Biggar and the House of Fleming

324 BIGGAR AND THE HOUSE OF FLEMING.
for breakfast, broth, butcher meat, and bread for dinner, and
parritch or sowens for supper. The gudewife, with her maids
and grown up daughters, besides attending to the dairy, spent
a considerable portion of each day in carding and spinning.
In preparing wool to make a very
fine worsted thread, a comb of the
constructiorl represented in the ac-
companying woodcut was employed.
It has long been out of use, and a
specimen of it is now rarely to be
met with.
The ancient implements of spinning were the distaff, the
spindle, and whorle. These implements, which were remark-
ably simple, had been in use from the earliest periods of which
we have any record. They are mentioned by Homer, Herodo-
tus, and indeed by almost all the ancient classic authors; and
Solomon declares that a virtuous woman " seeketh wool and
flax, and worketh willingly with her hands; she layeth her
hands to the spindle, and her hands hold the distaff." In the
ancient pagan mythology the three Parcse or Fates, called
Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, who presided over the birth and
destinies of man, are represented as engaged in the operation
of spinning. Clotho held the distaff, Lachesis spun the
thread of human life, and Atropos cut the thread, and termin-
ated the existence of each human being. St Catherine, in
more recent times, was the patroness of the art of spinning ;
and its votaries, and the implements which they used, had the
7th of January set apart to their honour, and hence called " St
Distaff's Day," or " Rock Day." An assemblage of young
people for industrial purposes was on this account called a
" Rockin." The readers of the poems of Robert Burns will re-
collect a reference to a meeting of this kind in the opening
stanza of his first epistle to Lapraik. "We quote from the ori-
ginal manuscript of this epistle, now in the possession of Adam
Sim, Esq. : —
" On Fasten e'en we had a rockin,
To caw the crack, and weave our stoken,
An' there was meikle fun and jockin',
Ye need nae doubt ;
At length we had a hearty yokin'
At sang about."