LOCAL SILK USED FOR ALTAR FRONTAL

Contributed by Valerie Kerslake for St Peter's Church Millennium Festival

The story: Altar frontals for St Peter's Church, Yateley, were made from silk grown in the village

Why the story is true

In 1840 GEORGE MASON, churchwarden, landowner and prominent Yateley resident, came to live at The Manor House (now Yateley Manor School). As well as the house, he bought 815 acres of land in Yateley, including the mill, and planted some of it with mulberries, cultivating his silk worms with such success that he showed his silk at the Great Exhibition of 1851. We have no record of where the silk was spun or woven; perhaps some of the work was carried out at The Manor House itself. In the school log book for July 7th 1876, the schoolmaster, Mr Padwick, notes:

If it was spun there, it still seems rather unlikely to have been woven there too. The pattern of damask requires Jacquard looms which are very tall - too tall for the ceilings at Whitchurch Silk Mills near Winchester, for example.

Humphries Weaving Co. in Essex who weave ecclesiastical silks could not tell whether they had woven George Mason's silk, but Mr Humphries at first was doubtful that it had been grown in England at all - the climate is not warm enough. He was eventually convinced by the contemporary references, saying that it must have been grown on the white mulberry (Morus alba), a tree that has a miserable little whitish berry but produces vastly superior silk.

A very inferior silk can be grown from the black mulberry (M. nigra) with the deep red juicy fruit (or even from lettuce leaves), but though in some cases this might do for the weft, the warp must be of superb quality with a very high tensile strength which can only be produced from the white mulberry. One acre of mulberry bushes produces one kilogram of silk, and each worm needs one kilogram of mulberry leaves.

It seems clear that George Mason knew what he was doing; he had been born in Bengal and had perhaps learnt about silk-growing in India. We do not know for certain where he grew his mulberries in Yateley but he owned two fields off Mill Lane named Silk Croft and Inner Silk Croft on the 1844 Tithe Map, and it is tempting to think it was here. Together they amounted to 12 acres.

Altar hangings

All Mason's hangings were in regular use at St Peter's until the arson attack in May 1979 when almost everything in the church was destroyed and the burning roof fell into the nave. After the fire, however, in the charred long wooden box in which the frontals were stored - which was labelled Made locally - two small fragments of silk were found. Packed amongst the other hangings, the flames and heat had just failed to reach them. One was a piece of green damask about seven by nine inches, carefully darned and beautifully embroidered with a vineleaf in shimmering metallic threads and tendrils in gold. The other was red, little more than one by four inches, and showed the tail of the dove from the centre of the frontal. It was embroidered in pale pink silk and edged with gold, and more broad gold lines were on each side of it.

As the fire was just after Easter the white festival frontal was still on the altar and so was totally destroyed, and here is one of the puzzles that others may be able to solve. The inventory listed a monogram donated by George Mason, and two or three people today believe they can remember the monogram IHS in the centre of the white frontal - or was it, they say, the green? However, a photograph of the white one taken in 1978 shows it to be richly and gorgeously embroidered with lilies and sunflowers but with no monogram, though the words Sanctus Sanctus Sanctus are worked along the top. Was there a second white frontal? Did the skilful and industrious ladies of the parish produce a whole set of alternative frontals, and all made from Yateley silk? George Mason died in 1887, and even if he ceased producing silk in the last few years of his life, the total output over some forty years must have been considerable, ample for keeping St Peter's in fine hangings and probably a good deal over for purposes yet to be discovered.

Easter Day 1877

On Easter Day 1877 John Mills, who had come to live in Yateley the previous year, wrote in his diary:

The Miss Masons would have been Emily, Margaret and Beatrice, George Mason's three unmarried grown-up daughters. The de Winton Corrys lived in Yateley Hall.

A few years later the Parish Magazine of 1883 contained an inventory of the Ornaments etc belonging to the Parish Church of St Peter, Yateley, and included, with the donor or source.

A hand-written correction in the margin inserts green beneath the red altar cloth, and 4 instead of 3 for the set of hangings. Perhaps the green ones were not quite complete.

The next issue of the Magazine contained this omission from the list:

Monogram on the Ferial (ie Festival) Altar Cloth from silk grown at Yateley, donor G. Mason, Esq