The Origins of Knitted Fabrics
By Braham Norwick
The Bulletin of the Needle and Bobbin Club, Vol. 63:1 and 2 (1980)
Introduction: For at least two hundred years, serious scholars in the textile field have insisted upon the relative novelty of knitting in Western Europe. Back in the 18th century, a supposed anachronism in the poem Tragedy of Ella was immediately denounced when Thomas Chatterton published it. He had claimed to have copied it from a manuscript of the mid 15th century, originally written by the monk Thomas Rowley. The lines at issue were:
She sayde as her whyte hondes whyte hosen was knyttinge, Whatte pleasure ytt ys to be married!
Subsequent research has found a slightly earlier reference, dating between 1452 and 1456, to “one knytt gyrdll.” This is in a recorded will kept at the church of St Peter and St Wilfred in Ripon. So the “whyte hosen” and “knyttnge” were not anarchronisms and the scholars of the late 18th century were wrong.
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