A Memoir of Jane Austen

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38 Changes of Customs
required for forming the thread, which the cottager took by a
more direct and natural process from her own mouth. I remember
two such elegant little wheels in our own family.
It may be observed that this hand-spinning is the most primitive
of female accomplishments, and can be traced back to the
earliest times. Ballad poetry and fairy tales are full of allusions to
it. The term ‘spinster’ still testifies to its having been the ordinary
employment of the English young woman. It was the labour
assigned to the ejected nuns by the rough earl who said, ‘Go spin,
ye jades, go spin.’° It was the employment at which Roman
matrons and Grecian princesses presided amongst their handmaids.
Heathen mythology celebrated it in the three Fates° spinning
and measuring out the thread of human life. Holy Scripture
honours it in those ‘wise-hearted women’ who ‘did spin with
their hands, and brought that which they had spun’ for the construction
of the Tabernacle in the wilderness:° and an old English
proverb carries it still farther back to the time ‘when Adam
delved and Eve span.’° But, at last, this time-honoured domestic
manufacture is quite extinct amongst us–– crushed by the power
of steam, overborne by a countless host of spinning jennies,° and
I can only just remember some of its last struggles for existence in
the Steventon cottages.