The manufacture of paper began in Italy in the thirteenth century and spread to France and other countries on the Continent over the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin write that by the mid-fourteenth century, “paper was beginning to replace parchment everywhere” (32), adding that “by the mid-15th [century] France was self-supporting” in the production of paper, and that “Italy continued to be the main supplier of . . . England” (32). In continental Europe, a sophisticated and extensive system of producing and distributing paper was thus in place before the introduction of print. Inevitably, however, “the main customer [became] . . . the printer, the newest arrival. The press was a huge consumer of paper, using 3 reams a day per press. . . . Thus the development of papermaking centres favoured the development of printing centres” (Febvre and Martin 40). This situation in continental Europe contrasts sharply with that in England, where the first paper mill was established only in 1490, years after Caxton set up his printing press in 1476. England was an importer of paper when its printing industry began, and the head start that Italy, France, and the other European countries had established in papermaking would adversely affect the papermaking industry in England until the end of the eighteenth century.

Paper was manufactured in early modern Europe in water-driven mills, often converted from corn mills. The primary raw materials for papermaking were pure water and rags. White linen rags were used to manufacture the “best” paper, the white paper that was used for books. Alfred Shorter describes how “coarser rags, netting, cordage, canvas, bagging, and other materials of flax and hemp [were used] in the manufacture of brown and other common papers” (Shorter, emphasis added). Brown papers were used, as today, for wrapping and other non-print purposes. The rags and other raw materials were cut, sorted, washed, and then fermented. After fermentation, the material was poured into a trough, mixed with water, and pounded into pulp by “a battery of iron-tipped wooden stamping hammers” (Shorter) powered by the water mill. The process of pounding and beating “breaks down the fibre walls and enables the vital hydrogen bonding to form between the fibres. It is this hydrogen bonding which gives paper most of its cohesion and tearing strength” (Hills 3). Workers poured the pulp into a vat, where it was kept lukewarm and agitated with a pole (Shorter). “From the pulp, the vatman formed a sheet of paper by inserting a wire-meshed mould of the required size and giving it a series of shakes, so drawing off the water and causing the fibres of the pulp to intertwine and form a matted layer on the surface of the mould” (Shorter 14). Richard Hills calls this a “special printers ‘shake’ [which would] send a ripple of stuff across [the mould] to interlock the fibres and ‘close’ the sheet” (25). Another worker carefully pulled the sheets from the wire mould and stacked them in a quire of 144 sheets, each sheet interleaved with a layer of woolen felt to prevent them from sticking together. Workers put the quire on a screw-lever press and squeezed the water out of it, then separated the sheets and hung them on lines to dry.

The paper manufacturing process is relatively simple, but the work was difficult and unpleasant. Women and children most likely did the preparatory work—the sorting, washing, and fermenting of rags and other used materials, and this would obviously have been a dirty and smelly business. Some mills in England were closed in 1636 because the dirty rags allegedly were spreading the plague. Men probably performed the work at the vats, and this portion of the process would also have been difficult due to the heat and smell of the cooking material and the repetitive motions required to stir the stuff, pull it from the vat, and separate the sheets from the mould.

Shorter and Hill, in their histories of English papermaking, emphasize a distinction between white and brown paper—the white, linen-based paper used for print, the brown used for wrapping and other purposes. The ability to make white paper considered suitable for books was manifestly important to the earliest English papermakers. These producers were beset by competition from France and Italy. The mills on the continent had better equipment and more skilled workers, and they could therefore produce higher-quality paper at a lower cost, and import it into England. At the same time, French papermakers aggressively imported linen and other rags from England for their papermaking industry. To early English papermakers faced with this competition, it was important to assert that they could make quality white paper to meet the demands of their own country’s growing print industry. In 1690 the Company of White Papermakers attained a patent giving it sole rights to make writing and printing paper in England for 14 years. This patent was contested by established English papermakers who were not in the company, and who asserted their own ability to produce quality white paper. Evidence indicates that the terms of the patent were not strictly enforced: imports continued and paper mills outside of the company continued to make white paper. But these legal maneuverings convey the significance of “white paper” to the papermaking industry.

What conclusions can we draw about the paper on which the cheapest of print products, the broadsides, were printed? One possibility is that the white/brown paper typology that Shorter and Hills emphasize is an historical oversimplification and that there were varieties of paper, gradients of quality and color, between the white and the brown. Between the linen-based paper used in books and the brown paper used for wrapping all the “other common papers” that Shorter mentions but does not define. To meet the needs of the lowest end of the print market, the broadside ballad market, papermakers probably used some combination of linen and the “coarser rags, netting, cordage, canvas, bagging, and other materials of flax and hemp” that Shorter describes, in order to produce the cheapest “white” paper that was suitable for print. Such paper could have been imported or it could have been produced domestically. English papermakers such as those in the Company of White Papermakers sought a means to monopolize the domestic market by associating their manufacturing abilities with the high end of that market, with the book and its associations with the godly and learned. These papermakers might not be inclined to trumpet their ability to produce the lower-grade paper used for the profitable but controversial broadside ballads. The manufacture of this low- or medium-grade print paper thus falls out of the historical record. The ability of the English manufacturers to produce all types of paper increased with technological developments during the eighteenth century, and by the end of that century English producers were meeting domestic demand and exporting their product to other countries.

~Gerald Egan

Works Cited

Hills, Richard Leslie. Papermaking in Britain, 1488-1988 : a Short History. London: Athlone Press, 1988.

Febvre, Lucien and Martin, Henri-Jean. The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450 - 1800. Trans. David Gerard. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1976.

Shorter, Alfred Henry. Paper Making in the British Isles: an Historical and Geographical Study. Newton Abbot: David and Charles, 1971.