Content:
1. Voluntary Full - Thalacio
3. And patience is longer than the thread itself
Voluntary Full - Thalacio
The Sabines, a large and warlike people, sent the founder of the eternal city ambassadors with exhortations. They say that they become friends and relatives without violent acts. And Romulus insists: "Talacio!" To this argument the other side softened. The peace treaty says women should not do anything for husbands except talasia. In Latin, this means "spinning wool."
After that, let us be assured that the world is ruled by love, and not by calculation. In the time of Romulus, as before and long after them, the ability to spin was tantamount to the ability to live. Where they spin, that family has a wind in the back, life is established there. The man, as usual, gets food, he took on the heavy housework. Woman, please, dress household members. And both, as the biggest gain in life, try to pass on the economic skills to the heirs: father to his sons, mother to daughters - what she can do, first of all - in spinning.
So rulers of the world and plebs behave. Spinning is the inherent virtue of a woman. The daughter and granddaughters of Augustus Octavian were exquisite in luxury, but Caesar insisted that they learn how to spin wool no worse than slaves of spinning mills. In families, it’s simpler to smack a girl who sits behind a girl for yarn, in a hurry to grow a shift from her.
Spinning remained predominantly feminine. And how could it be otherwise, if the Virgin Mary herself, according to legend, was a spider and fed this whole family with this labor. Women's hands made a thread, not knowing tired. If Tsar Saltan had been brought up worse and looked into other windows late in the evening, he would have seen - and there the girls spun. Traces of this ancient female craft through the Norman fog, vague shadows of the Goths and the Vikings appear in documents and all kinds of evidence of material culture.
Nestor in the annals indicates that even before St. Vladimir in Ancient Russia did homework woolen fabrics. They were so good that they served as a barter with foreigners. And another source reports that Russia had its own trading quarters in Constantinople - this huge workshop of luxury, where, on odnoderevki boats were delivered, among other things, tubes of cloth and other Russian-made woolen fabrics.
Judging by the cushioned lists, in the large boyar estates, among the yard people usually consisted of a spinner, or thin-wiggler, in the Pskov region, on Yaroslavl land, in estates near Moscow, and later in the Volga region. Spinning was included in the category of feudal duties. Monasteries borrowed peasants from household products. For example, the Solotchinsky monastery demanded in the ward villages “80 g of yarn and thread” (put on). In Svetozersky Iversky Monastery dues were accepted in the form of woven or knitted items.
The names of professions of people engaged in the processing of wool - spinner, dyer, needleman, berdyik, comber, half-eaten, danechnik, felt, hosiery and others became nicknames. It is well known that, say, the defense of Moscow from Tokhtamash in 1382 was led by Moskvitin Adam, the sous-horse. Nicknames later passed into surnames.
Researchers of Russian crafts are increasingly inclined to find a connection between spinning and knitting with the virtuoso technique of wax casting of jewelry models, which was famous for pre-Mongol Rus. Scientists believe that model made of cords, thick threads, woven and woven into a complex pattern like lace. Most likely women were engaged in wax knitting in the territories adjacent to the Urals. There, in female burials, foundry tools were found next to spinners and spindles, needles and sharpeners for them.
As the greatest luck was perceived by the family, if the girl is zarn (hunting) for spinning. What just for this was not done. A shred of wool and a spindle were tied to the cradle of the newborn. They offered prayers to the Almighty. Coached conspiracies and habits. Blued posts and prohibitions. And very little parents allowed to play with a spindle and imitate adults in spinning. The girl still doesn’t really blast, but she is trying to make a thread out of waste wool, to make a thread. By the age of five to seven, she confidently repeats her mother’s movements at work. And after a year, he really displays a thread, spins in an amusing way. Here you have one more spin. Her mother, meanwhile, would burn her first-student thread to ashes in a clean frying pan and allow her daughter to lick. Gradually, the convert will be forced to believe two truths. He who tightly coils the cob will have a comfortable family life for envy. And the second commandment is finished. Threads on a spindle abandoned by Sunday or a holiday will inevitably break.
Behind superstitions and ceremonies stood a crude prose of life. Extra hands with a spindle - a sensitive help to the female regiment. Working for a family, the girl seemed to be paying with her relatives for bread and salt. And with the same fingers she curled and twisted her fate. After completing the maternal lesson, she spun and wove herself: what got strained, stumbled, then she got into the dowry. With the advent of the matchmakers, she will dress in homespun cloth and show herself in all its glory. And if the case is in the Novgorod region, then the second time she will have to surprise her with skill. According to the wedding ceremony, the guests are invited to a barn, where the units are hung - all that the bride made over the years of girlhood.
Large families in the female half of the house have chambers with spinning wheels and a weaving mill. Often, spinners work not in a living room, but in an old bathhouse, a warm storehouse or in another outbuilding. Whether the maiden spends her days at home, goes on gatherings - there is no time for idleness: if today are goulash and tomorrow goulash, you are shirtless. And the mother does not doze off, lets go for conversations under the gratitude of an adult relative and gives the order, to spin so much wool over the evening. Around the spindle and spinning wheel revolves a young life. On the back-side there are dates - a lot of spinning, as long as there is no sweet one. Married, wandered on virgin highlights, will be thrown out with a noise spindle. Work next to peers is a test of strength, bride. Special demand from brides. In Karelia, for example, a propped-up girl should hide more, and better, and faster than the rest.
Envy, suffering, jealousy - not a number of plots. In each country - his own. Jacob van Loo, one of the small Dutch, in the miniature “Condescending Old Woman” depicted, obviously, an episode not uncommon for the late Middle Ages. The old mistress behind the spinning wheel, and the caballero holds the girl by the chin.With Russian strictness of morals, other scenes are more typical. Participants in the evening accept the honor of an invitation to the dress-ups to help. In a family, one cannot handle wool themselves; raw materials are distributed in yards. And on the appointed day, ready-made skeins of spinning are taken down to the owners, where they are waiting for a treat with nuts and gingerbread. A neighbor’s neighbor doesn’t better respect how he will call his daughter to his village for a meal in a meat-eater. These two weeks, she’s glad to dress up for herself. With full spindles, the legs themselves will carry home.
In women, time was counted in yarn. The thread in each area is measured on the surface. But the number (the number, number) was recognized as the initial length - often three turns of yarn on the reel, about four arshins (arshin = 0.71 m). In Kostroma, 30 numbers are skeins, 40 skeins are talc. Vologda and Perm, Tambov and Yaroslavl, Muscovites and Nizhny Novgorod - everyone takes into account spelled in their accounts. The result, however, is similar: an experienced woman in a week straightens out 2-3 Kostroma talc, almost a kilometer long thread.
Toward the end of winter, fatigue appears in the image of kikimora or house, the brownie's wife. The skeins are frightened, as if the thread breaks for no reason, it seems that the ends of the fibers get out very annoyingly. Everyone does, of course, the petty dirty women mentioned above. Women on what the light stands scolding them, As an extreme, they hide a tuft of camel hair under the hearth. It acts irresistibly, especially since not far off on March 13, when everyone together stops spinning. And the remaining days stubbornly sit at work, sometime before dawn. "... Comes bo (wife) man-chew for his benefit all life. Having found a wave and flax to create what is favored with the hands of one's own ... - the chronicler philosophizes in The Tale of Bygone Years. “Rutsi stretches her on useful, but affirms her elbows on lies ... Her husband does not care for his house, wherever he will be - all his clothes will be put on her ...”
To affirm the elbows on the spindles is a worthy pastime for any woman. Spanish artists see a Madonna in a woman with a spinning wheel. Such a spiritualized image was captured by the painter of the 16th century Luis de Morales in the painting "Madonna and Spinning Wheel". The same mood prevails in Russian society. Spinning is carried out, regardless of the ranks and titles, princesses, noble women, sleeve nobles, wives of artisans. And at closer times to us, in all classes, the ability to spin and knit is recognized as necessary as possession of a spoon. In high society, a good tone is considered to be training of the hands and fingers during spinning, working with knitting needles, crochet hooks, bobbins. They find that this gives a special grace to manners, makes the joints more mobile and useful for playing the pianos, for example.
The twisted spun thread gave rise to the word “twisted” in Russian. From the sixteenth century they have been designated eloquence, the gift of weaving words. The image lives on later:
I ditty to ditty, Like a thread, weave!
As with a stable concept - a spinning workshop - compares L. Tolstoy in the "War and Peace" of the evening in the salon of A.P. Scherer. Her spoken machine worked with spindle uniformity, and the mistress invisibly informed the conversation of the proper move.
As it turned out over the centuries and millennia, there is no need to steal, take in full, if the art of working with wool captivates. While spinning, the woman will think to the details of what and how she will get in touch, waiting for a blissful instant to collect loops and weave a sample. And the efforts are not sorry for the most mundane objects, such as, say, antiquity, such as stockings and socks. It turns out that archaeologists found a children's sock in Egypt in a layer that dates back to three thousand BC.
The ancient Greeks knew the stockings, borrowing, as a fashion, from the Germans. The ancestors of the Germans protected their legs from poisonous snakes with strips of skin and fur. Dinner ended, Pliny the Elder wrote down, "the men demanded their footwear, which they left in the wardrobe."
Europeans sewed stockings from woolen fabric until knitting needles appeared. Some historians claim that the knitting needles were invented in Venice, while others attribute the invention to the Englishman William Riedel. One way or another, unlike the former, thin, elastic stockings and socks made of wool yarn conquered the yards, nobles, celebrities. Voltaire tied himself more than one pair. Over many generations, a romantic story has been passed on how a young man from Cambridge, William Lee, invented a knitting machine for his lover, who made a living by knitting a stocking.
Knitted stockings and socks became an integral part of the toilet quickly and for a long time. Eyewitnesses say that at the end of the last century they were in full swing on the main market at the Kremlin, tents stretched down from the Spassky Gate to the Moscow River. Homeless craftswomen imposed their products countlessly. Mother shakes the cradle and knits. Two gossips gossip at the gate, and the needles only flicker in hand. Sitting on a cart and chasing phlegmatic oxen, the Cossacks from farm to farm managed to tie a pair of socks sometimes. Almost every knitter has her favorite ways, secrets, notions, bequeathed or acquired by her mother. In the same novel, War and Peace, L. Tolstoy writes that the Rostov nanny knitted two stockings at once and, having finished, took one of the children to the delight. How she did this, today no one has yet been able to explain to me. The description of the technique was not found in either old or modern books on needlework. Somehow all this is sad, gentlemen are good.
The thing speaks of the owner even more than he wants. It’s not bad, if it’s a fragile shirt. I had to sit on the stove in the suit - winter found in a summer dress. And all the reasons are in one handful: three days - three threads, five den - a piers, that is, just a spindle with strained severity. Such a spin is right in front of the avalanche, and the wham itself is down. Laziness seems to be older than the world itself. Even Dante metal angry thunders on the frivolous women of Florence and recommended that they seek happiness in the quiet buzzing of a spinning wheel. Loafers and stupid people always condemned and punished. MN Mordasova, whose youth was spent in the Tambov village, recalls that if you bring from the gatherings an incomplete spindle, spun wool, you can get zapatylina from your mother. And then, consider it easy to get off. In Galicia, in 1879, newspapers wrote, a trial was held of a woman who was losing her responsibility to spin on her family. For neglect of the house, as was said in the court decision, she was arrested for six days.