paper-maker is at work. The dipping out of the pulp with hand mould and deckle, the couching of the web on interleaving felts, and its transfer to be pressed by the brisk little boy, are the same processes in all points as those that have been described in the Japanese engraving. The processes of sorting and washing the rags, and of bleaching the half-made stuff are not shown in the cut, but they were not neglected. The screw press behind the paper-moulder is the only innovation of importance.
The development of paper-making in Europe cannot be traced with any degree of certainty. There are Italian authors who assert that linen paper was made in Lombardy and Tuscany as early as the year 1300, and that the Italian knowledge of the art was derived not from Spain or Sicily, but through the Greeks at Constantinople, who had been taught how to make paper by the Saracens. The earliest authentic mention of an Italian paper-mill is that concerning the mill of Fabiano, which had been in operation for some years before 1340, and which produced at that time nothing but the cotton card-paper. There is no record of paper-mills in the Netherlands during the fourteenth century. Paper was made at Troyes, France, in the year 1340. In the British Islands there was no paper-mill before that of John Tate, who is supposed to have established it in the year 1498. In Germany, a paper-mill was established at Nuremberg by Ulman Stromer about the year 1390.[1] But the different paper-marks in the home-made paper of German manuscripts of this period are indications that there were paper-mills in many German towns.
- ↑ The jealousy with which trades were then guarded is illustrated by the policy of Stromer. He obliged all his workmen to take an oath that they would not reveal the process, nor practise it on their own account, He had two rollers and eighteen stampers, and was about to put in another roller, when he was opposed by his Italian workmen, who probably thought that this extension of the works would give him a monopoly, and would deprive them of all opportunity of obtaining work from any rival manufacturer. The mutineers were brought before the magistrates and sent to prison. They afterward submitted and returned to work, but were allowed to renounce their oath of obligation.
