Quilting in the North of England

Traditional quilting is a functional needlework, forming a textile ‘sandwich’ of two layers of cloth with a wadding placed evenly between them, held together by lines of stitching. The sandwich is thus of a uniform thickness and provides warm and cheap material for clothing or bedding. Corded and stuffed quilting, however, are purely decorative with only parts of the work wadded to raise the design.‘Quilt’ comes from the Latin culcita - a stuffed cushion or mattress. Some of the quilts mentioned in medieval documents may have been mattresses, but by at least the fifteenth century the word seems to have its modern meaning of a padded coverlet. A will of 1477 lists various articles of bedding, distinguishing between ‘unum federbedd’ and ‘unum twylt’. This quilt was probably a simple affair of wool or linen with carded wool as the wadding, but in the sixteenth century elaborately worked silken quilts appear in inventories, and during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries such quilts were often embroidered. A variety of materials seem to have been used: an Essex inventory of 1691 lists ‘in the pantry chamber’ a ‘gray searge quilt, the like curtains and valens’ and ‘in the parlor chamber’ a ‘painted callicoe quilt

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