I recently returned to Bankfield Museum in Halifax to make a detailed inspection of a set of heddles from the old loom from North Lopham that I first visited in 2023. It is an unusual loom – almost nine feet wide and fitted with a witch engine operating twenty leaves of heddles. By analysing the placement of the heddles along the shafts I have been able to work out the damask diaper block pattern they were designed to weave. I had asssumed these bespoke heddles – and therefore the pattern – dated from the time the loom was used for linen weaving in Norfolk, but it turns out they were made for the museum in 1958.
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Introduction
Heddles are known as healds in the north of England, and once upon a time as yells, all deriving from the Old English hefeld: to raise. A collection of heddles on a frame is called a leaf, or a stave, now often a shaft. 1 They were sometimes made by the weavers themselves and were often bespoke for a specific cloth. Where old heddles survive, they can reveal information about the cloth they were used to weave. I recently started making my own heddles, hence my particular interest in historic examples (see my last post).
I first went to Halifax to look at the old linen loom from Norfolk in the stores of Bankfield Museum in 2023. I took photographs and measurements, and wrote a description of the loom in a post called Lopham Looms: the Bankfield Loom. I ended that post by speculating about what a twenty-leaf loom might have been used to make – perhaps some kind of damask diaper? 2 My recent interest in heddles prompted me to wonder if the heddles from the old loom might hold some clues about this. They were unattached to the loom, lying in a bundle underneath it, and the curator kindly arranged to bring them over the museum where I could carry out a detailed inspection, which I did in April this year. This post is a report on my findings.
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Description & analysis
There are twenty leaves, each consisting of a pair of wooden shafts carrying string heddles. The shafts are 2 metres (75 1/4 inches) long and 6mm thick; the top shafts are 42mm deep, the bottom shafts 32mm deep. The top shafts are numbered at one end. 3
A label on the first leaf indicates the heddles were made by T. Lund & Sons of Argyll Mills, Bingley, for Halifax Corporation.4 I was surprised to learn they were made in 1958 – 33 years after the loom had been acquired by the museum. The curators have no record of why the new heddles were made. Was this part of a like-for-like renovation or a complete repurposing of the loom?
The label also provides the following specifications:
Count: 40 (the sett, in ends per inch)
Staves: 20 (A ‘stave’ is a leaf or heddle-frame)
Width: 75 ¼ inches
Depth: 14 inches
Ends: 3010
Yarn: 16/50 (the yarn from which the healds are made, which appears to be cotton, subsequently varnished).
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The heddles are spaced at intervals along the shafts. The knitted cords running along the top and bottom are divided into short sections of 2.5 inches (63mm) by a green thread inter-knitted at intervals. Each 2.5 inch section contains 20 knots, each of which is a potential heddle place. The heddles have been coated with an amber coloured varnish after knitting.
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I marked the location of the heddles on strips of paper laid out along the shafts. It quickly became apparent that the heddle spacings on leaves 1 to 5 were identical, as were those for leaves 6-10, 11-15 and 16 – 20, suggesting that they were used to weave a damask diaper block pattern with four divisions and a 5-end satin ground weave. I am familiar with these kinds of patterns from my studies of the Thomas Jackson and Ralph Watson manuscripts from the 18th and early 19th century.
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Back at the studio I arranged the strips of paper adjacent to one another in leaf order, allowing me to determine the block profile draft which is repeated seven and a half times across the full width:
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In this profile, each row represents five leaves of heddles, and each column represents five warp ends. Damask diaper patterns were generally woven ‘treadled as drawn’ where the lifting sequence reflects the warp threading sequence creating a ‘square’ pattern symmetrical along the diagonal.
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The first two illustrations above represent the pattern that I believe the heddles were designed to weave. The first is a weave plan for one repeat of the pattern, with 305 ends, showing the entering and lifting orders. The blocks are differentiated by a contrast of primarily warp-faced and weft-faced satin. The second illustration represents the whole width of the web with seven and a half repeats of the pattern and left and right borders, a total of 3010 ends. The third image is an example of an eighteenth century English damask diaper block pattern showing the use of contrasting warp-faced / weft-faced satin.
Conclusion
The heddles were made for Bankfield Museum in 1958, and were not, as I had hoped, original heddles from the days of Lopham linen before 1925. It would appear there was an attempt in 1958 to use the loom to weave a damask diaper patterned cloth, but we do not know why this was done or if it was successful. The 2 metre width and the presence of the two borders suggests to me that there was an intention to make tablecoth.
A photograph of the loom, attributed to Calderdale Museums Service, was included in Michael Friend Serpell’s A History of the Lophams (1980) – see below. It shows the loom, with the witch engine on top, and a set of heddle leaves corresponding to those I inspected, and was perhaps taken around the same time the heddles were made.
The linen weavers of North & South Lopham became known for making fine damask linen, rather than damask diaper linen. Examples of the former but not the latter survive in the collection of Norfolk Museums. However, back in 1837 Thomas Buckenham had acquired the Royal Warrant as supplier of Diaper and Huckaback Tablecloths to Queen Victoria, and we know from the Buckenham ledger that the Lopham weavers were making cloth they recorded as “diaper” in the period between 1876 and 1911. Diaper is a rather ambiguous term that has meant different things at different times and in different branches of the textile industry. It seems likely that damask diaper – of the type represented by the Bankfield heddles, and as woven by eighteenth century Yorkshire weavers Thomas Jackson and Ralph Watson – was manufactured in North & South Lopham but I know of no consclusive evidence for this.
The cloth the Bankfield heddles were designed to weave is relatively coarse at 40 ends per inch, much coarser than the damask made in Lopham before 1925. This makes me suspect that the 1958 project was a repurposing of the loom. Whether or not the 1958 damask diaper pattern is a based on linen previously made on the loom in Lopham remains an open question.
Notes
- The term ‘shaft’ is now most widely used, but confusedly so in my view, since shaft also refers specifically to the wooden bars. ↩︎
- Damask diaper: I make a distinction between damask diaper – block patterns woven with a multi-shaft loom or a shaft draw loom – and damask proper – intricately figured linen woven on Jacquard looms. ↩︎
- Terminology: I use the term ‘leaf‘ to refer to a single frame consisting of heddles on a pair of shafts, following 19th century writers such as John Duncan, although ‘shaft‘ is now commonly used in this sense. The makers of the Bankfield heddles used the term ‘stave‘. As a northerner I prefer healds to heddles but the latter is now more globaly recognised ↩︎
- The firm Lund & Sons are still in business as Lund Precision Reeds Ltd. ↩︎