In 2016 our family lived in the UK. We stayed with my mother-in-law who, in her 90’s, needed some assistance to stay in her own home. My partner and I were both born in the UK but neither of us had lived in the Dales where MIL’s house was located. Just inside the Yorkshire Dales National Park, in the village of Askrigg, the house was known as Dog Kennel Cottage, as a previous owner had, yes, you guessed it, kennelled dogs.
While in this idyllic location, that many would recognise as the backdrop to the original seasons of All Creatures Great and Small, I worked in one of the three local pubs, not the one used as the Drovers. Known as ‘Top Pub’ as it was, yes, at the top of the hill in the village, (Yorkshire people have a habit of telling it how it is) The Crown Inn was, and still is, the place where the locals gathered: evenings, weekends, special occasions, fundraisers (pea and pie suppers). On Monday afternoons it hosted a Knit and Natter group. The woman of the village would gather between 1-3, after the midday lunch rush, to share patterns, learn new techniques and show off their skill. Many of these women knitted in the way their mothers and grandmothers had shown them with long needles, or pins, one tucked into an armpit.
This particular knitting technique is a hang over from the days when farm shareholders and lead miners used to eke out their megre incomes with knitting. Men, women and children would knit in the evenings, when they had any spare time and even while they walked, maybe to church. They made socks and stocking to sell. To aid them while they walked, they used a hand-carved, often as love tokens, wooden ‘sheath’ or ‘knitting stick’ slotted onto a belt. The needle would be poked in and this would give a hand free, if needed. Arm pits now take the place of the sheath.
Knitting was common across the Northern part of the UK , as a way to supplement income, but it is the Terrible Knitters of Dent that made it famous. Dent is a small village just over the border in Cumbria but still within the National Park. The knitters here were known for their precise and even knitting of socks, mittens, stocking and waist-coasts. Wool was brought to the village in ‘bumps’, a collection of rovings, and the finished articles collected to be sold in markets, as far away as Plymouth and London. Children from outlying farms were sent to the village, bordered with locals, to attend school, but also to learn how to knit.
There are different accounts of how the people of Dent became known as ‘Terrible’. In the Knit and Natter group I learnt they were so terrible because they even knitted in church on a Sunday, but also heard that they were just ‘terribly good’, and, with a little investigation found that the locals in Dent use the word ‘terrible’ to describe how the day is: ‘terrible fine day today’ or ‘its a terrible wet day’. They were also referenced as ‘terrible’ by Robert Southe in his collection of short stories Doctor &co published in 1847. Southe documented the true story of Betty Yewdale and her sister who had been sent to Dent to learn to knit. They both hated it. If the children did not knit enough in a day they would not get supper. The bumps would be wound into balls with three or four strands, each strand given to one child knitter. If one child could not keep up with the others they were beaten, according to Betty Yewdale. Betty and her sister stayed for a while, long enough to learn how to knit a stocking in 6 hours but escaped one night, never to return.
The Dales Museum in Hawes has a collection of knitting sticks and in 2021 held a special exhibition. The collection, of over 400, owned by John Dixon, a retired carpet layer, tell part of the story of people who do not get recognition often. The knitting sticks have been collected from around the country, and beyond, some dating back as far as 1700. Each district had their own distinct shape and contributes to the social history of the area.
In an interview with the Northern Echo, Dixon explained that the stockings were knitted as tubes, no heel or toe. They were then soaked in water and stretched over a last to dry out to give them a shape. Sailors would wear the stockings. When the heel wore out they would just turn the socks over, with the hole on top.
The history of the Dales knitters was also captured by Marie Hartley and Joan Ingleby (also residents of Askrigg, and friends of MIL). In the Old Hand-knitters of the Dales (1951, republished 1978 & 2013) they documented knitting patterns and the history of the people who knitted. Research from oral accounts, business documents from mills, old patterns and an empirical look at how wool prices during the Seven Years War affected a particular village, this book brings the lives of the people of this area alive.
Penelope Hemingway, author of the foreward to one edition of the Hartley and Ingleby book, and of British Textile History, discovered the book, and with a little assistance from a knitting historian wrote a pattern for the George Walton gloves featured and illustrated by Hartley and Ingleby. The pattern can be found on Ravelry.
The exhibition in Hawes was accompanied by a social history of the people who knitted including documenting the words, songs and poems used to describe knitting. Yorkshire has its own dialect, not always recognised and hard to understand on occasion. Words brought by the Vikings are used for gardens ‘garth’, streams, ‘beck’ and a sheep on its back unable to get up a ‘riggwelter’, all have been incorporated into the dialect. (Riggwelter is also the name of a beer brewed by Black Sheep Brewery in Masham) The passage below from the Rural Life of England by William Howitt 1838, describes some of the language and the pattern of life for many.
“…As soon as it becomes dark, and the usual business of the day is over, and the young children are put to bed, they rake or put out the fire; take their cloaks and lanterns, and set out with their knitting to the house of the neighbour where the sitting falls in rotation…The whole troop of neighbours being collected, they sit and knit, singing knitting-songs, and tell knitting stories… All this time their knitting goes on with unremitting speed. They sit rocking to and fro like so many weird wizards. They burn no candle, but knit by the light of the peat fire. And this rocking motion is connected with a mode of knitting peculiar to the place, called swaving, which is difficult to describe. Ordinary knitting is performed by a variety of little motions, but this is a single uniform tossing motion of both the hands at once, and the body often accompanying it with a sort of sympathetic action… They knit with crooked pins called pricks.; and use a knitting-sheath consisting commonly of a hollow piece of wood….”
In our year in Askrigg we did have electric lights, and central heating, did not dress like 'weird wizards' and I learned how to tune into the accent. It is a bit like listening to the words of Shakespeare, it took a little practice, but my knitting did not improve, even with light, heat and practice.
I am ending with a poem about the Terrible Knitters of Dent written in dialect. If you try to read it just remember there are no H’s in Yorkshire. Once you know that it becomes easier.
The Old Dent Knitter
Ay, it’s reyther dowly livin’, we’ve lile change fra day te day,
Ah’s ower owd te dance, ye kna, an’ t’ picters is miles away;
But doon i’ Dent we’re gey content as t’ Dee dances doon te t’ sea.
Though ther’s lile but neet an’ knittin’ fer sike-like fooak as me.
“We’re fain te git a bit o’ wark – te knit an’ wesh an’ beake,
Ther’s rent an’ rates, and cooal te buy, an’ than yan’s bit o’ keeake;
These gloves ye see me knittin’ noo, wi’ t’ buyer’s neeame an’ t’ date
Mun be i’ London in a week – mi order com fra t’ ‘Gate’.
“Some day seun ‘ll be mi last, fer t’ doctor’s been an’ telt,
They’ll pop me under t’ sod, an’ sell mi needles, sheath, an’ belt;
They’ll say, ‘That’s t’ last o’ t’ knitters, when yan’s deead an’ when yan’s gone,
An’ we s’aw be seun fergitten as t’ wolld keeps rowlen on.”
It was knit, knit, knit ay, en’ neeane ower good was t’ pay,
Yan had allis a heeamely welcome, they could work an’ chat away;
Ah’ve seen ‘em thrang as thrang could be – ay, maur an’ yan Ah kent.
Te me they waur winsome, wonderful, them “terrible knitters of Dent.”
From Wensleydale Dialect Rhymes Collected by John Thawaite published in early 1900
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