14 Jan Scutching sword story
Written by Tom Spence & Alison Cullingham, sharing their beginning in their flax adventure.
Alison and I bought a four-quarter Cape Cod style house, built circa 1800, on 12 acres just outside Chester, Nova Scotia, in 2015. The house and land had been derelict for about 40 years, with infrequent summer visits from its owners who lived in Connecticut but whose many family members still lived plentifully nearby. We were the fourth family to own the property, the last sale having been in 1923. In those days, with no easy way to move things, most homesteads were sold including the contents. In the case of our house, the 1923 sale included provision for the Grampie to continue living there with the new owners. Similarly, we bought it bought it lock, stock and barrel: dishes, cookware, flatware, furnishings, mouldy bedding and hidden spicy WW2 love letters included!
During our months-long cleanup to make the place habitable, we discovered in the eaves and in a dilapidated shed many artifacts, like four treadle sewing machines, but many that we could not identify. One of the curious items was a small wooden toy sword made of oak with a very worn “blade” edge. There weren’t any other toys about, so the sword seemed out of place. Later I saw a similar sword in an antique shop and we brought ours to the shop to see if it was comparable. The proprietor, who was a friend, didn’t know if it had any value or if it was even a toy, so he took a photo of it and uploaded it to his website, asking his patrons if anyone knew what it was. He immediately got several replies identifying it as a scutching sword. I said “Oh, great! A scutching sword…so… what’s a scutching sword?”. Our subsequent research discovered, of course, what scutching was and that flax must have been grown and processed into linen on the very land upon which we stood. We later discovered that many of the wooden artifacts we had seen were parts of spinning wheels (both Saxony and Great wheel types) and parts of a barn-frame loom. Sadly, the wheels and loom were too incomplete to resuscitate, but the sword still appeared to be functional!
We decided to dedicate 50 square feet of garden space to growing flax so that we could honour the sword and the history we had discovered. We have planted and harvested flax (in ever-increasing area) every year since 2016 and have learned how to process our flax manually, as it would have been done in the past, acquiring the necessary tools at yard sales or antique shops and making the ones we couldn’t find.
The last connection to flax that we found in the house was in 2023 when we had to replace a rotten exterior wall. Filling the draughty space between where the main floor ceiling meets the north wall in Alison’s spinning room, we found that bundles of now-mouldy tow and shive had been used as caulking, further proof that flax was not only grown and processed here, but even its waste had a valuable early use.
Alison is now an accomplished spinner and is soon going to immerse herself in weaving the linen she has spun so that she can make fabric to re-upholster a lovely chair we found in the living room. I have repaired or built the tools needed to process and spin the flax into linen and have learned to weave on a four-frame counter-balance loom so that I am knowledgeable enough to fix the loom when it needs fixing, and to help Alison on her weaving journey. All this on account of finding a cute little wooden sword in the attic.
I have attached a photo of the found sword (the darker one), and of a replica I made for our own use.