“In der guten alten Zeit wo die KÖnigen Bertha spann.”

“In the good old times when Queen Bertha span” is a thrifty proverb still current in France and some parts of Germany where the distaff is yet seen beneath the arm of the shepherdess, looking, as she tends her flock, precisely like S. Genevieve just stept out from her canvas, or that more modern saint of the hidden life, Germaine of Pibrac, who is always represented with her spindle and distaff. In the very same fields where S. Germaine watched her flocks and twirled her spindle in the old scriptural way, keeping her innocent heart all the while united to God, have we seen the young shepherdess clad in the picturesque scarlet or white capuchon of the country, which covers their heads and half veils their forms—guarding their sheep and spinning at the same time.

And the same womanly implement is sometimes found in the hands of those of gentle birth in those old lands where so many still cling to the traditions of the past. We read of the now world-famous EugÉnie de GuÉrin that the same hand that wrote such charmingly naÏve letters and journals did not disdain the spindle and the distaff. She writes thus in her journal: “I have begun my day by fitting myself up a distaff, very round, very firm, and very smart with its bow of ribbon. There, I am going to spin with a small spindle. One must vary work and amusements: tired of a stocking, I take up my needle and then my distaff. So time passes, and carries us away on its wings.” And again a day or two after: “I took my distaff by way of diversion, but all the while I was spinning, my mind spun and wound and turned its spindle at a fine rate. I was not at my distaff. The soul just sets that kind of mechanical work going and then leaves it.”

This reminds us of Uhland's verse:

EugÉnie's charming Arcadian life, passed in the primitive occupations of spinning, sewing, superintending the kitchen—even going, like Homer's Nausicaa, to the margin of the stream to wash the linen in the running waters, and afterwards taking pleasure in spreading it all white on the green grass, or seeing it wave on the lines: all this, we say, without detracting from the poetry and [pg 134] grace of her nature, is enough to make us recall with a sigh the good old days when Queen Bertha span.

And this queen was Berthe au grand pied, the mother of Charlemagne, who had one foot larger than the other, and hence her name:

Whether this Queen of Helvetia is our Bertha with the great foot we know not. The name is found in many curious old legends like the German one of Frau Bertha, a kind of tutelar genius of spinners, with an immense foot and a long iron nose, which doubtless served as a spindle. And an old manuscript, long hidden in some obscure corner of a German monastery, tells how King Pepin, wishing to wed the fair Bertha of Brittany, sent his chief officers to bring her to his court. The steward, who had charge of the escort, was not without ambitious views respecting his own daughter. He ordered his servants to put Bertha to death on the way. But they, instead of killing her, left her in a forest. Not long after—O happy chance!—King Pepin, overtaken by night while hunting, awaited the dawn in a house where he was served by the most beautiful maid his eyes had ever beheld. Of course it was Bertha with her great foot, which, we may be sure, she gracefully concealed beneath her flowing garments. And so they were married. Old poems sing of her industry, and tell us she knew how to spin like the princesses of scriptural and Homeric days. She is represented, too, on old coins seated on a throne with a distaff in her hands. All writers speak of her as Berthe au grand pied, but as otherwise beautiful and skilful in wielding the earliest implement of feminine industry. We may safely imagine her as tapping the mighty Charlemagne, leader of peerless knights, while yet a boy, with her convenient distaff; for her ascendency over him was such that he always regarded her with great reverence, even after his elevation to power!

And Bertha was not the only princess that laid her hand hold of the spindle. When the tomb of Jeanne de Bourbon, wife of Charles V. of France, was opened at St. Denis, among other things was found a distaff of gilded wood, but greatly decayed. And there is another in the HÔtel de Cluny, once used by some queen of France, we forget whom, on which is carven all the notable women of the Old Testament.

So too the daughters of Edward the Elder of England, though carefully educated, were so celebrated for their achievements in spinning and weaving that the term spinster is said to be derived from them.

And S. Walburga, the daughter of S. Richard, King of the Saxons, used to spin and weave among the royal and saintly maidens of Wimburn Minster. It was a common custom in those days. The distaff and the spindle were considered “the arms of every virtuous woman.”

The ancients held the use of them as such an accomplishment that Minerva is said to have come down to earth to teach the Greek women how to spin. Venus herself did not disdain to take upon herself the semblance of a spinner of fair wool when she appeared to Helen.

And spinning was as universal an acquirement among the Jewish as the Grecian women. They used to spin by moonlight on the housetops [pg 135] and, true to the instinct of their sex, kept so faithful an eye on their neighbors in the meanwhile that the ancient spinsters' tongues were potent in the world of gossip. There is a tradition that S. Ann spun the virginal robes of her immaculate child in the pure beams of the chaste Dian.

Of the valiant woman in the Book of Proverbs it is said: “Her fingers have taken hold of the spindle.” And in Exodus we read that “the skilful women gave such things as they spun, violet, purple, and scarlet, and fine linen and goats' hair, all of their own accord,” for the tabernacle.

We are told that the Jewish maidens who devoted themselves to the service of the temple were employed, among other things, in spinning the fine linen on their spindles of cedar, or ithel, a species of the oriental acacia, black as ebony and probably the same as the setim, or shittim wood, of the Holy Scriptures. According to tradition, the Blessed Virgin Mary, who passed her early days in the temple, participated and excelled in all the pursuits then carried on. The Protevangelion of S. James the Less relates that, when a new veil was to be made for the temple of our Lord, the priests confided the work to seven virgins of the tribe of David. They cast lots to see “who should spin the gold thread, who the blue, who the scarlet, and who the true scarlet.” It fell to Mary's lot to spin the purple. Leaving her work, one day, to draw water in her jar, the angel drew near with his Ave Maria.

A distaff lies at Mary's feet in Raphael's “Annunciation,” and in many other celebrated paintings she is represented with one. In a “Riposa” by Albert DÜrer she is depicted spinning from her distaff beside the Divine Babe who is sleeping in its cradle:

S. Bonaventura tells us that several of the early sacred writers speak of our Blessed Lady's industry in spinning and sewing for the support of her Son and S. Joseph in the land of Egypt. So reduced to poverty were they that, according to him, she went from house to house to obtain work, probably flax to spin as she sat watching the Holy Infant in the grove of sycamores of traditional renown. Her unrivalled skill in spinning the fine flax of Pelusium became a matter of tradition, and the name of Virgin's Thread has been given to that network of dazzling whiteness and almost vaporous texture that floats over the deep valleys in the damp mornings of autumn, says the AbbÉ Orsini.

It is said the Church at Jerusalem preserved some of Mary's spindles among its treasures, which were afterwards sent to the Empress Pulcheria, who placed them in one of the churches of Constantinople.

Other nations, too, had their famous spinsters. Dante's ancestor in Paradise, looking back to earth, tells him of a Florentine dame of an opulent family who,

And a Spanish writer of past times says, speaking of the model woman: “Behold this wife who purchases flax that she may spin with her maids. See her thus seated in the midst of her women.” Thus did Andromache spin among her attendants.

So have we seen old nuns spinning in the cloisters of the remote provinces of France: the white wool on their distaffs diminishing slowly and calmly as their own even lives. [pg 136] They looked as if spinning out their own serene destinies. Such a happy destiny is not reserved for all whose thread is drawn out by Lachesis.

At Rome there are two white lambs blessed on S. Agnes' day (“S. Agnes and her lambs unshorn,” says Keats) in her church on the Nomentan road, and then they are placed in a convent till they are shorn, when their wool is spun by the sacred hands of the nuns. Of this the pallium is made—the distinctive mark of a metropolitan.

I have called the distaff the earliest implement of feminine industry. Such is the old tradition. There is a pathetic miniature of the twelfth century depicting an angel giving Adam a spade and Eve a distaff previous to their expulsion from Paradise: and on the sarcophagus of Junius Bassus of the fourth century, Adam is represented with a sheaf of grain, for he was to till the earth, and Eve with a lamb whose fleece she was to spin. And we have our old English rhyme:

And so faithfully was the tradition handed down that the distaff has always been regarded as a symbol of womanhood, which woman scorned to see even in the hands of a Hercules.

In these days, when even our rustic belles are overloaded with accomplishments, the piano takes the place of “Hygeia's harp” on which the fair maidens of the olden time loved to discourse fair music, like the gentle Evangeline of Acadie, seated at her father's side,

who, I fear, would be regarded in these days of improvement, at least in our country, with nearly as much horror as those other indefatigable spinners are by the good housewife:

What charming pictures some of us retain in our memories of our gray-haired grandmothers of New England country life—delicately nurtured, too—sitting down in the afternoon by the huge fire-place to spin flax on a little carved wheel! How many of us carefully preserve such a wheel in memory of those by-gone days, when we loved to linger and watch the mysterious process, and look at the face that always was so kindly, and listen to the whirr whose music is now hushed for ever!

But though spinning by hand will soon become one of the lost arts, there is one who will spin on till time shall be no more—one from whose distaff is drawn out the web of our lives—the star-crowned Clotho: