FULLERS
Form: Gk. gnapheus, Lat. fullo.
The fuller's trade was one of the most important and most widely extended in Greek and Roman antiquity. It embraced all the processes, now distributed among different trades, necessary for converting the web into cloth, the chief material used by the ancients for clothing. Again, it was usual to send clothes to the fuller for cleaning and working up. Clothes when sent to be cleaned were stamped with the feet in pits or troughs filled with warm water and substances which separated the fat from them, as urine, nitre, and fuller's earth. If the object was to felt the web, and make it thicker and stronger, the same process was gone through, and the cloth was then beaten with rods, washed out in clean water, dried carded with a kind of thistle or with the skin of a hedgehog, fumigated with sulphur, rubbed in with fuller's earth to make it whiter and stronger, and finally dressed by brushing, shearing, and pressing. The fuller's earth, when well rubbed in, prevented the clothes from getting dirty too soon, and freshened up the colours which the sulphur had destroyed. Some frescoes preserved on the walls of an ancient fuller's shop at Pompeii give a clear notion of the different processes. The fullones at Rome formed one of the oldest guilds. Like all mechanics, they worshipped Minerva as their tutelary goddess, and took a prominent part in her chief festival, the Quinquatrus.
Pictures and Media
MURAL PAINTING FROM THE FULLER'S SHOP, POMPEII. (Overbeck, fig. 193.)