Lace tells

Lace tells were catchy rhymes chanted to the rhythm of bobbin lace manufacture in lace schools and workshops in Flanders, the English East Midlands, and the Saxon Ore Mountains (German: Erzgebirge). Tells helped lacemakers to count stitches, maintain a steady rhythm, and stay awake and focused. Lace tells were also used in lacemaking schools in order to increase the speed of work and to teach discipline and lace skills to children—including basic numeracy. Lace tells often borrowed content from existing songs and legends, adapting familiar narratives and formulations to metaphors relying on jargon and details of lace manufacture. Aside from lace manufacture, lace tells often concerned death and violence, as well as expressions of resentment and vengefulness against the girls' parents, school mistresses, and lace merchants.
The repertoire of surviving lace tells has been studied as a corpus of work songs by women and girls. Parallels between Flemish and English tells may point to a Flemish provenance of the East Midlands lace industry, and common elements among tells from all three regions suggest that lace telling originated at the foundation of the lace industry in the sixteenth century, and was spread across Europe by migrant lace mistresses.
As counting rhymes, lace tells sometimes featured number sequences, either counting down—often from 20 in English tells—or counting up. Some were adapted from existing songs by simply appending a number to the beginning of each line. Some lace tells did not enunciate any numbers, and it is not clear how these were used. Lace tells were often intertextual, with familiar material from various types of religious and secular song being appropriated and adapted to the form. David Hopkin writes that the references to lacemaking in the lyrics of lace tells were made "in an elliptical manner, with references hidden in a maze of apparent nonsense."
English lace tells were catchy and allusive, often appropriating familiar material from ballads, children's rhymes, games, legends, and riddles. Gerald Porter writes that the presence of well-known children's rhymes in lace tells could help promote discipline and focus among workers, many of whom were children. Lace tells which borrowed from games frequently incorporated sinister elements "to emphasize the grave consequences of breaking rhythm or looking up before the count was completed." Content from narrative ballads—also sung by lacemakers at work—was adapted into lace tells by truncating the ballad's story such that the lace tell version would only be meaningful to someone who had heard the full version many times before.
Metaphors in lace tells often relied on jargon and references to lacemaking practice that would be opaque to outsiders, and details of the work process were integrated in lyrical narratives of lace tells. For example, a common ballad opening that described 24 boys playing ball was reworked in a lace tell to refer instead to 19 "golden girls"—a metaphor for the gold-headed pins used to attach the lace, with 19 being the number at which lacemakers often began counting down their pins. G. F. R. Spenceley explains that 19 was "the greatest number of stitches a worker could complete in a single burst before she 'looked off' for a moment's relief." English lace tells were typically in doggerel verse.
David Hopkin writes that the lyrics of lace tells clearly expressed a sense of occupational identity among lacemakers, and that their references to work practices created intimacy and a sense of shared experience in the work environment. Porter identifies a retaliatory theme in lace tells, condemning the insolent lace merchants who sold the lacemakers' work. Porter also notes a theme of revenge against the punishing mistress, and interprets tells deploying this theme as a form of resistance. Hopkin also describes the gruesome nature of some of the lace tells, writing that they "often concerned punishments, domestic violence, sexual murder and premature death induced by work"—Porter identifies an element of "terror" in lace tells, for example in this tell recorded by Thomas Wright:
Some surviving Flemish tells (tellingen) are several hundred lines long, though most ranged from dozens to a hundred. Hopkin compares Flemish lace tells to sea shanties, in that both forms of song are performed in direct relation to the labor process. He describes Flemish tellingen as "bizarre composites of songs, hymns, [and] prayers." Though the content of tellingen were more overtly religious (due to Flemish lace schools being often overseen by nuns or beguines), the general themes were similar to their English counterparts: "the workers are hungry, exhausted, given mouldy bread, thrown in a hole… Mothers complain about their daughters' lack of work; fathers are even more threatening figures." While some Flemish tells refer explicitly to the experiences of lace schools, most do not. Direct mentions of lace manufacture in Flemish tells were most often positive. Themes of death, violence (particularly between fathers and daughters), incest, infanticide, and "drawn-out executions" were common in Flemish tells. Some Flemish lace tells were open expressions of complaint and resentment at the girls' parents—particularly their fathers—for sending them to work such long hours at lace schools, which were associated with ill health and premature death. For example:
Some tells expressed vengeful desires toward the parents. For example:
Another common theme in Flemish tells is the dream of escaping lace school. Hopkin interprets these songs as cathartic rather than resistant, considering that no material resistance by lacemakers is documented, and that some Flemish tells about punishment may have served to condition girls to accept the mistress's authority. Isabelle Peere writes that Flemish lace tells followed a principle of "assembling lines without significant concern for continuity of meaning", leading to "absurd punchlines and highly unexpected transitions". She gives as an example this tell, collected by Lootens in 1879:
Peere interprets this "nonsense" typical of tells in opposition to the conventions of other popular Flemish song forms of the time, with religious songs emphasizing family, ballads emphasizing loyalty, and comic songs parodying both, while lace tells "stand in direct opposition to any moral or familial norms ... reveling in staging bloody murders, grotesque and extraordinary verbal and behavioral violence, and near-sadistic scenarios." Peere writes that the uproarious subversion and disorder in lace tells "suggests release rather than hatred." She offers a number of examples of subversive, disordered, and violent scenarios found in lace tells, including that of a girl receiving a gift from her father by leading him to her bedroom, forcing him to kneel, beheading him, and throwing his head in the cellar and his body in the canal. Peere characterizes this sensibility as "a deconstruction of the real world and its norms in favor of a fantastical universe", which she links to ideas in the works of Roger Caillois and Sigmund Freud. Albert Blyau wrote in his 1900 collection of tellingen that tells composed of content from many different songs, further embellished by the girls' imaginations, were called babbeling (babblings). In the latter half of the 19th century, as more lace schools began to adopt religious education, some religious headmasters and teachers attempted to introduce religious lace tells to counteract the impietous secular songs.
Porter notes that lace tells are unconventional as work songs, which are typically "dominated by images of male physical labor" and feature shouted refrains. In contrast, lace tells precisely described the work of lacemaking and served to "excite [the lacemakers] to regularity and cheerfulness." Lace tells were chanted to the rhythm of work, helping lacemakers to count their pins—knowing how many pins corresponded to each tell—and maintain a regular, quick pace. Lace tells were also used in lacemaking schools to increase the speed of work and to inculcate discipline and lacemaking skills in the children, including basic numeracy. Marguerite Coppens writes that lace tells allowed lacemakers, who often worked 10-hour days, to stay awake and alert as they stitched. Students who lost rhythm or failed to keep pace with the tells were punished with a "glum" or "time of gloom"—a period of enforced silence during which they could neither speak nor participate in lace telling. Workshop-wide glums could also be initiated for non-punitive reasons. For instance, a verse ending with the line "for thirty-one speak or look off for sixty-two" triggered a mandatory silence in the workshop until each girl had placed 31 pins—or 62 if the silence was broken. David Hopkin writes that both English and Flemish lace tells were chanted rather than sung. In 1864, W. H. Oakes wrote that "it is only the very old people [in Olney] who remember anything about these 'Lace Tellings' [sic], as they have not been used in the schools about Olney for many years."
Flemish lace tells were primarily a feature of lace schools, and it is not clear if adult lacemakers continued to use tells to time their work, even as they recalled and occasionally performed them. Flemish children in lace workshops were apprenticed to a lace mistress for five years, and "heard the same pieces sung morning and evening for three or four years, under the strict surveillance of older workers who did not permit the slightest change in the way they were sung." David Hopkin attributes the "archaic" quality of the repertoire of Flemish tells documented by Adolphe Lootens to this strictness of tradition. Lootens noted that most tells he documented were chanted to the same "unrhythmic and very monotonous" tune. Lootens also wrote in his collection of Flemish tellingen that each line always corresponded to one pin done, but Hopkin argues, based on the scholarship of Coppens, that lace patterns more complex than netting are "too irregular" for such a regular rhythm. Coppens describes a 1954 field recording of a Flemish lacemaker working and chanting, in which it can be heard that the fast movement of the bobbins is unrelated to the rhythm of the tell. Manfred Blechschmidt wrote the same in his study of German lace counting rhymes, writing that "there are no work rhythms that serve as templates for work songs." Albert Blyau wrote in his collection of Flemish tells that the pause taken by girls when pinning, longer than the ordinary pause between two verses, was long enough for the lace mistress to whisper the next verse to the girls. Blyau also describes tells being slowed at lace schools in Ypres and Poperinge to fit the pace of workers, and distinguishes between tellingen and telseltjes (musical jousts), with the latter directly involving counting for competitive games of speed between students. Telseltjes were especially likely to refer to lace manufacture. Lootens records one tell, called "Mi Adel en Heer Halewijn", which is performed by three girls in different roles—a Crusader, his resilient wife, and her abusive mother-in-law—assigned by drawing bobbins, similar to drawing straws.
According to David Hopkin, "[lace] tells are the one genre in English lacemakers' song repertoire that has been documented." Gerald Porter wrote in 1994 that the repertoire of English lace tells—comprising over 50 songs or fragments—is among the largest surviving bodies of women's work songs in English. David Hopkin wrote in 2019 that the text corpus of English lace tells includes "about 80" tells, which were recorded by "folklorists and other visitors to Midlands lace villages from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century". Very few audio recordings or musical transcriptions of lace tells survive, and thus few lace tells documented in verse have known tunes to go with them. Lace tells have never been systematically collected and were only compiled and published in romantic early 20th-century volumes by "enthusiasts". No known lace tells from the eighteenth century have survived. Many English lace tells sung by children are recorded with attribution only to "a child", without further specification.
Porter writes that English lace tells, "deemed insufficiently narrative", have been "rendered silent" in traditional song scholarship. Hopkin writes that Flemish tells "have received some attention from folklorists and textile specialists, but not from labor historians, or from literary scholars, despite the fact that many significant Flemish writers either made use of, or themselves attempted to contribute to, the corpus of lacemakers' work songs." No collectors of Flemish lace tells explain precisely how the tells corresponded to the rhythm or counting of lacemaking. Adolphe Lootens recorded dozens of Flemish tells in the mid-19th century, and David Hopkin calls the English collection of lace tells "meager" in comparison to the much longer Flemish corpus, whose individual tells are also longer and less fragmentary.
Hopkin notes that while French lacemakers' songs exist, there appears to be no non-Flemish French equivalent to lace telling. German lace counting rhymes, called Zählgeschichten (lit. 'counting stories') and Klöppelmärschen (lit. 'bobbin tales') have not attracted the same scholarly attention that Flemish and English lace tells have.
David Hopkin writes that the parallel lace telling traditions of the East Midlands and Flanders may be evidence for "the frequently asserted but actually undocumented Flemish origins of the Midlands lace industry"—that the Midlands industry was founded by Flemish migrants of war and persecution in the 1570s. He raises these two tells—the Flemish Lisa's Terechtstelling and an untitled English tell—as an example of the similarities between both traditions, which may offer evidence for a Flemish provenance of the Midlands lace industry.
Hopkin also writes that common elements exist in lace tells from all three regions where they have been observed, suggesting that lace telling was "already present at the foundation of the industry in the sixteenth century and spread by migrant lace mistresses."
Collections of Flemish lace tells from 1856 and 1878 already reported that the practice was in decline and "tending to disappear entirely". This decline was influenced by the increase in lace schools run by orders of nuns, rather than the lay-taught schools most common in the 18th and early 19th centuries. The nuns found the chanting to be distracting, and the lyrical content of tells to be impious. By 1897, Blyau wrote that prayers and litanies had replaced songs even at schools run by secular teachers. Lacemakers' songs also began to be associated with the abusive conditions of lace workshops as such abuses gradually began to be denounced. A report from Brabant on the conditions of lacemaking girls said: "the habit these workers have of singing while they work, that is to say, a bent position, contributes greatly to the appearance of the symptoms of consumption ... they sing to distract themselves from their dreadful torture, and their singing is suicide."
Folk artists have recorded examples of some English lace tells.