Teazles

Recently, I’ve been trying to find out more about how our cloth was made, and I’ve ended up discovering lots more about teazles. The Fullers’ Teazle (which can also be spelled “teasle” or “teazel”) is a biennial plant that produces seed heads covered in hard, flexible hooks.[i] In the Victorian period and even until quite recently in some woollen mills, teazles were essential to one of the finishing processes, called “raising the nap”.[ii] This is where woollen cloth, after coming off the loom, had its surface fibres teased out with the teazles to produce a nice, soft pile.[iii]

Most teazles used in Leeds were grown in the Vale of York around villages like Sherburn-in-Elmet and South Milford.[i] Specialist “tazzle men” grew the crop on land rented from a farmer.[ii] Because the plant takes two years to produce its seed heads (and therefore any profits), being a tazzle man was usually a secondary job for farmers, shopkeepers or innkeepers.[iii] The crop needed attention in the meantime though, as regular weeding was essential.[iv] This was done with a special hoe-like teazle spade.[v]

During the second summer, the big “king” teazles at the top of each stalk stopped flowering and were ready to harvest, followed by the smaller “queens” and “buttons” further down.[vi] At the end of each harvesting day, gathered bunches were put onto poles and stood in an open-sided shed called an “ellum” to dry for a few weeks.[vii] Then over winter, growers moved the poles into storage.[viii] Traditionally, the crop was carefully made up into “glens”, fanned bunches of six large and four smaller teazles.[ix] Thirty glens were pushed onto a split hazel rod to form a cylinder of teazles called a “stav”.[x] I think this sounds like a real art.

One reason why I’ve found the story of the teazle so interesting is because of all the people who were involved in growing, trading and using them, all for what was an essential but only quite small part of the cloth-making process. This fits into a pattern we often see in the  Museum & Archive, where so many experts contributed to making the fabric, each supported by unexpectedly niche and specialist “industries behind the industry”.

In the early 1800s, growers often traded through middle-man dealers, who brought the stavs into Leeds by road.[i] Trade took place in inns, and many, like the Ship and the Angel, can still be visited today.[ii] The buyers would have been specialist cloth dressers who had their own shops in the city.[iii] They bought unfinished cloth from small-scale weavers and raised the nap by hand, which is probably how cloth from the initial club mill here at Sunny Bank Mills was finished.[iv] However, it seems that by the 1880s we were finishing cloth on our own site, probably using machinery called a “teazle gig”. This raised the nap using seed heads fitted to rods on a drum, but it created an increased demand for teazles.[v] Consequently, full-time teazle merchants became established.[vi]

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