SPINNING and weaving are believed to have developed as women's crafts because they were compatible with child rearing; they were interruptible tasks, like food preparation and other domestic chores. Given the high proportion of hours that must be spent spinning in order to support weaving, about 10:1, anyone available may have been recruited to spin, including children and old men no longer capable of heavy work. Nevertheless, textile implements from furnished Anglo-Saxon graves – spindle whorls and weaving beaters, shears and needles – are gendered, feminine possessions. Weaving, from classical antiquity at least, is presented in art and text as women's work, until the introduction of the horizontal loom into western Europe about AD 1000. This loom was operated by treadles, and its inception marks the beginning of mechanization and industrialization. It was a man's instrument. Before that watershed, and even after the horizontal loom's introduction, women wove on a vertical loom, and their weaving was probably of ten communal. An illustration in the ninth-century, Carolingian Utrecht Psalter, copied more clearly in the twelfth-century, English Eadwine Psalter, shows this collaborative, women's world. The woman on the left holds the end of a skein of thread on a forked stick, gesturing animatedly to her companion who holds a pair of shears. Two women work at a two-beam vertical loom. They are probably preparing the warp: one woman, kneeling, spreads the warp threads with her fingers; she holds what looks like a comb with an angled handle in her other hand.