All Things Medieval

People have a tendency to emphasize and celebrate things once they have ceased to be important in an urgent, primitive way, because it’s only then that these things can become socially important. For example, when the railroads were first built, nobody thought to make model railroads. It’s only when travel by train has become unusual that we look back and say, “how grand the trains were! Let’s join train clubs.” War is the same way; while it is a fight for literal survival, it isn’t glamorous. But once a war has ended, or once a weapon is outdated, it begins to seem glamorous. Wars of today always seem gritty and unfair, while battles of the past have a hazy air of nostalgia.

In the 12th and 13th centuries, tournaments were mock battles for real war training. The melee, a mass fight that could range over acres of field and woods, often left men injured or dead. Tilting, in which knights rode at each other with lances, was real practice for the state of the art attack. Knights on horses seemed invincible at first. But by the 14th century, warfare had begun to change and knights were no longer the greatest force. The Battle of Crecy had already demonstrated that farmers with longbows could mow down the most chivalrous knights, and that’s not even talking about gunpowder. As towns grew, their guild councils got tired of being pushed around by armies of knights, so they designed pikes: spears even longer than knights’ lances, equipped with a spike and a hook to swing a knight out of the saddle as he road. Knights still carried the main burden of battle, but their peak was already past when tournaments came into their own.

14th century tournaments no longer practiced peak battle techniques. They were ritualized; the melee was less central and sometimes skipped. Tilting took place in lanes, for points. By the 15th century, the weapons were often blunt and symbolic. The really grand armor you can see in museums comes from the 16th century, when tournaments had completely lost touch with reality and were just medieval equivalent of polo.

From 1300 on, tournaments were about fashion and social standing. When tournaments were somewhat real, the only ladies who looked on were those who lived at the host’s castle. But now, young ladies became tournament groupies. Like Ascot and Derby hats, their dresses and accessories made the tournament special. And not just the ladies: men, too, still preened like peacocks and flaunted their gold and pearls.

Fashion with a tournament theme meant imitating the shields that heralds used to identify war dead. Once heraldry became less of a practical art of ID’ing corpses and turned instead into the MC’ing of events, everyone wanted a coat of arms. They wanted to dress like a coat of arms, so they began the particolor look to imitate shields. Men’s hose came as separate legs so it was easy to put on a white left leg and a red right one. Surcotes were half one color, half the other, often the obverse of what the hose was doing. Sleeves, too, could pick up the theme, turning the wearer into a checkerboard. Ladies often took it one step farther, if they were tournament groupies. With a gown split into two colors, they used embroidery to recreate the rest of the coat of arms on the gown. They became walking signboards for their family partisanship and favored knights.

The particolor look allowed guilds to play up their tradesman-heraldry. Each city guild invented a color theme for a special set of clothes. The uniform was called “livery” because it was *delivered* from the guild to each honored, avowed member. Livery came to mean “uniform of one or two colors” and often included a badge that was based on a family’s coat of arms. Guilds had arms designed for them, although they did not need shields. Everyone needed livery, badges, and heraldry signs.

Men’s hats in the 14th century flourished, with some rather odd quirks that persisted into the next century. Men still wore the linen coif, the close-fitting cap that now most resembles a traditional baby’s cap. (Of course the baby’s cap is a holdover of the medieval coif.) The coif went under armor and even under other hats. But there were two new hat styles, in addition to some profession-specific ones.

The bycocket is a hat you’ve seen on Disney’s Robin Hood fox, and also on Dr. Seuss’s Bartholomew Cubbins, the boy who couldn’t take off his hat to the King because it kept replicating itself. It had a fairly tall peak on top of the head, but the real feature was a brim that stuck out like a point at the front. The bycocket had a brim all the way around the hat, but it was turned up close at the head. It only stuck out for a sunshade in front. Like the hat of Bartholomew Cubbins, bycockets could be plain for ordinary work, or fancy for aristocrats with tablet-woven braids, gold thread, or feathers.

But the really odd hat fad was the hood and liripipe. You’ll remember how the original hood was cone-shaped, but its tailoring was improved to fit the head better while keeping the cone’s point and, in fact, exaggerating it by making it trail off longer in a tube. The long tube, which hung down at back, was called a liripipe. Its length was a matter of personal style and decade-dependent fashion in the 13th century. But in the 14th century, someone in the upper classes decided to wear it with the face hole as a hat brim. Maybe they wanted to imitate a Turkish turban?

When the liripipe hat is turned this way, its long cone top or liripipe tub sticks out at the side, let’s say, over the left ear. Over the right ear is the floppy part that was supposed to cover the man’s neck and shoulders. The innovator who first turned a hood on its side wound the liripipe around the hat and pinned it, so that it was now a brim. Then he tucked the floppy part into the liripipe so that it stuck up and out like a giant broad feather. A new hat style was born: the chaperon. As odd as it sounds, this hat became the norm for men well into the 15th century. It lost all its practicality but, as so often happens, once it served no earthly purpose, it became indispensable. A role of fabric formed a brim and the liripipe could be tossed over the shoulder or draped across the front like a scarf. Here we see it on a bust of Lorenzo de Medici.

Certain professions and groups of men wore distinctive hats. Jews had to wear pointy yellow hats in many places; we find images of these hats in illustrations of the Bible, where Abraham or another Bible hero is pictured as a contemporary Jew in a weird yellow beanie. (Of course he’s also surrounded by men in coifs and liripipes, such was their idea of eternal fashion.) Scholars and doctors wore old-fashioned hoods, and as they went into the 15th century, they also wore bag-shaped silk caps. The modern graduating student’s cap is based on these hats, especially at the PhD level where silk caps and hoods are still common. Mummers began wearing caps with pointy “horns” that drooped or sloped down. Especially when made in parti-color silk, this hat developed into the “jester’s cap” we think of today.

Basic round hats and caps were also coming into use in lower working professions. One form had a brim all around for sunshade; we use many variants of this hat. Another was close-fitting with a turned-up brim. It sometimes had a “beanie” on top, which at the time was a practical feature: it was a little loop of fabric to use as a handle for removing the hat. Maybe that’s what Bartholomew Cubbins needed.

In the 12th century, men had mostly covered their basic tunics with cloaks that were some variant of a circle: semi-circle, 3/4 circle, or oval. It draped around their shoulders in grand idleness, made of heavy, rich fabric. But in the 13th century, noblemen began wearing two distinctive types of surcotes. One had no sleeves; the other had fake sleeves.

At the fringes of the Byzantine Empire, the Greek Cyclades Islands appear to have been exporting a particularly rich fabric. It may have been a silk brocade; the Muslim Caliphate had moved some Eastern (Chinese and Indian) technology into Damascus and Egypt, including the draw loom. Until the early modern Jacquard loom, the draw loom was the most complicated piece of fabric machinery. It required a second person, the weaver’s assistant, to sit on a perch by the ceiling and manipulate extra ropes and levers. Silk weavers could create complicated figures like peacocks, crowns, elephants and trees instead of the simple goose-eye diamonds possible in Europe.

The fabric from the Cyclades Islands may also have used a lot of gold threads; gold has the property of being drawn into very, very fine wire without breaking. Other fabrics at this time, called a variety of names like baudekyn, siglaton and just “cloth of gold,” used gold threads in their patterns.

In any case, the fabric was so expensive and showy that it didn’t require much tailoring to show to advantage. The “Cyclas” cut, as it came to be called, was a sleeveless tunic with a neck slit and a slit up the front of the skirt so that the wearer to walk more easily or even mount a horse. The under-tunic of the time usually had a batwing sleeve at this period: tight at the wrist but very loose and floppy at the armhole. As the Cyclas developed, sometimes it was not sewn up the sides, but instead lay open and was clasped at a few points. Eventually, women adopted and adapted it.

The Cyclas with sleeves was the Gardcorp. The sleeves were in a new style, too. They were often smocked at the shoulder so that a great deal of fabric could be gathered at teh shoulder but hang loose in the arms. However, the sleeves were often not worn. At the top of the sleeve, the tailor cut a slit for the arm to go through. The gardcorp’s smocked sleeve hung at the back, for show, while the wearer really just used his arms freely via the slits. Its name, “Gardcorp,” suggests another step in the evolution of the coat: something you put on to guard the body from cold.

By the middle of the 13th century, the costly fabric imported from the Byzantine Empire was no longer the definition of the Cyclas; it was just the cut of an over-tunic. So it was time to create a new fashion, the quintise, which meant “fancy” in medieval French. Heraldry cut shields into sections with zigzags, wavy lines, square-cut crenelations, and leaf shapes. The bottom of the quintise was cut into any of these fancy shapes, especially at Christmas time.

In the second half of the 12th century and moving into the 13th, there were some major steps forward in fitting cloth to the shape of the human body. At the start of the 12th century, around when the Crusades were launched, clothing shapes were very simple: T-shaped tunic with a neck slit; blocky breeches with a drawstring; tubes of cloth that only stayed on the legs because they were tied; round or cone-shaped hat; simple mittens with a drawstring for harsh winters.

First, the cone-shaped hood began to shift into a form that didn’t begin with a semi-circle of fabric. Instead, tailors cut out a shape that is more like a modern coat hood. Where a modern snow hood is round at the back of the head, the tailors cut a long trailing decorative piece that resembled the way the point of the original cone had flopped in back. It could be cut in a deliberate shape this way. Instead of tapering like a real cone, it tended to stick out of the back of the hood in a long tube, often very long. Although it still looked a lot like the original hood, it was fitted better to the human head. The neck could be cut closer to the skin, since the tailor could create lacing or a pin at the front.

Next, wealthy people began to have a different kind of hose cut to go under their robes, which were still at least knee-length. Woven cloth can be cut at right angles to the threads or at a diagonal, called in sewing, “on the bias.” When woven cloth is cut on a bias, the cloth is more flexible. When some tailor turned his hose pattern 45 degrees and cut out the shape of a leg on a bias line, he created a tube that could bend at the knee. Since it could flex and bend with the leg, the hose could be styled closer to the leg. Instead of baggy breeches and saggy “hose” tied on with laces, a gentleman could wear one close-cut set of wool hose.

Throughout the 13th century, the new style of hose caught on. For a long time, its use was restricted to the very wealthy because it was wasteful of fabric. A square yard of fabric could make several vertical-cut tubes of hose, but perhaps only one leg of one pair of bias-cut hose. There were awkward triangle-shaped scraps left over. Tailors learned how to cut smaller irregular patterns out to make sewn-in feet, and these pieces were surely pieced out of the scraps. But bias cutting is always more wasteful than straight cutting. When cloth was so expensive, poor people could not afford flexible bias hose.

The third innovation was in gloves. Gloves were the ultimate sign of wealth for a long time. Poor men’s hands got chapped, or maybe their wives knitted a pair of mittens—or patched together a pair from scraps of woven blanket. Civil rulers and “princes of the church” wore gloves with fingers. Gloves require careful tailoring to wrap fabric around the odd shape of the hand. They must also be made of very thin material. Oxhide worked for shoes, but for gloves, they needed the leather from does, rabbits, or even chickens.

Gloves made of tougher material along the wrist were used for hawking, the ultimate aristocratic sport. Gloves and hawks were associated as closely as polo and the British royal family. Finer gloves were for indoor use; bishops wore them when they officiated at Mass in the cathedral. When people like bishops needed to wear rings, they put them over the gloves, not under them. The gloves were not for cover as much as for display. Fine indoor gloves were heavily embroidered or even jeweled.

In the late 12th century, we start to see evidence of two fashion quirks that later became very prominent. Both seemed to come to England from Germany when an English princess had to return home after she became a widow. She had been the wife of the German Emperor (Germans continued to claim the “Holy Roman Emperor” title for many generations after the Pope gave it to Charlemagne). It seems likely that the fashion had been knocking around Italy already for most of the 12th century.

One of the trends was to cut the lower hem of a garment into strips, each several inches wide. The edges were secured and outlined with embroidery. The early word for this trend seems to be “dagges.” In the 12th century, just having the wealth to pay someone to overcast all of those edges in silk thread was a big deal. Later, the dagges themselves became very elaborate; for now, they were a novelty even in simple form.

By the end of the 12th century, commoners were wearing dagges on their tunics. Sumptuary laws forbade people below a certain rank, so as to preserve the decoration as a marker for the ruling class. As with all sumptuary laws, they existed mostly to permit officials to fine townsfolk when they wanted to; they were never more than partly obeyed.

(Later in the Middle Ages, some town officials, I think especially in Italy, tried hard to enforce the sumptuary laws. It meant hiring some men to sit at a booth in the city and grab women off the street to ask them, “is that fur you’re wearing?” The average medieval commoner could come up with some kind of “Gosh no, officer, it’s just brown moss” line, and at length they realized how futile it was to attempt real enforcement.)

The other trend was to make a tunic out of two colors. One half might be dark blue or black, the other half white or red and decorated with embroidery. In the 12th century, use of particolor was not as elaborate as it later became.

There’s another interesting note for the 12th century. People wonder what their ancestors wore to bed, and the only clues we have are in art, where kings or Biblical figures are shown in bed. As far as we can tell, in the 11th and 12th centuries, men and women wore their linen undershirt to bed. The men’s was called a sherte (spelling in early English was always wobbly) and the women’s, something like a camise. But once we get into the 1200’s, art shows people in bed naked. Stories that involved someone being surprised in the night, like attacked while in bed, also suggest that they leaped up naked and grabbed some nearby item to cover up. Night clothes didn’t become customary again until the early modern period, when once again, the basic shirt with a long tail became nightshirt, day shirt and drawers all at once.

During the early 12th century, working men began wearing a type of hat that was a dominant fashion for several centuries. It was worn in different ways, sort of like the baseball cap.

It was made of either linen or wool, and it began with a semi-circle of fabric sewn into a cone. Near the point of the cone, they cut a face-size oval. They weren’t trying to hide identity like caped crusaders, they were just trying to keep warm and not let midges get in their ears, so the full face showed. The flaring end of the cone draped over the shoulders, often slit in the front to allow it a bit more room. Some hoods flared out into broad capes that extended beyond the shoulders.

It’s a very familiar look from Robin Hood cartoons. We’re used to seeing the hood’s pointy end drooping down at the back, and we expect the wide end of the cone to have some decorative shape, like zigzag. When we see the hood worn like this, it’s not clear that it’s really a cone. Of course, tailors may have modified the cone over time to fit the human body better. The decorative touches we see in cartoons generally came about in the 13th century; working hoods were still plain at first.

Hoods were all-weather, all-purpose menswear. Made of fulled wool, they shed water. Made of linen, they kept the sun off while not overcooking the head. During the 12th century, they were worn straight-up the way God intended. Creativity would wait about 200 years to take notice of such a boring hat. (We’ll get there.)

Nobles did not wear hoods. They had full mantles to cover the whole body, and from pictures, it seems that at this time they wore uncovered heads of usually-long hair to copy Byzantine styles. Beards came and went; old men tended to wear beards more often than young men. Clean-shaved faces were more often the style than not.