I've been on a bit of a buzz over the last year or so to level up my sewing skills and learn a bit about medieval clothes, and this has become a low-key plan to make myself a (English or NW European) medieval wardrobe. Eventually it would be good to have kit that is as authentic as I can get in terms of designs, techniques, and materials, but for the time being, I'm being pretty relaxed about all that and mostly learning stuff.

And so, here I now have an enormous pair of medieval underpants (braies - or a breech). From what I can make out, this general sort of garment would fit OK for two or three hundred years up to the early 14th century - it seems pretty damn generic. I'm hoping to make a pair of hose (separate leg coverings from foot to thigh), and having braies like this will allow the hose to be attached.

Aside from having a serviceable (and comfortable!) garment, this was my first time sewing with linen thread, which takes some getting used to compared with modern, synthetic threads. The fabric I used is a linen-cotton blend, so not right for the period, but not ridiculously out, and it's all natural fibres, which is nice.

#HistoricalClothing

How Much Did a Shirt Really Cost in the Middle Ages?

Some people on the Internet are curious about how much a shirt cost in the middle ages. Now you could try to answer that question by trying to calculate how long it would take to spin and weave the linen and sew the shirt, combining your guesses in an elaborate chain of assumptions using your modern education. A certain Eve Fisher imagined and calculated and came up with the figures $3500 or $4200 for a shirt like those depicted by painters like Peter Brueghel the Elder. This has been re-posted by a number of popular websites, and several weavers and spinners have dropped by her website to comment that they are not so sure about some of her assumptions. But did you know that we can skip all of these guesses and calculations, and the questions which they pose about whether we spin and weave as fast as people in the past, and just ask medieval people how much they paid for a shirt?

People in the 15th and 16th century have left us whole rooms full of accounts where they listed how much they had spent on particular items. Eve Fisher used a 16th century Dutch painting as her example of a typical medieval shirt, so lets look at some accounts from Tudor England. At the court of Henry VIII, a shirt consumed 2 or 3 ells (225 or 338 cm) of linen, probably somewhere between 60 and 100 cm wide, and usually worth something between 6d (six pence) and 12d the ell. Making up a shirt cost 2d unless it was embroidered. Shirts for low-ranking servants cost amounts like 14d, 19d, and 20d (pence). (Caroline Johnson, The King’s Servants, pp. 12, 20, 21-23).

What is that like in modern money? Well, most families in late medieval England had incomes between 2 and 5 pounds English a year (much lower than that, and the man was unlikely to be able to afford a spouse and feed children well enough that they lived; much higher, and they had to be living off the work of others). Christopher Dyer reckons that people in late medieval England usually worked about 240 days a year after allowing for holidays, festivals, illness, and times when they showed up at the shop and the master was not hiring journeymen that day, so an income in pounds a year is more or less pence (1/240 of a pound £) a day (240 workdays in a year). So the shirts of humble servants at Henry VIII’s court cost between 3 and 10 days’ income. That would be similar to someone who earns 10 dollars or Euros an hour spending 240 to 800 dollars or Euros on an item today. (Of course, in the 15th and 16th century, people spent much more of their incomes on food, fuel, and clothing than they do in Europe or European settler societies today, and much less on rent, transportation, and medical care … but it seems that most people could make or obtain one or two new shirts every year or so).

I think it is great that Eve Fisher tried to help people imagine what life was like before the 20th century when almost anything made by human hands was expensive. Before the 20th century, many people could only afford one new outfit a year, and the poor sometimes had to go without underwear or pawn their winter clothing in summer. It was very easy to spend a month’s income on a single garment. And Fermi problems are good geeky fun. But I think it would be better to skip the fanciful calculations and move straight to how much things actually cost and asking why that was so. Finding sources for the prices of everyday things is not easy, but I hope that this post helps people move straight to the sources rather than having to guess how long it would have taken to make a shirt.

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Further Reading:

• Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1989) {on pp. 175, 215, Anicia atte Hegge transferred her farm to her daughter-in-law in exchange for lifetime maintenance including a shirt worth 8d. every year in a decade when a thatcher’s mate earned 1 1/4d. per day, so the shirt was worth 6.4 days’ work for a beginning worker}
• Tracy P. Hudson, “Variables and Assumptions in Modern Interpretation of Ancient Spinning Technique and Technology Through Archaeological Experimentation,” ExArc https://exarc.net/ark:/88735/10147
• Caroline Johnson, The King’s Servants: Men’s Dress at the Accession of Henry VIII (Fat Goose Press, 2009) {available on Etsy}
• Sean Manning, “Historical Prices for Gamers and Writers” {many examples of garments costing a month’s income or more}

A good example of the clothing of poor people any time from the Bronze Age to the 19th century is Cato the Elder, de Agri Cultura, chapter 59: farm slaves should be given a tunic and a cloak (sagum) in alternate years, and the old tunics or cloaks should be cut up and made into patchwork. According to Geoffrey Kron, many farmhands in 19th century Naples were poorer than the slaves of thrifty Cato. The authors of the English sumptuary law of 1363, which was so strict that no court in England tried to enforce it, allowed men earning £3 to 5 a year to spend a third of that (2 marks, 4/3 pounds) on the cloth for one outfit.

Edit 2020-07-22: Changed one phrase in the first paragraph which sounded a bit harsh.

Edit 2020-09-14: Trackback from Ecofrugals. Their beautiful watercolour avatar is causing problems with my CMS so I will link this way instead.

Edit 2021-04-16: Added data and page reference in Christopher Dyer’s book

Edit 2025-04-02: block editor

#economicHistory #HenryVIII #historicalClothing #medieval #modern #tunicCosts

I took a couple of photos of the cloak I finished the other day, based on the C14th "Bocksten man" cloak, though not a faithful reproduction. A couple of the buttons are wonky (and I think I may remake them) but otherwise I am very pleased with it. I don't currently have a use for it, so it'll probably be part of my potential trading stock *.

* I'm not selling stuff, but happy to trade something I have made for something cool.

#Cloaks #HistoricalClothing #HandCrafts

Iranian Trousers for Plataea

People representing Median, Persian, or Saka soldiers at Plataea in 2021 will need trousers. Not everyone needs them: the King rules many lands full of all kinds of men, many of whom have not adopted the Median dress. But reenactors representing men (and possibly women?) from those nations will need them.

One kind of evidence to use is artwork. Aside from the reliefs from Persepolis, the goldsmith’s work from Scythian tombs and the Oxus Treasure, and the mosaic from Pompeii which everyone knows, you will want to have a close look at some of the glazed terracottas of servants from Susa in Forgotten Empire: The World of Ancient Persia or on achemenet and of course at the tomb paintings from Tatarlı, Turkey.

By far the most important archaeological find are the trousers of saltman No. 4 from Chehrābād, Iran, radiocarbon dated to around 405-380 BCE. The saltman is still wearing trousers tucked into his shoes and covered by the skirt of his coat, and all of the textiles are so delicate and salt-encrusted that they cannot be removed, spread flat, and examined. What we know can be summarized in the following few sentences:

• The trousers are woollen, tabby weave, 8 z-spun weft threads per cm, 11 s-spun warp threads per cm.
• There are lateral seams in the trouser legs to ankle, and a vertical slit in the lateral thigh at hip level with the skin of the deceased exposed underneath. (Whether the seams are at the medial leg (inner thigh) or lateral leg (outer thigh) is not clear to me)
• A red woollen thread is sewn along the side seams hiding them except at the slit.
• Overall, they strike the excavators as loose and baggy.

There is no published information about stitches, thread, or dye of saltman 4’s trousers (the cloth looks natural white to me). Edit: Dr. Grömer describes the trousers and tunic as “made of a sturdy, plain natural white woollen cloth” (aus robustem einfarbig naturhellem Wollstoff bestehend).

*** Edit 2019-11-25: Since this was written, I got back in contact with Dr. Grömer and a future post may talk about her understanding of these trousers as described in an article from 2016, Durchdacht gemacht: Die Kleidung eines Salzmannes aus Chehrabad, Iran. Universum Magazin 3/2016, pp. 108-109. She has visited Iran and examined the mummy, I have not! ***

Out of all the trousers more than a thousand years old I have seen published, these look most similar to the Bronze Age trousers from Yanghai tombs M21 and M157 near Turfan in Xinjiang. The first, best-preserved pair have been radiocarbon dated to a 95% confidence interval of 1122-922 cal. BCE; fibres from the second tomb have been radiocarbon dated to 1261-1040 cal. BCE.

Similar short trousers (“breeches” in Middle English) are known from graves in the Caucasus region in the 7th to 10th centuries CE. Two are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (accession number 1999.153.40 and 1999.153.43). There are photos of them while they were more intact in an article by Nobuko Kajitani. These consist of two rectangular legs and a square or diamond-shaped gusset for the crotch. Bishop Timotheos of Ibrim (d. after 1372) in Nubia wore similar trousers of undyed cotton cloth with two rectangular pieces for the legs and a gusset of two right triangles, a slightly larger one in back and a slightly smaller one in front sewed bias to bias. His trousers had drawstrings tied at the centre front not the hips. Today, this style of trousers are known as shalwar and worn in Kurdistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

Information in English or German about the breeches from Tuekta kurgan 1 and the woollen trousers from Alakha-1 site and the Verkh-Kal’djin-2, also in the Altai, is harder to find, but photos and diagrams in the Russian publication show that the short trousers from Verkh-Kal’djin-2 have a piece for each leg and a rectangular or diamond-shaped gusset in the crotch. The Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age trousers from Chärchän in the Tarim Basin are also said to have been made this way.

Trousers from Late Roman Denmark and Egypt are also known. These have seams up the back of the legs (unlike saltman 4’s trousers) and a wide gusset in the back with a narrow tail between the legs. Because this style of trouser is not documented in the Near East until Roman times, I would avoid it unless you are already good at making Thorsberg trousers.

The Yanghai trousers have a stepped gusset, whereas the Caucasus and Nubian trousers have square or diamond-shaped gussets. A diamond shape is easy to cut but hard to weave, so it probably came into fashion as cut clothing replaced woven-to-shape clothing. Unless your trousers are woven to shape, you should probably try a diamond-shaped gusset.

The upper part of the Chehrābād 4 trousers cannot be examined, and I don’t know of any art which shows this part of trousers in this period. (If you know of a sculpture of topless Scythians wrestling, do share!) Any length from just long enough to cover the hips (like modern “low rider” jeans) to elbow-high (like the trousers in a mid-20th-century suit) could work. The Yanghai M21 trousers are only 104 cm long but have gussets 29 cm long, so a higher waist is probably more plausible than lower. The trousers from the Altai also seem to have high waists.

Early trousers sometimes end straight at the bottom, sometime have integral booties, and sometimes have a ‘stirrup’ under the heel to pull them tight. Saltman 4’s trousers are mostly hidden and my notes from Dr. Karina Grömer’s lecture in 2016 are a little unclear. The two pairs of trousers from Yanghai seem to end straight, but the hems are are worn and the trousers may have been shortened during their working life. The only artwork I know which could help is this carving of tribute-bearers from the Apadana at Persepolis. In some photos it looks like hose with integral feet, but in other photos there seems to be a right angle between the hanging part and the bottom of the legs. It could show stirrups, but the hanging part is a bit long. Do my gentle readers have any ideas or a better photo?

In indigenous artwork, Scythian and Median trousers disappear inside the shoes or boots rather than draping on top of them like modern trousers (Greek vase painters sometimes show curly-haired Africans or generic easterners whose trousers have cuffs hanging over the shoes, but neither they nor their customers were trouser-wearers). The bottoms of salt man 4’s trousers are still hidden inside his boots. So whether you chose straight cuffs, strirrups, or booties, any trousers you should make should disappear inside low boots without forming bags around the ankles. Eastern nations like the Arachosians and Sogdians sometimes wear loose trousers but they still disappear inside the shoes.

In a different month, I will make some mockups in cheap linen or cotton, then a good pair or two in wool. But that takes time and money, and as an underemployed researcher in fall application season I do not have much of either.

Help me pay my draper’s bill with a donation on Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay

Select Bibliography: The most useful books and articles are:

• Aali, Abolfazl / Stöllner, Thomas (eds). (2015) The Archaeology of the Salt Miners: Interdisciplinary Research 2010-2014. Metalla: Forschungsberichte des Deutschen Bergbau-Museums 21.1–2/2014 (Deutsches Bergbau-Museum Bochum) {for sale for about 25 Euros new}
• Beck, Ulrike, et al., “The invention of trousers and its likely affiliation with horseback riding and mobility: A case study of late 2nd millennium BC finds from Turfan in eastern Central Asia,” Quaternary International (2014), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2014.04.056
• Elizabeth Crowfoot, “The Clothing of a Fourteenth-Century Nubian Bishop.” In Veronika Gervers ed., Studies in Textile History in Memory of Harold B. Burnham (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1977) pp. 43-51
• Nobuko Kajitani, “A Man’s Caftan and Leggings from the North Caucasus of the Eighth to Tenth Centuries: A Conservator’s Report,” Metropolitan Museum Journal 36 pp. 85-124 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Mans_Caftan_Leggings_from_Caucasus_8_to_10_C_Conservation_The_Metropolitan_Museum_Journal_v_36_2001
• Krug-Ochmann, Julia Barbara (2014) “Achaemenid and Sassanian Trousers. A short technical description from Douzlakh Salt Mine at Chehr Abad, Iran.” Archaeological Textiles Review 56 pp. 60-64 {free to download}
• Polos’mak, N.V., Barkova, L.L., Костюм и текстиль пазырыкцев Алтая (IV-III вв. до н.З.) / Kostium i tekstil’ pazyryktsev Altaya (IV-III vv. do n. e.) / Pazyryk Altai Costume and Textiles (4th-3rd centuries BCE). Infolio: Novosibirsk 2005 (in Russian) pages 80-85 ISBN 5-89590-051-8 {colour photographs and diagrams of all the clothing and shoes from the Altai including trousers from Alakha-1 and the Verkh-Kal’djin-2}

*** Edit 2019-11-25: And see also Karina Grömer, Durchdacht gemacht: Die Kleidung eines Salzmannes aus Chehrabad, Iran. Universum Magazin 3/2016, pp. 108-109 which I discovered after writing this post! ***

(And honourable mention to Peter Calmeyer’s article “Hose” in the Reallexikon der Assyriologie which covers almost all the artwork available today but was written before archaeological finds were available).

Edit 2019-11-20: Added a photograph of a Red Figure plate showing leggings which end at the ankles.

Edit 2020-06: If you read German and are interested in the cut-and-sewed clothing from the Caucasus, check out Ierusalimskaja, Anna A. Die Gräber der Moscevaja Balka: Frühmittelalterliche Funde an der nordkaukasischen Seidenstrasse (Munich: Editio Maris, 1996)

Edit 2022-04-16: Added an apparent depiction of stirrup hose in the Louvre

Edit 2024-02-17: Tip-o-the-tiara to Carolyn Priest-Dorman of https://stringgeek.blogspot.com/: Aleksei Moskvin published some details on Saltman 4’s textiles for weavers as “Ancient textiles from Chehrabad salt mine,” https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/ancient-textiles-from-chehrabad-salt-mine-10a5f66e3286443c9826d14c80d0e41a (2022). Karina Grömer measured the textiles. I don’t know if these observations have been published in print.

Trousers of saltman 4:

• warp yarn, s twist, 50° twist, yarn thickness 0.5-0.6 mm, 7-8 threads per cm
• weft yarn, z twist, 20-30° twist, yarn thickness 0.5 mm, 22 threads per cm (so it is weft-faced, NB. that sources cited above say 11 weft threads per cm)

Tunic of saltman 4:

• warp yarn is s twist, 50° twist, yarn thickness 0.7-0.8 mm, 8 threads per cm,
• weft yarn is z twist, 20° twist, yarn thickness 0.5-0.6 mm, 30 threads per cm (so it is weft-faced)

This kind of information is very important for spinners and weavers.

#AchaemenidEmpire #ancient #DariusMosaic #historicalClothing #Plataia2021 #trousers

Saka Stockings and Plataea

Dario Wielec of Dariusz caballeros and Stefanos Skarmintzos want me to talk about the felt stockings with soles which have been found in some graves in eastern Central Asia. They were often worn in combination with a pair of short trousers that covered the thighs and crotch. You can find a full set of colour photographs and drawings on pp. 92-97 of the Russian book I cited in my original post. They are fascinating and beautiful objects (just think about having brightly coloured feltwork more than 2000 years old!) but I am not sure that they help us understand Chehrabad Saltman 4’s trousers for four reasons:

• they are not what Saltman 4 is wearing (they are felt, his are woven cloth; they are two separate legs, he wears joined trousers; they have seams up the back of the legs, his have seams at the side of the legs; the felt boots are close-fitting, his trousers are “baggy”)
• in artwork like the Darius Mosaic, Red Figure vase paintings, and the sculptures of the Aphaia temple on Aigina, the leggings of trousered warriors seem to go all the way up to crotch level without sagging. The felt stockings tend to be shorter (although I don’t have a full set of measurements) and in the middle ages when stockings (‘hose’) extended that high, they needed to be hung from a belt to stop them from falling down.
• trousers in early Achaemenid art often have a zigzag, diamond, or spotted pattern. That strikes me as something which would be easy to weave in tapestry weave like a kilim. Clothing in this period often had gold leaf, felt, or leather appliques, and its possible that the zig-zag was applied to felt. But we have a fragment of a textile with a rhombus pattern from the Achaemenid period at Chehrabad.
• I am not sure which genders wore these felt stockings, I seem to remember that the famous pair with shiny beads on the soles were from a female burial but I only have access to what has been translated into German or English and what I can obtain from my library or interlibrary loan.

Since none of the Chehrābād salt mummies are wearing these felt boots, and none of the artwork from the Achaemenid Empire or the Aegean clearly shows them, they don’t belong in a post on Saltman 4’s clothing. But if you scroll down, Herr Doktor Manning will give you his whole lecture on the trouser outfit across Eurasia.

Lets have a look at where these sites are located. The distance from Chehrābād, Iran, to Pazyryk, Russia is about the same as the distance from Glasgow to Istanbul. That is a long way to go on horseback or camelback … one of my friends came about that far by truck but it was not a small thing and most of his family stopped in Turkey. The fuzzy black lines are roughly the boundary between lands which know that a Persian is their god-given king (lower left), and lands which have unaccountably not realized that yet (top and right).

Old research tended to see the Medes and Persians as migrants from the Eurasian steppe who brought a common Eurasian material culture and Zoroastrian religion with them. They spoke an Indo-Germanische Sprache and called themselves Aryans, right? To people thinking this way, it would seem obvious to use finds from thousands of miles east of the King’s land to fill in the gaps in the archaeological record, as long as the finds seem “Scythian,” “Saka,” or “Iranian.”

But we now know that Media was an Assyrian province for more than a century, and that Persis (Fars) was the highland half of Elam (Khuzestan + Fars). Median and Persian culture were not purely ‘Indo-Aryan’ but products of complex cultural interactions and interchanges in the Zagros mountains. And while you might think that the “Median costume” or “riding outfit” was an unstained inheritance from the distant past, when we look closely we can see many differences between clothing in the Zagros Mountains and clothing in the Altai Mountains or the Tarim Basin:

• From eastern Central Asia we have a lot of felt head-gear, but the “Kimmerian/Scythian/Saka style” hoods in Babylonia were often made of linen. Babylonia had a felt industry since the Bronze Age, but apparently Babylonians liked linen hoods.
• Eastern Central Asian (and ancient European) trousers are often in a twill weave, but no twills have been found in the Near East or Greece until after the Achaemenid period. Saltman 4’s trousers are a plain weave like other indigenous Near Eastern textiles.
• Achaemenid tunics like saltman 4’s were pulled on over the head, Eurasian tunics including some of the finds from the neighbourhood of Pazyryk often open up the front like a kaftan (remember the Red Figure plate above?)

Just like folk costume in recent times, the basic idea of a tunic and trousers was interpreted differently in different regions. All these different local traditions had some things in common, but the details differed. The sculptors of the Apadana at Persepolis showed some of the King’s eastern subjects wearing clothing which looks more like the finds from eastern central Asia, such as high boots, kaftans, and coats which are short in front and long in the back (if you can find that Russian book it has lots of beautiful colour photos, artists’ reconstructions and diagrams of those finds).

I would be very grateful if someone who reads Russian and has access to the right publications would write up a study of far eastern material culture for re-enactors (maybe in partnership with Eran ud Turan?) Those books are very hard to obtain and very few of us can read them. And if I meet someone in a beautiful Pazyryk kit I will ooh and aah and ask lots of questions. But if you want to get as close to things worn at Plataea in 479 BCE as you can, if you want to represent someone from the central or western parts of the Achaemenid empire, I would recommend gathering as many sources from the empire as you can, then looking at Ötzi’s fire kit or the textiles from Yanghai and Pazyryk to fill in the gaps and help interpret things which are unclear.

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Edit 2019-12-07: In another place, Dario Wielec brings up Dagmar Dinkler and Carol James’ theory that some of the trousers in Aegean art are sprang (a type of springy weave similar to knit or naalbinding and often used for hammocks and sashes). I agree that that is a possibility which people working on the trousers in art from the Aegean or Neo-Assyrian reliefs should explore, but I don’t know of any archaeological finds and it is not what any of the salt men were wearing below the waist. To learn more about their ideas, check out:

• Drinkler, Dagmar / James, Carol (forthcoming) “Tight-fitting Clothes in Antiquity and the Renaissance.” Scheduled for publication in Proceedings of the Early Textile Society Conference, October 2014 London, UK http://network.icom.museum/fileadmin/user_upload/minisites/costume/pdf/Drinkler_ed_JP.pdf {an English summary of Drinkler 2010}
• Drinkler, Dagmar (2010) „Enganliegende Bekleidung in Antike und Renaissance.“ Zeitschrift für Kunsttechnologie und Konservierung 1 pp. 5-35
• Norsk Folkemuseum object NF.08455-027 https://digitaltmuseum.no/011013400023/detalj-av-spranget-strompelgg-eller-erme-teglefunnet-fra-eldre-jernalder (added 2024-01-24 thanks Len Parker)

#ancient #DariusMosaic #historicalClothing #Plataia2021

"Coming out"!
finally we can show the results of our collaboration with Fabian Boon!
this coat is made in commision for a dear friend of us who brought us together for this #Project1760

This coat had his #premiere at the #CarnavalofVenice ad a Casanova-themed party
#historicalclothing #crafts #ambacht #ambachtelijkvakmanschapnederland #ambachtinnederland #kleermaker #coupeur #brodeuse #goldworkembroidery #borduren #collaboration #silk #embroidery #1760s #project1760 #habitalafrancaise #handwerk