Until the invention of chrome tanning in the second half of the nineteenth century, little change had taken place in the three basic tanning methods for at least two thousand years. The most widely practiced method involved the use of vegetable tannins. Occidental tanners employed oak bark, gallnuts, and sumac leaves among their chief sources; other plants rich in tannins are found in every continent. Mineral tanning with alum, called “tawing,” has been in use since earliest time in Babylonia, Egypt, and probably China. Because the leather so made is snow white, workers in this specialty gained the name of “whitetawyers.” Tawed leather, although soft and stretchy, is very strong; quite appropriately, one of his eighteenth-century contemporaries described Richard Bland, the Williamsburg lawyer and political pamphleteer, as “staunch & tough as whitleather.” Currying—whatever it may have meant to Homer (or to Alexander Pope)—is not a method of preparing hides and skins from fresh-slaughtered animals, but a complex of processes for treating leather already tanned. These processes include smoothing the leather, paring it down to even thickness overall, especially working fatty matter into it for pliancy and water resistance, and giving it whatever surface dressing, color, and finish its intended use calls for. Prominent among such uses in the eighteenth century were shoe uppers, harness and saddlery, upholstery, trunkmaking, and bookbinding. [Illustration: _Two styles of carriage harness, one quite elaborate, the other fairly simple; both of the “breast-collar” rather than the now more familiar “neck-collar” type._ Diderot.] _CHIEF LEATHER CRAFTS_ A list compiled in London in 1422 recorded 111 groups or guilds of merchants and craftsmen then active in that city. Fourteen of these concerned themselves with leather or with articles made of it in large part: cofferers cordwainers curriers girdlers glovers leather dyers leathersellers loriners (or lorimers) malemakers pouchmakers saddlers skinners tanners whitetawyers Of these, only tanners, curriers, cordwainers, and saddlers showed up prominently in colonial Virginia—although always as individual craftsmen, not as members of an organized craft or guild. Cordwainers—the word comes from cordovan, a kind of sumac-tanned leather much favored in medieval England and made originally in the Spanish city of Cordoba—were shoemakers. The craft is to be carefully distinguished from that of cobbling, which is the mending of shoes. Although practically all colonial Virginia shoemakers also did shoe repairing, the trade of cobbling was looked on, especially by cordwainers, as inferior in status.