ABSTRACT
At what point the indigenous British production of carpets for use as floor coverings became separated from the main body of wool cloth manufacture and recognised as a distinct trade is far from clear. Oriental type knotted carpets, mostly imported, had from the time of the great and covetous Cardinal Wolsey, been only for the very rich. The lesser sort, when the fashion for Tote-cloths' developed, seemingly in the 17th century, were content with less expensive thick two-ply and later three-ply reversible woollen stuffs. Technically, given sufficiently robust hand looms, such 'ingrain' material could be produced in any location where weavers and suitable wool could be found and for a time this may well have been so in practice. By the 1780s however, the trade names given to such carpet material as 'Scotch', 'Kidderminster' or 'Kidders' indicate the main areas of specialised production, the former dating at least from the 1720s and the latter from the 1730s, to which were added by the closing decades of the century the West Riding of Yorkshire and the City of Durham.' The pattern having been set, these have remained the main centres of the carpet trade to this day, though with some developments elsewhere and with much diversification of product. A superior looped pile carpet known as Brussels, introduced into the Wiltshire town of Wilton from France in the 1720s under the patronage of the local aristocratic Herbert family, set a new standard which was quickly adopted in Kidderminster. This was followed by a cut pile version of Brussels, known as 'Wilton', also developed in that town and copied elsewhere so successfully that the Wilton location was marginalised in the trade by the end of the 18th century and has remained so. Ingrain production remained important much longer in the North and Scotland than elsewhere, but at the cheaper end of the pile carpet trade was overtaken by Tapestry while Patent or Royal Axminster was added in the 1880s as less expensive than Brussels, together with intermediately priced products of various kinds. Power loom weaving was not developed until the early 1850s. It then rapidly replaced the older handloom methods and led to a continuous development of mechanisation from narrow to broad looms and from the 1920s of rugs and carpets manufactured by non-traditional methods such as tufting and making increasing use of man made fibres.
