LINEN, in commerce, a well known kind of cloth, chiefly made of flax.—Linen was not worn by the Jews, Greeks, or Romans, as any part of their ordinary dress. Under-tunics of a finer texture supplied the place of shirts: Hence the occasion for frequent bathing. Alexander Severus was the first emperor who wore a shirt: but the use of so necessary a garment did not become common till long after him.
The linen manufacture was probably introduced into Britain with the first settlement of the Romans. The flax was certainly first planted by that nation in the British soil. The plant itself indeed appears to have been originally a native of the east. The woollen-drapery would naturally be prior in its origin to the linen; and the fibrous plants from which the threads of the latter are produced, seem to have been first noticed and worked by the inhabitants of Egypt. In Egypt, indeed, the linen manufacture appears to have been very early: for even in Joseph's time it had risen to a considerable height. From the Egyptians the knowledge of it proceeded probably to the Greeks, and from them to the Romans. Even at this day the flax is imported among us from the eastern nations; the western kind being merely a degenerate species of it.
In order to succeed in the linen manufacture, one set of people should be confined to the ploughing and preparing the soil, sowing and covering the seed, to the weeding, pulling, rippling, and taking care of the new seed, and watering and dressing the flax till it is lodged at home: others should be concerned in the drying, breaking, scutching, and heckling the flax, to fit it for the spinners; and others in spinning and reeling it, to fit it for the weaver: others should be concerned in taking due care of the weaving, bleaching, beetling, and finishing the cloth for the market. It is reasonable to believe, that if these several branches of the manufacture were carried on by distinct dealers in Scotland and Ireland, where our home-made linens are manufactured, the several parts would be better executed, and the whole would be afforded cheaper, and with greater profit.