Lee · 1589
William Lee and the stocking frame
In the autumn of 1589, in the upstairs parlour of the parsonage at Calverton in Nottinghamshire, the Reverend William Lee, twenty-six years old, a recently ordained Cambridge curate of the village living, finished the construction of a wooden hand-operated knitting machine of his own design: a frame on which a row of about a hundred small barbed-needle hooks (eight per inch, the fine-gauge stocking density) could be brought down through a row of weft yarn, loops drawn through previously formed loops, and a row of stocking knit in a single motion. The machine, by every later assessment of the textile-history scholars (Charles Singer, Stanley Chapman), is the first complex mechanical loom-and-needle device in European industrial history and the foundational machine of the modern knitting industry. Tradition holds that Lee had developed the machine because he was, in his courtship, distracted by the rapid hand-movements of his fiancée when she was knitting; the folk-attribution of the courtship-motive is, by the nineteenth-century antiquaries, probably apocryphal but is attested in the local Calverton tradition since at least the seventeenth century. Lee travelled to London in 1589 to seek a Crown patent from Elizabeth I; the queen, by the court tradition, refused the patent on the grounds that the machine would impoverish her hand-knitters. Lee took the machine to France in 1604 under the patronage of Henri IV, who granted him a French patent and pension; Henri's assassination in 1610 cut off the support, and Lee died in Paris a few years later in obscurity.
An age does not always turn on a battle. Sometimes it turns on a wooden frame in an upstairs room, on a young curate counting stitches against a clock, on the quiet arithmetic by which one pair of hands is found to do the work of ten. The hinge moves before anyone knows it has moved; the kingdom that depends on the old arithmetic goes on as if nothing has changed, and for a little while it is right, because the inventor is still alone with his machine, and the sovereign has not yet been asked.
THE CURATE AT CALVERTON
Calverton lies six miles north-east of Nottingham, a village of yeoman holdings and a small stone church, where the Reverend William Lee, born here about 1563, took the curacy of his home parish on his return from Cambridge. He had read for his BA at Christ's College in 1582-83, proceeded MA in 1586, and been ordained into the living that his father's people had attended for generations. He was twenty-six. He preached on Sundays, christened the village's children, and walked back across the churchyard to a parsonage in which, for four years, he had been building something that had no name in the English language because no English language had yet had to name it.
The hand-knitting of stockings was, in 1589, the cottage industry of the Midlands and of half of northern Europe. A skilled woman at her needles produced, by Lee's own count, some fifteen hundred stitches in the hour. The thread passed through her fingers; the loops came up one at a time; the stocking lengthened by the width of a thumbnail between supper and bed. It was the kind of work the Crown understood: dispersed, domestic, taxable through the cloth merchants, and the livelihood of more poor women than any single parish priest could number. It had been done this way since the loops of the Coptic sandal-socks. No one in the kingdom had reason to suppose it would be done any other way.
THE FRAME IN THE PARLOUR
Upstairs at the parsonage, on an oak frame about four feet broad and three feet high, the machine stood finished in the low autumn light of an unrecorded October afternoon. A hundred barbed needle-hooks were set in a row at eight to the inch, the gauge of a fine stocking. A system of wooden levers and leather strapping connected them to a foot-treadle and a hand-lever. The principle, which he had set down in his working notebook the previous year, was simple once one had seen it: the row of hooks came down through a row of weft yarn; the barbs caught the previously-formed loops on the needle-stems; the new loops were drawn through the old; and a whole course of knitting fell from the frame in a single motion of the treadle. What a pair of hands did in an hour, the frame did in four minutes.
Tradition in the village would say, fifty years on, that he had built the machine because he had been courting a girl whose hand-movements at her needles had distracted him at his prayer-book, and that he had set out to mechanise her into stillness. The antiquaries of two centuries later would call the story apocryphal, and they were probably right; but Calverton would tell it anyway, because a village remembers its inventions through the courtships its young men were occupied with at the time, and the love-story is the form in which a parish stores an industrial fact.
THE RECKONING
He stood at the bench in the slanting light and worked the treadle once, and then again. The hooks came down in their row; the barbs took the loops; the course laid itself across the frame as cleanly as a sentence. He counted under his breath and against the small clock his father had left him. Fifteen hundred in the hour by the fingers; fifteen thousand by the frame. The factor was ten. The factor would not be ten only at Calverton; the factor would be ten in Norwich, in Leicester, in London, in Rouen, in every cottage where a pair of needles had been the household's small bulwark against the parish rate. The arithmetic did not care for the cottages. The arithmetic was already on the bench in the room.
He understood, with the clarity of a man who has read enough common law to know what a thing is worth without protection, that the frame in this room was a Crown matter. Without a patent under the Great Seal it would be copied within the year by any joiner with a pair of eyes and a fortnight's leisure, and the invention would pass out of his hands into the trade without ever having paid him a shilling. With a patent it was an estate. He thought of his brother James, ordained these three years and well in with Sir Robert Cecil's people at court; of the journey to London in the winter; of the cost of a finished demonstration frame carried on a cart over the Great North Road. He thought of the hand-knitters of the village, the widow Aston and her two daughters at the end of the lane, who would in time be put out of their needles by what stood on his bench. He had been their curate two years. He had baptised the younger girl. He set the thought aside, because the thought, once admitted, asked a question that no patent under any seal could answer, and because the frame in any case existed now, and would exist whether he carried it to London or burned it in the orchard. He chose the road.
LONDON, GREENWICH, AND THE REFUSAL
He travelled to London in the winter of 1589 with the finished frame and, by his brother's introduction through Cecil's household, was admitted to demonstrate it before Queen Elizabeth at Greenwich. He set the machine up in an antechamber; he worked the treadle for the Queen; a length of fine worsted stocking came off the needles in the space of a court audience. She watched. She was sixty-two years old that winter, and had reigned over a kingdom whose stability rested, in no small part, on the dispersed labour of the poor women of her shires. By the tradition that John Aubrey set down in his Brief Lives near a century afterwards, she addressed him through Lord Hunsdon and said that his contrivance would in time take the bread out of the mouths of her hand-knitters, who had no other living, and that for that reason the patent he sought was not one she could in conscience grant. She refused.
It was a refusal of a particular kind. It did not deny that the machine worked. It did not deny that the arithmetic was as he had set it out. It denied only that the Crown would put its seal to the arithmetic, and in so doing it pretended for a little while longer that the arithmetic had not yet happened. A queen who has held her throne by the careful management of poor people's livelihoods knows what an invention costs before its inventor does. She sent him home with the frame uncovered.
THE INTERLUDE AT THE END OF THE LANE
The widow Aston, at the end of the lane in Calverton, did not know that her livelihood had been weighed at Greenwich and, for the moment, preserved by the Queen's refusal. She knit through the winter as she had knit through the winters before it: a stocking a week, the wool from the Sherwood flocks, the small coin from the carrier who took her work to Nottingham market. Her younger daughter, the one the curate had baptised, sat by her at the hearth and learned the heel-turn. The Queen's mercy reached as far as their fire and no further; it did not reach to the bench upstairs at the parsonage, where the frame stood in its corner under a linen sheet, waiting. The mercy was a stay of execution, and the stay would run for one generation, and the daughter at the heel-turn would live long enough to see her own daughters put out of the needles by what her curate had built the year she was christened.
ROUEN AND THE LOST PENSION
Lee did not burn the frame. He went on improving it through the 1590s under the quiet patronage of Sir Henry Cavendish and others of the Nottinghamshire gentry, and in 1604, on the accession of James I, he carried the patent application up again to a new court and was a second time refused. He took the machine then to France, where Henri IV granted him the French patent and a pension and a workshop at Rouen, into which he settled with his brother James and some ten apprentices, the eldest of them James Aston of Thoroton, who may or may not have been kin to the widow at the end of the Calverton lane. For six years the frames clattered in Rouen and the stockings came off them at a rate the hand-knitters of Normandy had no answer to. On the fourteenth of May 1610, in the rue de la Ferronnerie in Paris, a knife found Henri IV between the ribs, and the pension found its end in the same stroke. Lee survived his patron by some four years, in straitened lodgings in Paris, and was buried there about 1614 in a grave the parish register did not trouble to mark.
THE RETURN
His brother James and the apprentice Aston brought the frames back across the Channel in 1612 and set them up again in the villages around Nottingham, where the Crown had refused the patent but could not refuse the work. The Framework Knitters' Company of London was incorporated by Charles II in 1657. By 1844 the Midland Triangle of Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire employed some fifty thousand framework-knitters, the economic foundation of the East Midlands industrial revolution. Strutt's ribbing-frame of 1758, Arkwright's water-frame of the 1770s, Cotton's power-frame of the 1840s, every machine that put a stocking or a jersey on a European back into the twentieth century, descended in unbroken lineage from the oak bench at the parsonage at Calverton. The arithmetic the Queen had refused to seal had sealed itself.
An age does not always turn on a battle, and the man who turns it does not always know that he has. The Reverend William Lee preached his last sermon at Calverton, demonstrated his frame at Greenwich, set up his workshop at Rouen, and died in a Paris lodging without a stone. In the village he had served, the parsonage was rebuilt in 1844 on the 1589 site; the William Lee Museum stands there now, and on the bench in the upstairs room, in the same low light through the same south casement, a replica of the original frame keeps the count it first kept, eight needles to the inch, a hundred hooks in a row, waiting for a hand to work the treadle.
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