The tradition of lace-making is thought to be a very English craft, but in actual fact it arrived in this country from 1563 onwards, when people escaping religious persecution arrived from the Low Countries. Lace-makers and lace-dealers settled in Britain and thus began a new industry.

It was in every sense a cottage industry - a trade generated and sustained by women and girls working in their own homes to earn a meagre amount of money for their craft, typically a few shillings a week. Even men became lace-makers when work was scarce after the harvests etc. Some men found lacemaking was actually more lucrative than working on the land and so it became a long-term job for them.

The grand ladies of the stately homes and salons probably gave little thought to who produced the lace they wore - any more than modern consumers bother much about the sweatshop labour in the Far East which produces the cotton shirts and trainers for current internationally-known brandnames.

Women would sit outside their homes in daylight, with the lace attached to a pillow resting on a stool (called a pillow horse). Colourful bobbins holding threads were twisted around pins in perforated parchment bearing the pattern for the old point lace. The pins they used were probably made by local pinmaker Edward Lever or from Mr. Sayers' old shop near to Bull's Yard in Stony Stratford. Originally bobbins were made of bone, but were superceded by wooden bobbins.

The cotton used in lacemaking was bought in, but everything else was made locally, eg pillows, stools (often made by the family members), bobbins which were carved, along with pins from the two Stony Stratford pinmakers.

Villages developed their own particular style and patterns, Stony Stratford's most well-known pattern being the Butterfly.

	A typical lace pattern, showing the holes for the pins
	The actual lace produced by the pattern shown above