Working, Singing, and Telling in the 19th-Century Flemish Pillow-Lace Industry

Abstract

The female lacemaker who sings at her work is a European literary trope from Shakespeare to Nerval. However, there is considerable evidence from many countries that pillow lacemakers did sing while working, and that their repertoire of songs was in part learnt in the lace schools that many of them attended from about the age of six. Such schools were often under some kind of religious authority. In the English Midlands, the Erzgebirge region of Saxony, and Flanders, trainee lacemakers learnt “tells” that provided a rhythm to the production process; many of these tells were noted down in the 19th century. This article examines the corpus of Flemish tells to explore lacemakers’ own responses to the strict environment of the lace school. Singing together helped establish a corporate identity that lacemakers were proud to proclaim, and reinforced bonds of mutual sympathy between workers. But tells in particular were meant to foster competition. Tells could be used to voice resistance to, or at least the fantasy of escape from, the lace mistress as well as the parents who forced their children into this occupation. But lace mistresses also used tells to teach moral and religious lessons, and to break young girls to the discipline of the school and the relentless expectations of production.

Keywords:

• lace tells
• lace schools
• Flemish Movement
• singing at work
• work discipline
• child labor
• protoindustry

Notes

Notes

1 It is used, for example, in the “Monographie” dedicated to lace which accompanied the 1910 Brussels exposition on domestic work.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2015–16 on “Lacemakers: Poverty, Piety and Gender in a Transnational Work Culture.”

Notes on contributors

David Hopkin

David Hopkin is Professor of European Social History at the University of Oxford. His books include Soldier and Peasant in French Popular Culture, 1766–1870 (winner of the Gladstone Prize 2002) and Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France (winner of the Katharine Briggs award 2012). He is coeditor, with Tim Baycroft, of Folklore and Nationalism in Europe during the Long Nineteenth-Century (2012) and, with Éva Guillorel and Will Pooley, of Rhythms of Revolt: European Traditions and Memories of Social Conflict in Oral Culture (2017). He was an editor of the journal Cultural and Social History, and currently edits the Manchester University book series Studies in Modern French and Francophone History. He serves on the committee of the Folklore Society and the Society for the Study of French History. He is a regular contributor to the website dedicated to the history and other facets of lace and lacemakers: https://laceincontext.com/.[email protected]