Clothiers and Merchants in Spanish Cloth, 1627–1665: The Ashe Family of Somerset, Wiltshire, and London, and their Account Books.JohnGaisford ed., (Somerset Record Society, 2023. Pp. Xvi + 531. ISBN 9780901732514. £48)
本书转录了阿什家族1627–1665年的四本账本，详细呈现了该家族在西班牙呢绒贸易中的经营细节、利润来源及染色工艺创新，对研究17世纪英国纺织业和商业史有重要价值。
In 1681 two elderly widowed sisters with little else to occupy them, locked in dispute about the inheritance of family money, deposited some ancestral business records in Chancery in pursuit of their legal case against each other. The ledgers continued to gather dust among the Chancery Masters’ exhibits in the Public Records for over 300 years until they were discovered by an intelligent researcher who realized their importance. Dr Gaisford, by goodness knows how many hours of assiduous and painstaking work, was able to piece together the details of how a seventeenth-century business was run. Three generations of the Ashe family made a fortune in the cloth industry of the Somerset/Wiltshire border area, the flourishing trade over which both Daniel Defoe and Celia Fiennes so quotably enthused. The transcription of four large account books covering 1627–1665, transcribed in their entirety in this large volume, enable Dr Gaisford to give as complete as possible an account of the family's trade at their profitable peak. He does it with great competence. The leadingly profitable line of the Ashe family was the organization and sale of the ‘Spanish cloth’, that light-weight and attractively coloured new version of the traditionally filled ‘old draperies’, now made with some proportion of the imported fine Spanish merino wool, to compete with the new-fangled ‘new draperies’. The key thing about this new form of cloth is that the wool was dyed before it was woven, rather than being dyed after being woven into cloth as was traditional. It was dyed in the wool, not in the cloth. Being dyed in the wool enabled wool dyed in different colours to be mixed together, thus enabling cloth of a much expanded palette of shades to be produced beyond the traditional primary colours produced by dying in the cloth. This mixing of wools together was a new trade. It was called ‘scribbling’, a word presumably of Dutch origin. It required a piece of equipment to be mounted like a horse by the scribbler, who leaned forward and, with some sort of comb, blended together various different shades of coloured wool. No ‘scribbling horse’ survives in Wiltshire or in Somerset. Once a common pub name, there is no pub bearing such a name in either county. There is indeed no surviving picture of the piece of equipment itself. When Ken Rogers was revising his guide to the history of textile technology for the Trowbridge Museum recently, the only pictures of the scribbling process he could find were those engraved for the Waldstein woollen mill in Bohemia in the 1730s published years ago by Herman Freudenberger for the Kress Library. And Dr Gaisford himself never uses the word ‘scribbling’. It is not even in his well-considered ‘glossary’. Yet, it was the key process in producing his ‘Spanish cloth’. Dr Gaisford's prime interest is in trade, not in production. His concern is with the carriers who took the cloth to London, the merchants who bought the cloth in Antwerp, or the south coast English ports and the French ports en route to Paris. Masses of details are carefully presented, and the profits which accrued carefully assessed. It is incidentally revealed that in the 1630s some 70 different actual weavers left their individual marks on the cloths they had woven, usually their initials or some fanciful design based upon them, much like the more common ‘merchants marks’ (p. 26). Even more interesting is the list of more than 120 different colours that could be achieved by scribbling in the 1630s—‘French gray’, ‘French maregold’, ‘French mixt’, ‘French sage’, ‘Frog’, and so on (p. 28). It was a new world of subtle colour. It was the beginning of modern textiles. Daniel Defoe and Celia Fiennes did not realize how excited they should have been.