Making Connections

The Canaries of Norfolk

Yellow birds are not unique to the samplers of any one place but their frequent appearance on Norfolk samplers is related to a centuries-old local tradition—Read on for the back story!

A delightful pair of flanking canaries pulling on the sides of a cartouche

Since the time of the Roman occupation Norfolk was an important contributor to the textile trade, first as a supplier of raw wool., and beginning in the Middle Ages as manufacturers of desirable finished goods. The local sheep produced a wool of a special quality that enabled its long fibers to be spun into the fine yarns known as crewels and woven into desirable fabrics called worsteds, named after the Norfolk village where they were first made.

During the Elizabethan period, as business flagged, royal permission was sought and granted to recruit highly skilled weavers from the Low Countries to help reinvigorate the Norfolk textile industry. Known in Norfolk as The Strangers, this influx of Flemish (Dutch-speaking) and Walloon (French-speaking) artisans continued over the following centuries, becoming larger after the revocation of The Edict of Nantes in 1685, which deprived French protestants—the Huguenots—of all religious and civil liberties in their native country.

The county of Norfolk was the largest provincial center of Huguenot settlement in England, followed in numbers by Spitalfields, an area of London that became renowned for its silk weaving. In addition to their expert and creative weaving skills, the immigrants brought from their homeland a love of and attachment to the yellow songbird known as the canary

Bred in captivity, after the wild birds were transported to the European mainland from the Azores and Canary Islands by Spanish sailors in the 16th Century, domesticated canaries were, at first, known only in royal courts and wealthy households. Eventually they became available to the skilled artisan classes in France and in Flanders, where they were avidly bred. Brought to England by these French-speaking immigrants, the keeping and breeding of canaries became popularly associated with the home weaving workshops of Huguenot families in both Norfolk and Spitalfields.

By the 18th Century so widely identified was the image of the canary as melodic companion to the immigrant weaver at his loom that a poetic treatise published in London in 1709, Canary-Birds Naturaliz’d in Utopia. A Canto. Dulce es paternum solum would easily have been recognized as a metaphorical response to the controversial parliamentary “Act for naturalizing foreign Protestants” passed the previous year. In the poem the canaries (the immigrants) are opposed by a council of local birds but supported by the other local birds, the polemics of immigration being timeless and universal.

In the mid-19th Century the Norfolk enthusiasm for canaries and canary breeding developed into an international export business. By 1900 thousands of birds were shipped worldwide annually. In 1905, ten thousand Norfolk canaries were sent to the United States alone. During the same period forty Norwich pubs each hosted a canary club, and the Norwich City Football Club, formed in 1902, soon adopted their present nickname The Canaries, and began sporting their yellow and green team colors and canary badge.