Tapestry, cloth of gold, and other woven fabrics of great beauty and fineness, besides embroidery, were produced in convents, which in the Middle Ages were the chief centres of culture for women. So much was this the case indeed, that the spiritual advisers of the nuns at times became uneasy, and exhorted them to give more time to devotion and less to weaving and knitting "vainglorious garments of many colours." In that curious book of advice to nuns, the _Ancren Riwle_, composed in the twelfth century, the writer showed the same spirit, and opposed the making of purses and other articles of silk with ornamental work. He also dissuaded women from trafficking with the products of the conventual estates. These injunctions seem to indicate that women were showing some degree of mental and artistic activity and initiative. Royal ladies worked at spinning and weaving, and Piers Plowman tells the lovely ladies who asked him for work, to spin wool and flax, make cloth for the poor and naked, and teach their daughters to do the same. It is evident from old accounts that a good deal of weaving was done outside by the piece for these great households, and of course spinning and weaving were largely carried on in cottages as a bye-industry in conjunction with agriculture. Bücher gives a very interesting account of spinning as an opportunity for social intercourse among primitive peoples. In Thibet, he says, there is a spinning-room in each village; the young people, men and girls, meet and spin and smoke together. Spinning in groups or parties is known to have obtained also in Germany in olden times, and girls who now meet to make lace together in the same sociable way still say that they "go spinning." Spinning-rooms exist in Russia. In Yorkshire spinning seems to have been done socially in the open air, in fine weather, down to the eve of the industrial revolution. Spinning was one of the first works in which young girls were instructed, and thus spinster has become the legal designation of an unmarried woman, not that she always gave up spinning at marriage, but because it was looked upon as the young unmarried woman's chief occupation. Old manuscripts also show women weaving at the loom, illustrations of which can be found in the interesting works of Thomas Wright.