# Flax processing

> From retted stems to fibre for linen

- Date: c. 8,000 BCE
- Era: Prehistory
- Domain: [Materials & Chemistry](https://lastcodex.org/en/domains/materials/)
- Rebuild stage: II (Settlement)
- Difficulty: 2/5
- URL: https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/flax-processing/

Flax processing turns the stems of the flax plant into long, clean fibre that can be spun into linen. The stems are pulled, left wet until microbes loosen the fibre from the wood, then dried, broken, scutched and combed. The oldest linen whose flax is not in doubt comes from Nahal Hemar, a cave in the Judean Desert, and dates from about 8000 BCE.

![Flax processing · From retted stems to fibre for linen](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/plate.DP6O24mO_Z1hDcE.webp)

## Legend

1. Pulled flax with roots and seed capsules
2. Bundles retting under water
3. Flax break
4. Scutching board and knife
5. Hackle
6. Fibre bundles in the stem (cross-section)

## What it is

Flax (_Linum usitatissimum_) is grown for its seed and for the fibre in its stem, from which linen is made. A stem of fibre flax is tall, thin and hardly branched. Under its skin, bundles of fibre run from the root to the top around a core of brittle wood. Processing flax means freeing those bundles from the skin and the wood without breaking them, then splitting and straightening them until they can be spun.

In the traditional European method the plants are pulled up with their roots, so that the fibre keeps its full length, and the seed heads are stripped off. The stems are then retted: kept wet until microbes loosen the fibre. Once dry, they are broken to crush the wood, scutched to knock the broken wood away, and hackled, which means drawn through rows of pins. What stays in the hand is line, long glossy fibre that a spinner dresses on a distaff for the spindle or the [spinning wheel](/en/inventions/spinning-wheel/). What stays in the pins is tow, shorter and tangled, which is spun into coarser yarn.

## How it works

![A flowering flax plant with pale blue flowers and round seed capsules beside a retted stem snapped in two, its pale fibres pulling away from the broken wood](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v1.DCrNb1fG_Z1cWY80.webp)
_When a retted stem snaps, the fibres peel away from the wood._

A flax stem is built in layers. Outside is a thin waxy skin. Under it, in the cortex, lie the fibre bundles, each made of many long, narrow cells. The middle is a woody core. Pectin, a gum present in small amounts, binds the cell walls together and holds the bundles to the skin and the wood. Retting breaks that bond. In water retting the stems are held under water, where bacteria that live without air digest the pectin. In dew retting they lie in thin rows on grass and fungi from the ground grow on them. Water retting is faster and gives a paler fibre. Dew retting takes three to six weeks, depending on warmth and rain, and gives a darker one.

Retting has to stop at the right moment. Too short, and the skin and wood still cling to the fibre. Too long, and fungi that feed on cellulose attack the fibre itself and weaken it. The usual check is to snap a few stems: when the fibre comes away cleanly from the broken wood, the flax is ready and is dried at once.

Once dry, the retted wood is brittle while the fibre stays supple, and the last three stages use that difference. On the break, a hinged wooden jaw is brought down again and again on stems laid across a fixed jaw, and the wood cracks into short pieces called shives. Scutching gets rid of them: a handful of broken stems hangs over the edge of an upright board and a flat wooden knife strikes down along it. Hackling finishes the work. The fibre is thrown onto the pins of the hackle and drawn through them, first through coarse pins, then through finer ones, which split the bundles, lay the fibres side by side and comb out the short ones as tow.

## How to do it

**Get the stems.** Grow fibre flax from seed, sown thickly so that the plants grow tall with few branches; it is ready to pull about 90 to 110 days after sowing, when the lower third of the stem has turned yellow. Pull the plants up by the roots rather than cutting them. You can also buy flax straw from a supplier of spinning materials. A handful of stems is enough for a trial.

**Ret them.** Tie the stems loosely in a bundle, lay it in a bucket or tub of water and weigh it down with a stone so that every stem stays under. Change the water when it begins to smell. After a few days, test one stem each day by snapping it. When the fibre separates cleanly from the wood, lift the bundle out, rinse it and stand it upright in the sun or a dry, airy place until the stems are completely dry and brittle. Alternatively, spread the stems thinly on a lawn, turn them after a week or so and leave them three to six weeks, watering them if the weather stays dry.

**Break and scutch.** Lay a few dry stems along the edge of a sturdy table and crush them with a wooden mallet or a rolling pin, working along their whole length and turning them, until the wood is in small pieces. Then hold the handful by one end, let the other hang over the edge of an upright board and strike downwards along the board with a flat piece of wood, such as an old ruler, until most of the shives have fallen out. Turn the handful round and do the other end.

![A sturdy metal comb clamped to the edge of a wooden table with its teeth upwards, a handful of long glossy flax fibres drawn through it, and a small heap of short tangled tow and woody bits beside it](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v2.X6_pg2YU_Z1NxRQ1.webp)
_A coarse comb clamped to a table does the work of a hackle._

**Hackle the fibre.** Clamp a strong metal comb with straight teeth, such as a coarse pet comb, to the table with the teeth upwards. Lay the tips of the handful across the teeth and draw them towards you, then work gradually back towards the middle; turn the handful and comb the other end. Go over it again with a finer comb. Keep what stays in your hand, the line, apart from what stays in the comb, the tow. Twist a few fibres of line between your fingers to feel how strong they are.

**Safety.** Retting water is a smelly culture of bacteria: wear gloves, wash your hands afterwards and keep the tub covered and out of reach of children and pets. Empty it into a drain or onto soil well away from wells, ponds and streams, and never ret flax in a stream or pond, which it pollutes. Hackle pins and comb teeth are sharp, so keep your fingers above the points and cover the comb when you stop. Watch your fingers with the mallet. Breaking and scutching raise dust: work outdoors and wear a dust mask. Long exposure to the dust of raw flax, hemp and cotton causes byssinosis, a lung disease of textile workers.

## History and evolution

In 2009 Eliso Kvavadze and her colleagues reported wild flax fibres, many of them spun, dyed or knotted, from layers of Dzudzuana Cave, in Georgia, the oldest dated to between 32,000 and 26,000 years ago. A group of textile and fibre specialists led by Christian Bergfjord replied that the evidence was not enough to identify the fibres as flax.

Linen made of flax survives at Nahal Hemar, a cave in the Judean Desert: thread and fabrics made without a loom. Caroline Solazzo and her colleagues list two radiocarbon dates on linen yarn from the lowest layer of the cave, about 8000 and 8300 BCE, and date the finds of that layer to between about 8200 and 7300 BCE. Nysa Loudon and her colleagues give 7065 BCE for the Nahal Hemar linen, and Gleba and Harris the 7th millennium BCE. A cord tied to a comb from Wadi Murabba'at, also in the Judean Desert, is older. Tamar Schick, who published it, described it as flax; Antoinette Rast-Eicher, who examined a sample, suspects it may be the inner bark of a tree.

Margarita Gleba and Susanna Harris describe early linen thread as spliced: strips of fibre were pulled from the stalk after a short retting, or none, and joined one to the next, and the pectin left in them helped the joins hold. The woven linen from the Fayum in Egypt, of about 5000 BCE, is spliced. So are many textiles of the lake villages of the Alps, made between 3900 and 800 BCE, where, according to Urs Leuzinger and Rast-Eicher, flax working grew out of long experience with tree bast. Measuring flax seeds from 33 of these sites, Sabine Karg found that from the 38th century BCE a smaller-seeded variety, which carries more fibre in its stem, was grown, while loom weights, spindle whorls and linen became more common.

![A bundle of dried flax stalks lying across a flat stone, with a wooden mallet resting on them](https://lastcodex.org/_astro/v3.ieCzMQ_D_SsxJc.webp)
_Pliny describes the dried stalks beaten with a mallet on a stone._

Full retting, breaking, scutching and hackling go with draft spinning, in which fibres are drawn out of a loose mass and twisted on a spindle. Gleba and Harris, following Elizabeth Barber and Hero Granger-Taylor, place the change to drafted linen yarn in Egypt around 600 BCE, and at about the same time in Italy and Greece. In the first century CE Pliny the Elder described the Roman method: the stalks were steeped in water warmed by the sun under a weight, dried, beaten with a mallet on a stone and combed with iron hackles.

In the 18th century water power reached the work. The first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in 1771, reported a mill invented in Scotland about forty years earlier, which broke the flax between three toothed rollers and scutched it with arms turning on an upright axle. Scutch mills came to Ireland from Scotland around the middle of the century; the first in County Down is said to have been built at Drumbeg in 1757.

## Key facts

- Oldest linen: Nahal Hemar cave, Judean Desert, about 8000 BCE
- Dew retting: 3 to 6 weeks on grass, depending on the weather
- From the hackle: Line (long fibre) and tow (short fibre)
- Water-powered scutch mills: Scotland, 18th century

## Requires

- [Rope & Cordage](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/rope/): Twisted fibres that hold the world (46,000 years ago)

## Leads to

- [Condom](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/condom/): A thin barrier against pregnancy and infection (c. 975)
- [Splints and casts](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/orthopaedic-immobilization/): Holding a broken bone still while it heals (c. 2,450 BCE)
- [Surgical sutures](https://lastcodex.org/en/inventions/surgical-sutures/): Closing a wound with needle and thread (c. 1,600 BCE)

## Sources

- [Identification of the earliest collagen- and plant-based coatings from Neolithic artefacts (Nahal Hemar cave, Israel), Table 1: radiocarbon dates](https://doi.org/10.1038/srep31053), Caroline Solazzo et al., Scientific Reports 6 (2016), 31053
- [Sumerian and Akkadian Industries: Crafting Textiles, in H. Crawford (ed.), The Sumerian World, p. 396 (linen at Nahal Hemar, c. 8000 BC)](https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203096604.ch20), Rita P. Wright, Routledge (2013)
- [Plants to textiles: Local bast fiber textiles at Pre-Pottery Neolithic Çatalhöyük](https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2023.103940), Nysa N. Loudon, Michèle Wollstonecroft, Dorian Q. Fuller, Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 49 (2023)
- [The first plant bast fibre technology: identifying splicing in archaeological textiles](https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-018-0677-8), Margarita Gleba, Susanna Harris, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 11 (2019), pp. 2329–2346
- [30,000-Year-Old Wild Flax Fibers](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1175404), Eliso Kvavadze et al., Science 325 (2009), p. 1359
- [Comment on “30,000-Year-Old Wild Flax Fibers”](https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1186345), Christian Bergfjord et al., Science 328 (2010), p. 1634
- [Oldest Flax? Not So Fast: Prehistoric Turkish Textile Was Made of Oak Fiber](https://www.haaretz.com/archaeology/2021-08-23/ty-article/oldest-flax-not-so-fast-prehistoric-turkish-textile-was-made-of-oak-fiber/0000017f-e17b-d9aa-afff-f97bfd7b0000), Haaretz (2021)
- [Linen Most Useful: Perspectives on Structure, Chemistry, and Enzymes for Retting Flax](https://doi.org/10.5402/2013/186534), Danny E. Akin, ISRN Biotechnology (2013)
- [Flax: Growing Flax (pulling, rippling, dew and water retting)](https://exhibitions.psu.edu/s/flax/page/growing-flax), Center for Virtual/Material Studies, The Pennsylvania State University (2022)
- [Flax: Preparing flax](https://exhibitions.psu.edu/s/flax/item/4867), Center for Virtual/Material Studies, The Pennsylvania State University (2022)
- [Flax processing in the Neolithic and Bronze Age pile-dwelling settlements of eastern Switzerland](https://doi.org/10.1007/s00334-011-0286-2), Urs Leuzinger, Antoinette Rast-Eicher, Vegetation History and Archaeobotany 20 (2011), pp. 535–542
- [Flax seeds from Neolithic and Bronze Age pile-dwelling sites in Europe](https://doi.org/10.1515/pz-2022-2036), Sabine Karg, Praehistorische Zeitschrift 97 (2022), pp. 90–109
- [Woven linen (Fayum Neolithic cloth)](https://www.ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt/textil/wovenlinen.htm), Digital Egypt for Universities, Petrie Museum, University College London
- [Pliny the Elder, Natural History, book 19, chapter 3: The mode of preparing flax (trans. J. Bostock and H. T. Riley)](https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0137:book=19:chapter=3), Perseus Digital Library, Tufts University
- [Flax-dressing, Encyclopaedia Britannica, first edition (1771), vol. 2](https://jimclifford.ca/early_encyclopedia_britannica/articles/1771/eb_1st_1771_006662.html), Early Encyclopaedia Britannica transcription, Jim Clifford
- [Scutch mills in the district](https://www.newry.ie/history/scutch-mills-in-the-district), Newry.ie local history
- [Hackle, ca. 1760](https://www.mainememory.net/record/14773), Davistown Museum, Maine Memory Network
- [Byssinosis](https://www.msdmanuals.com/professional/pulmonary-disorders/environmental-and-occupational-pulmonary-diseases/byssinosis), MSD Manual Professional Version

Fact-checked on 2026-10-18.

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