Linen Heritage
Linen Heritage
The fine, ornate architecture we see today was created from prosperity and investments made during the peak of the linen and shipbuilding industries. In the mid-1800s the city accounted for fifty percent of production and exports in Ireland, this brought major social and economic changes which affected the whole island. Many would say it was the catalyst for the industrial revolution and took Belfast from a small town to a major industrial city known throughout the world for its innovation in manufacturing, engineering and shipbuilding.
There are records of Irish earls, nobles and ladies wearing brightly coloured Irish linen at court, Henry VIII introduced a tax on Irish linen to dissuade people from wearing it. Although the tradition of weaving goes back to earlier times, linen developed into a commercial industry during the post plantation years when thousands of settlers arrived here from England, Scotland, Wales and Europe, bringing various skills including weaving, this boosted the local skill level and increased the number of weavers. Production of linen was a labour-intensive cottage industry, flax was grown, pulled, stooked, retted, dried, scutched, spun, weaved and beetled before being turned into brown and white linen which would be sold at markets developed by the London Guilds.
The wealth did not remain with individual producers but with the drapers and bleachers who bought the raw brown linen at market, processed it to white linen and then sold it on. Interestingly, the first export of linen from Belfast was to the American colonies in 1704. Flax farming helped alleviate the hardships of subsistence farming throughout Ireland, it offered another source of income to supplement the low provision from the land. It was introduced, encouraged and readily taken up by rural farmers. There are not many places you can go to in Ulster today without finding remnants of the flax industry or hearing stories about it.
Improvements in weaving techniques introduced by the Huguenots settlers contributed greatly to the advancement of the industry. One person who played a significant role in the industry was Louis Crommelin, a weaver of fine linen from the town of Cambrai in France, he had taken up incentives offered by King William III and settled with a small community of Huguenots at Lisburn. Their influence on the industry led to the term ‘cambric’ being introduced for a much finer woven material. Crommelin was also appointed as overseer of the newly formed Royal Linen Manufacture of Ireland as part of the incentive from King William III, these new techniques made Ireland the leader in linen production and demand for Irish linen grew dramatically.
Expansion of bleaching led to more commercial developments, the traditional use of buttermilk and chlorine to turn green/brown linen to white was replaced with oil of vitriol (dilute of sulphuric acid) which was water-intensive, this led to new bleaching works and linen greens where it was dried. The Irish Linen Board was formed in 1711 to promote the linen trade and offered grants and subsidies to encourage landowners to develop necessary infrastructure for the industry. They built the White Linen Hall in Dublin in 1728 where bleached linen was sold for export, in 1787 a White Linen Hall was built in Belfast for export to England and overseas, this stood where City Hall is today.
A challenge came to the industry through mechanization in cotton production an the abundance of cotton imports to Europe and in turn cotton mills started in Belfast. The raw materials had to be imported directly or indirectly via England, but it still proved a cheaper and easier commodity to produce than linen. The new industry saw in excess of fifty thousand people employed which peaked in the 1820s. The phenomenal growth in the industry forced new thinking into the linen industry and its production techniques. The solution came in what was known as ‘wet’ spinning, a process developed by James Kay in 1824, this process and the removal of protective tariffs on cotton helped bring the linen industry back into the forefront where it would stay for the following fifty years.
The Huguenots who had such an influence on the linen industry were French Protestants who followed the teachings of John Calvin. The growth of Calvinism led to persecution and eventually open conflict between the state, church and the Huguenots. This eased when the Protestant Henry of Navarre changed his faith to become King of France. He signed the Edict of Nantes which gave Calvinists the right to live in France as a minority with religious rights. The Edict was drawn up to protect the Calvinists but bit by bit these rights were eroded which led the Huguenots to be more and more dependent on King Henry for their protection.
When Henry's position was challenged by the nobles (1640/50) many Huguenots left the country as they feared a return to the situation before the Edict of Nantes. When Louis XIV came to power he promised to honour the Edict of Nantes but this was not to be, gradually religious rights and freedoms were removed clandestinely, anything not expressed in the Edict of Nantes was open for restriction, for example: building new churches, the daytime burial of the dead was forbidden, churches erected after 1598 were destroyed. This erosion of rights was also increased by a surge in the French Catholic Church which resulted in less tolerance for minority religions, in this atmosphere many Huguenots left the country.
The repression continued on those that remained, guarantees were withdrawn and new restrictions imposed: mixed marriages were forbidden, travel of ministers controlled, children could be converted from Calvinism and taken away from their parents, Huguenots were banned from all public offices including the legal profession, they could not practise medicine nor print or sell books. The final actions which led to many fleeing France was the engagement of the French Dragoons in open terrorism against Huguenot families to force them to convert, thousands conformed under duress while thousands fled the country. Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes altogether in 1685 and introduced the Edict of Fontainebleau which:- banned all Protestant services; ordered all churches to be destroyed; the death penalty for any clergy who remained in France, banned any lay member and ordered children to be baptized and brought up in the Catholic faith.
The majority of Huguenots, some 700,000 remained in France with most nominally converting while 200,000 risked imprisonment or the gallows by going abroad. The largest number fled to Holland, others went to Switzerland, Germany and Denmark. Forty to fifty thousand escaped to England, where they joined earlier settlers. It is estimated that approximately 10,000 came to Ireland, they were not the first, some who had left France earlier were already settled, though their numbers were small. In 1692, after the victory of William of Orange in Ireland major incentives were offered to Huguenots if they settled in Ireland. It is worth noting that the majority who settled here were merchants or craftspeople, the weavers who settled at Lisburn played a significant role in the early years of linen development and also the growth of the cottage industries.