Of Druggets and Shalloons

Traveling around England a few years back, with the First Mrs. Buce and two middle-sized children, I toted a copy of Daniel Defoe’s A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724-6). Domestic attachments aside, I can’t think of a better traveling companion. As we moved from town to town, I regaled my captive audience with Defoe’s accounts of all that he saw and compared it, often with surprises, to what we saw.

Earlier I wrote about Sir John Mandeville, Kt. If Sir John was the first travel writer, maybe Defoe is the first empiricist. Sir John writes of “folk of foule Stature and of cursed kynde, than have no Hedes; and here Eyen ben in here Scholdres.” Defoe writes of the cloth trade—sheep and wool, broadcloth, “druggets and shalloons:”

At the east, and south parts of Wiltshire are, as I have already observed, all hilly, spreading themselves far and wide, in plains, and grassy downs for breeding, and feeding, vast flocks of sheep, a number of them. … In this extent of country, we have … market towns, which are principally employed in the clothing trade, that is to say, in that part of it, which I am now speaking of; namely, fine medley, or mixed cloths, such as are usually worn in England by the better sort of people; and also,exported in great quantities to Holland, Hamburgh, Sweden, Denmark, Spain, Italy, &c.

And not only the trade itself; Defoe is careful to show how the country grows fat upon it:

The increasing and flourishing circumstances of this trade, are happily visible by the great concourse of people to, and increase of buildings and inhabitants in these principal clothing towns where this trade is carried on, and wealth of the clothiers. … They told me at Bradford that it was no extraordinary thing to have clothiers in that country worth, from ten thousand, to forty thousand pounds a man, and may of the great families, who now pass for gentry in those counties, have been originally raised from, and built up by this truly noble manufacture.”

And so on and not just the southeast and the cloth trade: Defoe reports that he trekked into every corner of Britain (Sic—not just England, but Scotland and Wales). It is possible that he fudged a bit: copied others and at times, just made stuff up, but most of this has the ring of clear-eyed exactitude.

Aside from literary merits, the Travels did give me one brief, transitory note of personal satisfaction. We had touched down at Shaftesbury, the antique hill town on the edge of Salisbury plain. We’d settled the kids and ourselves; now we faced the task of dinner. Not a problem, said I to Mrs. B. Defoe reports that there is a restaurant just around the corner, run by ye people of ye Chinese extraction.

Oh, that’s good, said Mrs. B – Oh Cut That Out!

Well, I got her that time. It was perhaps the only time: the First Mrs. B did not fall from heaven on her head, and I probably owe my fleeting triumph to nothing more glamorous than fatigue. At any rate, I wasn’t all wrong: there was a Chinese restaurant around the corner, and if it had been there in Defoe’s time, he might well have mentioned it. He didn’t overlook that sort of thing, or much of anything, so far as I can tell.

OBTW, here is Defoe describing the route we followed to Shaftesbury across Salisbury plain:

[The Plain] has neither house or town in view all the way, but there is a certain never failing assistance upon all these downs for telling a stranger his way, and that is the number of shepherds keeping their vast flocks of sheep, which are every where in the way, and who, with a very little pains, a traveller may always speak with. Nothing can be like it, the Ardcadians' plains of which we read so much pastrol trumpery in all the poets, could be nothing to them.

Biblio note:I own two copies of the Travels, and I don’t want to part with either. One is the shopworn Penguin that accompanied me across Salisbury Plain and elsewhere, apparently still in print. The other is a more ambitious table model from Yale UP, with lots of yummy illustrations.