Tools for flax preparation, hanks of spun thread and cloth of complex weave have all been found in the alkaline lake mud. Because these people centered their communities over swampy areas, many wooden and fiber artifacts have survived from their culture. angustifolium grows wild in Briton and was employed as early as 3000 BC by the Swiss Lake dwellers.
Linen fabric, millennia before coinage was invented, served as a medium of exchange and a measure of wealth. Female serfs and slaves worked endlessly in crews on large estates in unplundered tombs hundreds of sheets are commonly found, stored up in anticipation of the departed's return. Workmen's wives set up makeshift looms in the doorways of their dwellings to weave linen for household use. While the former concentrated on wool production, the latter, employing the fertile fields of the Nile Delta, became experts at the creation of linen textiles which cannot be rivaled in strength and fineness of weave today.Įgyptians turned the coarser, low-grade flax into rope and string the finest quality was reserved for clothmaking. usitatissimum (meaning "of greatest use"), is the oldest cultivated fiber plant, with evidence of its growth and use dating back to the fifth millennium BC in both Mesopotamia and Egypt. Linum angostifolium, the wild ancestor of flax, can be found from the Black Sea to the Canary Islands. Making flax an even more valuable crop, the seeds can be harvested and linseed oil (used in wood treatments, paint and animal fodder) extracted.įlax has been with humankind long before Europeans' discovery of the Western Hemisphere. If not exposed to synthetic bleaches or mechanical drying, a regularly-used linen sheet can survive for a century or more. It is highly absorbent and dries quickly, and its high wax content gives it linen's characteristic luster. Other than ramie, it has the greatest tensile strength of any natural fiber, and is 20% stronger when wet. Spinning flax into thread is facilitated by properties inherent to the fiber, including its length (two to three feet when will prepared), its high pectin content (when wet, the pectin acts as a glue to further bind fibers together) and the nodes which appear along the length of the fibers (similar to those found on bamboo) which incline them to join even more readily.Īdditional properties of flax make it a desirable finished product. It is this woody stalk, hollow when dried, which is harvested and ultimately manufactured into linen.
The plant which provides the raw material from which linen is made is an annual which grows two to three feet high on a slim, little-branching stem. Although flax, the plant from which linen is derived, never rivaled tobacco as a cash crop in the Chesapeake, most farmers and plantation owners grew small amounts will into the 1800's for their own use. That did not mean, however, that wine, silk or linen were never produced in Virginia. The labor involved was either too intensive or required too much skill, the climate and soil of the Chesapeake region did not cooperate, or plain bad luck attended the operations.
Ultimately, none of these ventures was a commercial success. The stockholders hoped that, as with silkworm cultivation, viticulture and glass production, the colonists would use this ancient crop to both realize a profit and diversify their labors. When Sir George Yeardley returned to Jamestown in 1619, one of his instructions from the Virginia company of London was to promote flax harvesting. Woman spinning flax in a 17th-century Jamestown homeĭetail of painting by NPS artist Sydney King
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