INTRODUCTION

Linen (or linens) as a category of clothing has appeared across all the previous chapters: women bequeathed linen to family, friends, and servants; it was advertised as lost, stolen, or found; women recorded purchases of linen for themselves, the household, and the family; and paupers in need were provided with linen by the parish. Finally, in the next chapter we will hear from the gentlewoman Catherine Ettrick who alleged that, although she had brought a ‘great quantity of linen’ to her marriage, she was forced to sleep in damp and cold sheets as a result of her husband’s cruelty. Linen is therefore ubiquitous across the sources and social hierarchy, and this chapter explores it as a popularly understood category of clothing. Though a seemingly sparse descriptive term, ‘linen’ encompassed a range of meanings and uses and, as Alice Dolan has highlighted, forms a useful case study precisely because it was ‘part of the social fabric of daily life’. While the period saw great changes in women’s clothing such as the decline of woollen outerwear as well as the expanding descriptive languages traced across previous chapters, linen remained steadily in use and significant across it. Material literacy surrounding linen was not focused solely on price and textile type, but also revolved around understandings of cleanliness, health, decency, and the rhythms of everyday life. Linen was closely linked to the body and bodily integrity as well as to the female life cycle, while care of people and care of their linen were tied together in the contemporary imagination.

In order to untangle some of the meanings and uses attached to linen, this chapter explores it as a descriptive category from three angles. First, by looking at the purchase and provision of linen, it reveals a network of relationships, responsibilities, and material obligations involved in its supply and maintenance, which could prove a significant undertaking as linens were made, washed, worn out, and replaced. This provision might become burdensome for women at certain points in the life cycle, and the chapter secondly explores the fates of several women who became materially dependent on others to provide them with clean and sufficient linen. However, it also shows how their linen might be put to use as a rhetorical tool in different contexts, with descriptions demonstrating their need as well as speaking to material obligations and relationships of dependence.