All Things Medieval

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.

At the end of the 11th century, Europe came in contact with Byzantium and the Saracen Middle East in a big way. Prior to this, contact had been limited to ambassadors and rare travelers. Charlemagne’s successors had been imitating Byzantine robes at court, but few of them had actually been abroad. Now, with the First Crusade, a wide swathe of Europe’s nobles and commoners actually went there and came back.

The first Crusade-related fad was called, in French, the “bliaut.” (Probably the T was still pronounced at that time.) The two defining bliaut traits were that it was made of very lightweight silk and that it was heavily pleated. There were versions for men and for women.

The bliaut for men had a close-fitting top that laced in back. It had long sleeves and a heavily embroidered collar. Hanging below, front and back, was a very wide silk shaped like two semi-circles. Each had been pleated along the straight side until, together, they were shortened enough to fit neatly around the man’s waist. The bliaut skirt just hung there to be decorative; the garment was worn over a cotte (tunic) that took care of actual coverage/warmth issues. The bottom edge was embroidered to help weight down the light silk in its pleats.

Women began wearing corsets in the 12th century. These garments were made of leather, tightly laced at the front and sometimes stiffened more with wood or metal ribs. Later, even men began to wear the “corse” (from med. French, related to “corpse”).

The women’s bliaut began with the wives of Crusader Kingdom officials. For them, the Crusades were all about the bazaar shopping. They bought up silk in unheard-of quantities and brought or shipped it home. Their bliaut was not necessarily modeled on anything the Byzantine women were wearing; it may have been a 12th century dressmaker’s best guess at what to do with all this tissue-paper fabric.

Both the gown and its sleeves were cut of very wide pieces of silk that was gathered, pleated and crimped down to the proper size. The bliaut appears to be the first gown to have a real tailored armhole. A few inches down from the shoulder, the fabric was released into a wide, pleated sleeve hanging almost to the floor. Across the chest, the gathers were released just above the breasts so that the gown flowed in pleats around the body.

The Hollywood negligee look was not what they were after, though, so a “corsage” went over the gown. It was sleeveless, like a V-neck vest, and always close-fitting (laced at back). It was probably made of silk as well, possibly of several lightweight layers. Some corsages were quilted in gold thread along diagonal lines, while others wrapped the lady in a wide hip belt like a cummerbund.

Even before the bliaut was imported, ladies had been working on two trends: defining the waist while draping themselves in ever more fabric. The older way was to have a laced-up waist gown with such excessively voluminous sleeves that they had to get tied in loose knots just to take up fabric and make them manageable. The other way to manage super-long sleeves was to cut a slit halfway up, where the hands actually were, so that fingers could emerge to do needlework. Unlike the lightweight bliaut’s pleated sleeves, these impractical sleeves were often on wool gowns and could serve a second purpose: built-in hand muff.

“The centuries that established England’s Norman kingdom and launched the Crusades were the beginning of fashion in Europe. Clothing had been traditional and practical before this, and fashions changed very slowly: clothing a century old did not appear odd. But during the 12th century, fashion began to change every decade or so among the upper classes.”

The 11th century, of course, begins at 1000 AD. Iceland had just accepted Christianity; the Danes had settled in England as farmers. Charlemagne’s empire was divided mainly into West Francia and East Francia. Spain’s Caliphate of Cordoba was broken into about a dozen smaller kingdoms. In 1066, the Danish-French Normans took over ruling England. Italy was stable; in 1088, Bologna began the school that became its university. Pope Urban II called for the first Crusade in 1095.

As these bits of history suggest, the 11th century was a time of increasing peace and prosperity, but not of rapid social change (except for Anglo-Saxons now ruled by Normans). The “Dark Ages” had ended. This stigma-loaded term tends to refer to the period when barbarians (Vikings and Huns) were routinely burning and blackmailing cities. When they stopped, the cities developed rapidly from the more primitive “Dark Ages” society into the high medieval.

Prosperity was the key word in 11th century court fashion. Practicality was out, decoration was in: tassels, feathers, and pearls. Clothing was cut simply but layered on heavily.

Cloaks were lined with fur. Kings wore ermine: that white and black fur we see on their stereotypical robes was made up of many cute eensy-wittle white and black ermines, all sewn together. Every black spot represents another ermine. Tradesmen wore whatever fur they could get: hare, fox, or even wolf (well-washed).

Men wore cottes (tunics) that came to the knees in the 11th century, belted with a leather girdle. The surcote went over the tunic according to changing fashion. Only royalty were permitted to wear mantles, the large cloaks that covered everything. Kings sometimes rewarded messengers for extremely good news by giving them the mantles off their backs; but the messengers sold them (to middlemen, who sold them back to minor royalty?) instead of wearing them. Europeans always took for granted that social classes needed permission for some things beyond simply being able to afford them.

Men’s legs were covered with primitive socks. The next century saw the invention of full-leg hose; at this time they were wearing tubes of cloth held at mid-leg by garters. We can’t tell in pictures if these tubes were knitted or made of woven cloth. They didn’t have foot-shaped ends. They may not have been much better than wrapping the leg in a long band, which at least flexed with motion.

Women wore simple linen gowns underneath generous, heavy colored wool or linen gowns. 11th century gowns were longer than the floor and needed to be lifted, to walk. They were often laced at the back to show the lady’s figure. The 11th century lady showed off her wealth in her girdle, which was tablet-woven, embroidered, or jeweled. For most of the century, the belt was worn snug around the waist, but toward the late 1000’s, it sometimes hung slack, forming a V. We see this style copied in many romantic depictions of medieval ladies.