This Golden Fleece
Yesterday marked Distaff Day, the date when women used to resume their work after the twelve days of Christmas celebrations (although it was also a day for some play: pranks were common). The distaff, a wooden rod used in spinning flax or yarn, was the ancient symbol of work for women, and so I thought it appropriate to share my review of This Golden Fleece* by Esther Rutter, which is a must read for anyone interested in the history of knitting in the UK.
One Christmas, Esther Rutter received a bagful of Shetland wool from her mother. Sniffing the earthy tang of undyed yarn, an idea kindled in Rutter’s mind: she would take a year away from an office job she loathed and knit her way around Britain, uncovering the history of wool that had shaped her native land and its people. So begins Esther Rutter’s debut book, This Golden Fleece, which unravels Britain’s knitted history, revealing an ancient lineage that binds the present to the past through a rich cultural heritage of yarn craft and industry.
For her project, Rutter not only delves back to Britain’s earliest sheep, but returns to her childhood roots as well. Brought up near a sheep farm in Suffolk, it seems wool has always been a part of her story: as a young girl, Rutter learnt from her mother how to spin fleece into yarn, and her best friend’s mum taught her to knit. ‘Knitting is a skill passed down, most often from woman to woman,’ Rutter observes. Although Rutter uncovers a tradition of male knitters - particularly in Yorkshire, Wales and the Channel Islands - the history of British knitting falls mainly within the busy hands of working class women, who relied upon their dexterity with their pins to support themselves and their families. A history of knitting, therefore, offers a rare glimpse into the lives of women largely overlooked by historians. I was particularly touched by a photograph included in the book, circa 1900, of a group of ‘fisher lassies’ in Yarmouth; the women seated amongst piles of herring baskets with yarn on their laps, their knitting needles forever frozen in time by the click of a camera.
More illustrious, and even infamous, knitters are also examined by Rutter. Virginia Woolf appreciated the meditative qualities of knitting, and her books apparently feature more female knitters than writers. Les Tricoteuses de la guillotine - the knitting women of the French Revolution - were immortalised in Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, which prompts Rutter to explore ways in which women have plied their needles to aid protest and change. Joining a women’s march in London, Rutter knits a pink ‘pussyhat:’ a beanie with kitten ears that has been made by thousands of women marchers across North America and the UK.
I enjoyed the personal stories Rutter weaves through her narrative, as she writes about her own life in relation to what and how she knits, although This Golden Fleece is far less confessional than other books that dip into memoir territory. For the most part, Rutter confines herself to well-reasoned analysis, but her writing style still manages to be as engaging as it is articulate. A clear love for language elevates descriptions of landscape to passages of lyrical beauty, and Rutter also displays a gift for ferreting out the etymology of knitting vocabulary.
The pussyhat is one of many items Rutter knits as a result of her research and travels around Britain. Throughout her year devoted to all things woolly, she chooses a different pattern to knit each month. She starts with Dentdale gloves from Cumbria, then moves on to a fisherman’s jumper or ‘gansey,’ a knitted bikini and a Monmouth cap. In a satisfying narrative arc, the book ends with Rutter knitting a ‘hap’ (a type of shawl) for her as yet unborn daughter, having fallen pregnant towards the end of the year. It doesn’t take a great stretch of the imagination to picture Rutter teaching her own daughter the art of knitting one day, passing on the craft as so many women have done before her.
A condensed version of my review originally appeared in Selvedge magazine, Issue 93.
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