Knitting was mechanised before weaving and nobody wanted it

A machine that arrived too early

The stocking frame was invented in England at the end of the sixteenth century, and it was a genuinely remarkable piece of engineering: a bank of hooked needles that formed a whole row of loops at once, in place of a hand knitter making them one at a time. It predates the mechanisation of spinning and weaving by roughly two centuries.

It was famously refused a patent by the crown, on the grounds that it would put hand knitters out of work. Whether that account is exact in every detail is debated, and the outcome is not: the machine was not taken up in England on any scale for a long time, and its inventor took it abroad.

The refusal is worth pausing on, because the objection was correct. Frame knitting did displace hand knitters, and the displacement was a live political issue in the same regions for the next two centuries, occasionally violently.

Why stockings specifically

The machine was built for stockings, and the reason is that stockings are the hardest thing to make from woven cloth. A leg is a compound curve that changes circumference continuously, and woven fabric has almost no give, so a woven stocking has to be cut and seamed and still fits badly.

A knitted fabric solves this by construction, since a structure of interlocking loops stretches in every direction and returns. It conforms to a leg without being cut to a leg, and it can be shaped during knitting by adding or dropping stitches rather than by cutting cloth away.

That is why knitting occupied the hosiery trade for centuries before it occupied anything else. The advantage over weaving is largest exactly where the body is most awkward.

From flat frames to circular machines

The early frames knitted flat panels, which then had to be seamed up the back of the leg. That seam is the reason old stockings have a line running up the calf, and it persisted long after it stopped being structurally necessary, because people had come to expect it.

Circular knitting machines, which produce a continuous tube, removed the need for the seam entirely. Combined with the arrival of fine synthetic yarns capable of being knitted very finely, they made the seamless stocking possible and reorganised an entire industry in a few decades.

The same circular principle underlies almost all T-shirt fabric today. Jersey is knitted as a wide tube on a circular machine, slit open, and then cut and sewn like woven cloth — which is why a cheap T-shirt sometimes has a side seam that spirals slowly around the body as the fabric relaxes.

Fishermen, islands and the naming of cloth

Hand knitting continued alongside all this, particularly in coastal communities where dense wool garments were working clothing. Several of those places gave their names to garments and to fabrics, and the names outlasted any connection to the place.

The heavy hand-knitted pullover of the North Atlantic fishing communities was working kit chosen for practical reasons: wool insulates when damp, a dense knit resists wind, and a garment knitted in one piece has no seams to fail. The patterns that now read as decorative frequently had structural functions, creating thicker areas where thickness was useful.

The romantic stories attached to these garments should be treated with care. Several widely repeated claims about pattern meanings and identification of the drowned are not well supported by evidence, and appear to have been developed later. The garments are genuinely old; some of the folklore around them is not.

How knitwear became ordinary clothing

For a long time knitted fabric was underwear, hosiery and working garments, and it appeared as outerwear mainly in sport. That is where the change came from, as it did for so much else — knitted garments were adopted for athletic use because they moved with the body, and then followed athletes into ordinary life.

The decisive commercial step was the use of knitted jersey for dresses and outerwear rather than for undergarments, which took a fabric associated with utility and gave it an entirely different position. It worked because the fabric’s properties were real: jersey drapes, stretches and forgives fit in ways woven cloth cannot.

The result is a wardrobe now built mostly from knitted fabric without most people noticing, since a T-shirt, a jumper, socks, underwear and much sportswear are all loop structures. Weaving is what we picture when we think of cloth. Knitting is what we actually wear.