director of the Centre for Folklife Studies at theUniversity of Sheffield, who gave me access to the research library of the Cen-tre, where I found many useful sources I am also grateful to David Crossley forpermitting me to sit in on his lectures and tag along on field trips; David andhis wife, Elizabeth, also took me to many local sites of interest, among which for

intro-me the most impressive was Hardwick Hall in Derbyshire, with its outstandingcollection of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century embroideries

Dr Vince Gaffney, former Director of the Forge Mill Needle Museum, ditch, and Jo Ann Gloger, its current Director, were most welcoming and help-ful, allowing me to explore the museum and its archives, with its rich collection

Red-of documents pertaining to the needle industry

In 1995 I also had the privilege of being a Visiting Scholar at the Philips Library

of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts There I was able toread many account books and women’s diaries and to conduct research in EssexCounty records, and I am grateful to William LaMoy, Jane Ward, and John Kozafor their patient guidance and insight into the collections, and Daniel Finamorefor his collegiality and many kindnesses The highlight of my time at the Pea-body Essex was the opportunity to explore with Curator Paula Richter the col-lections in storage, most of which have not just Essex County provenance butwell-documented histories in local families And, of course it is always a thrillfor an archaeologist to be able to see and touch (indirectly, with gloved hands)items of the sort she will never recover from the earth

Many archaeological colleagues generously allowed me access to their lections Henry Miller and Silas Hurry of Historic St Mary’s City, Maryland,opened the St Mary’s City collections for my inspection, and Silas has served

col-as a sounding board and font of useful information over the years Julia King,Director of the Maryland Archaeological Conservation Laboratory at the Jeffer-son Patterson Park and Museum in Lexington Park, Maryland, allowed me ac-cess to materials from all of the seventeenth-century domestic sites held by hermuseum and Dan Mouer and Robin Ryder let me roam freely through the col-lections held by the now-defunct Archaeological Research Center at VirginiaCommonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia Charles Burke and AndréeCrépeau paved the way for me to examine the spectacular collection of sewingartifacts recovered from Fortress Louisbourg in Nova Scotia I must apologize inadvance that they will find that I did not incorporate any of the Louisbourg ma-terial into this work and plead what I fear is a lame excuse: the data mysteriouslydisappeared from my computer before I could back it up

Other colleagues sent or loaned me materials that have proved helpful, amongthem Sharla Azzizi, Edward Bell, Ellen Berkland, Kelly Britt, Eleanor ConlinCasella, Edward Chaney, Joyce Clements, Sara Rivers Cofield, Linda Derry,Diana DiPaolo Loren, Wilhelmina Lunt, Marla Miller, Stephen Mills, VirginiaMyles, Martha Pinello, Peter Pope, Mary Praetzellis, Marta Cotterell Raffel,Suzanne Spencer-Wood, Roderick Sprague, Kathleen Wheeler, Carolyn White,Rebecca Yamin, and Anne Yentsch For assistance with securing illustrations andpermissions to reproduce them, I thank Sara Rivers Cofield, Lorna Condon,Sally Hinkel, Ann-Eliza H Lewis, Douglas Lister, Rebecca Morehouse, SharonRaftery, and Howard Wellman

I am grateful to Lara Heimert for making it possible for me to publish withYale University Press and to Christopher Rogers, Executive Editor, and EllieGoldberg, Assistant Editor, for making working with Yale such a pleasant ex-perience Laura Jones Dooley, Senior Satellite Editor for Yale, did a wonderfuljob copyediting the manuscript, turning my stilted prose into readable English.Heartfelt thanks to Karen Bescherer Metheny and Ann-Eliza H Lewis for help-ing me so much by applying their sharp eyes and sharp minds to the task ofproofreading

Throughout my research and writing, Lu Ann De Cunzo, Julie King, andRebecca Yamin have been unfailingly supportive and always helpful with ideasabout how I should approach my research and writing I value their friendshipand have been inspired by the writings that they have produced while I slowly,slowly stitched away at this ‘‘bit of work.’’

Findings

Small Finds, Big Histories

My interest in the material culture of needlework and sewing began in theearly 1990s, with the slowly dawning realization that many items I was finding atthe Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm in Newbury, Massachusetts, the site I had beenexcavating since 1986, were artifacts related to sewing Each season we found one

or more thimbles and many straight pins; every so often we recovered a pair ofsewing scissors The 1993 season turned up several objects we could not identify

at first, among them a carved bone bobbin that, I later learned, was used to makelace That year we also found a silver thimble with a monogram It occurred to

me that such a valued personal object could serve as the point of entry for ing about the women who once lived at this site, women about whom both thedocumentary and archaeological records thus far have been disappointingly un-informative.1

learn-Although I had watched my mother sew and had learned embroidery whenyoung, I was a spectacular failure in the sewing portion of the home economicscourse I was required to take in high school Not being inclined to pursue ac-tivities that I am not good at, I have since avoided sewing anything And so myunderstanding of sewing and its associated paraphernalia was rudimentary, eventhough I often excavated sites at which generations of women had spent much

of their lives sewing, mending, making lace, and the like Their pursuits werelargely invisible to me because I did not recognize the implements used in suchwork for what they were Like most of us, I knew a pin or a needle or a thimble—and certainly a pair of scissors—when I saw one, or even part of one But there

my knowledge ended I could only guess at the identification of other objects,especially if they were not part of the great trinity of historical archaeologists’ arti-facts: ceramics, clay pipes, and glass

Excavated artifacts of needlework and sewing—pins, needles, thimbles, and

1

so on—fit quite naturally, albeit often anonymously, into the category of ‘‘smallfinds.’’ Although the phrase is more likely to be used by excavators working withinthe British archaeological idiom than by American historical archaeologists, astate of mind pervades the field as a whole that has led to acceptance of a narrowset of conventions in thinking and writing about small finds.

Historical archaeologists tend to assume, without giving it much thought, thatceramics, glass, clay pipes, and animal bones are more informative and hence

of far greater interest than many other sorts of finds, and they have developeduseful and widely employed conventions for presenting, analyzing, and inter-preting those categories of material Yet even though historical archaeology hasburgeoned over the past four decades and is now practiced all over the globe,huge gaps remain in our knowledge of the material culture of medieval, earlymodern, and modern times The frequent reprinting of Ivor Noël Hume’sGuide

to Artifacts of Colonial America, the appearance of Kathleen Deagan’s two

vol-umes devoted to artifacts of the Spanish colonies, and the publication in 2000

by the Society for Historical Archaeology of a volume of artifact studies and of asecond edition of a collection of artifact studies reprinted from its journal,His- torical Archaeology, are ample proof that we hunger for more information about

the artifacts we dig up.2

The increased interest in gender analysis among historical archaeologists hasgiven rise to greater interest in objects that might be related to women and, espe-cially, to women’s activities This has led since the early 1990s to attempts to fillthe gaps and remedy the silences of finds analysis by seeking out objects that havenot been studied because they were deemed trivial for the very reason that theywere associated with women’s domestic activities Because sewing is so univer-sally associated with women, artifacts of needlework and sewing often stand asevidence of women and women’s activities The link is based in part on realitybut also on uncritical assumptions about sewing and how sewing ties in with thelives of both men and women

Throughout history, activities customarily performed either by men or bywomen have become associated with and deemed appropriate to members ofone sex or the other Through such customary associations various undertakingsand responsibilities have become culturally designated as the ‘‘natural’’ province

of one sex or another and therefore integral to the definition of gender identitythrough designation of gender roles The processes, settings, tools, and materialsemployed in an enterprise are metonymically transformed into symbols of sex-specific tasks and so become emblems of gender identity (fig 1.1).3

Gender identity can be constructed and negotiated (as opposed to being simply

Fig 1.1 Frontispiece forEasy Steps in Sewing for Big and Little Girls, published by

Jane Eayre Fryer in 1913 The girl’s sewing tools have come to life to keep her company during what would otherwise be tedious hours in the sewing room as she is instructed

in sewing and femininity by another animated friend, her little sewing bird (Courtesy The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection)

assigned) Archaeologist Barbara Luedtke wrote that it is important to attend tothe possibility, if not likelihood, that ‘‘the meaning of our archaeological arti-facts varied with context.’’ In this book I explore, through the example of theartifacts of needlework and sewing, ways in which gender identity can be sig-naled and can shift according to context These issues can be examined by re-constructing, through critical analysis of documentary and pictorial sources, theethnographic contexts in which sewing and needlework served practical endsand those in which sewing and needlework implements featured as symbols inmyth or ritual or as expressions of sentiment in society; by examining the classi-ficatory logic underpinning the ‘‘gendered’’ nature of sewing; and by close read-ings of instances in which the ‘‘usual’’ symbolic import of sewing implements issubverted through symbolic inversion and anomaly.4

Feminist art historian Rozsika Parker, in her groundbreaking workThe versive Stitch, examines how ‘‘embroidery has become indelibly associated with

Sub-stereotypes of femininity’’—femininity being a ‘‘crucial aspect of patriarchalideology.’’ She demonstrates through detailed analysis of works—written andstitched—by both men and women that ‘‘the development of an ideology offemininity coincided historically with the emergence of a clearly defined separa-tion of art and craft.’’ The division began during the Renaissance, at a time whenembroidery was done more and more by women working in the home ratherthan by professional, usually male, embroiderers During the seventeenth cen-tury, embroidery was used to inculcate femininity in young girls, so much so that

‘‘the ensuing behaviour appeared innate.’’ An ideology of femininity as natural

to women evolved in the eighteenth century, and from the eighteenth century

on, embroidery came to signify femininity as well as a leisured, aristocratic style, proof of gentility because of its association with nobility,

life-providing concrete evidence that a man was able to support a leisured woman.Moreover, because embroidery was supposed to signify femininity—docility,obedience, love of home, and a life without work—it showed the embroiderer

to be a deserving, worthy wife and mother Thus the art played a crucial part

in maintaining the class position of the household, displaying the value of aman’s wife and the condition of his economic circumstances Finally, in thenineteenth century, embroidery and femininity were fused and the connectionwas deemed to be natural Women embroidered because they were naturallyfeminine and were feminine because they naturally embroidered.5

But, Parker notes, though many women may have ‘‘colluded’’ in the continuance

of this construction of gender identity, they were not always passive recipients ofsuch ideologies but responded to them: women used these ideologies and were

used by them Over the centuries, embroidery has provided support and tion for women and has served as a covert means of negotiating the constraints offemininity; women were able to make meanings of their own while overtly living

satisfac-up to the oppressive stereotype of the passive, silent, vain, and frivolous, evenseductive needlewoman Parker’s eye-opening study provides the framework for

my examination of the material culture of fancy needlework alongside the facts of ordinary sewing.6

arti-Consider for a moment the likelihood that complex civilizations could havearisen if no one had invented cordage for tying up bundles, creating strings fromfibers that could be manipulated in many ways, knotted, netted, laced throughskins, woven into cloth If women had never experimented with fibers, if this ex-perimentation had never led to textile production, to clothing, tapestries, blan-kets, bags, coverings of all sorts, the course of civilization, if indeed there was any,would be unimaginable, unthinkable Textile production and sewing of somesort have been tangled up with aspects of culture—technological, social, eco-nomic, ritual, and so on—since early in human history As a result, the products

of weaving and needlework, the tools used in these processes, and the personswho undertook these activities were enmeshed in a system of symbols with mul-tiple meanings The job of the archaeologist, as I see it, is to investigate the cul-tural complex of sewing in order to explore how needlework implements carriedmeaning in specific historical and cultural contexts and then to place these care-fully constructed cases into wider cultural contexts.7

Needlework held both homey and utilitarian as well as broader social quence Spinning, sewing, mending and remaking garments, and marking sheets,towels, and other linens was a regular component of household work done oroverseen by women Genteel women and girls engaged in fancy or decorativeneedlework as testimony to their skill in the feminine arts as well as to a so-cial position that permitted leisure for such nonutilitarian pursuits At the sametime, not all fancy needlework was a pastime for wealthy women of leisure, norwas all utilitarian sewing destined for immediate household use Many a needle-woman depended on the income her handiwork could generate Knowing this,

conse-it is clear that the artifacts of needlework from historical sconse-ites can be interpretedalong several lines of social and economic relevance: everyday, ‘‘practical’’ or

‘‘necessary’’ work (sewing, mending, and knitting); ‘‘fancy work’’ (embroideredpictures, muslin or ‘‘whitework,’’ cutwork, candlewicking, tambour work, stuffedwork, canvas work, and so on); and work of either sort produced for sale outsidethe home Attention to the type, quality, and intended functions of the artifacts

of needlework and sewing makes it possible to address the issues of the nature orquality of sewing activity and to relate this to household income and manage-

Fig 1.2 A needlework picture stitched by Jane Peirce of Newbury, Massachusetts, in

1734, when she was five years old (Courtesy New Hampshire Historical Society)

ment strategies, to social standing and social display, and to the construction ofgender identity.8

In the collections of the Historical Society of New Hampshire there survives

a wonderful embroidered picture (fig 1.2) It was done in 1734 by Jane Peircewhen she was five years old Jane was one of seven children of Charles Peirce andSarah Frost, and she grew up in the Spencer-Peirce-Little House, on the farm

[To view this image, refer to the print version of this title.]

where I have spent so many seasons excavating The embroidered picture is arare and marvelous survival, tangible evidence of needlework in service to the in-culcation of and construction of feminine identity In the chapters that follow Iexplore ways of identifying and interpreting the needlework tools archaeologistscommonly find; in my case, I am hoping that the knowledge I have accumu-lated will help me understand the sewing implements excavated from the soilsaround the house where young Jane stitched her canvaswork picture and to re-construct a more complete picture of the generations of women who plied theirneedles at the Spencer-Peirce-Little Farm But I am hopeful that the guidelines

I provide will prove useful for other archaeologists, and I have sought out manyadditional case studies beyond my own site to provide examples of how differingcontexts lead to differing interpretations.9

My approach is broadly interpretive, and my aim is to move past the ostensiblysimple first steps of artifact identification and dating and even beyond ‘‘engen-dering’’ artifacts by bringing multiple lines of evidence to bear on the interpre-tation of the material culture of sewing and needlework in the ‘‘active voice.’’ Aninterpretive approach acknowledges that material culture is not just somethingpeople create but an integral component of our personalities and our social lives,deeply implicated in how we construct social relationships Trying to compre-hend what things meant to people in the past is not the most easily undertakentask, but it is not altogether impossible, especially not for historical archaeolo-gists My goal is to construct a rich contextual analysis of how women and menused objects of needlework and sewing and to consider the multiplicity of mean-ings these everyday items conveyed Sometimes the best way to do this is to try

to reconstruct the stories in which people and their things played active roles, toconstruct narratives that ground interpretation in the everyday lives of people inthe past and in the life histories of the objects that archaeologists find otherwisemute or mysterious and strangely distant.10

I see the analysis of documentary evidence as vital to constructing the pretive ground, as it were, for artifact analysis This is why, throughout this book,

inter-I offer case studies that track back and forth among documents and artifacts tooffer interpretations that arise from the combined evidentiary sources AlisonWylie has described this process as one of constructing cables of inference; hermetaphor is a powerful one and aptly captures what I am attempting to accom-plish.11

An important step in the research process involves casting a wide net throughprimary and secondary sources to learn generally about the importance ofneedlework in women’s (and men’s) lives This involves knowing what articlesdifferent needlework tools were used to produce and their social, cultural, and

economic significance, the contexts of production, and the social implications

of different forms of needlework It is clear that cloth production, sewing, andneedlework played an important part in the lives of most women throughout his-tory and that the implements of these activities, because they were associatedwith women, often served as symbols of women’s status and women’s role.12Consider the seemingly most obvious and most trivial of all small finds—thecommon straight pin and the not-so-logical syllogism about pins that one oftenencounters in the literature Pins equal sewing, or so most archaeologists assume;they also assume that sewing was done by women Therefore, pins = sewing =women But, as I explore in chapter 2, common straight pins were used to fas-ten both men’s and women’s clothing, to fasten documents, to fasten shrouds, toserve as guides for thread in lace-making, to conjure spells and to ward againstthem; in other words, pins were used for many purposes beyond sewing And it issometimes possible to differentiate what these purposes might have been, sincepins were made in varied sizes because different sizes were needed for the diversepurposes I’ve mentioned But because we think we ‘‘know’’ what pins mean, we

do not pay them much attention A typical illustration in an archaeological port will show a small pile of pins from various contexts at a given site carefullyset beside the other items the archaeologists assume are women’s things or part

re-of the sewing assemblage

In the following chapters, I examine items of the material culture of work and sewing that are most likely to survive in archaeological contexts: pins(chapter 2); needles (chapter 3); thimbles (chapter 4); scissors (chapter 5); andless common items associated with weaving, lace-making, and the finishing ofgarments (chapter 6) I focus on implements or tools; I do not consider textiles ex-cept as they relate to sewing, and I do not consider buttons because although theyare sewn onto clothing and usually serve as fasteners, in my mind they are not

needle-tools of needlework but functional clothing fasteners, items of personal

adorn-ment, or both.13

In each chapter I present the history of the type of implement under ation as well as a comprehensive discussion of the techniques of manufactureand, where relevant, conditions under which the objects were produced I think

consider-it is important to understand how changing technology brought about changes

in form and functionality of objects, and like many before me, I am intrigued bythe nature of the work involved in the production of items like pins and needles

as well as the conditions under which youngsters, men, and women labored toproduce practical and fancy items used in sewing or worn as elements of socialdisplay I have also attempted to present for each type of artifact a comprehensiveguide to dating as well as identifying excavated specimens and suggestions for in-

terpreting their intended uses My intent is to provide archaeologists with betterways of making fine-grained distinctions within seemingly homogenous cate-gories of artifacts, as well as to provide for historians and collectors of needleworktools information about what sorts of things archaeologists have recovered Myprimary goal, however, is to provide examples of ways to construct contexts forinterpretation of needlework tools To this end, I conclude each artifact-specificchapter with a case study that suggests possible avenues of interpretation In theconcluding chapter, I attempt to ‘‘stitch together the evidence’’ by turning to awider consideration of the significance of sewing and needlework in the lives ofmen and women, looking at sewing as a profession and as a pastime, and offer-ing final thoughts on how archaeologists can use the excavated material culture

of needlework and sewing to illuminate ways in which the people who lived andworked at the sites they excavate incorporated such items into their daily nego-tiations of personal and social identity

The Lowly Pin

He that will not stoop for a pin will never be worth a pound.

—samuel pepys,Diary, 2 January 1668

Common straight pins made of copper-alloy wire are recovered in impressivenumbers from almost all domestic sites of the medieval, early modern, and mod-ern eras What could seem more ordinary and trivial than a common pin (fig.2.1)? This, at least, is the attitude most archaeologists take When they excavatestraight pins, unless the pins are unusually long or have decorated heads or areotherwise distinctive, archaeologists assume that all are sewing pins and tend tolump the pins together as such without regard for where they came from on thesite and for what other objects they were associated with in the ground And ar-chaeologists tacitly assume that if the pins are for sewing they must have beenused by women Hence the common straight pin has become, in the archaeo-logical literature at least, a widely accepted indicator for the presence of women.But the situation is far more complicated than this simplistic equation permits.Pins were indeed used for sewing, by both men and women (although accom-plished tailors and professional seamstresses used few if any pins in their work),but they served many other functions as well, and they were even perceived attimes as having magical or prophylactic powers against witches and other ma-levolent forces.1

THE HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLO GY

OF THE COMMON STRA IGHT PINPins of various sorts are common finds on archaeological sites throughout theworld Those found on historical sites are technologically superior though essen-tially similar in shape and function to the individually fashioned, handmade pins

of prehistoric times Since the very earliest of times pins have served as

fasten-10

Fig 2.1 The parts of a pin.

ers, first fashioned simply of thorn or fish bone Pins of bone and thorn havebeen found in Paleolithic sites, and bone pins have been found at Incipient Neo-lithic as well as at Celtic and Roman sites In ancient Egypt, the eyelids of thedead were held fast with tiny fish bones, and George Herbert, Lord Carnarvon,discovered in his excavations at el-Assasif, Thebes, a small, pierced ivory gameboard in which carved pins with heads of dogs and jackals served as the gamepegs Exquisite, ornately decorated pins of gold have been found at Salamis inCyprus (eighth century bc), at Chiusi in Tuscany (seventh century bc), and fromthe Temple of Aphrodite at Paphos in Cyprus (sixth century bc) The pin fromPaphos is interpreted as a votive pin; the others were likely hairpins Highly deco-rative silver hairpins are also found.2

Wooden and ivory pins and sticks were found by Sir Flinders Petrie in his cavations of predynastic sites in Egypt; some were dress pins, some hairpins Butitems sometimes identified as pins are more likely to have been spindles that onceheld a whorl or weight to aid in spinning thread or yarn Elizabeth Barber notesthat the close resemblance of some spindles (when found without whorls) to dresspins and hairpins leads to confusion over the functions of such ‘‘carved shafts.’’She notes especially the presence of items identified as dress pins in an EarlyBronze Age (mid-third millennium bc) royal tomb, Tomb H, at Alaca Höyük incentral Turkey These have flat ends and hence are far more likely to have beenspindles than pins.3

ex-Prehistoric peoples used pins for hairdressing, perhaps as votive offerings, and,chiefly, as clothing fasteners, or at least to fasten lengths of woven textile thatserved as cloaks or other garments By the Bronze Age pins took the form of com-plexly designed metal spikes; examples have been found in North Africa, Asia,and throughout Europe (both on the Continent and in the British Isles) Anespecially interesting example of early metal pins, typical of the large hammer-headed pins found in Kurgan burials of the third millennium bc in the vicinity

of Nalchik in the northeast Caucasus, provides clues to an early form of textileproduction Some of these pins were decorated by impressing twisted cords intothe clay used as molds for casting the pins; at least one such pin bears the im-pression of fabric, not just cordage, serving as evidence of the antiquity of card ortablet weaving Barber notes that tablet weaving was practiced in ancient Egyptfrom very early times—a good example being the girdle of Rameses III (around

1200 bc)—but that the technique was introduced into Egypt during the NewKingdom The pin found in the Caucasus points to a region in which tablet weav-ing may have originated before knowledge of the technique spread to Egypt.4The Romans had hand-forged pins with elaborate heads, made of bronze butalso of ivory, jet, silver, iron, and glass; these ranged from two and a half inches

to about six inches in length Roman pins are extremely common finds, and though many retained a skewerlike form, others were turned on a lathe and em-bellished with a wide array of carved heads The decorative terminals take theform of birds, animals, busts, and small statuettes, and some are enameled Itseems likely all were used to pin garments Ring-headed bronze pins were com-monly worn by Norse explorers and colonists and sometimes included in Viking-period graves, such as the Celtic-type pin with faceted head found at Tjørnuvík

al-in the Faroe Islands The rather plaal-in ral-ing-headed pal-in found at L’Anse aux ows in Newfoundland is among the most tell-tale artifacts of the only acknowl-edged Viking-age settlement in North America, around ad 1000.5

Mead-Many wooden pins have been found in waterlogged sites in Europe; these facts seldom survive in terrestrial sites, so their recovery from bogs and wetlandsites leads one to speculate that wooden pins may once have been quite com-mon Many sites from which wooden pins have been found date to the Neolithicperiod, for example, at the Sweet Track on the Somerset Downs in England,from which elongated, curved wooden pins were recovered; a single example of

arti-a very similarti-ar pin warti-as found in arti-a buriarti-al arti-at Duggleby Howe in Yorkshire Short,straight wooden pins, some with carved heads and others with beads for heads,have been found in crannogs in Balinderry, Ireland, as well as at other sites inIreland and Britain Wooden and bone skewers or pins were still in common usethroughout the medieval period and into Elizabethan times, when metal pinswere still relatively rare and expensive, although a comprehensive study of pinsfrom excavations at medieval sites in London reveals that metal pins were morecommon during this period than many scholars have suspected.6

Large numbers of pins were recovered from excavations of fourteenth- andfifteenth-century deposits in London, indeed, ‘‘in abundance from almost allsites yielding fifteenth- and sixteenth-century material.’’ Museum of London ar-chaeologists were not surprised by the increased numbers of pins in medieval

layers of the city, for by the fourteenth century pins were manufactured in greaterquantities than ever before In April 1440, two galleys outfitted on behalf of sevenVenetian merchants docked at Southampton on their return voyage from Flan-ders carrying eighty-three thousand pins as part of their cargo Documentary evi-dence hence reveals both trade in and use of vast numbers of straight pins, most

of them made of finely drawn wire and fitted with small heads Such pins wouldnot have served well as cloak fasteners and the like but instead were used to fastenwomen’s veils—pinning the folds of linen headdresses or securing transparentveils to the hair or around the shoulders to the front of a gown It is noteworthythat the trousseau of Edward III’s daughter, Princess Joan, whose wedding tookplace in 1348, included twelve thousand pins for fastening her veils, and there arenumerous examples of the use of pins in this manner in fifteenth-century art.7The study of more than eight hundred pins from six sites in London revealedthat although pins with decorative heads were still being produced in the four-teenth and fifteenth centuries, they were much rarer than in earlier times,and the heads were small The decorated pins from the London assemblages in-cluded fifteen with attached heads of materials different from that of the shank.Three pinheads were of red coral, two were small blobs of glass that had been ap-plied in a semimolten state, and another was a cast pewter circular head depictingChrist’s face surrounded by a nimbus This last pin, with its obvious religious sym-bolism, is interpreted as one of the mass-produced pilgrim badges commemo-rating the martyrdom of Thomas à Becket The majority of the pinhead designs,however, were much less varied in form than earlier pins and lacked ‘‘the virtu-osity displayed by many of the larger pins of the Anglo-Saxon and Viking epochswhich would have been worn more conspicuously.’’ Some of the decorated pinsmatched the ornamentation on dress accessories of the fifteenth century, such asstrap-ends on girdles or tassels on drawstring pouches A few of the London pins

of both bone and copper alloy had hipped shanks (that is, ‘‘shanks with a swellingtowards the tip to help prevent the pin from slipping out of position’’), and a fewhad looped heads It would appear that pins with decorated heads continued to

be made and worn in England up until the seventeenth century, as several havebeen found in postmedieval contexts in Norwich and elsewhere Bone pins sel-dom appear in contexts postdating the early thirteenth century, the fineness ofmetal pins, it seems, having given them dominance in the pin market.8The importance of pins as clothing fasteners continued in the early mod-ern era; pins were used as makeshift fastenings for items of clothing such asbreeches ‘‘by country folk and the poor’’ throughout the seventeenth and eigh-teenth centuries Seventeenth-century men who could not afford buttons to fas-ten the sleeves of their doublets used pins instead, as this bit of verse from 1616

makes clear: ‘‘A countrey fellow plaine in russet clad / His doublet mutton-taffetysheep-skins / His sleeve at hand button’d with two good pins.’’9

Despite what we might consider a potential hazard to the child, pins were portant for fastening babies’ clothing from at least medieval times Pincushionsfilled with pins were popular additions to the layette, although mothers werewarned not to keep the pincushion in the child’s basket or cradle Pins would

im-be used for fastening thetailclout (nappy or diaper) as well as the child’s

head-gear and swaddling Both the child’s garments and the pins used to fasten themplayed a role in shaping the child’s posture and future presentation of self.10Appropriate head covering for a newborn in the eighteenth century, for ex-ample, included several layers of bonnets known asbiggins: ‘‘As to the head, it

is covered with two or three small biggins, the first of which is of linen, and theothers woollen, and these are tied behind the neck In many places they add astayband [headband] or a kind of headdress with two ends which hang down onthe side of the head and are fastened on the breast with pins in order to makethe infant hold its head straight.’’11

Even once tailored or sewn clothing became common, women’s clothing tinued to be fastened with pins as well as held together by lacing—long aftermen’s clothing was being fastened with buttons, buckles, and the like The stom-acher, a long, triangular fill-in worn with low-necked bodices common in thefirst quarter of the seventeenth century, was stiffened by a busk (a strip of wood,whalebone, or other rigid material passed down the front of the corset to stiffenand support it) and secured to the bodice either by ties or pins, and bodices wornwithout stomachers might be fastened together in front by pins, ribbon ties, lac-ing, or, among the wealthy, a close row of buttons Gorgets, deep, capelike collarstypically worn by women around 1630–1660, were closed at the neck with pinsbut could also be tied or buttoned in place In the second half of the seventeenthcentury, the termpinner was used to refer to more than one sort of woman’s gar-

con-ment: a ‘‘modesty’’ fill-in pinned to a low décolletage (also sometimes called a

tucker); a white cap or coif with long lappets or strips that could be worn

hang-ing on either side of the head or pinned atop the head; and the bib of an apron,which would be held in place with pins In the late seventeenth century, a cap orcoif known as acornet, fitting the back of the head tightly but with flaps or lap-

pets dangling against the cheeks, was worn by some beneath the large hats thatwere popular at the time among women of the middling classes.12

In the eighteenth century, women used pins on their clothing in a variety ofways, including those described above for securing modesty pieces, apron bibs,and so on They might also pin up part of a gown to expose the petticoat below (atthis time women’s gowns were open in front and the petticoat was an integral part

of the dress, so it was a simple matter to gather up and pin back a portion of thegown), or they might pin up a train of a dress.Mantuas or manteaus, worn during

the first half of the eighteenth century, were open robes worn with petticoats, anunboned bodice, and an overskirt with train, which would often be pinned up: ‘‘Apin now in her mantua’s tail.’’ In the 1780s, large shawl-like ‘‘handkerchiefs’’were often worn draped around the neck and closely pinned beneath the chin.13

In 1751 a book aimed at children included a poem, ‘‘Miss and Her Pin,’’ thatenumerated the elements of a young woman’s costume requiring the services of

a pin

My Knot and my Hood,

It stickes in the Mode,

My Kercher in Order it places;

It fixes my RufflesAnd other Pantoffles

In their Plaits it keeps all my Laces.14

It did not escape notice that women were, at times, bristling with pins thatheld their costume in place Lord Byron inDon Juan compared a fully pinned

woman with an unapproachable animal, at the very least a creature to be proached with extreme caution.15

ap-Pricking her fingers with those cursed pins,Which surely were invented for our sins,—

Making a woman like a porcupine,Not rashly to be touched [6.61, 62]

The use of pins on clothing declined once other fastenings were produced, but in 1830 they were still recommended for baby clothes, along with

mass-a pincushion, mass-as pmass-art of the lmass-ayette, mass-and women continued to use blmass-ack steel pins

on mourning dress throughout Victorian times.16

MAK ING PINSBronze was the first metal used for pin-making, and each pin was forged byhand; as noted above, such pins often sported elaborately decorated heads, anddouble pins—two spike-like individual pins connected by a short length of chain,were fashioned from bronze or other metal to serve as especially decorative cloth-ing fasteners But here I am concerned for the most part with medieval and later

‘‘common’’ pins or straight pins, made from iron or, more often, brass wire Beforepin-making was mechanized, wire straight pins, like pins of earlier times, were

fashioned individually by hand The craftsman created a point on the pin by ting the length of wire into a bone, known as a ‘‘pin-maker’s peg.’’ Pinner’s bones(often horse or cattle metapodials, although sheep bones were also used) havebeen found at medieval and postmedieval sites in Europe; several pinner’s boneswere found, for instance, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century contexts at theBattle Bridge Lane site, London Bridge City, Southwark, as well as elsewhere

set-in London Additional examples of pset-inner’s bones were found set-in century dump layers overlying a clay floor at 14 Orange Street, Westminster,Greater London, from pits behind an early-sixteenth-century three-bay timber-frame house that until 1968 stood at 59–61 Moulsham Street in Chelmsford,Essex, at King’s Lynn, Norfolk, and in a seventeenth-century cesspit as well asother contexts in Norwich.17

seventeenth-The pinner’s bone served as a holder to improve the grip of the pin-maker andavoid bending the pin The bone was altered by sawing two or three grooves inits long axis; the pin wire was inserted into these grooves, which held the lengthsecurely while the pin-maker filed the exposed end to a point As a result, thebone was usually marked by diagonal file marks and frequently stained greenfrom copper salts in the pin In most cases the head was then fashioned from an-other section of wire, usually of the same diameter as the pin, that was coiled on alathe, then cut into pieces of two or three turns One of the resulting coils would

be slipped along the pin until it was held in place by a slight flattening at the top

of the shank, where it would be secured by soldering it with tin The heads could

be formed in various ways, so as a result, the size of the heads tended to vary

as well This technique at times resulted in problems, as the ends of the coiledhead proved rough and tended to snag the material on which the pin was used;the defect was eventually remedied by stamping the head into a smooth, roundball Geoff Egan and Frances Pritchard’s study of wound-wire-headed pins frommedieval sites in London showed fairly equal numbers of spherical heads andheads that had been stamped flat; the wound-wire heads overall were smaller insize than the heads of pins with solid wrought heads.18

Pin-making is similar to needle-making and almost as expensive; at the end offifteenth century, when in England a sheep sold for twenty pence, pins, pointedindividually on a pinner’s bone, cost four pence per hundred A guild of pinnerswas established in London in 1356; by the fifteenth century several other towns

in Britain had pin-makers with their corresponding guilds, but their productsfell short of the quality of those achieved by French pin-makers (chiefly because

of problems with brass wire production in England) As a result, large ties of fine pins were imported from France, which served as the main center

quanti-for pin-making French pin-making was based in Paris, where more than a sand craftsmen were employed in making high-quality straight pins Denis Dide-rot illustrated several scenes in ‘‘The Pin Factory’’ in hisEncyclopedia; another

thou-Frenchman, René-Antoine Ferchault de Réamur, in hisArt de l’épinglier (1761),

described how French pinners went about their work and illustrated his text withmany detailed copperplate engravings of the pin-making process and the toolsemployed by the pin-makers (fig 2.2).19

Brass wire was used in England for pin-making as early as 1443, and in 1483Richard III attempted to protect and advance the home market by prohibitingthe importation of pins, though his edict had little effect.20

In 1543 Henry VIII made a move to control the quality of pins produced inEngland in hopes that English pins of high quality would prove more desirablethan the imported items: ‘‘No person shall put to sale any pinnes but only such

as shall be double headed and have the heads soldered fast to the shank of thepinnes, well smoothed, the shank well shapen, the point well and round filed,canted and sharpened.’’21

Even though English pins may have improved had the pinners followed theirking’s command, the raw material for pin production, brass and iron wire, con-tinued to be imported from the Continent until its import was prohibited in

1662 Nevertheless, the English wire-drawing industry was not truly viable untilaround 1700, when the areas around Gloucester and Bristol became centers

of manufacture The first recorded mention of Gloucester pin-making dates to

1608, in a document that referred to both John Payter in West Ward and ThomasEdge in St Nicholas Parish as pinners, though it seems likely that Payter andEdge were engaged in making pins (rivets) for suits of armor rather than commonstraight pins A proper pin factory did get started in Gloucester in 1626, and by

1744 pin-making was among Gloucester’s most important industries The FolkMuseum on Westgate Street in Gloucester retains part of a pin factory, includ-ing its annealing furnace, and excavations on Eastgate in the same city producedevidence of a late-seventeenth-century pin factory Gloucester and its environsremained the chief center of pin-making until the automated pin machine waspatented in 1824, after which the industry moved to Birmingham.22

The slow progress of the wire industry in England did not prevent efforts inthe colonies to establish manufactures based on wire-drawing, however It seemshighly likely that Joseph Jenks intended that some of the wire he hoped to pro-duce at his waterpower seat below the ironworks at Saugus, Massachusetts, would

be made into pins In 1667 Jenks petitioned the General Court for seed money

to start up ‘‘wyre-drawing’’ at Saugus; the court approved an advance of money

Fig 2.2 A pin-maker’s workshop as depicted in René-Antoine Ferchault

de Réamur’sArt de l’épinglier (1761), showing the equipment and tools for drawing

wire and heading pins (Courtesy The Winterthur Library:

Printed Book and Periodical Collection)

to purchase wire-drawing tools and forty shillings to encourage the manufacture

of ‘‘cards and pinns of the said wiar,’’ though it is unclear whether these fundswent to Jenks or to someone else.23

Because eighteenth-century attempts at pin production in the colonies provedlargely unsuccessful, most colonials ordered their pins from England, and theUnited States continued to import pins, primarily from England, until the mid-dle of the nineteenth century During the American Revolution, a financial in-centive was offered by the North Carolina Provincial Congress to anyone whocould establish a pin industry that would compete with pins imported from En-gland (this consisted of an offer of fifty pounds for anyone who could producethe first twenty-five dozen pins equal to British imported ones costing seven shil-lings, six pence a dozen) At about the same time Jeremiah Wilkinson was alreadymaking pins from wire drawn at his mill in Cumberland, Rhode Island, and aman named Leonard Chester was petitioning the Connecticut legislature forpermission to erect a pin factory at Wethersfield Samuel Slocum, who twenty-five years previously had patented in England a machine for making pins withsolid heads, also began a factory in Rhode Island Shortly thereafter, anotherConnecticut gentleman, Dr Apollos Hinsley, invented a pin-making machine

By the early nineteenth century, there were many pin factories in the UnitedStates The emergence of a fully-fledged U.S pin industry can be attributed tothe Howe Manufacturing Company of Derby, Connecticut, which began itsoperations in 1836.24

Once mechanization was introduced, the manufacture of copper-alloy pinswas transformed into a labor-intensive, complex operation involving many peo-ple at different stages of the production process The organization and efficiency

of the pin industry—‘‘a very trifling manufacture’’—caught the attention ofAdam Smith, the Scottish economist, who in 1776 described pin-making inAn Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.25

As noted above, early straight pins were made from two pieces of wire Onepiece served as the shank, and the other was coiled two or three times to form ahead around one end of the shank The basic steps in industrialized pin produc-tion were as follows: wire was first reduced to the correct gauge by hand draw-ing, cut into lengths and pointed at both ends on a grinding wheel, then cut andpointed several more times until the required length was obtained (0.98–1.18inches) The shank was left in ‘‘the hard’’ (that is, it was not annealed) The headwas a close spiral made on a long wire the same diameter as the shank and cutinto lengths of two or three turns; after the heads were annealed, a number ofcoils were put into a tray, or the worker’s apron, and four headless shanks wereplaced into a holder Pushing this device through the coils, the pinner managed

to pick up a head on each shank (there is some indication that children times performed this operation) The heads were then secured to the shank withpressure by a machine similar to a drill press, usually a small drop-stamp that con-sisted of a weight that could be raised on guides by a foot-operated treadle, thenallowed to fall under its own gravity The bottom die of the anvil had recessesinto which the headed shanks were positioned, and the top die was allowed tofall, squeezing the spiral heads onto the shanks.26

some-Most pins were tinned ‘‘by placing the pins in a boiling aqueous solution ofargol (crude potassium bitartrate—the reddish deposit from wine vats) contain-ing granules or thin leaves of tin.’’ Alternatively—albeit with considerable risk

to the pinners’ health—a solution of an alloy of tin, mercury, and lead could

be used for this purpose Once tinned, the pins were ‘‘barrelled’’ in a manuallyturned bran tub to be polished In all, this was a lengthy process, with a differentcraftsman (or woman) undertaking each of eighteen distinct operations A lonepinner could produce just twenty pins a day Adam Smith remarked that the re-distribution of labor, detailing one craftsman to each task, increased production

to 4,800 pins per person per day We can see in pin-making the beginnings ofassembly-line production, so it is easy to understand why Smith held up the pinindustry as a milestone of industrial progress.27

The disadvantages of the straight pin with applied wound-wire head are ous to most archaeologists, who often recover only the headless shanks of earlypins So it is easy to understand that there were many attempts to make a one-piece pin until at last the technique was perfected In 1797 Timothy Harris tookout a patent for pinheads made from molten lead In 1817 American Seth Huntpatented an ‘‘upsetting’’ machine to make pins with heads, shaft, and point inone process; Kirby, Beard, and Company of Gloucester, England, bought Hunt’spatent, but the firm was not successful because with Hunt’s machine only pinsfrom soft wire could be made, so pins with the harder, spirally wound type ofhead continued to be produced and sold Finally, in 1824 American Lemuel W.Wright patented a machine that forced the head up from the shank and formed it

obvi-in one movement, producobvi-ing forty to fifty solid-headed pobvi-ins per mobvi-inute Wrightset up business in London and later moved to Strough, Gloucester He eventu-ally sold out to Daniel Foote Tayler, who adapted Wright’s machine to make 170pins per minute It seems likely that it was Tayler who sold the first solid-headedpins in London in 1833; in 1840 the company again was sold and moved to Bir-mingham.28

In Birmingham the company continued to operate under the name of D F.Tayler, and ‘‘Dorcas’’ was used as the trademark for the pins the company pro-duced A booklet issued by the company in 1860, Useful Arts, explained how

solid-headed pins were made and illustrated the various stages in manufacture.

By 1880 pin-making was fully automatic The company known as Newey, whichhad been producing shoe buckles since 1798, absorbed D F Tayler in 1934,and in modern times Newey Goodman Limited has continued to make pinsfrom brass, carbon, and stainless steel; the company’s advertising recommends

‘‘Dorcas’’ pins for dressmaking.29

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the mass production of pins incided with the introduction of cheaper steel and sophisticated power-drivenmachinery The result was a dramatic decrease in the cost of pins The Englishpin industry alone produced almost a hundred million pins daily and becamethe chief supplier to world The wholesale cost of a pound of pins ranged fromone shilling, three pence to three shillings—and it took on average ten thousandpins to make up a pound.30

co-DATING PINSAlthough there are some broad criteria for distinguishing early straight pinsfrom later ones, dating individual pins is nearly impossible—not even the stan-dard of workmanship provides reliable evidence of the time of manufacture.Metal pins were made in France by the fifteenth century, but the method ofmaking a two-piece brass pin with wound-wire head was invented by the middle

of the sixteenth century and continued until around 1830 when Wright’s ented pin-making machine came into use R F Tylecote’s metallographic ex-amination of pins ranging in date from 1548 to 1875 demonstrated quite clearlythat there was little, if any, difference in pins manufactured between the mid-sixteenth and at least the late eighteenth century In the late eighteenth centurysome spirally wound globular heads were replaced by a conical shape made up ofwire of a smaller diameter than the wire used for the shank, with up to five turnsversus the two or three turns of earlier wound heads, but this practice was farfrom universal So such pins, though definitely of late-eighteenth-century date,could readily be found in the same context as pins that look just like earlier pins.The major change occurred when the modern form of pin with ‘‘upset’’ headwas introduced in the early nineteenth century.31

pat-It is possible to determine the approximate age of selected individual pins onlybecause pins were sometimes used as a means of attaching the pages of a dateddocument, much in the way we use staples or paper clips today—the assump-tion being that only relatively new pins, ones that had not begun to tarnish orrust, would have been employed for such a purpose Of course, a pin spearedthrough the pages of an old document may be perceived as being out of its nor-

mal ‘‘use context,’’ but the survival of pins in archival contexts reminds us thatthese objects were used for many things besides holding together fabric await-ing stitching and that as archaeologists we should be alert to the multiple uses

to which pins might be put The earliest European straight pins in the Americaslikely are those found at the Spanish site of La Isabela, founded by Columbusand occupied between 1493 and 1498, and these are dated only by the securecontext of the site rather than on any other criteria, for they are all copper-alloywire with wound-wire heads Apart from the fact that they are longer than mostpins found at sixteenth-century Spanish colonial sites, they are indistinguishablefrom thousands of other pins found on colonial and European sites dating fromthe fifteenth century until the early nineteenth century.32

PIN SIZES AND T YPES

General Rules and Remarks.

In fixing work, the pins used should not be larger than what is needful to hold it firm.

Most historical archaeologists tend to lump all pins together regardless of sizeand to assume that almost all straight pins can readily be classified as sewingpins, relegated to the ‘‘sewing assemblage,’’ and hence linked directly to women

If only it was truly so simple! Pins varied in length and thickness because theywere intended for different purposes (fig 2.3) Archaeologists will find that pay-ing attention to pin sizes and being aware of the various uses to which pins could

be put will perhaps pay the reward of helping them realize the full interpretivepotential of their finds Kathleen Deagan, in discussing pins found on Spanishcolonial sites in La Florida, indicates that small pins were used for dressmakingand tailoring, particularly with light or fine fabrics, and larger pins were used forholding headdresses, veils, clothing pleats, and folds in place It has also beensuggested that fine ‘‘dressmaker’s pins’’ were much in demand in the late medi-eval period for the wearing and pleating of ruffs on men’s clothing and hencemight be more indicative of the presence of men and boys than of women—1,575pins were recovered from the sixteenth-century all-male Free Grammar School

in Coventry, England, for example.33It seems likely that veils and garments offine materials, including ruffs, would have been pinned with the smallest pinspossible, and professional tailors and seamstresses were less likely to use largenumbers of pins than less experienced persons engaged in home sewing

In the discussion that follows I have attempted to set out rough guidelines fordistinguishing one type of pin from another (table 2.1) All of the pins I discuss

Fig 2.3 Another workshop scene fromArt de l’épinglier illustrating various stages of

wire-drawing for making pins Of particular interest is the depiction of a range of pin types in the left center of the lower portion of the image; the accompanying text provides suggestions for appropriate uses for each size of pin (Courtesy The Winterthur Library: Printed Book and Periodical Collection)

Table 2.1 Types of pins and their approximate lengths and diameters (wire gauge)

Sewing pins

‘‘Blanket pins’’ or corkins

fall within the broad category of common straight pins and hence the differencesamong them are often not very great Documentary sources can prove confusing

as to nomenclature; sources from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries refer to

‘‘white pins, black pins, angel pins, red pins and red number pins, white pins,double cawkins, pins made from brass, pins coated with tin, and iron pins,’’ and

it seems that ‘‘even contemporaries had difficulty distinguishing particular typesand materials’’ of pins So although I have made every effort to provide a roughguide to pin nomenclature, there is no way to provide a firm typology based oncontemporary terms And it goes without saying that the very same straight pinscould be used in active production processes such as sewing and lace-making ormore passively as fasteners for clothing and wrappings—including shrouds—inaddition to serving as implements for ‘‘making the toilette,’’ in other words, ashairpins or wig pins.34

l i l l s , l i l l i k i n s , l i l l s k i n s ,

m i n n i k i n s , m i n i f e r sTiny pins, less than half an inch in length and less than four hundredths of aninch in diameter, were known variously asminnikins, minifers, lillskins, lills, or lillikins Lills could be used in pinning fine fabrics before stitching them together

but were most commonly used to pin veils and other elements of women’s garb inplace A source from 1706 offers this definition: ‘‘Minnekins, the smallest sort of

Pins, us’d by Women for their clothes.’’ As noted above, such tiny pins, when covered from the appropriate temporal (and social) contexts, could also be inter-preted as having been used in pinning men’s and boys’ ruffs In the archaeologi-cal literature these tiny pins are variously calleddressmaker or dress pins, though

re-dress pins is probably a bit more on the mark than re-dressmaker pins.35

c o m m o n s e w i n g p i n s( s h o r t w h i t e s a n d m i d d l i n g s )Ordinary or common sewing pins tended to be just over one inch long andabout one sixteenth of an inch in diameter; pin-makers called themshort whites.36

Middlings, in contrast, are defined as ‘‘pins of medium size,’’ and hence as long whites as opposed to short whites or double long whites (see below) Apparently,

middlings were typically among the pins kept ready to hand; one Miss Mitfordreferred in 1824 to pincushions capable of containing ‘‘a whole paper of shortwhites and another of middlings.’’ Middlings, therefore, were general-purposepins used for various tasks.37

The matter of determining which pins were most likely used in everyday ing is complicated by the fact that nineteenth-century pin packaging often toutedthe fact that the purchaser would take home pins in ‘‘Useful Assorted Sizes’’ orsimply ‘‘Mixed Pins,’’ while some wrappers specified that all the pins in a givenpacket were ‘‘short whites’’ or, somewhat mysteriously, ‘‘Laundry Pins.’’ The les-son learned from this is that most households of the nineteenth century andearlier would be likely to have pins of various sizes to hand for a variety of sew-ing and other needs A late-nineteenth-century deposit excavated in the FivePoints neighborhood of New York produced well over two hundred packages ofcommon straight pins along with other items indicative of a commercial sew-ing operation (for example, fifty thimbles, 222 hooks and eyes, scraps and rolls

sew-of twill tape, seam bindings, and 180 buttons).38

b l a n k e t p i n s o r d o u b l e l o n g w h i t e s

( c o r k i n s , c o r k i n g - p i n s , c a l k i n s , a n d s o o n )Large pins, around three inches long and about one-eighth of inch in diame-ter, were known asdouble long whites or blanket pins and were intended for fas-

tening the folds of heavy blankets, furnishings, and so forth The termcorkins

(also spelledcawkins), according to The Oxford English Dictionary (OED),

de-rives from the phrasecorking-pin, meaning ‘‘a pin of the largest size.’’ In a

pin-maker’s case dating from 1690 they were termed ‘‘Double Long Whites alias

Calkins.’’ Other sources quoted by theOED refer to such pins not in reference to

blankets but as stuck into a gentlewoman’s stomacher or fastening a man’s ridingskirt.39

m o u r n i n g p i n sMourning pins, intended to be worn on mourning dress, were originally made

of iron and coated with black varnish made up of linseed oil and lampblack.After 1850, mourning pins were made from tempered steel wire that took on a