A history of knitting

Knitting seems so simple and so homely that it is natural to assume it must be one of the oldest of human skills. In fact it is a relative newcomer. Weaving is known to be at least eight thousand years old, whereas the earliest objects that are unquestionably knitted, with two needles and a continuous thread, date from only about a thousand years ago. Older fragments that were once described as knitting have turned out, on closer study, to have been made by a slower technique that uses a single needle and short lengths of yarn.

Those earliest genuine examples are socks. They were found in Egypt, they are made of cotton, and they are decorated with bands of pattern in blue and white. The skill they display is so advanced that the craft must already have been practised for generations, although nothing survives to show its beginnings. From the Islamic world, knitting passed into Europe by way of Spain, where knitted cushions of great delicacy were placed in a royal tomb in the thirteenth century.

For a long time knitting in Europe was a luxury trade, and a male one. In the towns it was controlled by guilds, associations of master craftsmen that fixed standards and limited the number of people allowed to practise. A boy who wished to become a master knitter in sixteenth-century Paris served an apprenticeship of six years, at the end of which he had to produce a set of test pieces that included a carpet. What the guilds chiefly sold, however, was stockings. Men's fashions of the period left the leg on show, and a well-fitting knitted stocking, which stretched as no woven cloth could, was greatly prized. Queen Elizabeth I of England is said to have received her first pair of knitted silk stockings in 1560 and to have declared that she would wear nothing else.

It was in England, too, that the trade was first mechanised. In 1589 a clergyman named William Lee built a frame on which a whole row of loops could be formed in a single movement, many times faster than by hand. When he applied to the queen for a patent, she refused, reportedly out of concern for the many poor people who earned their bread by hand knitting. Lee took his machine to France, and it was only after his death that it was widely adopted. By the eighteenth century there were thousands of frames in the English Midlands, most of them rented by the knitters from wealthy merchants. When wages fell in the early 1800s, groups of workers known as Luddites broke into workshops at night and smashed the machines, and the government made frame-breaking punishable by death.

Hand knitting, meanwhile, survived where people were poor and wool was plentiful. In the Shetland Islands, off the north of Scotland, women developed shawls so fine that one could be drawn through a wedding ring, together with the many-coloured patterns named after Fair Isle. Around the coasts of Britain, fishermen wore close-fitting sweaters of tightly spun wool, knitted so densely that they kept out wind and spray. It is often claimed that every village had a pattern of its own, by which a drowned man might be identified, but there is little evidence that this was ever more than a story.

In the twentieth century, knitting twice became a patriotic duty. During both world wars, civilians were urged to knit for the troops, and millions of pairs of socks were sent to the front, where dry feet could mean the difference between health and serious illness. In peacetime, knitting was part of ordinary domestic life until the 1980s, when imported clothing became so cheap that making a sweater cost more than buying one. Sales of yarn collapsed, and the craft appeared to be dying.

Its recovery since the beginning of this century has surprised everyone. The internet allowed knitters to share patterns and to find one another, and a pastime once associated with grandmothers attracted a generation in its twenties. There is some scientific support for their enthusiasm. The repeated, rhythmic movements of knitting have been found to slow the heart rate, and in surveys of knitters a large majority report that the activity leaves them calmer. A craft that began by clothing the feet of the wealthy is now valued chiefly for what it does for the mind.