Pinned into your clothes: A study in silk, linen, thread, and lead

That noise you hear from behind the curtain is us preparing to polish off the Haberdashers, which will catch us up.

In the meantime, pins? Why were they important and how in-demand were they, really? 

There's one order for pins in Queen Elizabeth's Wardrobe accounts for 121,000 pins. No, I din't mistype that number. One hundred and twenty-one thousand pins.

"Item to Roberte Careles our Pynner for xviij thousand great verthingale pynnes xx thowsand myddle verthingale Pynnes xxv thowsand great Velvet Pynnes xxx and nine thowsande smale Velvet Pynnes and xix thowsand Small hed Pynned all of our great warderobe."

---

Arnold, J., 1988, p. 218. From PRO, LC5/33, f. 150, warrent dated 20 Oct. 1563. quoted by Rachel Jardine

Furthermore, according to Rachel Jardine's research, this was followed less than a month later by another order of similar size. The wardrobe accounts of the queen, in fact, are full of pin orders of all sizes for all sizes of pins, plus orders to have existing pins straightened and sharpened.

Elizabeth didn't always order in those quantities, but it illustrates handily how many it took to pull off the kinds of fashions that were rampant in the later Elizabethan period. Because you can't dress like this without using tons of them.

It's really no wonder so many pins are found by metal detector enthusiasts and construction crews. The internet is awash with 16th century pins for sale at astonishingly (to me) low prices considering the age of the artifacts.

More later. Much to do, many irons in the fire... so to speak.

~Scott

In Search of a Haystack: Pin Making Part II

As you know, we had a power outage that was compounded by power issues in the house proper that kept us mostly without power until around 3:00 pm today. Which meant that I would have to adhere rather more closely to my pledge for period methods than even I anticipated. For instance, when I was making the die for cold-forging the heads of the pins, I had to haul out the eggbeater drill I inherited from my dad. (I'd have used a bow drill but I don't have one.)

Fate is a big fan of dramatic irony.

Anyway: Part II of our ongoing quest to build the ultimate angel disco...

The bone, as it turns out is invaluable in this effort. Whether or not it needs to be bone is an open question. Now that I've done this, I can imagine why the Tudor pinners used bones. They were cheap and plentiful, they are incredibly dense, and plastic hadn't been invented yet. Antler or horn would've worked, but horn had other more valuable uses and antler came from deer, access to which were controlled by the nobility.

These days, if you want to do this, you could use just about anything dense enough to resist the teeth of the files.

The wire sits in the grooves that I carved into the bone. The grooves are angled between 10 and 20 degrees. The wire sits at that angle and you run a fine file along as you roll it with your fingers, creating a nice round taper as you feed it into the teeth of the file.

The bone acts to shield the parts of the pin you want to retain, allowing the files to
take away anything that stands proud of the surface.

It's easier to do than it is to explain. In short order, with a nice, sharp file, you can make an astonishingly sharp pin.

That's easy enough, right?  The tricky bit isn't putting the point on the pin. The tricky bit is putting a head on the darned thing...

In the episode of "Worst Jobs In History: The Tudor Age" that showed Bodger Hodgeson and his crew making pins, they flatten the top a bit to give you something to drag. Then, using a pliers, you twist a three rounds of softer brass wire round the shaft, tin it, and then cold-forge it between a die and a stamp.

In Bodger's pin making shop, they seem to be making springs and cutting them into bits of three turns each. I'm not mass-producing them at this point, so I just wrapped it around.

I made my anvil and stamp by drilling impressions into a couple of enormous bold heads that I utterly failed to take pictures of. Here's the general idea illustrated, though. Probably better than any picture could show.

Cold Forging: A stamp and an anvil with matching depressions
form theball at the top when the stamp is struck with a hammer.

Below is the first pin I made, I used some lead-free solder as Bodger showed (he's using tin, but I didn't have a forge fire laid to melt tin, so I used solder). I think tin will work better on many levels because it's so much more malleable than solder can be.

The second pin I made used considerably less solder, really just enough to fix the wire twist in place.

Summaries and "What I learned" will be posted later this week. It's been a crazy weekend and I hear friends playing games in the next room, so I must away to join in the fun.

~Scott

Building a Dance Floor for Angels: Pinmaking Pt I

When last we spoke, I was in the dark a bit. That too has passed, but we're falling behind a bit, so I'm going to go through this pretty fast so I can get to the Haberdashers, which should be an easy transition at least.

The Bone

When doing something like this, it's easy to forget that the tools are not the object of the exercise, but steps necessary to achieve the real object. Because of myriad interruptions by the real world, this has been a bit like focusing a black smithing book on how to make an anvil.

Let's get the bone out of the way then, shall we?

As previously noted, I ended up making my pin bone from a beef bone sold at a pet store for dogs to gnaw on. I boiled it until the 'meaty' bits were loose and then scraped it with a knife blade until it was clean and smooth. There followed an extended stint in a hydrogen peroxide bath both to bleach the bone and hopefully clean out any remaining contaminants that might foul my experience.

I carefully chose my bone from the pile at the pet store by laying them on the floor, looking for the most stable base for pin making. I have to wonder what the pet store folks thought of this madman crouched on the floor, examining how steadily each of their dog bones lay on the tiles. This meant I didn't need to shear slices off my bone or futz with it much at all to get a nice stable surface.

Using a saw and a file, I carved and cut several v-shaped grooves into the thickest part of the bone at an angle that I am guessing to be a good one for filing points onto pins.

Safety When Working with Bone
Note that I did not use power tools to work the bone. There's a reason for this aside from my promise to prejudice my methods toward the Elizabethan: Bone dust isn't something I want to line my lungs with. I'm not sure if we know the period methodology for working with bone beyond "Grab a knife sirrah, and go to with a will!" If I find something in my reading I'll let you know.

I worked this bone wet, but if I wanted to something more refined and give it a proper finish, there would be a great deal of polishing in my future with progressively finer grits.  Thankfully, this is a tool that doesn't require much refinement beyond what you see above.

When next we meet: Making the pin and the sad plight of the Pin Maker.

Making Light: The meditations of a powerless artisan...

As I noted on Facebook, sunset yesterday for the Puget Sound area was at 4:32 pm. Which meant I was standing over a boiling pot of bones in the freezing rain and dark of night. I told my wife that if it started snowing or sleeting, the US Post Office would be sending me a paycheck. Needless to say, I was thanking my stars I had a warm home to retreat to when I was finished.

I managed to make that observation via Facebook minutes before the power went out.

I burn the candle at both ends, I'd light the middle if I could...

The Engineer and I had headlamps, warm blankets, and lots of books to read. It wasn't that big a deal; these things happen when you live on an island. Contemplate, though, a world in which that situation isn't just a vexing part of life in the country, but a daily aspect of your life. An obstacle to every effort you make to get food on the table. For the sake of comparison, sunset in London yesterday (a few points north of here) was 4:07 pm. Thirty minutes earlier (relative to their GPS coordinates, of course).

It certainly illustrates a knotty problem for working class schmoes in a time before Edison and his light bulb made lighting well nigh a civil right rather than a luxury.

I wasn't going to really get into this until we got to the Chandlers' companies, but I see that fickle fate had other plans.

Fine work like pinmaking, embroidery, and sewing was heavily dependent upon the available light. If you imagine a work space lit by lanterns or torches or anything you might see come out of Hollywood, you'd be wrong. Tallow candles and rush lights give off a dim, flickering and smokey light at the best of times.  A rush light is a piece of straw dipped in animal fat and held in a metal clip as it burned.  Fitful light at best. Beeswax candles were beyond the reach of humble pinners. If you picture children and small-fingered adults clambering onto windowsills and jockeying for the best of the available light, you'd be closer to the mark.

Yes, most pinners were children. As Tony Robinson noted in that TV show I mentioned the other day ("Worst Jobs in History: Tudors") this pin making thing is an incredibly fiddly business and small, dextrous fingers are necessary to do it well. I spoke with one of the researchers he used and she made it clear that it was work that was often done by children, but mostly by the poor and desperate, quite often by crippled soldiers.

Rachel Jardine, who worked with Robinson on this episode of his television series (you can see her name in the credits as "special thanks"), contacted me via Facebook and kindly provided some of her research into pin making in the early modern period. I am still poring over most of it, but what I have digested thus far is amazing.

"In the constant protestations of the Pinners in the early seventeenth century that many 'poore and impotent people' gain employment through pinmaking, that lame soldiers, children and cripples find this their only means of employment it is similarly made clear that the majority of pinners are extremely poor.[1] It is therefore unclear what extent the technological developments which occurred during the sixteenth century were adopted for widespread use. It seems likely that most pinmaking continued to operated using the simplest of tools."

"Pinning down production: Pin manufacture, technology and the market c.1500-1610"  by Rachel Jardine

[1] See, for instance, BL Cotton MS Titus BIV f. 304/314, Lansdowne MS 84, no. 21.

I think I've expired the length of blog post that my waning laptop battery will allow, so that's all for tonight. More from Rachel's amazing research and on the process of pinning this weekend.

The bones are de-fleshed, boiled, and scraped. Now they are sitting in an antiseptic solution that will also bleach them white (health & safety). They should be ready to start making pins soon.

- Scott

I've a bone to pick with my butcher...

"What I really need is a bovine metatarsus," I said.

The butcher was silent for a moment, staring at me as if sizing me up for a styrofoam tray and wondering if he had enough shrinkwrap to do the job.  Finally, he said, "You want a what?"

"A cow's metatarsus. It's the lower leg bone," I explained. "Any is good, but front is best because they'll be a bit more manageable."

"Soup bones are over there." He gestured vaguely toward the meat cases.

"All you have are ham bones and ox tails. I need a meta... a leg bone,"  I insisted. "From a cow."

"Why?"

"Can I just come back there and look?" I craned my neck around the corner toward the door of the walk-in cooler, just out of reach of curious customers. "I grew up on a farm. I'll wear gloves, a mask, whatever I need."

"We don't do that kind of thing here; we're a grocery store."

"It's for a project." I gave him my best academic look on the off chance it would make a difference. "It's educational."

He shrugged and averted his gaze, obviously hoping the strange man with the cow leg fixation would just go away. Finally I did.  No use asking him to direct me to a proper butcher. I knew when I'd been beat.

This was going to be harder than I thought.

The part about growing up in farm country is true. I'm from a small town in rural Missouri. The part about growing up on the farm was stretching it a bit since it was my grandpa's farm, but suffice to say that I was around a lot of cows and a lot of dairy farmers from an early age.

If I needed a cow bone in Missouri, I'm pretty sure a couple of phone calls would get me one without too much fuss. May be true here too, and I just don't know the right numbers to dial.

Tacoma, Washington (where my wife and I work) is not in dairy country. It's a city, urban by any definition, and the butchers around here don't get whole sides or ever really see the whole cow. They're mostly in the backs of grocery stores. Which more properly categorizes them as meat cutters, I think (feel free to check me on that) as opposed to butchers in the classical sense -- their meat comes precut into primals from the packer and they slice it into steaks or grind it or whathaveyou.

All of which means no legs.

No pinner's bone.

I should explain. As I explained yesterday, a pin maker used a bone as a sort of specialized tool bench for making pins. The metatarsus of a cow or sheep were preferred because they are large and dense and can be grooved in many directions to allow for different dimensions of pin.

In all honesty I have no idea whether or not it matters whether I use a pin or a block of wood or the anvil of my vise. They used a bone, so I want a bone if I can get one.

One of the biggest obstacles to period crafts as a general rule is the simple fact that modern urban-dwellers do not have the access to the same materials as our early modern predecessors. Now, as then, every part of a butchered animal is used from hoof to moo, but that doesn't mean I can get at it. At least not very easily.

So I called around and discovered what happened to all of them. It's the dog's fault.  The first pet store I called said "Yeah, we have cow leg bones. C'mon over and take a look!"

Frickin' dogs.

So after work, to the pet store we go. There, I find a display of procine and bovine bits sawn down to manageable sizes for all walks of dog. About half of them are bleached white and filled with some sort of meaty corn syrup goo (yes really) and I didn't want anything to do with those. The rest were apparently smoked with a bit of the meat still on them and I bought a selection to experiment with.

A lot of things in the Elizabethan world were made of bone and horn, so this is going to be a learning experience that will pay dividends later on.

I bought two sections of a sliced-up joint because the pinners apparently liked to slice planes off the bones to make a more stable work surface (one of the reasons they favored the lower leg bones, no doubt) and a hunk of a bovine metatarsus, just because I could.

They cost me about $6.00 and I didn't even need a dog to share them with.

Tomorrow evening I will go outside and see if I can clean them with a nice, gentle boil or if I'm going to have to try something more drastic. It's going to be cold, but the Engineer insists that bone boiling is not an inside task. Bother.

I'll let you know how it goes.

In the meanwhile, here are some resources on pinner's bones:

• A pinner's bone cataloged at the UK Finds Database: http://www.ukdfd.co.uk/ukdfddata/showrecords.php?product=24059
  
• Another pinner's bone at the Museum of London, probably turned up by a Thames mudlark and recorded at the Portable Antiquities Scheme: http://finds.org.uk/database/images/image/id/230498
  
• An article about bone objects - including pinner's bones - posted by the York Archeological Trust. http://www.dighungate.com/content.asp?id=176

- Scott

Before Pinterest: The curious history of the Pinners

Just before Christmas, I received an email back the Museum of London in response to an enquiry I sent them about a list of 111 crafts that existed before the Livery Companies properly got going. I kept hearing about this list and seeing it referenced in books without anyone I could find actually presenting the entire list.

My question was answered patiently and thorough (more than!) by John Clark, retired Senior Curator of the museum's medieval collection, who sent me the list and links to a couple of books available online (archived as out of copyright) as well as some newer ones, which I have added to the "Library" tab above under a heading for general histories of the guilds.

From Mr. Clark's email:

"The list was compiled by the Clerk of the Brewers' Company and included in the company's records. It is headed (in English - the Brewers were one of the first companies to record their business in English rather than Latin or French):  'A list of the names of all the crafts exercised in London from of old, and still continuing in this ninth year of King Henry V [ie 21 March 1421 to 20 March 1422], and here set down in case it may in any wise profit the hall and Company of Brewers.'"

Mr. Clark went on to caution me that the list of 111 was a list of crafts compiled by the Worshipful Company of Brewers for their own uses. There were many such lists of varying length and contrary to what it says in many books, shouldn't be taken to mean that every craft on the list was represented by an organized guild or that the informal groups were the same as those who were later rolled up into the great livery companies.

It is a mistake, he warned, to assume that craft = guild.

It's an excellent point. This is a problem that we will encounter more than once on this journey, I think. The histories of many of the great and even lesser companies are so convoluted even they cannot say for certain in many cases whence they came. The Founderers, for instance were founded by God, apparently. I assume the Fruiterers claim Adam (though they should probably claim Eve) and the Cutlers even have a song about how they came about because Eve wanted apple slices.

But we will get to all of those great and might folks later. First, I want to talk about the Pinners, the makers of metal pins for sewing and dressing.

It might seem odd to begin with pin making for this project. It's not glamorous, elegant, or even all that difficult.  The Pinners are not even one of the Livery Companies, or rather not one of the ones named on my list of 54 (they were a small part of the Girdler's for awhile). But we will begin with them nonetheless because the illustrate the mercurial nature of trade in the 16th century.

Pins seem simple enough. The bog standard Tudor pin could be cast, but they were more generally made by wrapping a small ball of thin brass wire around a long, hardened brass pin. The ball was crimped and/or soldered to one end to form the head and the other end was sharpened with a file. There were, as always, finer and lesser pins: Jeweled, enameled, and precious metal pins for the gentry, but most were basically variations of that relatively simple formula.

The pin makers were not wealthy. They were not powerful. And it was not because pins were not in demand. In a time before velcro, snaps, or zippers, pins were an absolute necessity. The term 'pin money' didn't mean idle spending cash, it meant the money set aside to buy hand-made pins. Some of them were quite beautiful and ornate.

The ascendancy of Elizabeth I was the ascendancy of ever more elaborate costume including the elaborate ruffs, and the demand for pins was all the greater as the 16th century advanced. The more elaborate the ruff, the more pins that were needed to keep it stable and pretty.

And yet, it seems that the fortunes of England's pinners fell rather than rose along with demand. You see, the marketplace was flooded with cheaper pins of better quality from France. Successive administrations from Henry VIII through Elizabeth I enacted protections against the dumping of foreign pins on English markets, but it was for naught.

"In 1543 Henry VIII made a move to control the quality of pins produced in England in hopes that English pins of high quality would prove more desirable than the imported items: 'No person shall put to sale any pinnes butonly such as shall be double headed and have the heads soldered fast to the shank of the pinnes, well smoothed, the shank well shapen, the point well and round filed, canted and sharpened.'" 

From: 'Findings: The Material Culture of Needlework & Sewing' by Mary C. Baudry

Pin makers most likely began as one of these not-quite-a-guild independent trade associations that sprang up in the early 15th century. In 1497 they officially combined forces with the Wiresellers upon whom they were dependent for materials anyway. This continued until 1511 when both were consumed by the Girdlers, becoming subordinate members of that society.

Royal interventions in the market like those mentioned in Caple's book, banning the import of foreign pins by Henry VIII and again by Elizabeth, were well-intentioned, but fell short of the glory. Henry's quality demands for soldered heads put the pin makers in daily contact with very toxic materials and slowed production. The consumers kept buying the contraband foreign pins and since the poor pinners had to pay for the enforcement of their monopoly (as was done with most guild monopolies) it failed to pull them out of their slump.

However, the price of pins plummeting, they already could not afford to enforce their monopoly until 1579 when the wire-drawers/girdlers cut them loose. Pinners should have been wealthy, but they never seemed to get their feet under them sufficiently to really parlay the need for their product into real success.

Tudor pinners had it bad enough that they were chosen by Tony Robinson for his television show "The Worst Jobs in History" for the Tudor era, which is pretty high up on the universal list of dubious distinctions.

It would not be until automation and mass production that the humble art of pin making could make enough pin money to make anyone truly wealthy. And when it came, that person wasn't a pinner at all, but the inventor of a machine.

They were the humblest of the humble and yet, they quite literally held the whole of Tudor society together. Something in my quixotic nature is drawn to that. And so it is with them that we will begin.

This project includes a firm grounding in:

• Tools (files and materials safety)
• Wire-drawing and brassworks,
• We will make a pinner's bone,
• We will approximate a cold forge for pinheads,
• And finally, we will make some pins!

A great and special thank you to John Clark, Curator Emeritus at the Museum of London, for his kind assistance and patience with the questions I tossed across the Atlantic in hopes of finding a kind and scholarly ear for them to land on. Thank you sir. You are too kind.

- Scott


Post Script:  Here is the list of 111 trades recorded by the Brewers Company from the appendices of George Unwin's book The Gilds and Companies of London (Published 1908 and out of copyright in the United States) provided my Mr. Clark.  You can read the full book at Archive.org.

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edited 8/16/2016 to correct quote attribution and provide a link to the Findings book. - Scott

Time Travel Trouble

We are currently calibrating the time machine 

(and not at all recovering from last night's festivities)

Please stand by...

Photo by Byron Dazey, Creative Flashes Photography