PAISLEY MANUFACTURERS. 7 tageous position, second only to Glasgow; and men experienced in the kind of goods for which a demand existed throughout the country, were well qualified for directing the operations of manufacturers in a town. It often happens that in a particular town some one sort of manufacture greatly predominates. As soon as one or two individuals are observed to attain opulence by means of it, the whole of their neighbours rush into the current of prosperity; and, accordingly, in looking back to the history of this or any other manufacturing town, it will be found that at particular periods one or two branches of business have predominated over every other. At first, Paisley was celebrated for coarse chequered linen cloth, afterwards for chequered linen handkerchiefs. These were succeeded by fabrics of a lighter and more fanciful kind; and so forth. Another manufacture was also of great importance during a considerable period in Paisley, and the person who introduced it had previously been brought into notice by the superstition of the times. In the year 1697, Christian Shaw, a girl of eleven years of age, daughter to the laird of Bargarran, having had a quarrel with a maidservant, pretended to be bewitched by her, and forthwith began, according to the common practice in such cases, to vomit all manner of trash, to be blind and deaf on occasion, to fall into convulsions, and to talk a world of nonsense, which the hearers received as the quintescence of afflicted piety. By degrees a great many persons were implicated in the guilt of the maid-servant and no fewer than twenty were condemned, of whom five suffered death on the Gallow Green of Paisley, while one man strangled himself in prison, or, as the report went, was strangled by the devil, "lest," says Crawford sagaciously, in his History of Renfrewshire," he should make a confession to the detriment of the service."* The young lady whose petulance occasioned this infamous transaction, afterwards acquired a remarkable dexterity in spinning fine yarn. Her • The spot where the horrible incremation of the five witches took place, is now covered by the buildings called George Street. first attempts at this process were necessarily on a small scale. She executed every part of the process with her own hands, bleaching her materials on a large slate placed in one of the windows of the house. She succeeded so well, however, in these essays, as to have sufficient encouragement to go on, and to take the assistance of her younger sisters and neighbours. The then Lady Blantyre carried a parcel of her thread to Bath, and disposed of it advantageously to some manufacturers of lace; and this was probably the first thread made in Scotland that had passed the Tweed. The business was afterwards facilitated and extended by means of a relation who had acquired some secret as to the process in Holland. After setting the whole neighbourhood agog upon the subject, and founding one of the most important and extensive manufactures hitherto known in Scotland, Miss Shaw became the wife of the minister of Kilmaurs, and, it is to be hoped, expiated by a long life of usefulness the dreadful indiscretion of her youth. The manufacture of silk gauze was introduced into Paisley about the year 1760 by Mr M'Kerral, of Hillhouse, in Ayrshire. After various counteractions, to which all new inventions or experiments are exposed, this gentleman completely established a manufactory in imitation of those of Spittalfields. Originally, the pattern and designs of all fancy works, modes, and fashions, were composed at Paris, and issued out with an absolute authority all over Europe. But the Paisley manufacturers established draftsmen of their own; and the patterns, when executed, were sent to London and Paris for approbation. By these means, the inventive principle of modes and fashions, at least in respect of gauze, was transferred from Paris to Paisley. consequence was, that nice and curious fabrics were devised, and such a vast variety of elegant and richly ornamented gauze was issued from this place as outdid every thing of the kind that had formerly appeared. Spittalfields was obliged to relinquish the manufacture; companies came down from London to carry it on at The PAISLEY PEOPLE. 6 Paisley, where it prospered and increased, it is believed, beyond any manufacture which any town in Scotland can boast of. Indeed it not only became the great distinguishing manufacture of this town, but it filled the country round to the distance of twenty miles.* The manufactures which now mostly prevail in Paisley are indicated in a very singular manner by the externals of the town. A great number of the streets are named from these manufactures, as Gauze Street, Thread Street, Cambric Street, &c.-a thing which never fails to surprise and amuse strangers. The artisans of Paisley are said to be a somewhat more refined and virtuous race than those of other large manufacturing towns, and even to have in general considerable pretensions to literature. Their taste for the belles lettres, such as it is, may have received some excitement from the success of their townsman Tannahill, whose songs have attained considerable popularity. Whatever may be the merits of the men of the humbler order, a stranger is disposed to allow very little praise to the women, who are a race of slatterns, possessing not the slightest share of the taste for dress and domestic management, which forms so conspicuous a characteristic of the gentler sex. The women of the lower orders in Paisley all walk abroad, with their persons enveloped in abominable grey cloaks, similar to those used by beggars in the rest of Scotland; having at the same time their heads shrouded by the hoods attached to these offensive vestments, so that little of them is ever seen but the points of their noses. This of course tends to encourage great internal slovenliness of attire. Their inaptitude to household • It was at length so prevalent, that the weavers of Paisley had a ball, which all their wives, daughters, and sweethearts, attended in costly dresses of gauze, such as the best ladies of London could scarcely have sported; which circumstance, hav. ing happened just before one of those great depressions of trade which sometimes befall the town, became a sort of melancholy epoch; and it is even yet referred to as a case of extravagant pride punished by an infliction from the hand of Providence. affairs is more excusable, as it unavoidably arises from their being engrossed, from their earliest years, by active exertions in the cotton-mill. It is, however, to be lamented, as it occasions a shameful degree of profusion, or, to use a more expressive native phrase, wastry, and precludes the possibility of any provision being made in days of prosperity for those periods of depression which so often overtake a manufacturing population. Paisley has been repeatedly mentioned in this work as the terminating northern point of the great Roman road which stretches from Carlisle through Dumfriesshire and Clydesdale. As might be expected, it was an important station for the troops of that illustrious people. Its ancient Roman name is supposed to have been Vanduaria. The remains of this camp or station are yet visible to the south-west of the town. But by far the most interesting monument of antiquity of which Paisley can boast, is, beyond question, its Abbey Church, of which the chancel still remains entire, along with the window of the northern transept. Converted into a parish church, this building, with its double tier of lofty windows, is still a magnificent and most impressive object. Attached to its south side, a small chapel is shown, containing a tomb surmounted by a recumbent female figure, which is usually termed Queen Blearie's Tomb. The personage referred to by the popular Renfrewshire epithet of Queen Blearie, is generally understood to have been Marjory, daughter of Robert Bruce, the wife of Walter Stewart, founder of this abbey, and mother by him of Robert the Second, first of the Stewart sovereigns. This lady is said by tradition, to have died of a fall from her horse at a place near Paisley termed Queen Blearie's Cross. Being then pregnant, her child was brought into the world by the Cæsarean operation; and tradition affirms that it was an unlucky cut from the knife of the surgeon on this occasion, which caused that imperfection in the sovereign's eye-sight which was expressed by the epithet King Blearie. That Dame Marjory should have been posthumously named from a personal pecu liarity of her son, seems strange, though by no means impossible; and Lord Hailes and some other antiquaries have expressed great doubts respecting the name and quality of the person here so splendidly entombed. The chapel, though little, is extremely lofty, and possesses a remarkably fine echo. The dingy iron-grey hue of these venerable edifices, and of the ancient part of the town which surrounds them, is such as to justify Sir Walter Scott's finely picturesque line, referring to Claud Hamilton, the last abbot and first temporal superior Grey Paisley's haughty lord was he. After passing from the hands of that person, the abbey and its lands became the property of the Dundonald family and a fine dingy old mansion near the church, now occupied by the common people, is pointed out as having been the town-house of that race of proprietors.* The whole was finally bought back about sixty years ago, by the Earl of Abercorn, representative of the original family. Nothing could testify so strongly to the early importance and wealth of this religious foundation, as the remains of a splendid wall which one of the abbots built in the fifteenth century around the abbey park. This wall was altogether composed of fine square polished stones, and extended about four miles. In the portion which still remains, there is a stone with the following inscription: They callit the abbot George of Shaw • This house is included in the list of the Earl of Dundonald's seats, attached to an article referring to his title in Salmon's Peerage, (1767.) Paisley contained at one time the town-mansions of several other respectable families connected with the county. |