“The lad’s too young,” Lizzie says.

“He’s old enough.”

“He’s barely five, Jamie.”

Jamie is struggling with the waist of his nankeen britches which seem to be shrinking by the week.

Lizzie sets the infant, William, in his crib and crouches down to help her man with the fastening.

“If you hadn’t stayed up till midnight blethering with John Adams, you could have gotten up there yourself.”

“In time?”

“In time.”

“Johnny will be fine.  He kens the drill.”

The waistband pinches and the situation deteriorates as James begins to button up his waistcoat.

“I’ll let it out.  Later,” she says. “Now, get your sheen on and get down to George Street. And send Johnny home.  He’ll need his breakfast.”

“What about mine?”

“You should have gotten up, James Esdon. Shouldn’t you?”

The baby is already beginning to girn again as she helps him on with his blue worsted coat.

“Twelve yards of cambric, twelve yards of muslin?”

“Ay,” he says.

“Mind and get what your due.”

“Ay,” he says.

*

It is a fine morning.  Jamie sets his cocked hat at an angle as he sets off down Storie Street towards Henry’s warehouse. The heavy bundle of cloth, the results of their week’s darg, is slung across his shoulder.

Lizzie is in the right.  He shouldn’t have sent Johnny to keep his place in the queue.  But Bobby was busy setting up the looms. If Jamie was here he would be 9 but Jamie’s dead and Lizzie needs to mind young William so Johnny is the placeholder, not yet 5.

If Jamie didn’t have a placeholder he wait half the day at the coo’s-tail of the queue: that or turn up looking like a rascal in his workday dugs.  And that wouldn’t do, haggling with Henry’s man looking like a ragamuffin.

With the boy’s help, Jamie will get his webs paid for early and Lizzie and the bairns will take a stroll,out past Ferguslie and up to the Brandy Burn.  Get some fresh air after a week at their looms.

It is summer.  On Storie Street, gay flowers blow on the window-sills of the weavers cottages.  Festoons of birds’ eggs decorate the window panes.   Here and there, the whirr and clack of a loom  still worries away a Saturday morning, struggling to make ends meet.

 But Lizzie is right, again…as always.  He could have risen sooner.

John Adam must have stopped mid-afternoon, for Jamie was still weaving when the chiel knocked on the door of Jamie’s workroom.  He had the newspapers and a bottle with him.

“Ay, Jamie. What’s a do?”

John settled on the bench on the far side of the loom. 

“I see the Dutch have joined the revolution and signed a peace with the French.  The Batavian Republic, they’re calling themselves.  First the Prussians, now the Dutch.  It’ll be the Spaniards next.  But when will it be our turn?”

“They signed a treaty?”
“Ay. At the Hague[i],” John said, snapping the paper open. “France gets Brabant and Maastricht for their troubles.  Freedom’s coming, Jamie.”

The shuttle of Jamie’s loom shot right again.

“It’d be good if it got a move on.”

“The law ought to prohibit only actions hurtful to society. What is not prohibited by the law should not be hindered; nor should any one be compelled to that which the law does not require.[ii] It’s coming.”

“You have that off by heart?”

“Ver’ near.  ‘The Law is an expression of the will of the community. All citizens have a right to concur, either personally or by their representatives, in its formation. It should be the same to all, whether it protects or punishes; and all being equal equally presents like light in clouds…something about a dusky ray[iii].’ Damn it! That bit needs work!”

And then they were off, of  course: Thomas Paine and the Friends of Liberty & Reform, gossip, universal representation, poetry and annual elections.

In time, Jamie decided he had done enough and Lizzie came down with the bairns, a bit of cheese and bread, to join the conversation.  As a Neilson, she kent more about politics & poetry than John and Jamie put together.   She already had relatives across the water in Vermont, in a place called Ryegate, where they enjoyed the liberties of the new American constitution.  Their town was full of colonists from Inchinnan, Lochwinnoch, Houston, Renfrew and Paisley, planning and deciding for themselves how their community will govern itself[iv].  Everyman free and with an equal voice and vote. 

Whilst here in Scotland, the ‘authorities’ in Paisley banned the annual Weaver’s march this year, for fear a riot would ensue[v].  A march which was originally intended to demonstrate the weaver’s loyalty to the House of Brunswick, even as the great Dr. Witherspoon, an author of the new American constitution, was sermonising from the pulpit in the Laigh Kirk[vi].  Changed days.

When they had had a good portion of the bread and cheese, and John had, generously, shared his bottle, he asked Elizabeth, ”Is there any word o Sandy Wilson[vii]?”

“Not a peep,” she said. “Not since he embarked.”

*

The queue outside Henry’s warehouse is longer than Jamie had expected.  Perhaps the fine weather has impressed upon everyone the urgency of getting paid and enjoying the fruits of their labour as soon as possible on this Saturday morning.  Carpe diem, as the Latins said.

Dozens of wabsters waited in an orderly, sociable queue that stretched along George Street and back towards the town, each with the bundle of their week’s produce at hand.  The queue was interspersed with a variety of boys and girls, earnestly preserving their family place in the sequence whilst sorely tempted to break ranks and play.  Only the fear of a beating kept the weans in place: and Johnny was too young. 

Johnny was well up the queue, near half-way, chattering tig with another boy a few years older. Seeing his father approach, the boy froze then turned and ran back up towards the head of the queue.  Jamie caught up with him clinging to the thigh of Adam Cumming, avoiding Jamie’s gaze.

“He’s ower young, Jamie,” Adam says. “That’s three times now you’ve lost your place.  Get away to the back! What kept you?”

Jamie feels sick.  He breathes out  and prepares to turn back towards the end of the queue.

“Johnny, come away,” he says.

Wee Johnny backs further behind Adam then inches back again, looking for maximum cover.

“Come away!”

“Och, I’m jokin’, min.” Adam says. “The boy’s fine.  I asked him to go ask my nephew Billy for something.  Didn’t I Adam?”

Adam seems surprised by this information then nods enthusiastically.  Jamie nods his gratitude to Adam and moves to set his bundle ahead of Adam.

“Ay, no.  He was behind me.”

The chiel behind Adam, Geordie Orr, looks black disgusted by the proceedings but shuffles back a step to give Jamie his place.  The stepping back ripples down the length of the queue, a wee shiver of disappointment.

“But, dad,” Johnny said.

“Ay. Well done, son.  That’s fine,” Jamie says, lifting the boy into his arms.  “You run back home and get your breakfast.  Good, lad.”  He kisses the boy and Johnny smiles as he is set back on his feet to run.

“Thank you, Adam.”

“No bother,” Adam says as the queue shuffles up towards the door.

Henry is one of many manufacturers in the putting-out trade, providing wabsters with thread that is to be hand-woven to order on the loom-steads of Paisley and the surrounding villages.  The weight if thread issued is recorded and the weavers are paid on the return of the finished cloth at an agreed rate for the bolt of cloth, assessed on weight.  Henry expects the same weight of cloth back as thread put out.

Adam half-turns, half-mumbles, half whispers, “I hear Sandy Wilson’s arrived.”

Sandy? In the queue?  How would he show his face in the town again. But know, Jamie realises: word. “He made it then.”

“Ay.  Philadelphia, they say.”

“Philadelphia?  Good news.  That is good news. We’ll share a toast at the next meeting of the Friends, will we?”

Adam is more abstemious than Jamie: he shrugs. “I’d think so.  Still.  Another stalwart gone.”

Sandy had been planning a meeting of the Friends of Liberty & Reform, at Falconer’s Land on Storie Street, when they arrested him and threw him in the gaol.  They had had to have a whip-round to raise his bail and a bit more to cover his fare.  He walked all the way though Ayrshire to Portpartick and took ship[viii].   Otherwise, the government would have given him free passage – like it or not – to New South Wales for 14 years[ix].  Poetry has its attendant risks – for Sandy was a poet as well as a weaver: but then again, in Paisley every second man’s a poet (or so they say).  And even speaking and thinking has its risks.

Didn’t Thomas Paine assert that “The end of all political associations is the preservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man; and these rights are Liberty, Property, Security, and Resistance of Oppression.”[x]  And aren’t the Friends a political association? 

Yet those who will speak out are transported like common felons, their only hope the intervention of the French or self-imposed exile in America.

It is Adam’s turn.  He takes up his bundle and enters the warehouse.  It is already past 11 in the morning.

It was Henry that first tried to get Sandy the gaol[xi]: not for sedition but a squib about William Henry, swickin billie that he is[xii].

Attend aa ye, when on the loom

Survey the shuttle jinking

Whase purse has aft been sucket toom

While Willie’s scales are clinkin’.

Criminal libel and incitement to unrest, they said.  Henry backed down, with a wee bit persuasion.  Not so Willie the Shark[xiii]. 

Jamie prides himself a fine weaver, especially of muslin.  The business used to be in silk but now it is cotton.  Before silk it was linen.  But still the same darg, careful in the set-up, the rhythmic making up of warp and weft, the broad-cloth bigging up on the front draw roller. Never one to waste a thread or skim a bobbin.

For the LORD loves the just and will not forsake his faithful ones. Wrongdoers will be completely destroyed ; the offspring of the wicked will perish.[xiv]

Though Sandy favoured the devil to do the work for William Henry.

Adam emerges from the warehouse with a scunnered look on his face.

“Mind yersel,” he says. “His scales are loaded.”

“He said you were lightweight, man?  How much did he gouge you for?”

“A shilling! That and some defect in the weave his eye can see and mine canna!”

The scales are always loaded, whether for justice or the weight of cloth and any defect, real or imagined, is gouged out in silver withheld from the promise.

“Our time will come,” Jamie says. “No – here am I, wi vengeance big//Resolv’d to calm his clashin’;// nor shall his cheeps and powder’d wig//Protect him frae a lashin’.”[xv]

“Ay, so you say,” Adam says. “But what’ll you do about it?  Eh? I’m away.  Your turn to be swindled.”

Adam passed him with whatever silver was in his pouch.  Jamie stepped through the warehouse portal[xvi].

Notes

[i] Treaty of the Hague, July 1795

[ii] Thomas Paine, The Rights of Man,1791: Article 5

[iii] Thomas Paine, ibid: Article 6

[iv] History of Ryegate, Vermont (electricscotland.com)

[v] A History of Paisley, John Parkhill

[vi] John Witherspoon – Wikipedia

[vii] Alexander Wilson, 1766-1814.

[viii] Radical Renfrew: Tom Leonard, Polygon, 1990

[ix] Under the Transportation Act 1790: ‘his Majesty hath declared and appointed… that the eastern coast of New South Wales, and the islands thereunto adjacent, should be the place or places beyond the seas to which certain felons, and other offenders, should be conveyed and transported … or other places.’

[x] Thomas Paine ibid: Article 2

[xi] Tom Leonard, ibid.

[xii] The Hollander or Lightweight by Alexander Wilson in Tom Leonard ibid.

[xiii] William Sharp.  Tom Leonard ibid.

[xiv] Psalms 37:28

[xv] The Hollander, ibid.

[xvi] It appears that James Esdon (1748-1842) emigrated from Paisley to Vermont about 1800. Elizabeth Neilson died in Ryegate in 1829.  James remarried and had more children by his second wife before he died aged 94.