“Looms, weaving.”
Not quite correct. The word comes from the old english word “lome” which meant looms as well as any other tools. Heirlooms did not mean looms so much as any tool (which were the most valuable things one could inherit) left by the deceased.
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.
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.