Samplers, items of embroidery made to practise or exhibit needlework stitches, have been an vital a part of women’ training for hundreds of years. In Britain, women stitched samplers from the Seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, gaining expertise such because the literacy, counting, and dexterity they’d should be profitable wives, moms, and mistresses of households or, in the event that they wanted to earn a residing, efficient home servants or members within the textile trades. Many women all through the British Empire – in India, Australia, and Sierra Leone – have been additionally made to sew. Some have been despatched to British missionary faculties and made to make samplers with Christian messages, whereas different women embroidered at house or at feminine academies. Although often a chunk of needlework made in Britain’s Caribbean colonies within the Nineteenth century involves mild, discovering examples from the 18th century is like discovering a needle in a haystack, because of neglect, environmental circumstances, or only a few being made within the first place. Nonetheless, regardless of the percentages, two 18th-century Barbadian samplers have just lately been recognized in British collections.
Since 2023 the Royal College of Needlework (RSN) has been digitising its assortment of roughly 10,000 textiles. Included on this assortment is a prolonged, slender sampler lengthy believed to be English. It’s, nonetheless, really a sampler from Barbados – the earliest identified Barbadian sampler in any assortment. The RSN sampler is a particularly uncommon and vital materials survival which illustrates what and the way white women have been taught within the slave-holding colonies of the British Empire.
Upon first look, and even nearer inspection, the sampler, made by Martha Collymore in 1771, seems to be very similar to the samplers made in England a full century earlier. English samplers from the second half of the Seventeenth century are slender, lengthy, and populated by the identical bands of floral, figural, and geometric patterns. Nearly all have not less than one of many patterns seen on this piece, equivalent to bands of stylised carnations and Celtic knots, a menagerie with clothed ‘boxers’ (male figures with palms up), and irises. The sampler encompasses a slender band of needlelace methods on the backside, simply above an inscription which reads, ‘MaRTHa COLLYMORe HeR SaMPLaR ENDed DeCeMBeR THe 24 1771 MC IC SC KC IW MW’. The sampler’s widest band, with a rose flanked by two birds and a flame-stitched background (parallel flat stitches which mix to create zig-zag or flame patterns), is an outlier, the one a part of the work that doesn’t simply match stylistically into the Seventeenth century. It’s this band that exposed
that Collymore’s sampler was made in Barbados.
A sampler on the Victoria and Albert Museum made by Jane Rollstone Alleyne in 1777 is the one different identified sampler to have an identical band, which mixes a floral motif widespread to Seventeenth-century samplers with a zig-zagging background extra fashionable in 18th-century samplers. One can guess that with a sample this uncommon the Collymore and Alleyne samplers have been made underneath the instruction of the identical instructor. The truth that the samplers are only some years aside and each embrace patterns most incessantly seen on earlier examples provides weight to this idea.
Alleyne’s unusual identify and on-line genealogical data made it simpler to search out her and uncover that she was born and raised in Barbados, not in England, as was beforehand assumed. She was born in St James parish, Barbados on 31 December 1767; the inscription ‘10’, her age, on the backside of her sampler corroborates the genealogical data.
Each the Alleyne and Collymore households had been in Barbados for over a century and have been, as plantation homeowners, invested within the establishment of slavery. Whereas none of Martha Collymore’s genealogical data have but been discovered, it’s possible she was born in Barbados round 1760. Data for her possible dad and mom, brother (born in 1758 in St Philip, Barbados), and maternal grandparents have been present in Barbadian documentation and match the units of household initials on the underside of Martha’s sampler.
Although we will glean a lot about Jane and Martha from their samplers, the nameless instructor they learnt from stays within the shadows. Whereas newspapers in Jamaica marketed each boarding and day faculties for ladies to be taught studying, spelling, French, music, dancing, and all types of needlework by English girls as early as 1760, there aren’t any such commercials in extant problems with Barbados Gazette, established in 1731, or The Barbados Mercury, begun in 1762. It’s probably that the households of the ladies who attended these faculties have been in a position to afford their daughters’ training due to the monetary stability and affluence afforded to them by slavery. Whoever the lady was who taught the rich white women of Barbados, it’s clear that she was borrowing from a historic English sampler custom. Provided that Seventeenth-century band samplers are the English samplers to which she had entry, she is unlikely to have come herself from England however, like her college students, was a descendant of early English settlers on the island.
The Alleyne and Collymore samplers are considerably uncommon, vital, and particularly early examples of samplers made in British colonies outdoors of what turned the USA. Along with the RSN, V&A, and Philadelphia Museum of Artwork examples, the Barbados Museum and Historic Society holds two Nineteenth-century Barbadian samplers; little doubt there are different related examples in personal collections. Collymore and Alleyne’s samplers present us that the needlework produced by the daughters of rich English settlers within the Caribbean stitched collectively the schoolgirl aesthetics of the British Isles and its huge empire. This discovery illustrates that women hundreds of miles away from the motherland discovered to play the a part of mannequin British womanhood a century late.
Isabella Rosner is a curator on the Royal College of Needlework.
