indications
of ownership, would be the chosen receptacles for the numerous oddments
which are required in the practice and pursuit of every home handicraft,
and especially those connected with plying the needle. There was a time,
however, when the fabrics used in the making up of clothing were
home-made, when the seamstress and the needleworker stitched and
embroidered upon cloths spun if not actually woven by the housewife and
her handmaidens. In the barrows containing remains of people of the
Stone Age, and the peoples of the early Bronze Age, among the few
ornaments and personal adornments buried with them were spinning
whorls--the curiosities which remain to us of the earliest known form of
textile craftsmanship.

Spinning Wheels.

In old pictures and woodblock engravings some curious illustrations are
met with showing Englishwomen using the distaff. St. Distaff's Day was
formerly the 7th of January, for it was then that the women resumed work
after the Christmas festivities were over. The distaff and the spindle
belonged to an age little understood now, and the occupations of the
women of that date are almost forgotten. The spinning wheel was the
outcome of the simpler distaff and spindle, and although the spinning
wheels we find among the most interesting of household relics look
primitive indeed compared with the complex machinery seen in the
spinning mills to-day, those dating from the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries must have been considered ingenious contrivances when compared
with the older models, just as the latest types of sewing machines show
a wonderful advance from the early machines invented in the beginning of
the nineteenth century.

Very clever indeed were many women in manipulating the spinning wheel,
and there seems to have been some competitive contests for notoriety
among country women, who found a pleasing though perhaps at times
tedious occupation in spinning the wool for the local weaver who wove
the home-made cloth. It is recorded that in 1745 a woman at East Dereham
spun a single pound of wool into a thread of 84,000 yards. She was
far outdistanced, however, a few years later, when a young lady at
Norwich out of a pound of combed wool produced a thread computed to
measure 168,000 yards.

[Illustration: FIG. 72.--OLD SPINNING WHEEL.

(_In the collection of Mr. Phillips, of the Manor House, Hitchin._)]

To secure a fine spinning wheel is the ambition of collectors, and many