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Anyone visiting London or one of our other big cities cannot fail to notice the graffiti covering the walls and buildings. You might think that the absence of this graffiti is one of the benefits of living in Eydon, but you'd be wrong! If you look closely at the walls of the village, you will see that they are just as covered as those of London with graffiti, or more correctly graffito, scratched into the soft stone of the village.
Some of this is useful. I have a sundial scratched on a window lintel, with a curlicue nine that suggests an 18th century origin, and there is another 'sundial' of a series of straight lines carved into the gable end of the house at the top Morton Road which uses the shadow of the roof to tell the time. Most of the carvings are names and initials, such as those seen on the house at the bottom of Blacksmiths Lane. Some of these are over ten feet off the ground and whoever did them must have climbed onto what ever structure was build into the wall at that point. There are other things, such as the horse and bird carved in the wall at the side of the cart entrance into Home Farm. There are also lines of parallel groves in the stone that I've seen explained away in other places as archers sharpening their arrows before compulsory practice in Tudor times. However, as the old school, which is only 150 years old, also has these grooves, as well as a lots of names and initials, it's more likely that these groves, and a lot of the carvings in the village are school children sharpening their pen knives and practising their new found writing skills on the way home.
How old are these carvings? Well, some are kindly dated for us. There is a date of 1886 on the wall of Home Farm, another house on High Street has a small carving dated either 1837 or 1937, whilst the imposing porch of the house facing the Green has several 1774 dates carved on it. The earliest date that I know is on the window mullions of a neighbour, who, besides having some wonderful carvings of birds and possibly people, have a number of dated initials. The earliest of these is, in a nice frame, AW 1691, which is 50 years before the date the listed buildings people think the house was built! Shows what they know!!
Look about your own home, you might find out have some graffiti
of your own, in which case I'd love to hear from you. Even if
you haven't, keep your eyes open as you walk round the village,
you may be surprised what you see!
Kevin Lodge
The chief source of employment in Eydon in the nineteenth century was working on the land, never a well paid job, and in order to provide their families with a bare subsistence, many women and girls turned to pillow lace making as a means of increasing the family income.
Northamptonshire had been an important lace making centre since the sixteenth century when Huguenot lace makers fled from France because of religious persecution and their influence is seen in the patterns of lace which were made in this region. There were 5800 lace makers recorded in Northamptonshire in 1851 and lace-making schools were found throughout the county. From the age of six, both boys and girls went to lace making schools to learn their skills, working for twelve hours a day, and sometimes more if they hadn't completed their allotted quota, and the cane was used liberally if the work was not up to standard.
There is no evidence of male lace makers in Eydon, and no dealers either, but during the period covered by the Census, 1841-1891, there were 42 women lace makers in this village, varying in age from twelve to 66 years old. Lace making was at its peak in Eydon in the 1850-60s when there were 15 women employed in making it, but by 1891 there was not one lace maker left in Eydon. This reflected the nationwide decline of the lace making industry, caused in part by the advent of machine made lace.
Originally only the wealthy could afford lace; the poor never wore it. Machine made lace was cheap, easily available to all and demand rose dramatically. In order to compete, the pillow lace makers started to use cheaper threads and their work became coarser and slipshod. Prices plummeted and when pillow lace was no longer the exquisite, exclusive product that it had been, the industry went into deep decline. An 1891 "Report on Northamptonshire, Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire Lacemaking" found that in many villages the lace designs were poor and that in consequence the average earning of the pillow lace maker was very low. A desperate need to turn lace into money for food did not encourage the making of fine, time-consuming lace. Poor pay became the rule and the industry went into decline. There are several instances in Eydon of lace makers on Parish Relief because they could not earn enough to support themselves. The final blow to pillow lace making was the Education Act of 1870 that decreed that all children must attend school daily, and that resulted in the demise of the lace schools. These were harsh and in need of reform but they did teach the necessary skills to enable the lace industry to flourish. Instead the girls went into domestic service, taking the place of farmers' and tradesmen's daughters who had previously been the ones to go into domestic service.
This is reflected in Eydon where, in 1881, of the five remaining lace makers, three were over 55, one was described as imbecile and the other was a 23 year old unmarried niece. By 1891, there were no lace makers left in Eydon and their skills have now disappeared forever.
Leila Leeson
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