On the Trail of a Silk Pattern Book
A distinctive feature of ‘The Rings of Saturn’ by WG Sebald (indeed all his main prose books) is the use of photographs throughout, either to illustrate a passage or to augment the narrative in some way (see ‘Shadows of Reality’ by Boilerhouse Press about his photos, which I recently purchased). Shown on a double page spread near the end of The Rings is one of his most iconic photos, of a silk fabric sample book, which Sebald said was “kept in the small museum of Strangers Hall, which was once the town house of .. a family of silk weavers who had been exiled from France.”
I wanted to track down the whereabouts of this pattern book, so I visited Strangers Hall in Norwich, my second only visit to this extraordinary house (my first was aged 7 and I vividly remember the dark studwork, steep & uneven stairways, and narrow labyrinthine corridors). It’s one of the oldest domestic buildings in Norwich, with the Undercroft believed to date from 1320. The original house is gone, replaced by a magnificent Great hall in around 1450, and extended over the centuries, with many rooms added or remodelled — there is a very elegant Georgian room with eau de nil walls that stands out among the medieval dark panelled rooms. The building has changed hands numerous times, most notably purchased by Nicholas Sotherton in 1525, a grocer and later the Sheriff and then Mayor of Norwich.
The "Strangers" name refers to the Dutch, Walloon and Flemish refugee weavers who were invited by the city in the 16th century to settle in Norwich to revive the weaving trade — city folk referred to them or anyone from outside Norfolk as "strangers". By the 1890s the hall was empty & derelict which is when local solicitor Leonard Bolingbroke bought it, filling it with his extensive furniture & antiques collection and then opening it as a museum in 1900. He gave the house and much of its contents to the City in 1922, and it continues today as a museum. See photos of Strangers Hall on my Instagram account here and here.
I didn't find the Silk sample book at Strangers Hall or anything related to silk, so after some online research and a tip-off from someone who knows Norwich very well, I found that the silk pattern books were most likely to be at The Museum of Norwich, which is where I would try next.
The Museum of Norwich at the Bridewell is a wonderful museum in Norwich, tucked down a narrow pedestrian street in one of the older parts of the city, next to St Andrew’s, one of 58 churches from the medieval city. The Bridewell in the name refers to its former use as a type of prison, named after the Bridewell Palace in London which after 1556 became a prison — beneath its foundations is the ancient Undercroft, a series of dank, brick-vaulted rooms, no doubt home to many unsavoury characters in its prison days. The museum has over 5000 objects on display ranging from shops & millinery, the city’s industrial past including a vast collection of shoes (Norwich employed over 12,000 shoe workers, a 1/10th of the population), an entire chemist’s shop with shelves of potions, pills and curiously shaped coloured bottles, as well as an extensive collection of machinery and ephemera from the city’s cloth trade, including the last remaining working Jacquard loom.
There is a reconstruction of a cloth traders office containing two silk pattern books (above left) — alas neither of them are the ones from The Rings, but nonetheless glorious examples. It’s fascinating to see the hand loom with the Jacquard mechanism fitted which revolves around a series of punched cards (above right) that determines the pattern woven, and regarded as the first form of computer programme. Looms like this were in use in the 19th century in weavers’ garrets or small workshops right across Norwich, but they eventually lost out to the powered & mechanised looms in the colossal factories of the industrialised midlands and the north.
Then recently I was sorting through photos, looking back at 2019, I found several hundred from an exhibition ‘Lines Of Sight: Sebald's East Anglia’, dedicated to The Rings of Saturn, including several photos of THE silk pattern book from The Rings — I had forgotten that I had already seen the pattern book (no doubt a sign of old age). How could I forget this wonderful show at Norwich Castle art galleries, which I visited several times! The exhibition covered every aspect & nuance of the book (a Sebald fan’s dream) with hundreds of objects drawn from the collection of Norwich Museum and Sebald’s own photos & manuscripts from the University of East Anglia where he lectured in Literature and translation for many years. The pattern book contains details of the fabric produced including the costs, quantities, code letters which refer to types of fabric and who produced them. See more photos of the exhibition on my Instagram here.
Silk production is one of the many threads running through The Rings of Saturn, including the cultivation of mulberry trees for the rearing of silkworms and moths — indeed there are countless references to sericulture, the ancient science of silk production. A large portion of the final chapter covers silk production in the Chinese imperial court (which started thousands of years before it came to the west), its introduction into France & other European courts, the subsequent flight of the Huguenot weavers from France and their part in the growth of the silk trade in England — the Norwich cloth trade started in ‘worsted’ wool in the medieval period, then grew to its height in the 18th and 19th century with fine silk production — the names are so evocative.
the materials produced in the factories of Norwich in the decades before the Industrial Revolution began – silk brocades and watered tabinets, satins and satinettes, camblets and cheveretts, prunelles, callimancoes and florentines, diamantines and grenadines, blondines, bombazines, belle-isles and martiniques – were of a truly fabulous variety, and of an iridescent, quite indescribable beauty as if they had been produced by Nature itself, like the plumage of birds. [extract from The Rings of Saturn]
As you would expect with Sebald, he draws heavily on the history, the many characters and places involved with silk production, and weaves many strands into an examination of how whole industries and cultures can evolve over many centuries, rise to a peak of perfection and complexity, only to seemingly disappear overnight. The cloth trade in Norwich is a case in point developing over centuries but finally coming to a halt towards the end of the 20th century (along with many other manual trades and crafts), just when Sebald was putting together his thoughts for The Rings of Saturn.
Thanks for another insightful article! I had no idea about Norwich's connection with the shoe and silk trade. Fascinating!