Gone Medieval - How To Dress in the Middle Ages

Episode Date: July 11, 2023

What clothes would you have worn in the Middle Ages? What were the most fashionable hairstyles? How did your clothing denote social status? How did you wash your clothes?In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis puts these questions to Sarah Grace Heller, associate professor in Medieval French at Ohio State University and an expert in medieval fashion.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians including Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here >You can take part in our listener survey here.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here: https://insights.historyhit.com/signup-form Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Amongst those big hitting names and events, we always try to bring you some of the everyday detail from medieval life too. And it doesn't get much more of an everyday necessity than clothing and getting dressed. What did people wear and what was it like to be in medieval clothes all day? Well, fortunately, Sarah Grace Heller is here to tell us. Sarah Grace is a social

professor of French at Ohio State University, but one of her areas of expertise is medieval fashion theory, and her books include fashion in medieval France and a cultural history of fashion in a medieval age. Welcome to gone medieval, Sarah Grace. Hello, thank you. It's an honor to be here. To start us off with, what would most clothing in the medieval period be made out of, and how much is that affected by your social standing? All clothing is made of natural fibers. So you start with a layer of linen or hemp. Linen, the finer the thread and the finer the weave

would equate to nicer social standing. The rougher weaves shed dirt and stains and so on more easily, particularly hemp. So hemp was a very practical fiber. Linen is nicer next to the skin. It's a little bit softer. Then silk

was highly prized. It was not highly available. In the early Middle Ages it had to come from the east, from Byzantium, and then further into Persia, what is now Iran and Iraq. And silk is woven on very narrow looms, and it can take a very long time to weave it and to take the threads off the cocoon. A lot of labor involved. So clothes made of silk tend to be very close fitting to the body because of those narrower looms. Wool is present all the way through medieval period, no togas were wool,

and then white sheep began to be cultivated in the early Middle Ages as dye became more important. So bright colored dyes are a sign of wealth and prestige, and wool and silk take those dyes very well. So we begin to see more white sheep as the period goes on. In around the 10th 11th century, they begin to develop broadlooms, which allows them to weave wool into much wider pieces of clothing, which allows garments to become more and more ample. By the 13th century, the more fabric you could get on your fur. body through your cloak, your cut, so your under gown, and then layers on top of it would indicate status. We should talk about fur. Fur is very important for lining. It wasn't worn on the

outside like you do with the mint coat in Hollywood today. And there were different types of furs that also equated to what you could afford for social status. Furs from the Baltic, the winter pelt of Martens, which were called Zimbolene, and squirrels, which were called Vair and Miniver, depending on whether their bellies or their backs were used, were the prestige furs. Whereas more ordinary people would wear things like sheepskin fleece, which gets matted over time and it's heavier, so not quite as nice. And then you could talk about faux fur imitating those nice squirrel furs from the roofs, from Russia.

They would use things like local squirrels, but they would use things like local squirrels, but they don't have as thick and luxurious a pelt. Some of those squirrels were more brown. Brown is not so great. Gray and silver and white are what are prized. And there's also archaeological evidence. For example, at Sandini places where they've excavated pits of pelleteers that cat's fur was used a fair amount because, you know, you can also get nice colors. Rabbit as well was a local fur, less prized. Yeah, that's really interesting how broad selection of furs they were willing to use. I think particularly a lot of people might be surprised at the idea they were using cats. That sometimes bothers modern people.

But there's the expression, there are a lot of ways to skin a cat, right? Yeah, must have come from somewhere. And why were those materials particularly favoured? Further down the social scale, it has to do with cheapness and ease of access. And further up, it has to do with, as you said, the amount of work that goes into it and how expensive they are. But is it simply that? Is it that people wore whatever they could get their hands on and as expensive clothes as they could afford?

Display is, of course, very important. Dye is very important. And so how bright your clothing. There's a kind of dye product called Granah in Italian and Latin and in French. And it's made with kermis, these little parasitic insects, little red insects, that live on a particular kind of oak tree. And if you take millions of these and combine it with dyes, it makes them very intense and rich.

So rich color is what gives clothing the highest prestige. But then there's what I'd call a vestry food chain where people at the highest level use their clothing for a while and then it goes down. It gets given to servants or friends. There's a very important market in use clothing. and clothing was quite valuable, so where today we would give it to a thrift store, or people just discard it. There's a story of the three women of Paris, and they get so drunk that they pass out in the street, and people take their clothing because it was valuable.

They're bourgeois women. So clothing is a way to make cash. It would be pond. And so then that pond or sold clothing continues to be worn. So the fabrics are much sturdier and higher value than. a lot of the things we wear today and our t-shirts are disposable. So colors then fade as they move down that food chain. So if you're wearing lighter or more faded colors, that indicates lesser means as well.

Okay. So essentially, more fabric and the brighter the fabric, the wealthier you are. So me, I'm sitting here currently in a white t-shirt. Clearly, I'm a peasant. So as a peasant man, what would I wear most days? What would the routine of getting dressed look like for me? That's a little bit hard to say, but from visual evidence, from paintings of shepherds, for example, we can see that a man would start with what were called Bragas or Braille. This was a linen layer that went over the lower part of the body, and it was pretty loose.

It was draped. You can see this from images of men harvesting in the fields, for example, in books of ours. And they're described sometimes. And then there's a chemise that went over that. Both men and women would wear a chemise, and these two layers are easily washed. Then over that you layer what is less easily washed. Most people would have worn a wool tunic over these layers, except when it was hot or they were working. And then sometimes there was leather as well.

So men wore hose, chouse in Old French. These came up the legs, and they're separate. They're two different pieces, and then they would connect. in the groin area, they would be tied on. And there's an industry of making laces that tie clothing on. And they would have little aglets at the end of those laces to make it easy to go through the holes and tie them on. A peasant probably wore a shorter robe for practicality's sake.

And so then that would be belted so that it could be of various lengths. When you're not working, when you're in the city, the longer the better. But for work, you would belt things up. up so that they would be out of your way and save from things like fire. Fire dangerous omnipresent. So leather layers might include an apron or a surcoat, something sidelis, that went over one's clothing. So that's a man.

A woman would be similarly dressed except that her robes would go all the way down to the ground. In images we see both men and women wearing shoes that are black. Shoes were not a real area of display. Women's bodies change constantly with things like pregnancy and then nursing. And women don't seem to have worn the braes of the braves, but they would have a chemise. But with a longer front opening so that they could nurse, women's clothing has gores down the side. So does men. They take triangular pieces when they cut and they sew those into the side to make width so that you can walk without wasting any fabric clothing starts with rectangles and triangles, and waist was not okay when you constructed clothing for the most part. Both men and women, there aren't fixed fasteners on clothing, right? Obviously, no zippers, no Velcro, but even buttons only begin to appear in the late 13th century, and to some degree they're decorative. They do go with the period of tightening

sleeves. So clothing at the neck was held on by ring broaches. In French, they're called Fermais. So you would put the two ends of the clothing through those ring brooches and then there's a pin that holds it on. So both chemise and the outer robe that cut, and then even things below, like hose, garters, would be held on with ring brooches. I think it's striking how practical all of that sounds. And I think we probably sometimes undereuxes. And I think we probably sometimes underestimate our medieval forebears in thinking that they may do with whatever they could find. But, you know, they worked in these clothes and presumably there was an element of finding the most comfortable thing to wear to do the job that you had to do for hours and hours and

hours every day. I think that's right. Yeah. To what extent did fashion ever play a part in the lives of those ordinary folk, the peasantry, were they ever interested in fashion, or is it just about what it's practical to wear to do you work in? It's hard to say exactly because we have fewer records of peasant consumption and display. We have much more of that for urban life, where things were organized, where we begin to see professions and guilds, where there were taxes.

Some of the representations of peasants that we see are humorous. They're making fun of the peasants. What I will say, fashion is a debated topic. Did it exist for the mid-14th century? And I say yes, especially once we see cities in courts. So fashion is something where you have to look at each other and make comments about what,

someone is wearing. Without gossip, there's no fashion. Without that kind of theatricality, you don't have fashion. Now, another piece of fashion is, can people make their own individual small choices within the larger silhouette? And we have growing evidence of that in the high middle ages. So from about the 12th century onwards, we can see representations of people wanting to have spending money so they can make those choices. We see growing markets, But even in the early Middle Ages, the Marevindian period, we see certain things like belt buckles and broaches, which are the only things that often survive. But we see them in gold and in silver and in copper and in base metals like pewter. So there we see a silhouette that's being imitated for people at multiple levels of society.

So our evidence is always limited. but that conformity and personal choice within a set silhouette is something that we can see. How different then would getting dressed be and what I wore and what I looked like if I was a member of the nobility? I don't have to worry about the practicalities of working in the field. Do my clothes just get bigger and more silly? Silly. Flamboyant. Let's say bigger and more gorgeous.

Thanks, splendid. They do get more exaggerated as we go into the 14th and 15th. century, and that in books of hours in the splendid, decorated books that come out of the court of Burgundy. There are a lot of books that come out of the court of England. And there we see impractically long shoes and men in what look like corsets and nipped in waist and chest that are stuffed. Part of clothing is related to armor for men and for the nobility who would wear armor, of course. And so they need layers that would go under chain mail and later plate armor and that would be protective. Men of the nobility have a slit down their long undergarments,

which allows them to ride. Even peasants ride to some degree, but the idea of being chivalric is being a person who functions and lives on horseback and for whom horses were really important. So wealth and horses go together. Another thing we see in courtly text is advice to have your clothing cut close to your body. And so this is something that someone lower and the social strata wouldn't be able to do to work as closely with a tailor. If you have access to a tailor, they can make clothes really fit you. And there's that idea of showing off the beautiful noble body. Stories tell about how nobles are taller and stronger. Men trained for that. And there's this sort of genetic choosing of strong, well-built people in marriage circles.

I didn't talk about headwear, but that's an important site of social distinction as well, because it's the part of you that's most visible in a crowd on horseback. And we have a lot of information in things like sumptuary laws, as well as descriptions of what people wore in their heads. Just for anyone who isn't clear, subtry laws are literally laws about what you're allowed to wear, right? Yes, sometimes they're fines for wearing things that took too much money away from the economy. Sometimes they're a protectionist in England. They sometimes had to do with not wanting people to buy products that weren't English.

There's one example of that. Sometimes they were fundraisers, like I said. So there's a lot of variation. In the French royal laws of the late 13th century, try to distinguish how many new outfits you could have per year based on your income. So if you had 6,000 pounds in rents a year, you were allowed to have four complete changes of clothing made. And then down the social scale, they don't even talk about peasants in those laws. They also want to limit the clergy, and that's the educated men, as well as the priests and the monks and canons,

were actually serious consumers of clothing and furs. And they were not exempt from fashion, which there was a constant effort to reform them and make them humble again. But some of these laws talk about the fur they're allowed to have in their hats. So noble women, I have shopping lists, for example, from the Queen of Sicily. So she's French, but she's down in Naples. And she writes to Paris via her husband, King Charles of Vangelo, and she asks for huge quantities of linen.

And she asks for little crowns that were made of pearls and gold. not solid, but things that would wrap around. And she asked for wimples that wrap around three times and that wrap around four times and that wrap around five times. So there at the end of the 13th century, it is quantity. She orders 10,000 pins. And so it was straight pins that were creating these head looks. So the quality of that very visible space,

both for men and for women, was important in social distinction. There's quite a juxtaposition in some of that, I think, between the idea that you would have a more tailored, close-fitting outfit to demonstrate that you can afford a tailor, but wanting more material to demonstrate your wealth that you can afford to buy more material. Were there places where less was better and other places where more was better? So hats were big, but clothes were maybe more tailored? Young men and women wear their hair down. We can see that in images, and it's also described. Once women were married and also working men and women, they would cover their hair. Partly for practical reasons, you don't want fire near your hair.

You don't want lice. There are other parasites, and so covering is better. So that's, to some degree, an example of less is more. And then there were monastic orders like the Cistercians, say we're going to wear white, we're going to go unadourned. Same thing for the Franciscans. They were called the Calderie in French because they wore rope. belt instead of leather or silk belt. But nudity, no. Nudity is disruptive, it's scary,

it's Adam and Eve being thrown out of paradise, it's those drunk bourgeois women face down in the street, it's death, it's madness. So now being dressed is good. We start to see lower necklines in about the 1370s and very close-fitting. garments among the higher classes. Is it scandalous when we start to see things like lowering necklines? You know, I'm thinking it's not that long ago when women's skirts getting shorter was a huge uproar in society. Do we see the same thing in the 1370s as necklines get lower? Are people concerned about the moral state of the women wearing clothes like that? Yes, but every time a new fashion comes through, people get upset. And that's one of the ways

that I would say we can tell fashion is present. Is somebody getting mad about it? it. Somebody saying, the new generation has no morals. What are some other examples? There are sermons that we have, for example, from the Feast of John the Baptist in summer, in which the preachers are saying, the trains are too long, cut them off and give that fabric to the poor. So excess could make people as upset as revealing the neck. There are examples from much earlier in the early English period that talk about how women in Britain, were going crazy over the sexy Danes who were coming in, and they had their head shaved at the back, these short hairstyles that were radical and bothersome. But then we have evidence a little bit later

of men's long hair being upsetting. And the Merivingen kings in the 57th century were called the long-haired kings. They didn't cut their hair. And then the Carolingians come in the 8th to 9th centuries. and they wanted to look like Romans with clothes cropped hair. In the 13th century, men curled their hair. So those are some examples of men's hair fashions. I wouldn't have much like getting my hair curled, to be fair. Now, you would be either wearing maybe a felt hat or a linen hat that came down over your head.

It would be comfortable, right? It helps you regulate your temperature to have your head covered and feels good. Yeah, I guess that's true. If you're out in the fields all day in the summer, you would want something that would help you keep cool. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb. And on not just the Tudors from History Hit, my guests and I run through the full gamut of human emotion and experience.

From the heartbreak of the Virgin Queen. Elizabeth, not being able to marry, arguably the only man in the world she ever really wanted to marry, may have, for that reason, not married anyone else. To a prenatal battle of the sexes. A male and a female seed meet in the womb at conception, and whichever one is stronger determines the sex of the unborn child. From Lady Jane Grey facing her executioner.

You can't help but feel just the utmost sympathy for this young girl. To why the Laughing Cavalier is, well, laughing. He strikes me as someone who goes off on a sort of swaggering booze up. Subscribe now to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. What do we know about the routine of washing clothes? So I think the traditional perception is that outer clothes weren't washed very often. Is that true? They're highly valuable, so people took care of them.

Movies and media where the customers have decided to put people in gray and dirty clothes, suit all over themselves, and threadbare, and you really don't see that in representations, in images or in descriptions. What we know about clothes washing is very limited because that's not the exciting thing that you would put into a story, into an epic song. So it's invisible. Archaeologically, there were these buildings that were built by the side of rivers, especially small rivers. And a lot of those small rivers have been covered up now.

So there were quite a number of them in Paris, for example, that are gone. They're underground. But so those smaller streams were better places for washing things like linens than the seine. But there's evidence when you look on the seine in Paris in tax records of professionals, especially women, they were called la vendres, so laundresses, who would work there and would probably take quantities of clothing in the city down to those places, especially since there was such a big university culture of single men, people who needed to do it. In terms of those more expensive outer layers, wool can be spot-cleant pretty easily. Wool was often filled, so they would

take the woven wool and they would put it in water and kind of shrink it and then they would take blades to it to raise the pile. And so it was really dense. It's like really good overcoat fabric, but sometimes it was finer than that. It's water repellent practically. These are really nice wools. Will can be clean then because it is water resistant, stain resistant. It can be spot cleaned with water. There's a product called Fuller's Earth that comes out of caves in champagne, for example, and that was used for wool processing. It's something that you'd find in scouring powder now. If you use that to clean your sink, that's full of serve. You can also clean things with products like vinegar and wine. You still use vinegar mixing in acid with a base.

It depends on what you would use. Soap was made, too, with a combination of fat and lye, so you'd soak ashes and get that product, soak them through a wooden barrel for example. So there were a variety of ways to clean clothing as well as yourself. When it came to furs, the tax records of Paris indicate that there was a palatier in every neighborhood, sometimes on almost every street. So that indicates that there is a lot of need for fur maintenance. They were sold pre-sown into semicircular shapes for mantles for capes, and then pre-sown into sleeveless body shapes for something that was called the police. This was a layer that people would wear. So furs needed to be maintained in a different way.

They needed to be re-sown a lot, probably. Did clothing and fashion change much during the medieval period? If so, what do you think drove those changes? Yes, it did. It is hard to gauge what happened in the Carolingian period in the 8th, 9th, 10th century, especially in, oh, France. We see more evidence of it in the Holy Roman Empire and what is Germany in Northern Italy in the Otonian places, and especially a courtly culture and a clerical culture. They're courtly, and they're looking at each other, they're very conscious of one another. In the Meravenging period, so the kind of fifth to seventh or eighth century, we have archaeological evidence of significant changes happening regularly in jewelry and metal pieces of clothing that were worn on the body. But styles change

on the order of every 20 years. So that's per generation. That's not what we call constant change, such as what we have. When does that start? It starts more slowly than what we see now. But by the 12th and 13th century, you can identify clothing by decade. Where does the belting happen? How are the sleeves. They're tight. Sometimes they use a rectangle of fabric on young people's clothing that would hang down and be fun in dancing. Had dresses change quite regularly. Belting goes in and out. Length doesn't change very much. But there are a lot of places where you can make small changes, how tight things are, colors, your choice of fabrics, how you wear your hair. It's not an annual thing or every few weeks, as we see now in fast fashion,

but there's definitely changing happen and choices that are happening in the order of every few years. You see some style changes. Would that be driven by contact with other places, other courts, importing fashions that people like, or is it just an expression of how people are feeling, you know, or different ways to express wealth in terms of the amount of clothes you wore? Yes, absolutely.

Materials are available and then not available. the collapse of the silk importing under the Mongol disruptions of the Silk Road in the 13th century meant that there was less silk. It meant that the Italians were trying to develop silk industries, sometimes sneaking cocoons out of the monopolies on silk that existed in Byzantium. Silk cocoons have to be kept at just the right temperature. And so they say that women would hide them under their breasts in order to transport them out. So there changes in silk availability, and there's a lot of innovation when it comes to how those things were used. The Italians were producing a lot of innovative products. Northern France and the

low countries were major sites for producing high-quality woolens. Availability of materials is important, but we see more and more creativity meeting demand as cities grow and as these. the possibility of importing of banking grows. Yeah, there are a lot of factors. Supply and demand, though. And I guess even then, access to fashion and new clothing is as affected by your position in the social scale, your access to money as it still is today. That's possibly something that hasn't changed. I guess fashion was probably less of a concern for those lower down the social scale who just needed their clothes to be practical. who weren't trying to attract attention at court or for municipal power.

There's an irony, which is that the nobles were constantly in debt. So they have a pressure to look good. They're leading people. They want to pull people into their orbit. And there's a long tradition of them looking impressive, but they have fixed incomes. And so they were often generally in debt to the Jews. and the Lombards, so Northern Italian bankers. Whereas bourgeois merchants were able to get richer and richer by being entrepreneurs,

and so they have less limited incomes. So there's anxiety over people who weren't born to importance, being able to manipulate fashion to attract attention. And peasants could be very enterprising too. They exchanged land, they built up farms. Peasants could be wealthy. And there's downward mobility as well. There are stories of noble daughters being married to wealthy peasants for economic reasons, usually not for love in those stories. They're sad stories or angry stories. Well, thank you so much for joining us to talk a bit more about that everyday aspect. And I think something that we can still identify with today. We're still fairly obsessed with fashion and the clothes that we wear today. So it's interesting to hear how people viewed that kind of thing centuries ago. So thank you very much for joining us to talk about that. This is delightful, Matt. Thank you so much.

I hope you found that interesting to take a look at what it was like to get dressed and to wear clothes in the medieval period. If you'd like to find out more Sarah Grace's books, fashion in medieval France, and a cultural history of fashion in the medieval age are available in all good bookstores right now. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more on the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from. and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to your podcasts. It really does help new audiences to find us. If you're enjoying this and looking for a little bit more medieval goodness in your life,

you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter by following the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I've better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.