Beside the point, as far as the wills you see in the early years of US household history and New England, where most of the weaving took place. They heard "loom" and thought "that big clunky thing in the barn that makes cloth." And they referred to the coverlet as heirlooms. Days of the year for the housewife was cleaning out the linen closet, putting in tobacco to discourage the vermin, and refolding the contents to avoid wear along the folds. They were a large repository of household wealth. I'm thinking particularly of the overshot coverlets that weavers were hired to weave for a share of the wool and linen that a household produced and spun themselves. While "spinsters" were unmarried females in the homes, often the young men found themselves at the wheels throughout long winters.
The rest of your post is accurate from my limited knowledge. My understanding is that weaving didn’t get less expensive till the 14th century, when Italian looms became common.
Well, gee, thanks. Weaving in Christ's time was a version of a frame loom , more like what you'd see the Navajos using for their fine rugs. There's lots of ancient Egyption art that shows these looms in great detail, and you can immediately see how unwieldy a very wide loom would be. This kind of loom provided most of the fabric for most of the population for many centuries to come. Garments are designed for Renaissance festivals today around the fact of the 18-inch wide loom in most feudal households.
Fabric did not truly become cheap and available until the world's cotton production increased, technology for ginning the cotton developed, and the British dominated the steam produced industry. Linen is still very expensive. Don't form a taste for linen sheets.
If you tour the museum in DC and look at the gowns of the First Ladies through the years, you'll notice something interesting. They're rotting right off the mannequins. Many of them are made of silk, which just rots. Likewise the old cotton and wool dresses, though not as badly as silk. But anything made of linen will look surprisingly new. It is resistant to decay. The Egyptians wrapped their mummies in linen that holds up for thousands of years.
Which is why the Shroud *might* be authentic.
It lasted at least until the early 19th Century. If you will recall, in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, when Scrooge was shown the future , the Ghost of Christmases yet to come, the servants were stripping the bed of the hangings and linens... as they were among the most valuable things in his estate. Used clothing had such a market that there were streets in London dedicated to its reworking and sale. Cloth was something you just did not throw away like we do today.
There is more about the linen used to make the Shroud at this site:
http://www.shroudstory.com/faq-burial-of-caiaphas.htm
I apologize for not knowing how to make it “linkable”, but if you copy and paste it into your browser, you can get there. There has been extensive research done on the fabric, and apparently the image could only have formed in this way on linen manufactured in the manner common in the first century, but not on linen made near medieval era. There are also extensive analyses on the site of pollens found on the Shroud, flower images found on it (perhaps as it was laid in the sunshine on bushes to dry), the Sudarium of Ovieto as relates to the Shroud (read the link, it is very interesting!) and some fine microscopic images of the linen. I think you will find the site quite informative! Happy Easter!
Hey, it is linkable, what do you know?!! :-)