Origins and development of the Scottish hand-knitting industry
Abstract
The study traces the emergence of handknitting as an
industry in Scotland, and follows its course in different
areas of the country.
A survey of the available evidence - material, documentary,
iconographic, and linguistic - suggests that
knitting is a recent innovation: it appears that in
Northern Europe, Scotland included, neither the making nor
the wearing of knitted clothes was common before the end
of the Middle Ages, and considerably later in some parts.
With the aid of burgh and craft records, and the
registers of testaments, the work of the bonnetmakers, the
first identifiable knitters in Scotland, is investigated,
especially in the main centres - Dundee, Edinburgh,
Glasgow, Kilmarnock and Stewarton. In general, the bonnet-makers
are revealed as modest craftsmen producing a variety
of low quality knitted woollen garments, mainly for the
home market; the exceptions are Edinburgh and, to a lesser
extent, Ayrshire, from where there are indications of the
export of coarse hose during the seventeenth century.
Thereafter the trade is shown to have become concentrated
in Ayrshire. Here, during the latter part of the nineteenth
century, the making of bonnets by machine methods gradually
superseded the old craft of producing bonnets by hand.
Outside the ranks of the bonnet-makers, hand-knitting
an an industry can be traced from the seventeenth century
on. But whereas in North-East Scotland a stocking trade,
based on Aberdeen, flourished until the late eighteenth
century (the beginning of the main development of frame-knitting
in Scotland). elsewhere it came late: this is
especially so in parts of North and West Scotland where
it appears that knitting was not greatly used until it
was introduced as a subsistence activity in the nineteenth
century.
Finally the special case of Shetland is examined. In
these islands, despite the recent advance of mechanisation,
handknitting as an industry has maintained a continuous
existence from the beginning of the seventeenth century to
the present day.