In Praise of Pins: from Tool to Metaphor

See a pin and pick it up Then you'll have a year's good luck.¹

This essay is concerned with a simple tool, the pin, and two persons named Smith. In conjunction, they highlight a surprising view of European economic, social and cultural history. It is a tale of how this tiny tool became a necessity of life, an object lesson in early economic planning, a constituent part of capitalist theory, a symbol of European social criticism, a metaphor for female oppression, and, last but not least, a weapon in the campaign for women's liberation. At the same time, the story pinpoints some complex lines of European, that is Anglo-Dutch and Franco-Scottish, communication. It is not the pin as object that concerns us here. This is an essay in the history of ideas which attempts to trace the development of a small and practical device into a concept that appears metaphorically in the work of some of Europe's outstanding thinkers and writers.

In textile-related labour pins and needles are tools with a separate function and history. Pins might be used to hold things together semipermanently, while the needle is a far more passing object, moving through layers of fabric and leaving thread behind. What also distinguishes needles from pins is the long folk and parable tradition about the needle's eye. The difficulty of threading the small eye inspired a metaphor used in the religious texts of Judaism, Christianity and Islam that was based on the impossibility of passing a large object or animal through the eye of a needle. Yet since this essay will focus on the grand tapestry of interdisciplinary overview rather than the exquisite embroidery of specialist detail, that distinction – as in the 1960s song 'Needles and Pins' by Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono, later so brilliantly performed by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers – is largely disregarded.

Pins and Projects: Thomas Smith

Upon reports in 1567 that the Duke of Alva was coming into the Southern Netherlands with an army of some 10,000 veteran soldiers, trading people of town and country withdrew from the provinces in vast numbers. Many of them fled to England and found refuge in Canterbury, Norwich, Sandwich, Colchester, Maidstone and other towns, introducing the industries of linen and silk-weaving and seeking work as dyers, cloth-dressers and the like. This was the largest uprooting that early modern Europe had experienced. By the early 1570s some 10,000 refugees from the Low Countries had moved across the Channel. England had not seen immigration on that scale before.

Flemish and Walloon immigrants contributed to the enlargement of the Tudor textile industry by the introduction of lighter-weight cloths known collectively as the New Draperies, using innumerable combinations of long wool, silk, and linen yarn. The first immigrants settled in Norwich; later groups in towns and villages all over Norfolk, Suffolk and Essex. By the early seventeenth century some of the New Draperies had spread to other parts of the country. They went under a variety of names, for instance 'bays', 'tufted taffeties', 'wrought velvets' and 'braunched satins'. With them a whole range of skills was introduced, such as lace-making, ribbon-making and stocking-knitting, which fundamentally changed the English clothing industry. Throughout the sixteenth century England's largest export industry was cloth, sent largely to the Low Countries where the unfinished articles were dyed and dressed. Time and again the English authorities attempted to gain a larger share of the profitable finishing business either by inviting skilled craftsmen from the other side of the Channel, or by bringing in measures that would favour the English textile industry.

In May 1593 a breakdown was compiled of the 7,113 strangers residing in the Liberties of the City of London and adjoining parishes. This record supplies a list of trades practised by 1,862 individuals which is headed by silk-workers (355), merchants (163), tailors (118), brewers (85), shoemakers (66), goldsmiths (61), cutlers (42), joiners (40), thread-twisters and dyers (33), seamstresses (31), hemp-dressers (27) and hat-makers (27). Pins were essential...