 Silk Mill provides high impact into the trade of the region, which is even greater if there is local resource of dyes to complete the process of cloth fabrication. Of course the trade is much higher in summer when the silkworms are in active state.
The 13th century saw an already changing technology undergo many dramatic changes. It is possible that, as with in England at the end of the 18th century, advances in the textile industry were a driving force behind advances in technology as a whole. Silk indeed occupies a privileged place in history on account of this.
At the start of the thirteenth century, a primitive form of milling the silk threads was already in use. In 1221, Jean de Garlande's dictionary, and in 1226, Étienne Boileau's Livre des métiers (Tradesman's Handbook) enumerated many types of devices which can only have been doubling machines. The instruments used were further perfected in Bologna between 1270 and 1280. From the start of the fourteenth century, many documents allude to the use of devices that were quite complex.
The reel, originally developed for the silk industry, now has multiple uses. The earliest surviving depiction of a spinning wheel is a panel of stained glass in the Cathedral of Chartres. Bobbins and warping machines appear together in the stained glass at Chartres and in a fresco in the Cologne Kunkelhaus (ca 1300). It is possible that the toothed warping machine was created by the silk industry |
Cotton Mill
