The Macclesfield Silk Button Industry: The Probate Evidence

Abstract

Most histories of the silk industry in England begin with the arrival of French refugees to Spitalfields in London, yet silk was prepared for embroidery in Macclesfield by the Middle Ages and the silk button trade was well-established by the early modern period. Through the study of probate evidence, this article aims to redress the imbalance in the historiography of the silk industry in England away from the focus on the activities of the Huguenots in the early modern period, and away from the silk weaving in order to show that the silk button industry succeeded not through technical innovation, but through marketing a luxury item in sufficiently small packages to make it accessible to a wide portion of the population. The silk button industry can be viewed as having laid the foundations in east Cheshire for the transformation of the silk industry into weaving cloth in the mid-eighteenth century.