The humble endeavors of peasantry in England (which could boast of
no schools of design), Germany, Sweden, Russia and Spain could not
result in work of so high artistic pretension as that of France and
Flanders. In the 18th century good lace was made in Devonshire, but it
wasn't till much later that to some extent the hand lace
makers of
England and Ireland had become impressed with the necessity of well
considered designs for their work.
Pillow lace making under the
name of bone lace making was pursued in the 17th century in.
Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, and in 1724 Defoe
refers to the manufacture of bone lace in which villagers were
wonderfully
exercised and improved within these few years past. Bone
lace dates from the 17th century in England and was practically the
counterpart of Flemish dentelles au fuseau, and related also to the
Italian merletti a piombini.
In Germany, Barbara Tuttmann, a native of Nuremberg, instructed peasants of the Harz
mountains to twist and plait threads in 1561. She was assisted by
certain refugees from Flanders. A sort of purling or imitation of the
Italian merletti a piombini was the style of work produced then.
Lace of comparatively simple design has been made for centuries in
villages of Andalusia as well as in Spanish conventual establishments.
The point d’Espagne, however, appears to have been a commercial name
given by French manufacturers of a class of lace made in France with
gold or silver threads on the pillow and greatly esteemed by Spaniards
in the 17th century.
No lace pattern books have been found to have been
published in Spain. The needle made laces which came out of Spanish
monasteries in 1830, when these institutions were dissolved, were mostly
Venetian needle made laces. The lace vestments preserved at the
cathedral at Granada hitherto presumed to be of Spanish work are
verified as being Flemish of the 17th century. The industry is not alluded to in Spanish ordinances of the
15th, 16th or 17th centuries, but traditions which throw its origin back
to the Moors or Saracens are still current in Seville and its neighborhood, where a twisted and knotted arrangement of fine cords is
often worked in under the name of Morisco fringe, elsewhere called
macrame lace. Black and white silk pillow laces, or blondes, date
from the 18th century. They were made in considerable quantity in the neighborhood
of Chantilly, and imported for mantillas by Spain, where
corresponding silk lace making was started.
Although after the 18th
century the making of silk laces more or less ceased at Chantilly and
the neighborhood, the craft is now carried on in Normandy at Bayeux and
Caen as well as in Auvergne, which is also noted for its simple laces. Silk pillow lace making is carried on in Spain,
especially at Barcelona. The patterns are almost entirely imitations
from 18th century French ones of a large and free floral character.
Lace
making is said to have been promoted in Russia through the
patronage of the court, after the visit of Peter the Great to Paris in
the early days of the 18th century. Peasants in the districts of Vologda, Balakhua
(Nijni-Novgorod), Bieleff (Tula) and Mzensk (Ore)
make pillow laces of simple patterns. Malta is noted for producing a
silk pillow lace of black or white, or red threads, chiefly of patterns
in which repetitions of circles, wheels and radiations of shapes
resembling grains of wheat are the main features. This characteristic of
design, appearing in white linen thread laces of similar make which have
been identified as Genoese pillow laces of the early 17th century,
reappears in Spanish and Paraguayan work.