Lace Making in Northamptonshire

9/22/2024

I live in Brackley, Northamptonshire which is a quaint English market town. The area is famous for Formula One racing teams and the novelist Flora Thompson who wrote 'Lark Rise to Candleford'. Brackley Market was initially a grain market, but in the 1850s a sheep market was introduced. Lace and other wares were also sold at Brackley Market. The old cottages near Brackley church are where the lace makers lived and worked in the 1850s, and a couple of the houses are named after lace-making. I researched lace-making in the area and found Reverend Thomas Mozeley's book on the conditions and ages of the lace makers in the village of Morton Pinkney, which is 7.5 miles from Brackley.
I wanted to make a reminder of the extract below, so took some phrases and put these together with pictures that are related to lace-making and Brackley.

Of Pigs and Lacemakers: The Reverend Thomas Mozeley’s Reminiscences of Morton Pinkney (1832 – 36)
The school was but half filled. It had a rival too strong for it. This village of misery and dirt, of cold and nakedness, of pigs and paupers, was the busy seat of a beautiful and delicate manufacture. As many as a hundred and fifty women and girls made pillow lace. On the higher green was the ‘lacemaking school,’ as it was called. Near thirty children were packed in a small room, and kept at their pillows from six in the morning, all the year round, to six in the evening. They were arranged in groups of four or five, round candles, about which were water-bottles so fixed as to concentrate the light on the work of each child. Girls were sent thither from the age of five, on a small weekly payment.
It kept them out of the way in the day, and it prevented the wear and tear of clothes. The food side of the calculation was doubtful, for the parents always said the lacemakers ate more than other children, though it did not do them much good. For a year or two the children earned nothing. They could then make a yard of edging in a week, and, deducting expenses, they got twopence for it. By the time they were eleven or twelve they could earn a shilling or eighteenpence a week. There were women in the village who could not clothe their own children, or present themselves at church, who had made and could still make lace to sell in the shops at 20s. or 30s. a yard. The more costly lace was generally ‘blonde,’ that is, made with ‘gimp’ or silk thread. The makers were all bound to the dealers by hard terms, so they said, and obliged to buy at the dealers’ terms their gimp and thread.
They took great pride in the number and prettiness of their bobbins, making and receiving presents of them, and thinking of the givers as they twirled the bobbins. We took a good deal of the lace, and disposed of it amongst our friends. My youngest sister set up a pillow, and made some yards of good lace. I learnt to be a critic in lace, and an appraiser.
Though all these children were taught to read, and even to write and to sum a little, they were of course very backward, and they soon ceased to do anything but make lace.
Reverend Thomas Mozeley

I have made a booklet with words and images that will remind me of the cottage industry of lace-making in my area. This sample is kept with the extract to give context to the words written.