This is excellent advice for the treatment (or apparent maltreatment, in linen’s case) of natural fabrics.
Here’s some additional info based on personal experience over many decades and numerous ways of doing laundry from ancient (well, early 1960s) to modern.
Wool. A splendid outer layer, since rain sits on rather than soaks in, but needs care when washing, and even more when drying. Don’t wash a woollen garment on Hot, and definitely don’t dry it that way. If you do, your favourite woolly pully will shrink to something for a child, and a child’s woolly pully into something for a doll. I have done this, and it was not well appreciated except, way way back, by my small sister and presumably by her nattily pullovered favourite doll.
Cotton. Will indeed shrink a bit after washing and drying, but fortunately will stretch again during wear. Can be washed very hot to get rid of Those Annoying Stains, and by Very Hot I mean boiled. It’ll still stretch back - eventually - and although sometimes uncomfortably snug during the stretching process, will nevertheless be nice and clean.
Silk. Usually expensive, so accordingly laundered with probably more care than it needs, since this is a fabric once used (in many layers, granted) as armour. Does Not Chafe, which is why it was worn as scarves by fighter pilots who had to keep turning their heads in case of The Hun In The Sun. “Silk hiding steel” is appropriate, because a lady with a Hermés (not “an ‘ermes”, you pronounce the H) silk scarf and something to weigh it with is not as unarmed as she seems.
Linen. The 600lb gorilla of the fabric world, only bettered by hemp. Can have a weave tight enough to carry water without dripping - especially after the weave soaks and swells - and a tensile strength enough to carry pounds and kilos of it. (You can still buy collapsible “canvas” - usually linen or hemp - buckets…) @dduane and I inherited a lot of Irish Linen from my Mum, some still in original boxes with original washing instructions. Those instructions were, more or less, “rub soap into stubborn stains, scrub thoroughly and boil until clean”.
Where linen and hemp fabrics are concerned…
Even though she had a succession of increasingly modern washing machines, Mum also had and occasionally used - or more accurately supervised my use of - some quite old-fashioned laundry equipment.
Linens with stubborn stains were indeed scrubbed thoroughly, using a block of hard soap then a washboard, and an impressive abs workout it was…
Then the scrubbed stuff was boil-washed in Mum’s washing machine (which could reach a genuine 100°C rolling boil) before being rinsed, passed through the mangle (or wringer, more in this post) and pegged out on the washing-line to dry.
As i hunted up illustrations I (re-)discovered a Terry Pratchett Discworld connection. Remember the “copper stick” used by Granny and Nanny to summon the demon in “Wyrd Sisters”?
“What are you going to try?” said Granny. Since they were on Nanny’s territory, the choice was entirely up to her.
“I always say you can’t go wrong with a good Invocation,” said Nanny. “Haven’t done one for years.”
Granny Weatherwax frowned. Magrat said, “Oh, but you can’t. Not here. You need a cauldron, and a magic sword. And an octogram. And spices, and all sorts of stuff.”
Granny and Nanny exchanged glances.
“It’s not her fault,” said Granny. “It’s all them grimmers she was bought.” She turned to Magrat.
“You don’t need none of that,” she said. “You need headology.” She looked around the ancient washroom.
“You just use whatever you’ve got,” she said.
She picked up the bleached copper stick, and weighed it thoughtfully in her hand.
“We conjure and abjure thee by means of this—” Granny hardly paused – “sharp and terrible copper stick.”
It’s one of these, not made OF copper but meant for use IN a copper.
Mum had one, originally Granny’s, which kept getting pinched to play the role of sword, baton or whatever, though its official purpose was to stir, untangle and finally remove laundry which had been boiled in a “laundry copper”:
This one shows how it straddled two gas jets, but Nanny Ogg’s copper had a fireplace space under the actual cauldron (though in summer she used it as a beer cooler).
These cauldrons were still called “coppers” even when more cheaply made of iron. It’s another instance of how vacuum cleaners became “hoovers” and sticking-plasters became “band-aids” etc., etc., no matter what brand they really were.
“Boil”, however, wasn’t a figurative term. It meant what it said, and those thoroughly scrubbed linens (cottons, too) would bubble merrily for quite a while “until clean”.
Coppers were also used for cooking, with perhaps the most famous literary instance being chez Cratchit in “A Christmas Carol”:
“A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastry-cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress’s next door to that! That was the pudding!“
Mum initially had a separate electric boiler - IIRC it was Burco brand, which still makes much smaller boilers for catering, though ours was never used for anything except laundry - but mostly I remember the boil being done in her washing machine.
More modern machines only go to 90-95°C, sometimes just 60°C, but when her Hoover was running at full belt, things got as lively as any pot on a hob even before the agitator started churning. Never mind closing its lid to avoid mess, when a boil-wash was taking place that lid was also a needful safety precaution against scalding splashes.
Removal by copper stick was superseded by use of tongs, and Mum had a set just like these…
…though I don’t think hers had such an apt name.
Stirring with the copper stick was replaced by washing with a posser, which pumped up and down, or a washing dolly, which rotated.
Both actions have been replicated by washing-machines, and though variants of the dolly rotation became almost standard in tub washers, the posser did appear in an early 20th-century hand-operated machine…
…as well as the Frigidaire “Jet Cone” washer…
…whose action, TBH, reminds me of certain non-laundry gadgets I saw many years ago in The Pleasure Chest on Santa Monica… :-P
Modernised possers or even original designs are still available today.
Whenever you read in stories about avoiding trouble with laundresses, those devices along with scrubbing, wringing out and cranking mangles are why. Regular workouts with laundry equipment gave them the sort of muscles nobody wanted to provoke.
I’ve already mentioned “A Christmas Carol” and, given the time of year (posted 22nd December 2024) this ought to end with another one, so…
As shepherds washed their socks by night,
All seated round the tub,
A bar of Sunlight soap came down
And they began to scrub…
