page 464 note b It may be of some interest to note here the methods by which the two plants named were, and still are, prepared for the use of dyers.
In the case of woad, the following extract from a work published early in the present century gives an account of the processes by which the raw material is rendered available for the dyers' use: “The plant, after being cut, washed, and partly dried, is carried to a mill, and there ground to a paste, after which it is formed into a mass or heap, and being covered to protect it from rain, is left to undergo a partial fermentation for about a fortnight. The heap is then stirred, well mixed, and formed into balls or cakes, which are exposed to the sun and wind to dry, and thereby obviate the putrefactive process which would otherwise take place. Being afterwards collected in heaps, these balls again ferment, become hot, and emit the odour of ammonia or volatile alkali…. After the heat has continued for some time, these balls fall into a dry powder, and are then sold to the dyer, who now seldom employs them without a mixture of indigo, which last the woad helps to deoxygenate and render soluble. Formerly, however, this preparation, fermented by well-known means, was employed alone, though it was incapable of giving a deep and bright blue colour, because the tingent matter was in union with too great a proportion of the other constituents of the plant. The colour, however, which it didgive was very durable.” Edward Bancroft, M.D., Experimental Researches concerning the Philosophy of Permanent Colours, and the best means of producing them by Dyeing, Calico-Printing, etc. (London, 1813), i. 166, note.Google Scholar
Woad is still cultivated for dyeing purposes both in Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire, and its preparation, with certain differences, is the same as that described above.
The same writer, describing the plant (Rubia tinctorum, Lin.) from which the noted madder dye is obtained, says, “This is properly the Zealand madder, and appears to have been greatly cultivated in that province during more than 300 years; the Emperor Charles the Fifth having encouraged its cultivation by particular privileges conferred on the inhabitants of Zuyderzee for that purpose; and Great Britain alone is supposed for a long time to have paid annually two millions of guilders (nearly 200,000l. sterling) for the purchase of Zealand madder; which I believe is never exported otherwise than in a prepared state.” Ibid. ii. 221-222. He then goes on to explain the manner in which the roots of the plant, which contain tho colouring matter, were dried by stove heat and ground into powder for export.
At the present day madder is imported in powder from the south of France.
An extract from another and earlier work, the Discorsi on Dioscorides of Matthioli, the Siennese physician and naturalist, will show the cultivation of madder for dyeing purposes in Italy in the sixteenth century. This writer says that the plant was well known in Tuscany everywhere where the dyeing of cloth was practised, and that as the dyers were known to buy every year an infinite quantity of the roots, the country people during the winter dug up these roots and sold an infinite quantity of them in bundles to the dyers. I discorsi di M. Pietro Matthioli, Sanese, medico ccesareo, etc.—nelle sei libri di Pedacio Dioscoride Anazarbeo della materia medidnale. In Venetia MDLXVIII. ii. 971.
From these remarks it may be seen that in Italy in the sixteenth century the madder roots were furnished to the dyers unprepared, who must therefore have had to grind them themselves. The fact here stated may show what was probably the practice at a much earlier time.
Pliny, writing concerning the distribution of this plant throughout the Roman empire, says that it was produced in nearly all the provinces in great abundance, and was used for dyeing wool and leather.
