Knitting: how it all began
Have you ever wondered how we started making clothes with sticks and yarn? Then read this history of knitting. By Olivia Gordon
How knitting first began - in fact, most of its history - is shrouded in darkness. Knitting doesn't figure in any mythologies, which implies it was a relatively recent invention, and until the 19th century, no one thought to write down knitting patterns. The main things knitting historians have to go on are archaeological remains - and very few garments from ancient times survive. So how did knitting become the craft we know and love so much today?
The origins of knittingThe very first pieces of anything resembling knitting we know about were socks, found in Egyptian tombs dating back to around 3AD, a time when Egypt was part of the Roman Empire. But this wasn't technically knitting (using two sticks to pull loops through other loops) - it was more knotting; using a one-needled, many-threaded technique called ‘nålebinding', which, despite the Scandinavian name (because it lasted there), was practised all over the world. From knotting, it is assumed, eventually came knitting - the word ‘knit', which entered the English language in the 1400s, can be traced to the Old English word ‘cnyttan', which meant ‘knot'.
No one knows who first had the brainwave that by using just a single thread and two sticks it is possible to create a piece of fabric. The possibility was there from Neolithic times, when a thread and two sticks were possible to make, and yet it seems that either the concept of knitting simply didn't occur to anyone until 3,000 years into civilisation, or we simply don't know about earlier knitting.
Knitting proper
Knitting as we know it dates back to the Middle Ages and the Middle East, specifically to 11th-century Egypt, where cotton or silk, not wool, were the staple materials for yarn. Egyptian socks in white and indigo were knitted in intricate detail, with Arabic blessings knitted into them. It appears that knitting then crossed into Europe - we know that Muslims employed by the Spanish royal family around the 13th-century made gloves and cushion covers. The gauges made for incredibly fine and painstaking work: silk stockings might be knitted at 25 stitches and 32 rows per inch!
Into the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, knitting spread through Europe, but wool was still not being used, and knitted possessions made from imported cotton and silk, with such fine gauges, were very expensive, so knitted stockings, jackets and shirts were for the wealthy. For instance, King Eric of Sweden owned 27 pairs of knitted silk stockings from Spain in 1566, and each cost the same as his valet's annual salary.
All needles at this time were still double-pointed - often made of exotic materials like walrus tusk or ivory - and it took until the mid-16th century for the purl stitch to be invented - previously, only garter stitch was used and stocking stitch was created by knitting in the round, then cutting the garment open to make it flat.
Gradually, ordinary working people began to learn how to knit inexpensively for themselves using their own wool and cottage industries sprang up; knitting became a folk craft. In Renaissance Europe, men knitted as well as women - in fact, only men were allowed to join knitting craft guilds. Sailors would knit on long sea voyages and shepherds while tending their flocks. But in Britain's fishing villages, it was women who famously made ‘ganseys' or guernseys for their husbands using family patterns handed down orally from generation to generation, as well as intricate shawls for babies and lingerie for their bridal trousseaux.
The first knitting machine
The story goes that in 1589, a Nottinghamshire clergyman called William Lee was so frustrated by his beloved's attention being more on her knitting than him that he invented a knitting machine to do the work for her. It was called the ‘stocking frame'. Famously, Elizabeth I, concerned that work would be taken away from the handknitting industry, refused to give Lee a patent, but over the next few centuries the stocking frame became a staple of the industrial revolution.
Victorian knitting
As knitting became industrialised and the cottage industries declined, it was no longer a career for a working man. In Victorian England, knitting swung back to being a refined art, with lace and beaded knitting becoming popular displays of a well-bred lady's accomplishments. It even became a moral duty - girls were expected to learn to knit and complete a set number of rows every day, and ladies carried their knitting with them to social occasions. Now that the educated middle and upper classes were knitting (even Queen Victoria), patterns were written down by women and published for the first time in craft books for ladies looking for something to do in the parlour.
It was in the 19th century that knitting ‘pins' - the long, bobble-ended type we use today for flat knitting - were first invented, and the old English needle sizes from 1 to 26 were introduced. The higher the number, the thinner the needle - Victorians often specified a size 20, 1mm needle for lace knitting.
But patterns were very different from those we rely on today. Often authors didn't explain the size of needle were needed - they would simply write ‘use regular needles', for instance, which must have led to some confusion. The concept of gauges or tension squares was nonexistent, illustrations were few and far between, and patterns were often very vague and full of mistakes. The abbreviations used (for example ‘P' for ‘plain' stitch - what we call ‘K' for knit) were not standardised and there were no ‘rep's or ‘*'s - instead, every stitch was written out in a long chain of letters and numbers virtually incomprehensible to modern readers. Instructions on the type of yarn to use or how much was needed only started to be given in the 1860s.And the patterns themselves were not presented as new designs, but more as classics the authors were simply passing on.
Knitting for victory
Women had been knitting for men for centuries, but in the First and Second World Wars, knitting for soldiers was every British civilian's duty. Everyone from the young Queen Elizabeth II to Boy Scouts knitted military patterns, from jumpers and socks to shooting gloves, balaclavas and even sleeping bags. Patterns evoked both Blitz spirit and tragedy, with names like ‘Ready for Anything' and ‘For Jack - "Somewhere" - Out at Sea'. Interestingly, at this time English knitting became more popular than continental knitting in Britain, because of the association of continental knitting with Germany.
Twentieth-century stitches
New knitting developments have continued in the last 100 years: cabling, for instance, is quite recent - it comes from early 20th-century Ireland. And it was only in the 1970s that the modern metric needle-sizing system we use today came in.
When early film stars like Joan Crawford took up knitting, the craft became truly glamorous in the 1930s and 40s. Magazines like ‘Movie Star Hand Knits for Men' even featured pinups of male stars like Jackie Cooper modelling knits!
Then, in the post-war 1950s, with the return to domesticity, knitting came over all moralistic again as women were encouraged to knit their way into their beaux' hearts by making them argyle socks and ‘sweetheart sweaters', proving what a good wife and mother they would be.
In the last third of the century, as feminism took hold, knitting, along with other domestic pursuits like baking and sewing, lost its mainstream appeal and was seen as something for grannies.
Now and tomorrow
In the last decade or so, knitting has returned to fashion as a new generation of women, raised in the 1980s to focus on careers rather than housewifely pursuits, started to long for a bit more of a ‘work-life balance'. And some men, too, have started to knit again - though male knitters are still in a tiny minority.
As modern women - including stars of our times from Sarah Jessica Parker to Julia Roberts - have rediscovered knitting, it's no longer something we have to do, and we see it as a relaxing, luxurious hobby. And how amazing it is that from just two basic stitches, knit and purl, new stitches and techniques are still evolving all the time - magic loop knitting, for instance, was only invented around 2002. Who knows what knitting will be like in the future?
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