Figures in Silk (53 page)

The article explained that a silkwoman was someone who made items of silk, from braids, laces, ribbons, to buttons, fasten-ings, and tassels. She also dealt in haberdashery (still known in French as
mercerie
) and in veils of silk and linen, kerchiefs, gloves, and linen, and silk coifs for the head. All these goods were mer-cery, which in its widest definition included all goods that were not bulky or foodstuff s, and that were traded by merchants known as mercers. Because London was a sophisticated capital city, a London mercer, unlike his provincial counterparts, could afford to specialize. His most prestigious and valuable commodity was silk, and his most common and relatively cheap one was linen, of which over a million yards were imported into London alone every year by 1480. The mercer’s and the silkwoman’s joint interest in silk made it essential for them to know each other, and do business together. Inevitably they trained in the same house holds and married.

Anne Sutton’s article set out to track, through wills and bills of sale and other documentary evidence in the archive of the Mercers’ Company, all the silkwomen of London who were daughters or wives of London mercers in the fifteenth century.

Her research was a treasure trove of personalities, joined by a spider’s web of interconnections through skills learned by apprenticeship in the house hold of the master and mistress, whether as mercer, vestmentmaker, embroiderer, or silkwoman. Reading the names and life stories of these women gave me a first glimpse of the teeming, prosperous world of silk and of the men and women who peopled it.

One silkwoman was Isabel Bally- Otes- Frowyk, twice lady mayoress, whose career lasted over fifty years from about 1410 to her death in 1464. She first supplied the Mercers’ Company with silk fringe in 1415–16; in 1417 she was left a widow by John Bally, mercer, who referred in his will to her chests of goods and her craft. She had her own shop by this time in Soper Lane, abutting Cheapside. She had three children by Bally and soon acquired a new husband in the mercer William Otes, who died in his turn three years later in 1420. She then married Henry Frowyk, a younger man but probably a business partner of Otes’s, for the two men apparently shared some apprentices. Her wealth, as a two- times widow and as a woman with her own business undoubtedly made her an extremely desirable wife for a fast- rising mercer. Frowyk had the advantage too of belonging to a long- established and well- connected London and Middlesex family, the members of which had a tradition of moving back and forth between the civic and gentry worlds. He was twice mayor of London. Isabel was still running her business when he died, and her bequests to women suggest she persisted in it up to her death.

Another silkwoman, of lower status and wealth, was Isabel Fleet. She ran a training establishment with her husband William between the 1420s and 1450s. Perhaps the two met as apprentices in the house hold of Symkyn Fleet, mercer and relative of William; certainly they met in the crowded Mercery, packed with apprentices of both sexes, a veritable marriage mart for young people setting out in their careers. Isabel rented a shop in the Crown Seld. In 1449 William died and left bequests to his four“maidens,” who must be identified as the female apprentices of his wife; in 1455 Isabel died and left small bequests to five women skilled in her crafts of “dyer, throwster and corse weaver.”

A third Isabel was Isabel Brown- Hatton, sister of John Brown, mercer and vestmentmaker, who went into the female side of the business as a silkwoman and may have trained like her brother in the house hold of Thomas Gibbes (mercer, vestmentmaker, and embroiderer; Gibbes was king’s embroiderer to Edward IV).

Isabel’s husband, Nicholas Hatton, had trained in the mercer-silkwifery house hold of the Fleets, so he would have readily accepted, indeed actively wanted, a wife with textile skills. Isabel trained at least three apprentices, and had a shop in the Crown Seld with her husband, as Nicholas’s past mistress, Isabel Fleet, had had. Nicholas ended his days as silkweigher, operating the small beam of the city on which he weighed all silk brought to him by sellers and buyers within the city, especially those sales that involved a man who was not a citizen of London.

As well as the three Isabels, the article described Alice Claver as one of the most successful silkwomen of late fifteenth- century London. She must have trained many apprentices in her thirty- three years of widowhood. As silkwoman to the Yorkist kings and their courtiers, she is one of those rare silkwomen whose goods can be glimpsed in the great wardrobe accounts of the kings of England, giving some idea of the scope and quality of her trade. She supplied work to decorate Edward IV’s books and the mantle laces for the coronation robes of Richard III and Queen Anne, among other items. Her mercer husband, Richard Claver, died in November 1456, and her only son died early in his career as a mercer. She never remarried and, when she died in the 1490s, she left the business to her favorite apprentice, who in her turn married a mercer. The young couple went on living in Alice’s great house on Catte Street, whose rent was over £8 a year—a sure sign of the success of the Claver business.

In the circle of Alice Claver, there were some mercer wives who can only be suggested as silkwomen. One was Alice Boothe, married to a fellow apprentice called William Pratte, who became an established mercer; the Prattes were lifelong friends of Alice Claver, as was William Caxton, who was a mercer colleague of William Pratte’s until he became England’s first printer.

I couldn’t get the silkwomen out of my head. Alice Claver’s circle eventually became the main figures in my novel (the only change I needed to make was to rename the real- life Alice Boothe Pratte “Anne Pratte,” to avoid confusion with Alice Claver; when it came to choosing a name for my entirely fictional silkwoman heroine, the one that came naturally was, of course, Isabel).

Jane ShoreKing Edward IV’s “merry” mistress Jane Shore (born Elizabeth Lambert in 1445; died c. 1527) was the daughter of John and Amy Lambert. John Lambert was a well- to- do London mercer who made large loans to King Edward. She was a beauty and charmer. She married the mercer William Shore, but had the marriage annulled in 1476 on grounds of his alleged impotence. Will Shore, who never married again, went abroad. By then, Jane had probably already become King Edward’s mistress. Edward did not discard her as he did many others; a friendship persisted until his death in 1483.

Things went wrong for Jane Shore as soon as Richard III came to the throne. She was arrested in June 1483 and imprisoned. Her property was confiscated. Richard III sent Sir Thomas Howard to take her to prison, and Howard took everything she possessed—above the value of 2,000–3,000 marks, or £1,000. Even before her arrest, she had became the mistress of Edward’s friend William Hastings, First Baron Hastings, and after he was executed by Richard, she probably also became the mistress of Edward IV’s stepson, Thomas Grey, First Marquess of Dorset. After being forced to do public penance for promiscuity, by walking through London in her kirtle with a taper in her hand, she was released from jail.

Within a year, she had so enchanted her interrogator, the king’s solicitor, ThomasLynom, that he married her. They later had a daughter, Julyan Lynom. ThomasLynom was not destroyed by the death of his royal patron, Richard III; he found a new midlevel bureaucratic job at the Tudor court. Thomas More suggests Jane Shore was still alive forty years later, during Henry VIII’s reign.

and published by Andre Deutsch, London, 1969.