As part of the Gather Fiber Symposium events, there is a book talk coming up. It's unfortunately the same day as our Ipswich event so I can't go, but I thought it was worth checking out the book.
The Golden Thread: How Fabric Changed History by Kassia St Clair [review I found elsewhere]
It has a very good whole chapter on lace. It has a quick but effective summary of lace history. It has some of the price details of things like Elizabethan lace. It had a couple of other useful bits and references too. Including one about the black lace decay:
"Although used extensively in clothing and interiors during the seventeenth century--the 1624 will of Lord Dorset, husband of the well-known peeress Lady Anne Clifford, even mentioned the 'greene and black silke lace' that decorated his coach--black lace is often overlooked. In part this is because it is less striking in portraiture, but another, more prosaic reason is that very little has survived to be studied. The mordant used to fix the black dye to silk was acidic, making it brittle and fragile and in most cases, eventually consuming it altogether."9
The citation #9 says: "Wardle, p. 207; Kelly p. 246; Will quoted in Williamson p. 460.
Wardle is: Wardle, Patricia. "Seventeenth century black silk lace in the Rijksmuseum. Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, 33 (1985) 207-25.
Kelly is: Kelly, F.M. "Shakespearean Dress Notes II: Ruffs and Cuffs". The Burlington Magazine, 29 (1916), 245-50.
Williamson is: Williamson George C. a 1922 book about Lady Anne Clifford.
I would like to get that Wardle one, as it seems probably relevant to the Ipswich story. [edit to add: it's right on the web as a PDF]
Another bit just made me giggle. Lace as a career was preferred to domestic service and prohibited at one point.
"In 1589, magistrates in Ghent passed a law to prevent servants from giving up their positions to become lacemakers: only children under the age of 12 who still lived at home were permitted to continue making bobbin lace. A similar law was passed in the southern French city of Toulouse in 1649. So many women were engaged in making lace, the lawmakers grumbled, that finding domestic servants was becoming impossible. Moreover, they reasoned, lace-wearing had become so widespread that it was no longer possible to confidently distinguish between "les grandes and les petites".
