Margaret Frazer’s most excellent series on Dame Frevisse, a fifteenth-century nun-cum-detective, includes a tale of how one unmarried woman earned her living by her sewing skills in The Sempster’s Tale.
While the terms seamstress and spinster define a woman who sews, Frazer chooses the word sempster for the title of her book set in 1450 because it refers to both genders. She notes that the term seamstress appeared first in the sixteenth century about the time that gender-specific words appeared in occupations – actor/actress, waiter/waitress, etc. The term spinster indicating an unmarried woman in a household who performed the lowly chore of spinning yarn became the generic term for any unmarried woman. Thus, the occupation defined the status.
In simpler times, women not only carded and spun yarn but they also wove it into cloth and sewed. While the ordinary housewife was occupied with sewing clothing for her family, royal ladies embroidered with finer yarn/thread. The Bayard Tapestry which records an historic event in fabric, the Norman conquest of England in 1066, was probably embroidered by Queen Matilda and her handmaidens. Later analysis suggests that English women, perhaps those similar to Frazer’s heroine Anne Blakwell, actually completed this 230 foot-long strip of linen tapestry.
So well known were the English embroiderers that professional textile workshops and guilds grew to regulate production and standards of their embroidery called Opus Anglicanum or "English work." Although the making of church vestments had long been the provenance of cloistered nuns as the means of financially sustaining their convents, the demand for elaborately decorated clothing and hangings found its way into the top classes of society and soon the demand for heavily embroidered clothes exceeded the supply. As the daughter of a tailor, Anne Blakhall, a young widow in London in 1450, is skilled in plain-clothes-making but her marriage to another tailor allows her to learn how to make more fashionable clothes demanded by the rising middle class. She learns as well “how to deal with the drapers and mercers from whom both cloth and thread were bought, and with the silk women who could provide her directly with the best silk threads to be used in her embroidery.” She supports herself as a femme sole, “a woman legally able to act in her own right in all her business dealings” and one who “could work in my own name.”
It is this last statement that sets the tone for the rest of the book. Frazer incorporates the back story of Anne’s skill into that important first chapter so that the problems of the story plot revolve around fabrics and Anne’s independence from financial ruin. At that time, most women and their dowries belonged to their husbands. Many were forbidden to practice their husband’s trade after he died. But if a woman were trained by a guild, she could become a guild member and be declared a femme sole, a woman able to conduct her own business.
Like the beguines of Europe, she also supports herself by teaching young girls “reading, writing, plain reckoning, and skilled sewing… [which] would be needed when they were London merchant’s wives and there was never harm in knowing how to sew.”
Her handling of the girls is sympathetic. When one student put “another unwanted knot in her thread…Anne took the sewing to herself, gently teased the knot loose with the needle’s point.” (3) (How many of us still use this method of untangling knotted thread.) One student is “embroidering a pillowbere’s [pillowcase] edge with a double-running stitch of red-dyed linen thread” while another is “plain-hemming a white towel” with dubious skill and enthusiasm. “’Four more stitches, and you’ll have it done,’” Anne encourages as the girl completes the towel with a “great sigh of someone finished with heavy labor” and survives her “trial by thread and needle.”
What charmed me most were the details of a committed sewer. Frazer’s heroine sits at the source of natural light -- “her embroidery frame beside the parlor’s garden-ward window.” (How many needleworkers seek a window or doorway to see the project in a better light.)
The author is careful to have Anne’s actions befit an embroiderer of her stature. Specifically, Anne has been taught by a member of the Broiderers’ Guild how to handle the metallic threads of silver and gold that need “a delicacy and certainty of eye and hand” in the making of church vestments. In her window seat, Anne is pictured “carefully setting the slightly twisted yellow silk thread in small, encroaching flat stitches along the outstretched wing of the St. John’s eagle centered in a roundel.” She was using gold thread to finish the “eagle’s last careful shading by way of small stitches laid over larger, couched ones.” Here Anne is securing the couching stitches which themselves hold the fragile gold thread to the background. A special thread of gold-coated silver called silver-gilt which wrapped around yellow silk secured the couching stitches more firmly and, in Anne’s case, created a shadow to highlight the goldwork itself. What makes Anne’s occupation of embroidery of church vestments more poignant is that she is in love with a Jewish merchant Daved [sic] at a time when Jews were forbidden to live in England and were allowed in the city on probation, so to speak, only for specific times. When the mystery of a brutal killing seems to indicate it being done by someone who knew Hebrew, Anne becomes involved with Dame Frevisse and others to bring the criminal to justice. Set against the historical background of a peasant uprising of Jack Cade, the mystery twists and turns on itself like an embroidered Celtic knot, bringing a desperate solution and an unhappy separation for the lovers.
Knowing that any further contact with Daved would lead to both of their arrests, Anne refuses to flee with him. Instead, at the conclusion of the novel, her “gaze turned inward to some place deep inside herself: but calmly and with a pride that came from that far inward place she said ‘Whatever else, I am his eishet chayil [woman of valor]. That will have to do.’ And took up the embroidery lying there unfinished and began to sew.”
Even at her moment of crisis and facing a future without love, Anne turns to sewing to soothe her. Ironically, Anne is embroidering the same set of new vestments that the novel started with while her lover Daved is fleeing for his life from that same religious prejudice which separates them.
Frazer creates a believable historical mystery by selecting her accents as carefully as an embroiderer chooses her palette of colors – a good read for a hot August day.
Quilt Hunter…a.k.a. Anne K. Kaler
