The French prisoners at Yaxley Barracks, near Stilton, produced “pretty and useful articles such as baskets, workboxes, mats, etc.” (Mr. Alfred Tansley Soc. Art., 1860). These were decorated with “laid work,” a kind of mosaic pattern made of coloured straw splints, cut to various sizes and pasted on suitable foundations. “For the purpose of making these splints, they used a straw splitter made of bone, about two inches long, brought to a point behind which a set of cutters was arranged in a circle, the point entered the straw pipe separating it into so many equal sized splints” (Tansley). This instrument was soon copied by a Dunstable blacksmith named Janes (some authorities say Norman) who made some in iron and turned the cutting parts at right angles to an elongated stem, which could be used as a handle. These were subsequently also made in brass, and in 1815 other varieties, in the form of metal wheels set in wooden frames, appeared. Mr. Tansley says, “To this invention may be attributed the success which in after times has attended the manufacture of straw plait in England.” The two methods of working straws, either _whole_ or _split_, opened up a wide field for diversity of plaitting, and quickly novelties began to appear. From 1815 to the present day, at intervals sometimes short and sometimes very long, new designs of plait have been put on the market, and now there is no style of shape that cannot be suitably fitted up with one or more plaits. British plaitters have not been content to use only the straws grown in the five counties. They have ransacked the world for materials, _wood_ cut into fine shavings or splints, _Manila grasses_ or _hemp_, manufactured splints of _cotton_, _silk_, or similar fibres, stuck together in a flat ribbon called a “_lame_,” _horsehair_, _bamboo_, _raffia_, and many other articles have been used for the purpose. At one time 30,000 persons were engaged in the plaitting industry, but by 1890 the number had dwindled to under 3,000. The reasons for this decline were manifold. Although the district had produced, and was still producing, straws better than any other continental centre, yet about 1855 the demand for something different from the plaits made solely of straw induced foreign plaitting communities to plait fancy materials which before had been used for other purposes. Switzerland and France began to make pretty and delicate patterns of plait or braid, woven both by hand and by machinery, of all kinds of fancy fibres such as silk, horsehair (or crinoline as termed by milliners), fine ribbons, etc., in various combinations of one or two or more of the above articles either with or without straws. Further attempts in the way of decoration were made by intermixtures of glass beads and bugles. These very fanciful braids had a wonderful success, for they were especially adaptable for bonnets, which to about 1865 were much more in demand for fashionable wear than hats.